ABSTRACT
Bembo's solutions to the language questions at hrst met with considerable opposition. For Berni realized that the fifteenth-century Ferrarese poet Matteo Boiardo could be saved from the oblivion to which Bembo condemned all his contemporaries only if his Orlando innamorato were translated into one of the two languages which Italians would now deign to read. That one of Bembo's two languages won out over the other as a language of speech as well as of prose and poetry, that Italy eventually became monolingual rather than, as Bembo hoped, bilingual, was due in large part to the adoption of the Volgare by the authors of most of the literary monuments of the High Renaissance. Other High Renaissance monuments fell into such well-established humanist genres as Ciceronian dialogues, prose treatises and Livian-Thu cydidean histories. Michelangelo had surpassed all the funeral monuments upon which wealthy Florentine families had been staking their public images for almost two centuries.
