Petrarch: father of Renaissance humanism

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) was the most consequential writer of the Italian Trecento. To Jacob Burckhardt, writing in 1860, he was the first witness to the modern discovery of the individual. To the long tradition of Italian literary history, he was the poet of the stil nuovo vernacular. To the humanist scholars of the Quattrocento, he was the founding father of the studia humanitatis. That he is conventionally called the father of humanism is itself a measure of his authority, since the term humanista did not exist in his lifetime. The careers of Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla, and Marsilio Ficino would have been impossible to imagine without the precedent he set. The basic accounts of the man and his work remain Ernest Hatch Wilkins’s Life of Petrarch (1961), Nicholas Mann’s Petrarch (1984), and Ronald G. Witt’s In the Footsteps of the Ancients (2000). The documentary base is Giuseppe Fracassetti’s nineteenth-century edition of the Epistolae, re-edited by Datemi Rossetti in the 1930s, and Giuseppe Billanovich’s Petrarca e la tradizione del testo di Livio (1951), the starting point for the modern study of Petrarch as a working philologist.

Arezzo, Avignon, and the long apprenticeship

Petrarch was born in Arezzo on 20 July 1304. His father, Ser Petracco di Parenzo (d. 1326), was a Florentine notary exiled along with Dante Alighieri by the pars Albizzorum of the comune in 1302. The elder Petracco followed the papal court of Clement V to Avignon in 1309, and the family joined him in 1312. The young Francesco grew up in the cosmopolitan Carrière of the Curia, was educated at Montpellier (1316–1320), and then read the ius civile of the Digest of Justinian at the Studium of Bologna (1320–1326). His father died in 1326, and Petrarch, already convinced that the law was not his calling, returned to Avignon, took minor orders, and was given the modest canonry of the cathedral of Lombez in the Gascon Pyrenees. The praebenda of Lombez was, for the next forty-eight years, the institutional base of his life. It gave him the otium he would later defend in the De vita solitaria and the De otio religioso as the proper condition of the vita contemplativa.

The decisive moment of his life was, in his own retrospective account, a conversio of around 1326: the moment at which he resolved that the study of the classical Latin auctoritates was the proper studium of his life. The conversio is the mythologema of the Secretum of 1342–1343, the Epistola metrica to Thomas the Apostle of 1335, and the Posteritati of 1351. It became a public event with the laurea poetica of 8 April 1341, when the Roman senator Orso dell’Anguillara crowned Petrarch poeta et historicus on the steps of the Capitol in Rome — the first such coronation in modern history, and, in Witt’s phrase, “the moment at which the humanist understanding of the classical pater was made literal in the working life of the clericus.”

The ascent of Mont Ventoux

The most famous episode of Petrarch’s life is the ascent of Mont Ventoux on 26 April 1336, recorded in the fourth book of the Familiares in a letter to the Augustinian canon Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro (c. 1300–1342), the lector of the Studium of the Curia of Avignon:

“Today I climbed the highest mountain in this region, which is properly called Ventoux. The ascent took the whole day. The old man who accompanied me — my only companion on this long climb — kept urging me to hurry, but I would much rather have lingered over the varied scenes on every side, for I was being shown a wonderful spectacle.”

Petrarch climbs the mountain and from its summit looks out over the Vaucluse, the Provence, the Languedoc, the Pyrénées, and the Lyon; then, opening the Confessiones of Augustine that he had been carrying, he reads the famous passage in Book X — “Et eunt homines admirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris et latissimos lapsus fluminum et oceanum et gyros siderum et relinquant se ipsos” — and weeps. The episode is, in Pierre de Nolhac’s phrase (Pétrarque et l’humanisme, 1892, rev. 1907), the moment at which the clericus of the studium discovers that his proper peregrinatio is a peregrinatio of the anima and not of the corpus. The mountain is the speculum of the self; the lectio of the auctoritas of Augustine is the correctio of the lectio of the clericus. The episode is the exemplum of the whole humanist programme: the peregrinatio of the studium as the peregrinatio of the anima, and the lectio of the auctoritas of the classical past as the correctio of the lectio of the clericus.

The Latin works

Petrarch’s Latin works are the working documents of the humanist programme. The Secretum (1342–1343), an imaginary dialogue between Petrarch and Augustine in three books, is the most ambitious of the examina of the conscientia of the humanist clericus; Thomas G. Bergin (Petrarch: A Humanist among Princes, 1970) treats it as the most exact of the biographiae of the anima of the humanist studium. The De vita solitaria (c. 1346) and the De otio religioso (c. 1347) are the two treatises of the otium of the clericus; the De remediis utriusque fortunae (c. 1366) is a philosophia morum in the tradition of Seneca and Augustine; the De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (c. 1367) is the invectiva of the clericus against the ignorantia of the clericus of the Aristotelicae of Paris. The De viris illustribus (c. 1338) is the biographia of the viri illustres of the Roma of the classical past, and the Rerum memorandarum libri (c. 1343–1345) is the encyclopaedia of the exempla of the mores of the viri illustres of the classical past.

