Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, was born on July 19, 1304 in Arezzo, a Tuscan town south of Florence ^[1]. His father, Ser Petracco, was a Florentine notary who had been exiled from Florence in 1302 during the same wave of political purges that expelled Dante Alighieri. The family's banishment meant that Petrarch, though Florentine by descent and legal status, never lived in the city his parents considered home ^[2].

In 1312 the family moved to Carpentras, a small town near Avignon in Provence, drawn there by the presence of the papal court, which had relocated from Rome to Avignon in 1309 ^[1]. Ser Petracco found work connected to the papal administration, and the boy received his early schooling in grammar and rhetoric at Carpentras under the teacher Convenevole da Prato. Avignon and its surrounding countryside would remain the center of Petrarch's world for decades.

His father intended him for a legal career. Petrarch studied law first at Montpellier, beginning around 1316, and then at Bologna, one of the great law schools of medieval Europe, from about 1320 ^[2]. He later wrote that he found the profession distasteful, seeing it as the art of selling justice, and that he spent his student years reading Cicero and Virgil instead of legal texts. According to his own account, his father once discovered the hidden classical books and burned most of them, sparing only a Virgil and a copy of Cicero's rhetoric after his son's protests ^[3]. When Ser Petracco died in 1326, Petrarch abandoned law immediately and returned to Avignon.

Back in Avignon, Petrarch took minor ecclesiastical orders, a common route for educated men who wanted an income without pastoral duties. Church benefices, which required celibacy but little else, would support his scholarly life for the rest of his days ^[2]. He never became a priest, and the arrangement left him free to read, write, and travel.

The defining event of these years, by his own testimony, occurred on April 6, 1327, when he saw a woman he called Laura in the church of Saint Clare in Avignon ^[1]. Her historical identity has never been established with certainty; some scholars have proposed Laura de Noves, wife of Hugues de Sade, while others treat the name as partly or wholly a poetic construction. Whatever the truth, the encounter set in motion the vernacular poems he would revise and rearrange for the rest of his life.

Patronage came through the powerful Colonna family. From 1330 Petrarch served Cardinal Giovanni Colonna as a household chaplain, a position that gave him money, protection, and connections across Europe ^[2]. He traveled widely on the cardinal's business and his own curiosity, visiting Paris, Ghent, Liège, and Cologne in 1333. In Liège he found two previously unknown orations of Cicero, an early sign of the hunt for lost classical manuscripts that became one of his life's central occupations ^[4]. In 1337 he bought a small house at Vaucluse, a valley by the source of the river Sorgue near Avignon, and it became his refuge for reading and writing over the next sixteen years.

Any account of Petrarch achievements must begin with the crown he received in Rome. On April 8, 1341, Petrarch was crowned poet laureate on the Capitoline Hill, an honor revived in conscious imitation of ancient Rome ^[1]. He had, with some careful stage management, arranged to receive invitations from both Paris and Rome and chose Rome, where King Robert of Naples first examined him. The coronation made him the most celebrated writer in Europe and confirmed his claim that poetry and classical learning deserved public honor.

His Latin works were the foundation of that reputation. The epic Africa, begun around 1338 and never finished to his satisfaction, celebrated the Roman general Scipio Africanus ^[3]. He compiled De viris illustribus, a set of biographies of famous Romans, and later wrote the moral treatises Secretum (an imagined dialogue between himself and Saint Augustine), De vita solitaria, and De remediis utriusque fortunae, one of the most widely copied books of the late Middle Ages ^[2]. His hundreds of collected letters, gathered into the Familiares and Seniles, were modeled on Cicero's correspondence, which he himself had helped recover: in 1345, in the cathedral library of Verona, he discovered Cicero's letters to Atticus, Quintus, and Brutus, a find that transformed knowledge of the Roman statesman ^[4].

Yet posterity has valued most the work he affected to dismiss as trifles. The Canzoniere, formally titled Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, gathers 366 poems in Tuscan, most of them sonnets, tracing his love for Laura in life and after her death ^[5]. Its psychological introspection, its refined handling of the sonnet form, and its portrait of desire as an unresolved inner conflict became the template for lyric poetry across Europe. Poets from Ronsard in France to Wyatt, Surrey, and the Elizabethan sonneteers in England worked in his shadow, a phenomenon literary historians call Petrarchism ^[5]. He also wrote the Trionfi, allegorical poems in Dante's terza rima. For anyone asking who was Petrarch, the shortest answer joins these two halves: the scholar who rebuilt the bridge to antiquity, and the poet who taught Europe a new way to write about love.

