Reassessing the speech on Platonic love by the interlocutor Pietro Bembo in The Book of the Courtier (1528), this essay discusses Castiglione’s Platonic love ideology both as a philosophy and as the theoretical underpinning of an amorous praxis. After an overview of the reception of Platonic love during this stage of the Italian Renaissance, it examines to what extent Bembo’s discourse reflects Ficinian Neoplatonic notions of love as enjoyment of beauty and ascent toward the divine. While Castiglione echoes Ficino in his emphasis on the role of reason, Bembo creates a more permissive standard for younger lovers and for older lovers sanctions the kiss as a pivotal point on the ascent towards spiritual love, thus reconciling contemplative aspects of Platonic love with the concrete amorous dynamics of court life. Moreover, Bembo’s speech is predicated on the awareness that desire can degenerate into fury, an aspect that is discussed in the context of the contra amorem tradition. Literary form is a constant consideration: as a Ciceronian dialogue, the text not only projects an ideal Renaissance court, but also has a mimetic function in that its medium reflects and supports its content.

The vernacular language was a topic of great interest across Italy throughout the sixteenth century; most were interested in setting standards of good writing based on the models of Petrarch and Boccaccio as promoted by Pietro Bembo. Florentines differed especially in that they came to distinguish literary style from the language itself, and focused on the study of language. They modified the tools of humanistic study, developed for Latin and Greek, by distinguishing between the study of living languages and dead ones, sinceliving languages constantly undergo change and development. They also used a biological model, arguing that a language is like a living thing with its own life cycle. Most Florentine writings from the 1540s and 1550s came from a circle of friends who often collaborated with one another: Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Giovan Battista Gelli, Cosimo Bartoli, Carlo Lenzoni, and Giovanni Norchiati. Although they are now best known for their arguments about the history of the language, in fact they devoted many years to the study of modern language practice.