Why did Pietro Bembo favor Petrarch and Boccaccio as language models?

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Italian literature Portrait of Italian poet Dante Alighieri.

In his influential work Prose della volgar lingua (1525), Pietro Bembo advocated for 14th-century Tuscan as the standard for Italian literary language. He specifically favored Petrarch and Boccaccio as the ideal models for this standard.12

Bembo’s preference was rooted in his pursuit of stylistic decorum and linguistic refinement. He considered the work of Dante Alighieri to be stylistically uneven and lacking the necessary decorum for a formal literary model. By promoting the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio, Bembo sought to codify Italian grammar and orthography, providing a stable foundation for the language that eventually triumphed by the end of the 16th century.21