This observation of Orazio Lombardelli's on Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua (1525), can tell us a great deal about the reasons for the decline of dialogue in late-Cinquecento Italy. In particular, stemming as it does from formal and methodological considerations, it provides a useful corrective to any temptation to interpret this phenomenon simply as a result of the cultural policies of the Counter-Reformation. The glamour of the explanation considered in the previous chapter – the cultural reverberations of censorship – should not blind us to the many less dramatic factors in the culture of the age which may have an equal weight in determining developments in the dialogue. After all, whatever Lombardelli is objecting to in Bembo's Prose, it is certainly not their capacity to act as a covert channel for the expression of what Sforza Pallavicino might term ‘empia credenza’ or ‘viziosa cupidità’.

It is important to stress that Lombardelli's critique of the dialogue is not referred to a work like Castiglione's Cortegiano, which makes a genuine attempt to represent a plurality of voices. The Prose della volgar lingua are – especially after the first book – indisputably monological in character: indeed, they would be cited by Pallavicino as one of the supreme examples of the ‘maniera insegnativa perfetta’ in dialogue, precisely because of the clarity with which they reveal ‘l'opinione dello Scrittore’.