Petrarch, Francis

(Francesco Petrarca)

(1304–1374)

   Petrarch is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest Italian writers, and is generally recognized as the founder of the movement that came to be known as humanism—a movement that aimed to revive the study of the Greek and Roman classics, and that promoted an attitude about human beings that extolled achievement in this world, rather than considering this world a mere pilgrimage to the next, as medieval Christianity often advised. Petrarch was one of the most famous writers of his time, and significantly influenced his contemporaries (particularly BOCCACCIO). Even more, Petrarch influenced his successors, not, as he would have desired, through his voluminous writings in Latin, but chiefly through his lyric poetry in the vernacular, which popularized the SONNET form and the language and conventions of the “Petrarchan” love that pervaded the Renaissance.

   Petrarch was born in 1304 in Arezzo.His father, a native Florentine, had been exiled in 1302 along with DANTE and other White Guelfs (the party that opposed Pope Boniface VIII). In 1314, Petrarch’s family moved to Avignon, the new seat of the papacy, where his father worked as notary for the French pope Clement V. His father intended Petrarch to enter the legal profession, and accordingly sent him to study law at Montpellier (1319–23) and Bologna (1323–25), but Petrarch was uninspired by the law and devoted much of his time to the study of classical literature and culture. Petrarch returned to Avignon in 1326, after his father’s death, and entered the service of the powerful Cardinal Giacomo Colonna, who employed him as a diplomat and gave him the opportunity to follow his scholarly pursuits. Petrarch made use of the huge library at Avignon, and devoted most of his time to the study, collection, and transcribing of manuscripts of classical antiquity. He also traveled a good deal in Colonna’s service, so that he began to move in the influential circles of European courts. In the late 1320s, he published his first scholarly work, an edition of Livy’s history of Rome that coherently organized the scattered manuscripts of the Latin historian. Perhaps more important, on Good Friday of 1327 he is supposed to have seen for the first time, in a church in Avignon, the unattainable lady he called Laura, the inspiration for his most famous poetry. It is possible, as some have suggested, that Laura is a literary fiction, a character created by Petrarch to be the object of his love poetry. Others believe that she was the wife of Hugues de Sade and that she died in the BLACK DEATH of 1348, and that Petrarch’s love for her was strictly platonic for more than 20 years. In either case, from 1327 on, Petrarch began writing vernacular love poetry addressed to a woman named Laura.

   In about 1330, Petrarch seems to have tired of Avignon and began a period of wandering. Petrarch also traveled through France and Germany in 1333, a journey recorded in a number of his surviving letters. He returned to Avignon in 1336, and took minor orders, as canon of the Cathedral of Lombez, which provided him with an income and demanded little of his time beyond a daily reading of his office. In 1337 he traveled to Rome with members of the Colonna family. Later that year, he began spending a good deal of time at a house he bought in Vaucluse in southern France, where he wrote many of his literary works of the 1330s and early 1340s, beginning work on his epic poem Africa, a work in Latin hexameters recounting the story of the Roman hero Scipio Africanus and his victory over Carthage in the Second Punic War. Here Petrarch also finished his De viris illustribus, a collection of the lives of famous men.And he continued to work on his lyric poems. One of the things that drove Petrarch was a desire for personal achievement and a quest for individual fame, a motive that many scholars see as characteristic of Renaissance humanism. Renowned through Italy for his Latin scholarship, Petrarch, in one of the great public-relations coups in history, was crowned poet laureate by the Roman Senate on Easter Sunday of 1341. It was an act that helped make him the most famous man of letters in Europe—a reputation he was able to sustain throughout his life. In 1345, in his manuscript studies, he discovered Cicero’s letter to Atticus. These personal letters inspired him to compose letters of his own as a literary form, letters to his contemporaries as well as to some of the ancient writers. During this decade he also wrote his Secretum, presented as a dialogue between himself and St.Augustine,who chides him for his excessive love of Laura, showing him that such love is idolatrous, and that he is self-deceived in thinking of it as idealistic. But the decade ended in disaster with the advent of the Black Death, which took not only Petrarch’s beloved Laura, but also his longtime patron, Cardinal Colonna.

