Francesco Petrarca
Francesco Petrarca
(Arezzo 1304 – Arqua 1374)
His life
Childhood and years of training
The first of the great humanists of the Renaissance, Petrarch has gone down in posterity for the perfection of his poetry in the vernacular language, which down the centuries has become the model for all Western classicisms, as an alternative to Dantesque realism.
Petrarch’s life was as eventful as it was studious. Though he was initiated into the appreciation of Virgil and above all Cicero by his father Pietro, a Florentine notary originally from Incisa in Valdarno, he owes his birth in Arezzo to his father’s political exile there (1304). Disdaining the amnesty issued in 1309, in 1311 Pietro joined his wife, Eletta Canigiani in Pisa. She had brought up Francesco and his young brother Gherardo, three years his junior, alone in Incisa. He took his family to Avignon (1312), converted into a capital city by the recent transfer of the pontifical see. Unable to find lodgings there for his family, he moved them into neighbouring Carpentras; there, Francesco received teaching at the trivium. In 1316, his father sent him to Montpellier to study law, which he then continued without any great inclination at Bologna University from 1320, in the company of Gherardo. Francesco abandoned his studies once and for all on the death of his father in 1326, which took him back to Avignon, where the effervescence of the Pontifical Court was marvellously suited to his thirst for pleasure (which earned him two illegitimate children, Giovanni and Francesca, born in 1337 and 1342 respectively), as well as his social, literary and political ambitions. In between his frequent diplomatic missions, mixed with scholarly research, he stayed in Provence until 1353.
At the Papal Court in Avignon
An ecclesiastical career promising to be the fastest, he received minor orders and won the favour of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, in whose service he remained until 1347. Poetic laurels were far from being the young Petrarch’s least social asset, whether versifying in the vernacular his passion for Laura, encountered for the first time, according to the story by Canzoniere, on Good Friday 6th April 1327 and dead at the age of 21 on 6th April 1348, or embarking, in the solitude of his retreat in Vaucluse (between 1339 and 1341), on the monumental Latin poem of Africa and the De viris illustribus, for which he would be solemnly crowned poet on the Capitole (8th April 1341) thanks to the support of the learned King Robert of Naples. He had already been to Rome with the Colonnas in 1337, after a long peregrination in France, Flanders, and the Rhineland in 1333.
Upon returning to Avignon in 1342, he had a profound religious crisis of conscience, accentuated by Gherardo’s conversion to become a monk (1343), to whom he paid frequent visits in the Carthusian monastery at Montrieux (especially in 1347 and 1353). He himself went more and more often into retreat at Vaucluse (1342–1343, 1346–1347, 1351–1353), where he wrote Secretum meum, De vita solitaria, De otio religioso, the Psalmi penitentiales and a number of Latin and Italian poems that attest to the new direction in his spiritual life. This coincided with a growing interest in Italy’s political fate, at that time compromised by the rivalries between cities and anarchy among the nobility, as well as in the restoration of the Church as a prelude to a regeneration of all Christendom. In 1335 and 1336, Petrarch had addressed two Latin epistles to Benedict XII, exhorting him to re-establish the pontifical see in Rome, a petition that he renewed in 1342 to Clement VI. In all truth, his political theories exhibit plenty of contradictions, and his action is marked by a number of reversals of opinion in the face of events, the princes to whom he lent his services, and the missions entrusted to him. All the same, he didn’t hesitate, even if it meant losing the support of the Colonnas, to openly side with Cola di Rienzo — in whose favour he had pronounced himself at the Pontifical Court in 1342 — who had installed a popular government in Rome (May 1347). At one time, he even envisaged going to join him in Rome. Neither the tribune’s dictatorial evolution, nor its being crushed, nor his imprisonment in Avignon ever dissuaded him from forcefully defending his ideas for the political and moral renovation of Christendom on the basis of a radical reform of the Roman institutions and above all his centralizing conception of the political rôle of Rome in Italian unification.
Departure from Provence
Tired of the corruption at the Avignon Court, which he denounced in his sonnets and the Sine nomine epistles (1351–1353), Petrarch considered leaving Provence for good. He finally made up his mind to do so in 1353 following short trips to Verona, Padua, Mantua and Florence, which he interrupted to make his last stay in Vaucluse (1351–1353), declining the offer of Boccaccio as Ambassador of Florence to come home to take possession of his father’s property and teach at Florence University. Contrary to all expectations, he moved to Milan in the service of the Visconti, remaining there until 1361. Given principally honorary offices and diplomatic missions (to Prague in 1356 and Paris in 1361), he enjoyed in return great material comfort and plenty of free time, which he made the most of to finish off the Secretum and De otio religioso, to establish the definitive version of his Bucolicum Carmen, to make a collection of his vernacular Rime, his epistles in verse and the Familiari, and lastly to embark upon the De remediis utriusque fortunæ and the Trionfi.
