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Petrarch, Italian in full Francesco Petrarca, (born July 20, 1304, Arezzo, Tuscany [Italy]—died July 18/19, 1374, Arquà, near Padua, Carrara), Italian scholar, poet, and humanist whose poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry. Petrarch’s inquiring mind and love of Classical authors led him to travel, visiting men of learning and searching monastic libraries for Classical manuscripts. He was regarded as the greatest scholar of his age.

Education and early poems

Petrarch’s father, a lawyer, had been obliged to leave Florence in 1302 and had moved to Arezzo, where Petrarch was born. The family eventually moved to Avignon (1312), in the Provence region of southern France, the home of the exiled papal court, at which an Italian lawyer might hope to find employment. Petrarch’s first studies were at Carpentras, France, and at his father’s insistence he was sent to study law at Montpellier, France (1316). From there he returned to Italy with his younger brother Gherardo to continue these studies at Bologna (1320). But already he was developing what, in a later letter, he described as “an unquenchable thirst for literature.”

Petrarch’s earliest surviving poems, on the death of his mother, date from the Montpellier and Bologna period, though like all Petrarch’s work they were heavily revised later. Meanwhile, his knowledge and love of the Classical authors increasing, he made his acquaintance with the new vernacular poetry that was being written. After his father’s death, in 1326, Petrarch was free to abandon his law studies and pursue his own interests. Returning to Avignon, he took minor ecclesiastical orders and entered the household of the influential cardinal Giovanni Colonna. Petrarch enjoyed life in Avignon, and there is a famous description of him and his brother as dandies in its polished courtly world; but he was also making a name there for his scholarship and the elegance of his culture.

As well as a love of literature, Petrarch also had during his early youth a deep religious faith, a love of virtue, and an unusually deep perception of the transitory nature of human affairs. There now followed the reaction—a period of dissipation—which also coincided with the beginning of his famous chaste love for a woman known now only as Laura. Vain attempts have been made to identify her, but Petrarch himself kept silent about everything concerning her civil status, as though he thought it unimportant. He first saw her in the Church of St. Clare at Avignon on April 6, 1327, and loved her, although she was outside his reach, almost until his death. From this love there springs the work for which he is most celebrated, the Italian poems (Rime), which he affected to despise as mere trifles in the vulgar tongue but which he collected and revised throughout his life.

He spent the summer of 1330 at Lombez, France, the bishop of which was an old friend from Bologna, Giacomo Colonna. In 1335 he received a canonry there but continued to reside at Avignon in the service of the cardinal, with whom he stayed until 1337. Quite apart from his love for Laura, this period was an important one for Petrarch. These were years of ambition and unremitting study (notably in the field of Classical Latin). They were also years of travel. In 1333 his journeying took him through France, Flanders, Brabant, and the Rhineland, where he visited men of learning and searched monastic libraries for “lost” Classical manuscripts (in Liège he discovered copies of two speeches by Cicero). In Paris he was given a copy of the Confessions of St. Augustine by a friend and spiritual confidant, the Augustinian monk Dionigi of Sansepolcro, and he was to use this more and more as the breviary of his spiritual life.

These experiences bring Petrarch’s mission as a stubborn advocate of the continuity between Classical culture and the Christian message more sharply into focus. By making a synthesis of the two seemingly conflicting ideals—regarding the one as the rich promise and the other as its divine fulfillment—he can claim to be the founder and great representative of the movement known as European humanism. He rejected the sterile argumentation and endless dialectical subtleties to which medieval Scholasticism had become prey and turned back for values and illumination to the moral weight of the Classical world. In 1337 he visited Rome for the first time, to be stirred among its ruins by the evident grandeur of its past. On returning to Avignon he sought a refuge from its corrupt life—the papacy at this time was wholly absorbed in secular matters—and a few miles to the east found his “fair transalpine solitude” of Vaucluse, which was afterward to become a much-loved place of retreat.