Petrarch never married, as his clerical status required, but he fathered two children with a woman or women whose names he never recorded. His son Giovanni was born in 1337 and his daughter Francesca in 1343 ^[2]. Both were later legitimized by papal dispensation. Giovanni, whom Petrarch found idle and disappointing, died of plague in 1361; Francesca married Francescuolo da Brossano, and her family cared for the poet in his final years.

His friendships mattered enormously to him and are documented in his letters. The closest literary bond was with Giovanni Boccaccio, author of the Decameron, whom he met in Florence in 1350 ^[3]. The two corresponded for a quarter century, exchanged manuscripts, and encouraged each other's Latin scholarship. Petrarch also cultivated a personal relationship with the classical past itself, writing letters addressed to Cicero, Seneca, and other ancient authors as if they were living correspondents.

Among the most quoted episodes of the Petrarch biography is his ascent of Mont Ventoux in Provence, which he described in a letter dated April 26, 1336 ^[6]. He climbed, he said, simply to see the view, and at the summit he opened a pocket copy of Augustine's Confessions and read a passage rebuking those who admire mountains while neglecting their own souls. Historians have debated how literally to take the account, and whether the letter was written or reworked years later, but it remains a famous emblem of a mind turning between the outer world and inner examination ^[6]. Laura, the other fixed point of his emotional life, died on April 6, 1348, during the Black Death, twenty-one years to the day, by his reckoning, after he first saw her ^[1].

The plague years and the death of Cardinal Colonna in 1348 loosened Petrarch's ties to Avignon, a city he increasingly attacked in his writings as a corrupt Babylon. In 1353 he left Provence for good and settled in Italy ^[2]. He spent eight years in Milan under the patronage of the Visconti rulers, a choice that dismayed republican friends in Florence, since the Visconti were tyrants in Florentine eyes. Petrarch answered that he served no one, kept his independence, and used the position for diplomatic missions, including an embassy to Prague in 1356 and one to Paris in 1361 ^[3].

Politics had drawn him before. In 1347 he had publicly supported Cola di Rienzo, the Roman notary who seized power in Rome and proclaimed a restored republic; Petrarch hailed the revolution in enthusiastic letters before Cola's regime collapsed within months ^[2]. He also campaigned for years, in letters to successive popes, for the return of the papacy from Avignon to Rome, an outcome he did not live to see completed.

After Milan he lived in Padua and Venice, where the republic gave him a house in 1362 in exchange for the promised bequest of his library, a plan that ultimately came to nothing after his relations with Venice soured ^[4]. In 1370 he retired to a small house he had built at Arquà, a village in the Euganean Hills southwest of Padua, under the protection of Francesco da Carrara, lord of Padua. There he lived with his daughter's family, revised the Canzoniere and the Trionfi, and continued to work despite failing health. Petrarch died at Arquà on July 18, 1374, one day short of his seventieth birthday; a tradition reports that he was found with his head resting on a manuscript ^[1]. The village was later renamed Arquà Petrarca in his honor.

Petrarch's influence runs along two channels, one scholarly and one poetic. As a scholar he did more than any contemporary to recover, copy, and circulate the texts of ancient Rome, and he argued that the study of classical literature and moral philosophy, the studia humanitatis, was the proper education for a full human life ^[4]. Later humanists, from Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni in Florence to Erasmus in northern Europe, built on his program, which is why historians routinely call him the father of Renaissance humanism ^[2]. He also gave later ages a way of framing history itself: his description of the centuries after Rome's fall as an age of darkness contributed to the idea of the Middle Ages standing between antiquity and a hoped-for revival ^[6].

As a poet he standardized the Italian sonnet, with its octave and sestet, now known as the Petrarchan sonnet, and made the Canzoniere the most imitated secular book of poetry in early modern Europe ^[5]. Alongside Dante and Boccaccio he is counted among the three crowns of Italian literature, and his Tuscan became a model when sixteenth century writers, led by Pietro Bembo, debated the standard form of the Italian language ^[3].

Among the more curious Petrarch facts is the afterlife of his own remains: his tomb at Arquà Petrarca was opened several times, and a 2003 examination found that the skull in the tomb belonged to someone else, apparently substituted at an unknown date ^[7]. His library was dispersed after his death, but hundreds of manuscripts he owned or annotated survive in European collections, carrying his marginal notes. Seven centuries on, his poems are still read, translated, and set to music, and his letters remain a rare window into the daily texture of a fourteenth century mind examining itself ^[1].