In 1361, he fled the plague that was threatening Milan — first to Padua, then to Venice, where he was showered with honours and stayed from 1362 to 1367. There, he finished off De remediis and put the finishing touches to the Familiari as well as to the new anthology of theSenili, while he wrote De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia in response to attacks from a circle of young Venetian Averroïsts. In 1367, he accepted the hospitality in Padua of Francesco da Carrara (?–1393), in the company of his daughter Francesca and his son-in-law, who would help him right up to the last days of his pious and studious old age. While staying in Padua, he mainly preferred the contemplative serenity of his small property of Arqua, in the Euganean hills, though he never gave up his frequent travels: to Udine in 1368, to appear before the Emperor Charles IV, at war against the Visconti; then to Milan, to intervene with the latter; and to Pavia, where he continued to spend the Summer until 1369, a habit he had started in 1363; in 1370, a blackout interrupted a journey to Rome to greet Pope Urban V; in 1372 Petrarch was in Venice. And right up to his death, on the night of 18th – 19th July 1374, supported in particular by his increasingly close friendship with Boccaccio, he never stopped maintaining and enlarging by correspondence the very huge network of cultural exchanges at which he had worked all his life, setting down in a lasting fashion the bases of humanism.
His œuvre
The Canzoniere
The essence of his glory, of his linguistic and stylistic influence comes from his Canzoniere (also known as the Rime sparse) in the vernacular, the last version of which is to be found transcribed in the autograph manuscript “Vaticano latino 3195” entitled Francisci Petrache laureati poete rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Since before 1336, Petrarch had been thinking of collecting and organizing his love poems, which all his life he never stopped refining, and the first anthology he made included 215 pieces. The definitive anthology has 366 of them (317 sonnets, 29 songs, 9 sestines, 7 ballads and 4 madrigals), arranged in two sections: In vita di Madonna Laura (1–263) and In morte di Madonna Laura (264–366). In effect, with the exception of the few politically-inspired poems exalting Ancient Rome or denouncing the foreign invader and the corruption of the Pontifical Court, the Canzoniere is entirely dedicated to the poet’s love for the woman he names Laura, Laura-Aurora, Laura-Lauro-Laurea (the laurel: both the bush and the crown), Laura-L'Aura (vital, poetic breath), but also — twice — Laureta, a gracious diminutive evoking, outside any symbolism, a concrete female figure whose identity, however, remains a mystery. Although Petrarch resorts in the Provençal tradition to the fiction of a single, idealized love, and though in the spirit of the “dolce stil novo” he makes this invention the metaphor for a divine revelation (underlined by the chronology of the loving passion, which literally repeats the Passion of Christ), he does avoid transcendence and the logic of the symbol, on the one hand in his analysis of the contradictions of desire, and through the obsessive repetition of emblematic fantasies on the other. Disorder in love would be incapable either of leading to divine order (except through the denial of repentance), or particularly of representing it, and the very sublimation of the desire for Laura into the desire for glory (Lauro) only ever happens here below. To the realistic invention of the theological symbolism in Dante’s Vita nova, Petrarch contrasts the timeless emblems and figures of amorous alienation.
The “Rime disperse” or “extravaganti”, in other words, not contained in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, are in part apocryphal.
The Trionfi
Moreover, Petrarch’s most ambitious undertaking in the vernacular is the allegorical poem of the Trionfi, undertaken around 1354 and continued almost right up to the end of his life, written in “terzine” (tercets, the metrical unit of the Divine Comedy) and in which Petrarch arranges his spiritual autobiography into a succession of symbolic cycles culminating in the triumph, by turns, of Desire, Chastity, Death, Glory, Time, and Eternity.
The works in Latin
Petrarch’s works in Latin comprise: – the nine volumes of Africa (unfinished, despite several drafts subsequent to that of 1341), exalting the glory of Rome through the great figure of Scipio the African, going both back to the origins of the Urbs and forward to the contemporary period using the device of a premonitory dream by the hero; – De viris illustribus, the original outline for which included a series of biographies going from Romulus to Titus (interrupted at Cato the Censor, then the cycle was expanded to all the heroes of humanity, from Adam to modern times, then once again abandoned); in the last draft, the lives of Scipio and Cæsar stand out by their scale and their historical quality; – the four volumes of Rerum memorandarum (begun in 1344), a thematic anthology of “exempla”, anecdotes and historical episodes; – Secretum (1342–1343 and 1353–1358), a dialogue, of Ciceronian structure and religious inspiration, between Petrarch and St Augustine, who, inspired by Truth (a silent witness to their conversation), tries hard to overcome the poet’s inner conflicts (each of the three volumes corresponds to one day of the dialogue); – the treatises De vita solitaria and De otio religioso (1346–1347, both subsequently reworked), in praise of retreat and study, according to the classical ideal and the monastic rule; – the Psalmi penitentiales (c. 1347), where the poet implores for Divine forgiveness; – De remediis utriusque fortunæ, a treatise undertaken around 1354, divided into two series of 122 and 132 brief dialogues between Reason, Joy, and Hope, and between Reason, Pain, and Fear, following an erudite casuistry that lends each of them mediæval moral reflection; – the four volumes of Invective contra medicum (1352–1355) and De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (1367–1370), in which Petrarch defends the dignity and usefulness of literary studies against encyclopædism, abstraction, formalism and the vain subtlety of contemporary philosophy and science; – Invectiva contra eum qui maledixit Italiæ (Apologia contra Gallum), from 1373, a refutation of the thesis in favour of maintaining the pontifical see in Avignon; – four anthologies of prose epistles (24 volumes of Familiari, 17 of Senili, 3 of Varie and 4 of Sine nomine [or Sine titulo]; – an anthology, in three volumes, of sixty-four epistles in verse, mainly written prior to 1350, the Epistolæ metricæ, which in their autobiographical inspiration have certain similarities to the eclogues of Bucolicum Carmen (written c. 1346 and revised in 1357).
© 2006 Umanista.Net