ABSTRACT
Between 1552 and 1554 two related works appeared in Venice: the Lettura sopra un sonetto del marchese della Terza by Girolamo Ruscelli and Del tempio alla divina signora Giovanna d’Aragona, also edited by Ruscelli.1 The latter was published by the little documented Plinio Pietrasanta who, between 1553 and 1554, printed numerous works, including the anthology Rime di signori bresciani and the Rime by Domenico Mantova.2 The link between all these enterprises over these busy years is the Accademia dei Dubbiosi (Academy of the Doubtful). As stated in one of the introductory texts of Del tempio, ‘in the year 1551 the Accademia dei Dubbiosi was founded in this city, under the auspices of the Illustrious Count Fortunato Martinengo, of blessed memory, and of the Most Reverend and excellent Doctor Macasciuola’.3 Members also included the writers Girolamo Ferlito and Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano, Ruscelli and, very probably, the Venetian patrician and later Patriarch of Aquileia Daniele Barbaro.4 With a series of successful publishing ventures, an illustrious editor and a noble patron, the society appeared to be set for plain sailing. But this was not the case. By the eighteenth century all memory of it had already been lost, even in the erudite Brescian circles that gravitated around Cardinal Angelo Maria Querini and Giammaria Mazzuchelli.5 It was said to have f lourished possibly in Venice, possibly in the Venetian dominion of Brescia, about a hundred miles away; there was no list of members, no trace of an editorial programme, no explanation of the name. Indeed, some scholars including Giovan Battista Chiaramonti maintained, without providing specific evidence, that the academy had been revived in Venice in the early seventeenth century by Giulio Strozzi (1583-1652), in his turn member of Giovan Francesco Loredan’s Accademia degli Incogniti. Such information is however untrustworthy, even though it may unwittingly indicate a certain libertinism, or rather philosophical scepticism, which appears to be in keeping with the name of the academy.