   Looking for a new patron, Petrarch moved to Milan in 1353 and spent some time acting as a diplomat for the powerful and autocratic Visconti family. He also lived in Venice for a while, and eventually was granted land in Arqua near Padua in 1368.He continued working on his personal letters, revisions of his lyric poems, and his transcriptions of classical texts, eventually building up the largest private library in Europe. He also studied Greek, though he admits he did not learn it well.Most important, these were the years of his friendship with his great contemporary, Giovanni Boccaccio. Petrarch convinced Boccaccio to abandon writing in the vernacular and to take up the study of classical culture, and the composition of texts in Latin. It was under Petrarch’s influence that Boccaccio began his work on the Latin text of his Genealogy of the Gentile Gods. And Petrarch, who first met Boccaccio in Florence in 1350 and admired his DECAMERON, made a Latin verse translation of the story of Patient Griselde, the last tale of the Decameron— a translation that CHAUCER used for his version of the story in The CLERK’S TALE. Even after his retirement to Padua, Petrarch spent a good deal of time on diplomatic missions. He died at his home in July of 1374, purportedly with his head resting on an opened manuscript of Virgil. It is clear that Petrarch thought his ultimate literary reputation would be based on his Latin works, in particular his epic Africa, which he left unfinished in draft form upon his death. But despite the enormous efforts he put into his study and recovery of classical literature, and the inspiration it gave to his own Latin compositions, modern readers have not been moved by them, and Petrarch’s posthumous fame rests almost solely on his vernacular verse. His CANZONIERE (Scattered rhymes), a collection of 366 lyrics, are deeply introspective lyrics that explore the poet’s psyche as affected and transformed by his love for the unattainable woman, Laura—both before and after her death. In these lyrics, Petrarch perfected and popularized the sonnet form. He also drew largely on the tradition of COURTLY LOVE as it had developed for two centuries throughout Europe and, particularly, as it had been refined by Dante, CAVALCANTI, and other poets of the Italian DOLCE STIL NOVO, who had elevated the lady to an angelic position. But however much they owe earlier poetry, Petrarch’s lyrics focus to a greater extent on sexual frustration (he never actually meets Laura) and on the contrary emotions of his own psyche. Thus the images and vocabulary of Petrarch’s poetry abound in paradox: Love is both a joy and a torment; the Lady is both friend and enemy.His lyrics also employ conventional catalogue descriptions of his lady’s beauties—eyes like the sun, hair like gold wires, lips like coral. In this sense his poetry is original, and its influence on the next 300 years of European verse was so powerful that his successors gave his name—“Petrarchan”—to both the Italian sonnet form he refined and the love conventions he transformed. English poets like Wyatt, Surrey, and Spenser used Petrarch as a model, as did Shakespeare, who also parodied Petrarchan conventions in works like his sonnet “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”

   Bibliography

   ■ Bernardo, Aldo S. Petrarch, Scipio and the “Africa”: The Birth of Humanism’s Dream. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962.

   ■ Bloom, Harold, ed. and intro. Petrarch. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.

   ■ Foster, Kenelm. Petrarch: Poet and Humanist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984.

   ■ Mann,Nicholas. Petrarch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

   ■ Petrarch, Francis. The Canzoniere, or, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Translated with notes and commentary by Mark Musa. Introduction by Mark Musa with Barbara Manfredi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

   ■ ———. Letters of Old Age. Translated by Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernado. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

   ■ ———.The Secret by Francesco Petrarch. Edited with an introduction by Carol E. Quillen. Boston: Bedford/ St.Martin’s, 2003.

   ■ Quillen, Carol Everhart. Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

   ■ Roche, Thomas P., Jr. Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences. New York: AMS Press, 1989.

   ■ Trinkaus, Charles. The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.