Pietro Bembo, O.S.I.H. (Latin: Petrus Bembus; 20 May 1470 – 18 January 1547) was a Venetian scholar, poet, and literary theorist who also was a member of the Knights Hospitaller and a cardinal of the Catholic Church. As an intellectual of the Italian Renaissance (15th–16th c.), Pietro Bembo greatly influenced the development of the Tuscan dialect as a literary language for poetry and prose, which, by later codification into a standard language, became the modern Italian language. In the 16th ce…