Francis Petrarch

Francis Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) (1304–1374)

If a single person can be credited for the impetus that resulted in the flowering of the European Renaissance, that person is Francis Petrarch, who among many other achievements was the earliest of the great Italian HUMANISTs. The son of an exiled Florentine notary, Ser Petracco, Petrarch was born in Arezzo just south of Florence, and in 1312 moved with his father, his mother, and his brother Gherardo to the papal court in Avignon. The family resided in the village of Carpentras near Mount Ventoux, and there the young Francesco acquired an ardent love of literature—a subject to which he swore he would devote his life.His father, however, had other ideas for his eldest son and sent the lad when he was just 12 years old to study civil law at Montpellier in France. After four years there, he moved on to the law school at Bologna, Italy—Europe’s finest legal institution of the epoch—where he spent much of his next five years.

Petrarch’s upbringing in a Tuscan family in a district of Provence gave him mastery of the two most important literary vernaculars of 14th-century continental Europe: the Italian of Tuscany, of DANTE, and of BOCCACCIO, on the one hand, and the Provençal used by the Troubadors of southern France. The poems of the Troubadors modeled for Italian poets of the generation immediately preceding Petrarch’s the manner of writing love lyrics—mainly SONNETs—that the Italians would develop into the “Sweet New Style.” Petrarch also mastered Latin—not just the Vulgate Latin of the Middle Ages but also the classical Latin of the great age of Roman letters, and throughout his life he worked at purifying his own command of that idiom in his Latin writings. He was probably the first 14th-century European to perceive the potential for the construction of modern poetry that lay largely unexplored in the secular writings of the ancients.He haunted libraries in search of lost and neglected manuscripts. As a law student he rediscovered several lost portions of Livy’s history of Rome and edited them. He found in Liège, now in Belgium, two orations of Cicero previously unknown to medieval Europe. In Florence he discovered a lost portion of Quintilian (ca. 35–ca. 100). In the Capitoline Library of the Cathedral of Verona, Italy, he found the letters of Cicero. He was one among few persons in Europe who could have recognized them for what they were. On their model, he early decided that he would preserve his own correspondence, and he did so in two famous collections of letters, those of his youth and those of his old age.

If the secular literature of the ancients inspired Petrarch, so did a religious work.When the poet was 19, the Augustinian monk Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulchro had presented Francesco with a manuscript copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions—a work that modeled for Petrarch the interiority and the dividedness that reappears throughout Petrarch’s best-remembered 366-poem vernacular collection, PETRARCH’S SONGBOOK (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta or Canzoniere), and throughout his Latin work, Petrarch’s Secret—an imagined dialogue
with St. Augustine on the subject of Petrarch’s own lifelong consuming passion for a woman he called Laura.

His parents’ early death meant that Petrarch could desert the law and devote himself to study and writing. Doing so, however, also meant that he would ever afterward be dependent on the generosity of a series of patrons who supported him throughout his career, both directly by giving him access to their libraries and with gifts of Money and less directly by bestowing upon him the income from ecclesiastical livings. Petrarch seems to have taken minor orders that allowed him to accept livings from churches he did not in fact serve, but he seems never to have become a priest. That his Italian poems made him the most influential European lyric poet of all time would have come as a surprise to Petrarch. He staked his claim to glory on his Latin writings.While they are far from forgotten, they did not bring him posterity’s acclaim as his Italian poems did. He expected that his EPIC poem Africa would be regarded as his masterpiece. This poem celebrates the career of the Roman general Scipio Africanus (237–183 B.C.E.), who conquered Spain for the Romans and forced the withdrawal from Italy of the Carthaginian general, Hannibal.When a grateful populace offered Scipio the offices of Roman consul and dictator for life, he refused them and instead retired to a secluded, private life. Petrarch’s other Latin writings include his Lives of Illustrious Men, his work in praise of The Solitary Life, his treatise about the ease of the religious life, the letters mentioned above, Remedies against Adverse Fortune, his description of his Ascent of Mount Ventoux, and INVECTIVEs. Petrarch aspired to glory and he achieved it. During his lifetime he became the most famous private person in Europe. The subsequent history of lyric poetry in Europe and the Americas can accurately be regarded as a series of footnotes (sometimes very great ones) to the achievement of Francesco Petrarca. His admirers imitated him— often badly—and his detractors reacted against his imitators—especially the bad ones. Those who imitated him well are called PETRARCHANs and those who did it badly are labeled PETRARCHISTS. One of Petrarch’s primary goals was to reestablish in his own person the ancient Roman honor of the office of poet laureate. His unparalleled achievement and some careful finagling conspired to accomplish this objective. Almost simultaneously Petrarch received invitations from the University of Paris and from the Senate at Rome to accept the honor. Petrarch opted for Rome, and, on Easter Sunday 1341, he delivered an oration on the steps of the capitol and was crowned with the traditional wreath of laurel leaves.

After moving from court to court under the auspices of first one patron and then another, in his old age Petrarch agreed to leave his books to the Republic of Venice as a founding collection for the Marciana Library in exchange for what amounted to an old-age pension. He moved into a pleasant house just outside Arqua in the Eugenian Hills between Venice and Padua. There he died. His books were taken over by the local Paduan ruler and his library dispersed to the highest bidders across Europe. Venice nonetheless considers the Marciana to be Petrarch’s monument, and the poet’s brooding statue presides over it. Behind glass, his stuffed cat presides over his residence at Arqua Petrarca. The home has been preserved as a literary tourist site. Petrarch’s bones have recently been disinterred from his monument in the town square in the interests of scientific study and of television and journalistic voyeurism.