Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 2.djvu/488

 BENAOm

426

BENARD

venuto Cellini

1470; d. at Rome, 18 January, 1547. He was the son of Bernardo Bembo, whose enthusiasm for ItaHan literature led him to raise a monument tc Dante at Ravenna. His early education was received at Florence. He afterwards studied Greek under Las- caris at Messina and philosophy under Pomponazzo at Padua. After spending some timeatthe court of Ferrara, where he met Lucrezia Bor- gia, with whom he maintained a Platonic friend- ship for many years, he went in 1506 to I'rbino, where he became the leading figure among the bril- liant group of men of wit and culture gathered about the court. In 1.512 he accompanied his intimate friend, Giuliano de' Medici, to Rome, where a short time afterwards he was appointed secretary to Pope Leo X. He remained at Rome for eight years, enjoying the society of many dis- tinguished" men and loved and admired by all who knew liim. There he became enamoured of the beautiful Morosina. It was at her urgent solicitation that Bembo, in 1520, on the death of Leo X, with- drew from public affairs and retired with his health impaired by severe sickness to Padua, where he lived in ease and elegance, devoting himself to literary pursuits and the society of his learned friends. Here he collected an extensive librarj' and formed a rich musevmi of medals and antiquities. His Paduan re- treat became the gathering-place of all the most cultured and most scholarly men in Italy. In 1529 he accepted the office of historiographer of the Re- public of Venice, and shortly afterwards was ap- pointed librarian of St. Mark's. In 1539 Pope Paul III recalled him to Rome and conferred on him the cardinal's hat. From the time of Bembo 's eccle- siastical preferment there was a marked change in his conduct. Heretofore his life had been anj-thing but edifying — in fact it had been more pagan than Christian. But now he renounced the study of the classics and applied himself chiefly to the study of the Fathers and the Holy Scriptures. Two years after he was raised to the cardinalate, he was made Bishop of Gubbio, and still later he received the Bishopric of Bergamo. He died more admired and lamented than any man of letters of his time and was buried not far from Pope Leo in the Church of the ilinerva.

Bembo was a thorough master of elegant diction. He possessed beyond any contemporarj- the formal jjerfection of style, both in Latin and Italian, de- manded by the age in which he lived. In his Latin writings it was his aim to imitate as closely as possi- ble the style of Cicero. His letters were masterpieces of Latin style and of the art of letter-writing. He is said to have passed his compositions through numer- ous portfolios, revising them in each one of them. Bembo's works include a history of Venice, poems, dialogues, criticisms, and letters. The most important are: "Rermn Veneticarum Libri XII" (1551). a historj' of Venice covering the period from 1487 to 1513, oridnally published in Latin, but afterwards translated by the author into Italian; "Gli Asolani" (^'enice, 1505), a dialogue in Italian on Platonic love, composed in imitation of Cicero's Tusculan Disputa- tions, and dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia; "Le Prose", a short treatise on the Italian language; "Le Rime" (Venice, 1530); "Carmina" (Venice, 1533), a collec-

tion of Latin poems; and several volumes of letters, written in Latin. Besides these original works he edited the Italian poems of Petrarch, printed by Aldus (1501), and the '"Terze rime" of Dante (1502). His collected works were published at Venice in four volumes in 1729.

Stmonds. Renaissance in Italy (New York, 1900), II; The Rn-iial of Learning; G-1Knett, A History of Italian Literature iNew York, 1898); Vos Kecmont. Gesch. der Stadt Rom.; fiR.iBoscHi. star. lett. Ital. (1809). VII, 1, 110-111, 235-231; III, 926-931, 1120; IV, 1560; B-\tt.\glia, Elogio del Cardinale P Bembo (Venice, 1827); Becc.itelli, Vita di Pietro Bembo, cardinale, in Istor. case Vertez. (1718), II. xxxii-li.

Edmund Bitrke.

Benadir, Prefecture Apostolic of, in Africa, Ues between 8° and 12° X. lat., and between 42° and 51° 16' E. long. It comprises the whole territory of Italian Somaliland, the area of which is a little more than 192,800 square miles, or nearly twice that of Italy; and its boundaries are identical -n-ith those of the Italian possessions in East Africa, namely: on the east, the Indian Ocean: on the north, the Gulf of Aden from Cape Guardafui to the boundary of British Somaliland; on the west, the same British boundary as far south as the Juba River; and on the south, the com-se of that river from Lugh to the Indian Ocean. The longest meridian within this territory measures 776 miles, while the greatest width is 559 miles.

The commercial company which had been formed for the exploitation of El Benadir (i. e. "The Ports", now the littoral region of Italian Somahland) found it to its own interest to call the Church to its aid, and asked for missionaries, to whom it assigned a subsidy of 10,000 lire (S2,000) per annum. Propaganda, by a decree of 21 January, 1904, entrusted the mission to the Difcalced Trinitarians, for which order the re- demption of captives is a special tradition, and the first prefect Apostolic, Father Leander of the Seven Dolours, embarked within the same year. However, the presence of a religious who would jealously watch the slave trade, and denounce infractions of the treaties, might become inconvenient; the governor, therefore, forbade Father Leander to enter his terri- torj', and the prefect Apostolic, excluded from his mission, was obliged to take refuge in the British territory to the south. The governor's order was rescinded in May, 1906, and Father Leander then entered upon his prefecture; but on the 10th of July, 1906, he died at Gelib, nearly 250 miles from the coast. Towards the end of that year Father Gu- glielmo da San Felice was sent as successor to Father Leander. taking with him five religious of his o-rni order. At the present wTiting (1907) too short a time has, of course, elapsed to permit of obtaining any information as to the actual progress of mis- sionary work in Italian Somaliland.

The" residence of the prefect Apostohc is at Brava, while the headquarters of the colonial government are at ilogadishu (Mogadoxo. or Mukdishu). The population of the whole territory is estimated at 3,000.000, almost aU Mohammedans. Slavery is practised, and the efforts of the Anti-Slaverj' Society to suppress the slave trade, by representations to the Italian Government, have so far had no result.

Missiom-s Caf/io/icir ( Propaganda. Rome, 1907), 355; SlaUs- man's Year Book ^London, 1907'.

Albert B.4.tt.\j<dier.

Benard, L.\urent, chief founder of the Maurist Congregation of the Benedictine Order, b. at Never."!. 1573; d. at Paris, 1620. He joined the Cluniac Bene- dictines at Xevers. became a Doctor of the Sorbonne and later Prior of the Cluny College, Paris, which he reformed with the help of two monks of the recently established Congregation of St.-Vannes. Refusing the abbacy of "St. Etienne. Caen, and the grand- priorship of Cluny, he passed tlu-ough a second novitiate at St.-^'annes, and renewed his profession