Petrarch, Francesco

PETRARCH, FRANCESCO. - I. LIFE. - He was born in Arezzo on July 20, 1304, to ser Petraccolo di ser Parenzo and Eletta Canigiani. His was an old Florentine family, with firm traditions of culture: his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were notaries; but it had been reduced to straitened circumstances by the exile of ser Petraccolo, whom the victorious Blacks drove out of Florence on Oct. 20, 1302, nine months after Dante's condemnation.

Together with his younger brother Gherardo, P. studied in Provence, where his father had moved: first at Carpentras, then at Montpellier; he came, however, to perfect his studies at Bologna, where he continued the study of law in deference to his father's wish. In 1326, summoned to Avignon by the death of ser Petraccolo, the two brothers were free to dispose of their lives. P. abandoned legal studies for literary ones; he embraced the ecclesiastical state, limiting himself, however, to receiving the minor orders, which placed him, through the enjoyment of some benefice, beyond the reach of economic hardship; he made a name for himself at Avignon for his talent, his culture, and his elegant and refined life. Among the prominent personages who wished to have him as a familiar, he preferred Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, with whom he remained a long time « not as under a master, but rather as under a father, or better still a most affectionate brother ». Meanwhile he formed those numerous friendships that allowed him to be a master to a vast school of talents bound by a commonality of cultural interests. This Provençal period was decisive for the definitive formation of P. First of all because of the amorous experience: on Apr. 6, 1327, he met Laura in the church of St. Clare at Avignon and was kindled with that love which was to remain the only one of his life. The woman's virtue soon weakened his ardors, and little by little that love died out; but he always kept a most vivid memory and regret of it; indeed, in it, through long yearning, he ended by reflecting his entire spiritual life. P. could then hold other women dear; not love them, however. No less important were his cultural and artistic experiences: he made his own culture vast, both through tireless study of the books that the Avignon environment abundantly supplied him and through frequent travels. Among several lesser ones, two were important, each of them for instruction: the first took him in '33 to Paris, to Flanders, to southern Germany; the second, in '37, to Italy. And with his culture, continually increased and perfected, there went a literary activity, in the vernacular and in Latin, through which he gradually conquered that artistic maturity which may be considered attained after his thirtieth year, as the writings of the second half of his life testify, the only ones, with few exceptions, that he allowed to reach us. The year 1337 was of great weight: the visit to Rome, fundamental for P. the humanist, the birth of his son Giovanni, the residence in the most sweet solitude of Vaucluse. The year 1341 inaugurated a third period of P.'s life: that of alternating residences in Italy and in Provence. The occasion for the first residence in Italy was the journey undertaken by P. to receive in Rome, on the Capitoline, the crown of laurel, earned for him by his fame as a poet and as a most learned man of letters (Apr. 8, 1341). For almost a year he accepted the hospitality of Azzo da Correggio, lord of Parma, and here he came to know and especially love the secluded dwelling of Selvapiana, his cisalpine Helicon. Then again in Provence, in a biennium most dense and important: the birth of Francesca, his second natural daughter, the entry of his brother Gherardo among the Carthusians, the signs of a spiritual crisis that induced P. to meditate on the vanity of the passions to which he had for long years been obedient. Without, however, any decisively new orientation being discernible in his life. He crossed the Alps again in Sept. 1343 as ambassador of the Pontiff to the court of Naples; and again and for a long time he stayed at Parma. But because of the siege laid by the Visconti, P. abandoned it in Feb. '45 with a dramatic and dangerous flight. Toward the end of the same year he returned to his beloved Vaucluse, and remained there tranquil and industrious for almost two years. In '47 he greeted with enthusiasm the news that the Roman people had risen against the nobles and had elected Cola di Rienzo tribune, and he soon seized the occasion to return to Italy; but from Rome information reached him that depicted Cola as different from what he had hoped. He then went to Parma, where he held a benefice, and from '48 he held the office of archdeacon; but he often traveled: to Verona, to Mantua, to Rome, to Padua, where he had a canonry. In '48, at Parma, the news of Laura's death, which had occurred on Apr. 6, was a new invitation to meditate on the vanity of worldly things. In '51 he wished to see Vaucluse again, to which the sweetest memories bound him, but he did not stay there long. In '53, having definitively left Provence, P. accepted the invitation of Cardinal Giovanni Visconti and settled in Milan, first in a little house near St. Ambrose, then in the monastery of St. Simplician outside the walls. From Giovanni and then from Bernabò and Galeazzo, P. several times received solemn assignments as secretary and as orator: he negotiated with Genoa, with Venice, with the Novarese, with the Emperor Charles IV, with the rebel Iacopo Bussolari, with the King of France; never, however, would he accept a well-defined office, jealous as he was of his own freedom. In Milan P. remained a good nine years; he left it in '61 to escape a plague, and, at the invitation of Francesco da Carrara, took refuge in Padua, where almost immediately he received the news of the death of his son Giovanni. The spread of the plague forced him to move soon. He went then to Venice and remained there five years, honored by the government of the Republic, comforted by the presence of his daughter Francesca, who had married Francescuolo da Brossano. After brief residences at Pavia and Padua, he chose as his dwelling for his last years a small villa at Arquà, on the Euganean hills. Here too, as once at Vaucluse and at Selvapiana, he was able to live as he preferred: « fully tranquil of mind, far from tumults, from noises, from cares, reading continually and writing ». But his health was much shaken: from '69 tertian fevers, in '70 a most grave syncope from which he could not entirely recover. On the morning of July 19, 1374, his family found him dead.

