Francis Petrarch (born Francesco di Petracco; 20 July 1304 – 19 July 1374) was an Italian scholar and poet of the early Italian Renaissance, as well as one of the earliest Renaissance humanists.
Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited with initiating the 14th-century Italian Renaissance and the founding of Renaissance humanism.This designation appears, for instance, in a recent review of Carol Quillen's Rereading the Renaissance. In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch's works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio, and, to a lesser extent, Dante Alighieri.In the Prose della volgar lingua, Bembo proposes Petrarch and Boccaccio as models of Italian style, while expressing reservations about emulating Dante's usage. Petrarch was later endorsed as a model for Italian style by the .
Petrarch's sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry. He is also known for being the first to develop the concept of the "Dark Ages".Renaissance or Prenaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4, No. 1. (Jan. 1943), pp. 69–74; Theodore E. Mommsen, "Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages'" Speculum 17.2 (April 1942: 226–242); JSTOR link to a collection of several letters in the same issue. Biography
Youth and early career Petrarch was born in the Tuscan city Arezzo on 20 July 1304. He was the son of Ser Petracco (a diminutive nickname for Pietro) and his wife Eletta Canigiani. Petrarch's birth name was Francesco di Petracco ("Francesco [son] of Petracco"), which he Latinized to Franciscus Petrarcha. His younger brother Gherardo (Gerard Petrarch) was born in Incisa in Val d'Arno in 1307. Dante Alighieri was a friend of his father.J.H. Plumb, The Italian Renaissance, 1961; Chapter XI by Morris Bishop "Petrarch", pp. 161–175; New York, American Heritage Publishing,
Petrarch spent his early childhood in the village of Incisa, near Florence. He spent much of his early life at Avignon and nearby Carpentras, where his family moved to follow Pope Clement V, who moved there in 1309 to begin the Avignon Papacy. Petrarch studied law at the University of Montpellier (1316–1320) and Bologna (1320–1326) with a lifelong friend and schoolmate, Guido Sette, future archbishop of Genoa. Because his father was in the legal profession (a notary), he insisted that Petrarch and his brother also study law. Petrarch, however, was primarily interested in writing and studying Latin literature and considered these seven years wasted. Petrarch became so distracted by his non-legal interests that his father once threw his books into a fire, which he later lamented. Additionally, he proclaimed that through legal manipulation his guardians robbed him of his small property inheritance in Florence, which only reinforced his dislike for the legal system. He protested, "I couldn't face making a merchandise of my mind", since he viewed the legal system as the art of selling justice.
Petrarch was a prolific letter writer and counted Boccaccio among the notable friends with whom he regularly corresponded. After the death of their parents, Petrarch and his brother Gherardo went back to Avignon in 1326, where he worked in numerous clerical offices. This work gave him much time to devote to his writing. With his first large-scale work, Africa, an epic poem in Latin about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus, Petrarch emerged as a European celebrity. On 8 April 1341, he became the secondafter Albertino Mussato who was the first to be so crowned according to Robert Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 1973) poet laureate since classical antiquity and was crowned by Roman Senatori Giordano Orsini and Orso dell'Anguillara on the sacred soil of Rome's Capitoline Hill.Plumb, p. 164Pietrangeli (1981), p. 32
He traveled widely in Europe, served as an ambassador, and has been called "the first tourist"NSA Family Encyclopedia, Petrarch, Francesco, Vol. 11, p. 240, Standard Education Corp. 1992 because he traveled for pleasureBishop, Morris Petrarch and his World, p. 92, Indiana University Press 1963, such as his ascent of Mont Ventoux. During his travels, he collected crumbling Latin manuscripts and was a prime mover in the recovery of knowledge from writers of Rome and Greece. He encouraged and advised Leontius Pilatus's translation of Homer from a manuscript purchased by Boccaccio, although he was severely critical of the result. Petrarch had acquired a copy, which he did not entrust to Leontius,Vittore Branca, Boccaccio; The Man and His Works, tr. Richard Monges, pp. 113–118 but he knew no Greek; Petrarch said of himself, "Homer was dumb to him, while he was deaf to Homer". In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of Cicero's letters not previously known to have existed, the collection Epistulae ad Atticum, in the Chapter Library (Biblioteca Capitolare) of Verona Cathedral.
Disdaining what he believed to be the ignorance of the era in which he lived, Petrarch is credited with creating the concept of a historical "Dark Ages", which most modern scholars now find inaccurate and misleading.. In explaining his approach to writing the work, Snyder refers to the "so-called Dark Ages", noting that "Historians and archaeologists have never liked the label Dark Ages ... there are numerous indicators that these centuries were neither 'dark' nor 'barbarous' in comparison with other eras."; Same volume, Freedman, Paul, "Medieval Studies", pp. 383–389. "The stereotype of the Middle Ages as 'the Dark Ages' fostered by Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophes has, of course, long since been abandoned by scholars."
