Petrarch

• 1. Introduction

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  Petrarch was born in Arezzo on the 20th of July 1304, and by the time he died seventy years later, he had reshaped what it meant to be a thinking, feeling human being in Western culture. Here was a man who could write tenderly about a woman he barely spoke to, who climbed a mountain for the sheer pleasure of the view, who invented the idea that the centuries before him were a dark age, and who left fifty florins to his best friend to buy a warm winter dressing gown. He was a scholar who burned through seven years of law school and came away convinced he had wasted them. He was a poet whose sonnets still carry his name. And he was a letter-writer who once confessed, in those same letters, that he could not honestly claim to have always been free from desires of the flesh. What made this Italian scholar from Tuscany into the figure historians call the first Renaissance humanist? What were the passions that drove him, the friendships that shaped him, and the ideas that outlasted him by centuries?

• 2. A Poet Against the Law

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  Ser Petracco, Petrarch's father, was a notary by trade, and he expected his two sons to follow him into the legal profession. Petrarch studied law at the University of Montpellier from 1316 to 1320, then continued at Bologna from 1320 to 1326, alongside his lifelong schoolmate Guido Sette, who would later become archbishop of Genoa. But Petrarch's attention kept drifting toward Latin literature. His father, in a fit of exasperation, threw his books into a fire. Petrarch protested in a phrase that has lasted: "I couldn't face making a merchandise of my mind." He viewed the legal system as nothing more than the art of selling justice. He also accused his guardians of robbing him, through legal manipulation, of his small property inheritance in Florence. When his parents died, he and his brother Gherardo returned to Avignon in 1326, where clerical work gave him time to write. That freedom paid off quickly. With Africa, an unfinished Latin epic about the Roman general Scipio Africanus, he became a celebrity across Europe. On the 8th of April 1341, he was crowned poet laureate on the Capitoline Hill in Rome by the senators Giordano Orsini and Orso dell'Anguillara, becoming only the second person to hold that distinction since classical antiquity.

• 3. The Climb and the Turn Inward

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  On the 26th of April 1336, Petrarch set out with his brother Gherardo and two servants to climb Mont Ventoux, a peak rising to 1,912 meters. An old shepherd warned him against attempting it, saying that fifty years earlier he himself had reached the summit and got nothing from it but toil, repentance, and torn clothing. Petrarch climbed anyway, and the letter he later wrote to his friend and confessor, the monk Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, has been studied ever since. At the top, he pulled from his pocket a volume of Saint Augustine's Confessions, the book he always carried. The passage his eyes fell on reads: "And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not." Petrarch closed the book, angry at himself for still admiring earthly things. He turned from the outer landscape to the inner world of the soul, and said nothing more until the group reached the bottom. The psychologist James Hillman later argued that this descent, the return to the valley of the soul in his phrase, is where the Renaissance actually begins. Scholars note that the ascent itself was not unique; Jacob Burckhardt pointed out that Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain shortly before. What was new in Petrarch's account was the aesthetic pleasure he took in the scenery, and the moral reckoning that followed it.

• 4. Laura and the Canzoniere

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  On the 6th of April 1327, in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon, Petrarch saw a woman he would call Laura. She may have been Laura de Noves, wife of Count Hugues de Sade and an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade, though the identification remains uncertain. What is certain is that their contact was minimal. According to his Secretum, she refused him because she was already married. He channeled the resulting passion into the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the collection of 366 lyric poems also known as the Canzoniere, or "songbook". The vast majority, 317 of the 366 poems, are sonnets. Laura is described as fair-haired, with a modest and dignified bearing, but her descriptions remain deliberately fragmentary and elusive. When she died in 1348, Petrarch wrote that his grief was as difficult to live with as his former despair had been. In his "Letter to Posterity", he called it "an overwhelming but pure love affair" and admitted that premature death, bitter but salutary for him, extinguished the cooling flames. The word-play around her name is constant: the Italian l'aura means both the breeze and the name Laura, and the poetic laurels he sought share the same root. Gianfranco Contini described Petrarch's language in the Canzoniere as "unilinguismo", a single, polished register, in deliberate contrast to Dante's mixing of every level of speech. Rima 134 distills the emotional core of the whole collection: "I find no peace, and yet I make no war: / and fear, and hope: and burn, and I am ice."

