Christopher S. Celenza - Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer

PETRARCH

Books in the RENAISSANCE LIVES series explore and illustrate the life histories and achievements of significant artists, intellectuals and scientists in the early modern world. They delve into literature, philosophy, the history of art, science and natural history and cover narratives of exploration, statecraft and technology.

Series Editor: Franois Quiviger

Already published

Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason Mary Ann Caws

Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity Troy Thomas

Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares Nils Bttner

John Evelyn: A Life of Domesticity John Dixon Hunt

Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time Bernadine Barnes

Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer Christopher S. Celenza

Rembrandts Holland Larry Silver

REAKTION BOOKS

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
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4448 Wharf Road
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www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2017

Copyright Christopher S. Celenza 2017

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN 9781780238777

COVER: Justus van Gent, Petrarch, 15th century, oil on panel. Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino photo Scala, Florence (courtesy of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attivit Cultural)/ Art Resource, New York

1 Justus van Gent, Petrarch, 15th century, oil on panel.

EW FIGURES ARE AS MISUNDERSTOOD as Petrarch, or Francesco Petrarca, in the original Italian. His life spanned much of the fourteenth century, an epoch of turmoil and crisis, and he himself in his interests and passions responded in ways that made him famous in his own time and a landmark figure even now. Over the centuries since his death in 1374, however, much has changed regarding his reputation and identity ().

If he is known today, it is for his love poetry, written beautifully and evocatively in the vernacular. Indeed, Petrarchs Tuscan poetry served as one of the models for high Italian when later thinkers in the sixteenth century were fashioning the canon and vocabulary of what became the Italian national language. And Laura, the subject of most of Petrarchs poems and the animating impulse behind all, became over the ages, like Dantes Beatrice, a model of the idealized woman: not woman as a person with an inner life but woman as symbol of male desires, aspirations and inner turmoil. It is this Petrarch Petrarch the Tuscan poet with whom later ages developed a fascination.

Yet during Petrarchs lifetime, he considered his work written in Latin more important. He wrote numerous Latin letters, which he collected and quite deliberately curated, reflecting a wide network of friends. He made trips to obscure libraries, so that he could find and study Latin works little known to the Middle Ages. In his continued cultivation of Latin, Petrarch set the tone for the rest of the Italian Renaissance, whose leading lights after him continued the quest to rediscover the ancient Roman, and eventually Greek, worlds in all their fullness. If every major Western city is full today of classicizing architecture, this tendency is due in no small part to the passion for Graeco-Roman antiquity that Petrarch inaugurated. If classical authors like Virgil, Cicero, Livy and eventually a whole host of ancient Graeco-Roman writers emerged as the centre of school curricula for many centuries, this development, too, can be traced back to Petrarch. Though he was by no means the first thinker to develop a consuming passion for the ancient world, he was the first one to make it a cultural ideal that had staying power. And he did so in a way that can seem paradoxical at first glance: by adapting it to his age with his own, very specific Christian sensibility.

When all is said and done, there have been three different images of Petrarch, whose perceived importance has varied over time. First, there is Petrarch the Tuscan poet, whose fame has lasted and grown over the centuries. Then there is Petrarch the classicist who in looking backwards to antiquity pointed the way towards the Renaissance. Finally, there is Petrarch the Latin writer. This last identity, though so vital to him during his lifetime, was soon dissociated from his image as the classicizing father of the Renaissance. New literary tastes, changing priorities among learned elites and blind spots among scholars all led to Petrarchs Latin writing sinking into relative oblivion. In life, however, Petrarch enfolded all three of those identities. To understand him in full, they all need to be brought to the fore.

Petrarch. A Tuscan who grew up in France. A devotee of the ancient pagan Roman world and a devout Christian. A lover of friendship and sociability, yet at times an intensely private and almost misanthropic man. A person who believed life on earth was little more than a transitory pilgrimage, yet one who nonetheless took himself as his most important subject-matter.

Who was this man?

You will, perhaps, have heard something about me, although even this may be in doubt, since a small and obscure name will travel far in time and space only with difficulty. And it is likely that you will want to know what sort of man I was, or what was the fortune of my works, especially those whose reputation has reached you or of which you have at least heard the titles.

etrarch wrote this letter when he was in his sixties. In its vanity disguised as modesty, misanthropy masquerading as a love of the simple life, and willing revelation of what was clearly a complicated personality, his Letter to Posterity is nothing less than a classic.

The letter is indeed addressed simply to posterity not to a specific person but to an unnamed and unquantified readership, who might, someday, take an interest in Petrarch. If you have heard of me, you might like to know something about what I was like. Here Petrarch (now a relatively old man, of course) reveals that his substantial fame will outlive him.

Petrarch was exceptional, in all the senses that word implies. One manifestation of this exceptional status is that, unlike many medieval thinkers, Petrarch took great care in shaping his own identity, often openly and unashamedly taking his own life as his subject-matter. He wrote a series of revealing letters in Latin, the most famous of which is the Letter to Posterity. It uncovers much about Petrarchs personality and, to boot, offers an (admittedly short and sometimes attenuated) autobiography. For example, he tells of the circumstances in which he was born: