Queer Places:
Chiesa di San Luca Venice, Città Metropolitana di Venezia, Veneto, Italy

Lodovico Dolce (1508/10 – January, 1568) was an Italian man of letters and theorist of painting. He was a broadly based Venetian humanist and prolific author, translator and editor; he is now mostly remembered for his Dialogue on Painting or L'Aretino (1557), and his involvement in artistic controversies of the day. He became a friend of Titian's, and often acted as in effect his public relations man.

The scholar Antonio Anselmi lived in the Bembo palace during the period in which he was Bembo's secretary (from 1537 to 1547), dealing with correspondence and the library. What kind of individual he was is revealed in a letter in verse in which the Venetian scholar Ludovico Dolce asks him to send him back one of his servants, a boy, who had left him in the lurch and had gone to stay in Padua near him. Throughout the poem it is clear that the boy's main merit was his availability in bed, a merit appreciated, apparently, by both Dolce and Anselmi. As a demonstration of the fact that the letter will perhaps also be joking, but still scandalous, at the end of the poem Dolce asks that Anselmi burn the writing, to prevent it from falling into the hands of Cardinal Bembo, and he trusts to receive the boy back together with the answer.

The date of Dolce's birth, long accepted as 1508, has been more likely set in 1510.[1] Dolce's youth was difficult. His father, a former steward to the public attorneys (castaldo delle procuratorie) for the Republic of Venice, died when the boy was only two.[2] For his early studies, he depended on the support of two patrician families: that of the doge Leonardo Loredano (see Dolce's dedication of his Dialogue on Painting) and the Cornaro family, who financed his studies at Padua.[3] After he completed his studies, Dolce found work in Venice with the press of Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari.[4] He was one of the most active intellectuals in 16th-century Venice. Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi claims that over the course of thirty-six years Dolce was responsible for 96 editions of his own original work, 202 editions of other writers, and at least 54 translations.[5] As a popularizer, he worked to make information available to the non-specialist, those too busy to learn Greek and Latin.[6] Following a productive life as a scholar and author, Dolce died in January, 1568, and was buried in the church of San Luca in Venice, "although in which pavement tomb is unknown."[7]

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