• 5. Scholar, Traveler, Collector

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  In 1345, in the Chapter Library of Verona Cathedral, Petrarch personally discovered a collection of Cicero's letters that no one had known to exist: the Epistulae ad Atticum. That find is often credited with igniting the scholarly recovery of classical antiquity. He had already been traveling widely across Europe, serving as an ambassador, collecting crumbling Latin manuscripts from libraries and ruins. He described visiting Rome and paying local peasants for ancient coins they dug from the soil, delighting in identifying the faces of Roman emperors on the metal. Historians credit him as the first and most famous devotee of numismatics. He also encouraged and partly funded Leontius Pilatus's translation of Homer, though he was sharply critical of the result. His own limitation was clear: he owned a copy of Homer but read no Greek. He described the situation in a sentence that stuck: "Homer was dumb to him, while he was deaf to Homer." His letters were modeled on the same Cicero whose correspondence he had found. He eventually organized his own letters into four major collections, the most important of which are the Familiares and the Seniles. The Seniles contains his "Letter to Posterity", completed in 1371 or 1372, which he considered the first autobiography written since Saint Augustine, a gap of roughly a thousand years. Among the recipients of his letters were Cola di Rienzo, tribune of Rome, and Philippe de Cabassoles, bishop of Cavaillon.

• 6. Humanism and Its Argument

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  Petrarch did not call himself a humanist; the movement took that name from those who followed him. His core argument, spelled out in Secretum meum, was that God gave humans their intellectual and creative potential specifically to be used to its fullest, and that secular achievement does not preclude a genuine relationship with God. He was a devout Catholic, yet some later philosophers have styled him a Proto-Protestant for the way he challenged received dogma. His internal conflicts, between the active and the contemplative life, between sensuality and mysticism, between classical literature and Christian piety, became the defining arguments of Renaissance humanism for the next two centuries. In De vita solitaria, written in 1346, he argued that Pope Celestine V's refusal of the papacy in 1294 was a model of virtuous solitude. The thinker Leonardo Bruni, born in 1370 just four years before Petrarch's death, later countered with the case for civic humanism, the active life in the world. Petrarch also coined the term "Dark Ages" to describe the centuries before his own, expressing contempt for what he saw as ignorance. Most modern scholars now regard that framing as inaccurate and misleading, but the concept lodged in historical memory and shaped how Europeans understood their own past for generations. In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo built the model for modern written Italian on Petrarch's works and those of Boccaccio, and the Accademia della Crusca later endorsed Petrarch as the standard for Italian style.

• 7. Last Years and What Remained

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  Around 1368, Petrarch moved with his daughter Francesca and her family to the small town of Arqua in the Euganean Hills near Padua, where he passed his remaining years in religious contemplation. Francesca had married Francescuolo da Brossano, who Petrarch would name executor of his will. The will, dated the 4th of April 1370, left fifty florins to Boccaccio for a warm winter dressing gown, a horse and a silver cup and a lute to his brother and friends, and the house in Vaucluse to its caretaker. The bulk of the estate went to Brossano, with an instruction to give half of it to an unnamed person whom, as Petrarch put it, "he knows I wish it to go" - presumably Francesca herself. Petrarch died in his house in Arqua on the 18th or the 19th of July 1374, one day before what would have been his 70th birthday. His library, which he had promised to Venice in exchange for the Palazzo Molina where Francesca's family had lived from 1362 to 1367, was ultimately seized by the da Carrara lords of Padua, and the manuscripts are now scattered across Europe. When the tomb at Arqua was opened in 1873 by Professor Giovanni Canestrini of Padua University, the skull found inside proved, by DNA testing carried out during a later examination in 2003, not to belong to Petrarch at all. The skeleton in the tomb does bear injuries consistent with ones Petrarch described in his own writings, including a kick from a donkey when he was 42. The Petrarchan sonnet, named for him, remains a living form, and in 2004 the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho crafted a piece for solo piccolo flute in which the flutist whispers fragments of Petrarch's Sonnet 132 into the instrument.