The chronology of Petrarch’s writings is somewhat complicated by his habit of revising, often extensively. By the time he discovered Vaucluse, however, he had written a good many of the individual poems that he was to include in the Epistolae metricae (66 “letters” in Latin hexameter verses) and some of the vernacular Rime inspired by his love for Laura. At Vaucluse he began to work on Africa, an epic poem on the subject of the Second Punic War. He also began work on De viris illustribus, intended as a series of biographies of heroes from Roman history (later modified to include famous men of all time, beginning with Adam, as Petrarch’s desire to emphasize the continuity among ideals of the Old Testament, of the Classical world, and of Christianity increased).

Moral and literary evolution (1340–46) of Petrarch

Meanwhile, his reputation as a scholar was spreading; in September 1340 he received invitations from Paris and Rome to be crowned as poet. He had perhaps sought out this honour, partly from ambition but mainly in order that the rebirth of the cult of poetry after more than 1,000 years might be fittingly celebrated. He had no hesitation in choosing Rome, and accordingly he was crowned on the Capitoline Hill on April 8, 1341, afterward placing his laurel wreath on the tomb of the Apostle in St. Peter’s Basilica: again, the symbolic gesture linking the Classical tradition with the Christian message.

From Rome he went to Parma and the nearby solitude of Selvapiana, returning to Avignon in the autumn of 1343. It is generally believed that he went through some kind of moral crisis at this time, rooted in his inability to make his life conform to his religious faith and possibly heightened by his brother’s decision to enter a Carthusian monastery. At any rate, this is a common reading of the Secretum meum (1342–43). It is an autobiographical treatise consisting of three dialogues between Petrarch and St. Augustine in the presence of Truth. In it he maintains hope that, even amidst worldly preoccupations and error, even while absorbed in himself and his own affairs, a man might still find a way to God. Thus, Petrarch’s spiritual “problem” found a coherent solution, one that can be said to express the Petrarchan vision and the humanist’s religious and moral outlook.

It was therefore an evolution—both moral and literary—rather than a “crisis” that made Petrarch decide his love for Laura was love for the creature rather than for the Creator and therefore wrong—proof of his attachment to the world. It was an evolution in his thinking that led him to break through the barriers of his too-exclusive admiration for antiquity and to admit other authoritative voices. It was now, for example, that De viris was enlarged to include material from sacred as well as secular history, while in the De vita solitaria (1346) he developed the theoretical basis and description of the “solitary life” whereby man enjoys the consolations of nature and study together with those of prayer.

Break with his past (1346–53)

The events of the next few years are fundamental to his biography, both as a man and as a writer. In the first place, he became enthusiastic for the efforts of Cola di Rienzo to revive the Roman Republic and restore popular government in Rome—a sympathy that divided him still more sharply from the Avignon court and in 1346 even led to the loss of Cardinal Colonna’s friendship. The plague of 1348, known as the Black Death, saw many friends fall victim, including Laura, who died on April 6, the anniversary of Petrarch’s first seeing her. Finally, in the jubilee year of 1350 he made a pilgrimage to Rome and later assigned to this year his renunciation of sensual pleasures.

These are the landmarks of Petrarch’s career, but the time in between was filled with diplomatic missions, study, and immense literary activity. In Verona in 1345 he made his great discovery of the letters of Cicero to Atticus, Brutus, and Quintus, which allowed him to penetrate the surface of the great orator and see the man himself. The letters spurred him on to write epistles to the ancient authors whom he loved and to make a collection of his own letters that he had scattered among his friends. These great collections record not only Petrarch’s genius for friendship but also all those shifts in attitude by which he left behind the Middle Ages and prepared for the Renaissance. Toward the end of 1345 he returned again to the peace of Vaucluse and spent two years there, chiefly revising De vita solitaria but also developing the theme of solitude in a specifically monastic context, in De otio religioso. Between November 1347 and his pilgrimage to Rome in 1350 he was also in Verona, Parma, and Padua. Much of the time was spent in advancing his career in the church; the maneuvering and animosities this involved resulted in an intense longing for the peace of Vaucluse; not even a visit from his lifelong friend the poet Boccaccio, who offered him a chair to be established under his guidance in the University of Florence, could deflect him. He left Rome in May 1351 for Vaucluse.

