De Aetna in the Context of Quattrocento Venetian Humanism

After our introduction to Ermolao Barbaro in Chapter 3, the story of his estrangement from Venice is taken up in Chapter 4, but in the context of our larger coverage of the shift that is discernible in Venetian patrician humanism of the late Quattrocento—a shift away from the disciplined devotion to public duty and the common cause that characterizes the distinctly Venetian strain of civic humanism earlier in the century. Whatever the extent to which Barbaro’s estrangement from the Republic may have influenced Pietro’s ambivalence toward the conventional patrician career path, Bembo’s detachment from Venice as portrayed in De Aetna is related in the rest of Chapter 4 to these broader currents in the evolution of Quattrocento Venetian humanism.