The Seniles (Rerum senilium libri, in eighteen books, written in the 1350s and 1370s) and the Familiares (Rerum familiarum libri, in twenty-four books) are the two great collections of Petrarch’s epistolae; together they are the largest body of humanist Latin correspondence in the long fourteenth century. The Itinerarium ad sepulcrum Domini (c. 1358), the Itinerarium Syriacum (c. 1358), the Psalmi Penitentiales (c. 1340s), the Vita Scipionis Africani (c. 1338), the Invective contra medicum (c. 1352), the Invective contra quendam magni status hominem (c. 1366), the Epistolae ad Posteritatem (c. 1351), and the Posteritati (c. 1351) are the smaller Latin works of the clericus of the canonry of Lombez. The Trionfi (Triumphi, in six books, written 1351–1374), Petrarch’s last long vernacular poem, was, in its long-term effect, the most ambitious of his poetria of the amor of the clericus of the studium of the auctoritates of the classical past.

The Canzoniere and Laura

The Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 366 poems in the forma of the sonneti, canzoni, sestine, ballate, and madrigali of the stilnovo tradition of the poesia of the Italian Trecento) was the most ambitious vernacular work of the clericus of the canonry of Lombez. By Petrarch’s own retrospective dating, the book was begun on 6 April 1327 — Good Friday of that year — in the church of Santa Chiara in Avignon, at the moment when the young clericus first saw Laura (conventionally identified with Laura de Noves, daughter of Audibert de Noves and wife of Hugo de Sade, 1308?–1348). The Canzoniere is, in Mark Musa’s reading (trans. Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works, 1985), the vita of an anima written in the vernacular: 366 poems in the strict forms of the sonetto and the canzone, organised into two parts by Petrarch himself (In vita and In morte di Madonna Laura) and revised almost up to the poet’s death in 1374.

The Canzoniere was the most influential single work of Italian vernacular literature of the long fourteenth century. Its formal vocabulary — the sonetto of fourteen lines in endecasillabi with the tight rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, the canzone of the longer strophe, the sestina of the patterned end-word repetition, the ballata of the dance-refrain — became the standard lyric forms of Italian and, in the long run, of European vernacular poetry. The first Canzoniere manuscript, the Codex Vaticano Latino 3195, was copied in the 1360s; Petrarch’s final text was fixed in the Codex Laurenziano Plut. 41.17 of the Laurentian Library in Florence. The Canzoniere shaped, in the next two centuries, the work of Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Gaspara Stampa in Italian; of François Villon, Pierre de Ronsard, and the Pléiade in French; of Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare in English.

The search for manuscripts

Petrarch’s search for the manuscripts of the lost Latin auctoritates was, in its long-term effect, the single most consequential piece of textual recovery in the long history of European humanism. Between the 1320s and the 1350s he hunted the libraries of northern Italy, the Rhineland, and the Île-de-France for the texts that the medieval Latin West had either lost or possessed only in corrupted form. He was the first European to recognise, in Cicero’s Epistolae ad Atticum, ad Quintum fratrem, ad Brutum, and Epistolae ad Familiares, a body of late-Republican Latin prose of a quality that the medieval florilegia had only hinted at; the Codex Laurenziano 49.9 of Cicero’s Epistolae ad Familiares and the Codex Vaticano Latino 5758 of the Epistolae ad Atticum (both written in Petrarch’s own hand or under his immediate direction) are the basic working texts of the modern Cicero tradition. He rediscovered Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria in a manuscript at the Abbey of Saint Gall in 1416 — an event recorded in the Familiares and the basis of the Codex Laurenziano Plut. 46.5 of Quintilian, copied under his supervision. He recovered Catullus, Propertius, Lucretius (in part), Celsus, Aulus Gellius, Asconius Pedianus, Pseudo-Sallust, and Tacitus (in part) for the Latin West; he hunted in vain for the missing decades of Livy, the missing books of Polybius and Diodorus Siculus, and the complete text of Cicero’s De re publica. The men who found what Petrarch could not — Cola di Rienzo in 1347, who recovered a manuscript of the De re publica at the papal library in Avignon, and Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, who found the De rerum natura of Lucretius and a fuller De re publica of Cicero in the cathedral library of Cologne — were working in the long wake of his programme.

Petrarch’s legacy

Petrarch’s programme was, in its mature form, the programme of the Italian Quattrocento. Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), the chancellor of Florence and the Latin biographer of Petrarch, was the first of his successors; Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444), the chancellor of Florence after Salutati, produced the Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII (in the Livian tradition of Petrarch’s De viris illustribus), the Epistolae, and the Ad Petrum Paulum Histrum dialogus of the humanist dialogue; Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), the Florentine secretary of five popes, was the most aggressive of the humanist hunters of manuscripts; Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), the Roman humanist, was the most consequential of the humanist philologists. The Canzoniere and the Secretum and the Familiares and the De vita solitaria were the working models of the studia humanitatis of the studia of the Italian peninsula, and the studia of the clericus of the canonry of Lombez of the studia of the repubblica of the comune of Florence was the studium of the long fifteenth century.

Petrarch died at his house in Arquà in the Euganean Hills, near Padua, on 19 July 1374, the eve of his seventieth birthday. He was buried, in a sarcophagus of red Verona marble, in a small churchyard in the village. The Canzoniere and the Trionfi and the Familiares and the Seniles and the De viris illustribus and the De vita solitaria and the Secretum were, by the time of his death, the working library of the humanist movement. Through Salutati, Bruni, Poggio, Valla, Ficino, and Pico — the next four generations of Italian scholars — his model of studia would become the working method of the Quattrocento, and his example of the philological clericus would become the founding type of the modern European man of letters.