Giovanni Francesco Loredano [Loredan]. Bizzarrie Academiche. Venice:Giacomo Sarzina, 1638. Krown & Spellman re...

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In 1630, Giovanni Francesco Loredano (1607-1661), founded the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti to 'lasciar correr l'ingegno.' Loredano wrote this set of discourses for the Academy under the title Bizzarrie Accademiche. Among these eccentric and often ironic vignettes are those on love, women, and desire.

"The published discourses and debates of the Accademia degli Incogniti provide insight into the prominence accorded 'the female question' at meetings of the Academy, as well as the philosophical moral inclinations of its mysterious leader and founder, Giovanni Francesco Loredano... Loredano's discourses engage a number of issues... with which the Venetian opera was also concerned: the danger of women for their lovers, the equivocal nature of female chastity, the inherent right of men to sexual pleasure, and the impossibility of female silence. They are public rather than private writings, designed to be spoken by a masculine voice and heard by a audience that, at least according to some reports, included women. Their inherent theatricality is in part what links them to opera... this is an exaggerated rhetoric, filled with satire and double meanings, encoded for a knowing audience..." [Wendy B. Heller, Emblems of Eloquence, 2003.]