Here he worked on a new plan for the Rime. The project was divided into two parts: the Rime in vita di Laura (“Poems During Laura’s Life”) and the Rime in morte di Laura (“Poems After Laura’s Death”), which he now selected and arranged to illustrate the story of his own spiritual growth. The choice of poems was further governed by an exquisite aesthetic taste and by a preference for an approximately chronological arrangement, from the description of his falling in love to his final invocation to the Virgin; from his “youthful errors” to his realization that “all worldly pleasure is a fleeting dream”; from his love for this world to his final trust in God. The theme of his Canzoniere (as the poems are usually known) therefore goes beyond the apparent subject matter, his love for Laura. For the first time in the history of the new poetry, lyrics are held together in a marvelous new tapestry, possessing its own unity. By selecting all that was most polished and at the same time most vigorous in the lyric tradition of the preceding two centuries and filtering it through his new appreciation of the classics, he not only bequeathed to humanity the most limpid and yet passionate, precise yet suggestive, expression of love and grief, of the ecstasies and sorrows of man, but also created with his marvelous sensibility the form and language of the modern lyric, to provide a common stock for lyric poets of the whole of Europe.

He also continued work on the Metricae, begun in 1350; he embarked on a polemic against the conservative enemies of his new conception of education, which rejected the prevailing Aristotelianism of the schools and restored the spiritual worth of Classical writers—the new studies to be called litterae humanae, “humane letters.” He also began work on his poem Trionfi, a more generalized version of the story of the human soul in its progress from earthly passion toward fulfillment in God.

Later years (1353–74) of Petrarch

But the death of his closest friends, dislike of the newly elected pope, Innocent VI, increasingly bitter relations with the Avignon court, all finally determined Petrarch to leave Provence. He found rooms in Milan and stayed there for most of the next eight years. During these eight years he also completed the first proper edition of the Rime, continued assiduously with the Familiares, worked on the Trionfi, and set in order many of his earlier writings.

Early in 1361 he went to Padua, hoping to escape the plague. He remained there until September 1362, when, again a fugitive from the Black Death, he sought shelter in Venice. He was given a house, and in return Petrarch promised to bequeath all his books to the republic. He was joined by his daughter Francesca, and the tranquil happiness of her little family gave him great pleasure. He was visited by his dearest and most famous friends (including the great chancellor Benintendi de’ Ravegnani and Boccaccio, who presented him with a long-desired Latin translation of Homer’s poems); he was invited to play an honourable part in the life and politics of the city; he worked peacefully but with great concentration at the definitive versions of his various writings. Nevertheless, after receiving an insult from four young men who followed the Arab “naturalist” interpretation of Aristotle’s work, Petrarch was induced to move back to Padua in 1367. He remained there until his death, dividing his time from 1370 between Padua and Arquà, in the neighbouring Euganean hills, where he had a little house. There he wrote the defense of his humanism against the critical attack from Venice, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia. He was still in great demand as a diplomat; in 1370 he was called to Rome by Urban V, and he set off eager to see the fulfillment of his great dream of a new Roman papacy, but at Ferrara he was seized by a stroke. Yet he did not stop working; in addition to revision he composed more minor works and added new sections to his Posteritati, an autobiographical letter to posterity that was to have formed the conclusion to his Seniles; he also composed the final sections of the Trionfi. Petrarch died in 1374 while working in his study at Arquà and was found the next morning, his head resting on a manuscript of Virgil.

The hallmark of Petrarch’s thought was a deep consciousness of the past as the nutriment of the present. His abiding achievement was to recognize that, if there is a Providence that guides the world, then it has set man at the centre. Petrarch provided a theoretical basis for the enrichment of man’s life. But, even more important, the humanist attitudes of the Italian 15th century that led into the Renaissance would not have been possible without him.

Courtesy - John Humphreys Whitfield

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Petrarch

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