Gli Asolani - Later Influences

Later Influences

The romantic poet Robert Browning credits Cardinal Bembo with coining the poeticism "asolare" upon which he based his last work "Asolando" published posthumously in 1890.

"...a titlename popularly ascribed to the inventiveness of the ancient secretary of Queen Cornaro whose palace-tower still overlooks us: Asolare—" to disport in the open air, amuse oneself at random." The objection that such a word nowhere occurs in the works of the Cardinal is hardly important— Bembo was too thorough a purist to conserve in print a term which in talk he might possibly toy with..."

Indeed Bembo's anthropology of human love as divine gift reconciling fallen man to his neighbor (rather than primitive psychological strife in the battle of the sexes) represents an early instance in the development of Christian metaphysics towards an understanding of the experience of human persons in mutual relationship with each other. This romantic or conjugal meaning of the body as sign of the Transcendent, reflects the mystery of Divine Love found in human sexual love. As icons of the Trinity, the integral, inseparable nature of the human body and soul reaches its fullest understanding much later in the phenomenological personalism of Karol Wojtyla, and his teachings on the theology of the body. His 3-act play The Jeweler's Shop also employs a trio of couples reversing the dramatic order, setting theamore lovers first with the amare lovers second, concluding with a couple from the next generation, a plot twist that provides the experiential material that helps resolve their stand-off of positive vs negative fatalism allowing them to cross the threshold of hope. Burt Lancaster and Olivia Hussey starred in a 1989 movie adaptation entitled La Bottega dell'orefice.