Mount Ventoux
Petrarch recounts that on 26 April 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux (, a feat which he undertook for recreation rather than necessity.Nicolson, Marjorie Hope; Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1997), p. 49; The exploit is described in a famous letter addressed to his friend and confessor, the monk Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, composed some time after the fact. In it, Petrarch claimed to have been inspired by Philip V of Macedon's ascent of Mount Haemo and that an aged peasant had told him that nobody had ascended Ventoux before or after himself, 50 years earlier, and warned him against attempting to do so. The nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt noted that Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before, and ascents accomplished during the Middle Ages have been recorded, including that of Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne.Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilisation of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Translated by S.G.C. Middlemore. Swan Sonnenschein (1904), pp. 301–302.Lynn Thorndike, Renaissance or Prenaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4, No. 1. (Jan. 1943), pp. 69–74. JSTOR link to a collection of several letters in the same issue.
ScholarsSuch as J.H. Plumb, in his book The Italian Renaissance note that Petrarch's letterFamiliares 4.1 translated by Morris Bishop, quoted in Plumb. to Dionigi displays a strikingly "modern" attitude of aesthetic gratification in the grandeur of the scenery and is still often cited in books and journals devoted to the sport of mountaineering. In Petrarch, this attitude is coupled with an aspiration for a virtuous Christian life, and on reaching the summit, he took from his pocket a volume by his beloved mentor, Saint Augustine, that he always carried with him.McLaughlin, Edward Tompkins; Studies in Medieval Life and Literature, p. 6, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1894
For pleasure alone he climbed Mont Ventoux, which rises to more than six thousand feet, beyond Vaucluse. It was no great feat, of course; but he was the first recorded Alpinist of modern times, the first to climb a mountain merely for the delight of looking from its top. (Or almost the first; for in a high pasture he met an old shepherd, who said that fifty years before he had attained the summit, and had got nothing from it save toil and repentance and torn clothing.) Petrarch was dazed and stirred by the view of the Alps, the mountains around Lyons, the Rhone, the Bay of Marseilles. He took Augustine's Confessions from his pocket and reflected that his climb was merely an allegory of aspiration toward a better life.
As the book fell open, Petrarch's eyes were immediately drawn to the following words:
Petrarch's response was to turn from the outer world of nature to the inner world of "soul":
James Hillman argues that this rediscovery of the inner world is the real significance of the Ventoux event. The Renaissance begins not with the ascent of Mont Ventoux but with the subsequent descent—the "return [...] to the valley of soul", as Hillman puts it.
Later years Petrarch spent the later part of his life journeying through northern Italy and southern France as an international scholar and poet-diplomat. His career in the Church did not allow him to marry, but he is believed to have fathered two children by a woman (or women) unknown to posterity. A son, Giovanni, was born in 1337, and a daughter, Francesca, was born in 1343. He later legitimized both.Plumb, p. 165
For a number of years in the 1340s and 1350s he lived in a small house at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse east of Avignon in France.
Giovanni died of the plague in 1361. In the same year Petrarch was named canon in Monselice near Padua. Francesca married Francescuolo da Brossano, who was later named executor of Petrarch's will, that same year. In 1362, shortly after the birth of a daughter, Eletta (the same name as Petrarch's mother), they joined Petrarch in Venice to flee the plague then ravaging parts of Europe. A second grandchild, Francesco, was born in 1366, but died before his second birthday. Francesca and her family lived with Petrarch in Venice for five years from 1362 to 1367 at Palazzo Molina; although Petrarch continued to travel in those years. Between 1361 and 1369 the younger Boccaccio paid the older Petrarch two visits. The first was in Venice, the second was in Padua.
About 1368 Petrarch and Francesca (with her family) moved to the small town of Arquà in the Euganean Hills near Padua, where he passed his remaining years in religious contemplation. He died in his house in Arquà on 18/19 July 1374. The house now hosts a permanent exhibition of Petrarch's works and curiosities, including the famous tomb of an embalmed cat long believed to be Petrarch's (although there is no evidence Petrarch actually had a cat). On the marble slab, there is a Latin inscription written by Antonio Quarenghi: Original Latin English translationEtruscus gemino vates ardebat amore: Maximus ignis ego; Laura secundus erat. Quid rides? divinæ illam si gratia formæ, Me dignam eximio fecit amante fides. Si numeros geniumque sacris dedit illa libellis Causa ego ne sævis muribus esca forent. Arcebam sacro vivens a limine mures, Ne domini exitio scripta diserta forent; Incutio trepidis eadem defuncta pavorem, Et viget exanimi in corpore prisca fides.::The Tuscan bard of deathless fame Nursed in his breast a double flame, Unequally divided; And when I say I had his heart, While Laura play'd the second part, I must not be derided.
For my fidelity was such, It merited regard as much As Laura's grace and beauty; She first inspired the poet's lay, But since I drove the mice away, His love repaid my duty.
Through all my exemplary life, So well did I in constant strife Employ my claws and curses, That even now, though I am dead, Those nibbling wretches dare not tread On one of Petrarch's verses. Latin text included.