II. THE WORKS

1. In verse

a) Rerum Vulgarum Fragmenta. This is the title desired by P.; but the collection is commonly designated by the title "Canzoniere" or by that of "Rime Sparse," taken from the first line ("Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono"). As early as 1336 P. began to work on a collection of his selected rhymes; and he continued to work on it intermittently throughout his life, always increasing the number of compositions and modifying the general arrangement of the collection. Altogether it is possible to recognize nine different stages, the last of which has been preserved by cod. Vat. lat. 3195, transcribed partly by Giovanni Malpaghini, partly by P. himself. In this stage, which is the one reproduced in all modern editions, the collection is divided into two parts, and comprises 366 compositions (317 sonnets, 29 canzoni, 9 sestine, 7 ballate, 4 madrigals), the oldest from around 1330, the most recent from the poet's last years. In pre-Petrarchan collections it was customary to order the rhymes by separating the sonnets from the canzoni; P. instead wished to adopt a chronological basic criterion, departing from it, however, when it seemed necessary to him in order to preserve that organic character which he wished to be impressed upon every one of his works. b) Triumphi: it is a short poem, also in the vernacular, in six parts (Triumphus Cupidinis, Pudicitie, Mortis, Fame, Temporis, Eternitatis), to which P. was unable to give a definitive form. The manuscripts preserve the traces of the complex elaboration of the work, attesting to several redactions, among which it is difficult to orient oneself in order to establish a text that reflects P.'s final intention. The short poem is in terzine in the form of a vision, according to a scheme that links it to Dante's "Commedia." It is not yet known with certainty when P. began its composition; but it is known that he worked on it for 20 and perhaps 30 years, modifying it several times, and that he was still working on it a few months before his death. c) Not all the rhymes written by P. found a place, as is well known, in the "Canzoniere". Admiring readers of the poet preserved the so-called extravagant ones. d) Africa: like the Trionfi, this poem too remained unfinished and was published posthumously by Pier Paolo Vergerio. It consists of nine books, some of them however very lacunose, in hexameters, and its subject is Scipio's campaign in Africa. The poem, in Latin, begun in '38 or '39, was carried very far forward before the death of Robert of Anjou (1343), to whom it was to be dedicated. Afterwards the P. worked on it at various times, with additions and modifications, but did not finish it, despite the insistence of friends and the great expectation. e) Epystole metrice: as early as '50 the P. thought of a collection of poems to dedicate to Marco Barbato da Sulmona; and he worked on it a great deal with many reworkings prolonged over several years. But the collection did not receive from the P. its complete definitive form. It comprises 66 Latin epistles in hexameters, in three books, according to a basic chronological order. However, with epistle III, 12, every rule ceases for the remaining 22 epistles, evidently joined together at random. Apart from the verses for his mother's death, the epistles all belong to the twenty-year period 1333-54. f) Bucolicum Carmen: there are 12 eclogues in Latin, collected in a definitive transcription by the P. himself (cod. Vat. lat. 3358). This kind of composition always concealed, as tradition demanded, an allegorical meaning; so too for these Petrarchan eclogues, but today one is not always able to see clearly beneath the pastoral fiction. g) A few Latin poems that found no place in the collections begun or brought to completion by the P. have been preserved by his admirers.

2. In prose

a) Secretum meum: the subtitle De secreto conflictu curarum mearum libri tres clarifies the content of the work, which has an autobiographical character. It is an introspective inquiry with reference to the moral and religious problem, which the P. destined solely for himself and did not divulge. The work was composed between the autumn of '42 and the winter of '43. b) De vita solitaria: it is a treatise in two books dedicated to Philippe de Cabassole, bishop of Cavaillon. It was written in 1346, but received retouchings and expansions much later and its publication was delayed by twenty years. The first book is devoted to illustrating the advantages of a life far from the anxieties and discomforts of those who take part in worldly ambitions and disputes, the second gives examples of illustrious persons who experienced life in solitude. c) De otio religiosorum: it is a treatise in two books, composed in 1347 and dedicated to the Carthusians of Montrieux. There the theme of the preceding work is taken up again, but with particular reference to the character of the contemplative life of religious. d) Psalmi penitentiales: seven prayers made up of verses in prose. The composition is certainly earlier than 1347. e) Itinerarium breve de Ianua usque ad Ierusalem et Terram Sanctam: a brief guide to the countries that Giovanni di Mandello would have had to cross in order to go to the Holy Land. It is from 1358. f) De viris illustribus: a great historical work left unfinished. From the researches of G. Martellotti (v. Linee di sviluppo dell'umanesimo petrarchesco, in Studi Petrarcheschi, 2 [1949], pp. 51-80) it seems established that the P. conceived the work as a series of biographies from Romulus to Titus, and that at a second stage he greatly expanded the plan, going back to Adam. Of the first plan 23 biographies remain; of the second, 12. Francesco da Carrara, to whom the work was dedicated, asked the P. for a compendium, but even this brought together only the first 14 biographies. Also unfinished and late is the very extensive biography of Caesar (De gestis Cesaris), probably not intended to enter the De viris. g) Rerum memorandarum libri: another historical work of the vastest design; and this too unfinished. The P. had proposed to collect examples of the cardinal virtues, but he barely managed to prepare the rough draft of a brief part of the work: the first four books, which were composed between Dec. 1343 and Feb. 1345, when the P. fled from besieged Parma. h) De remediis utriusque fortune: a vast manual written for anyone who wished to conduct himself well in every case of prosperous or adverse fortune. The work is dedicated to Azzo da Correggio and divided into two parts, respectively of 122 and 132 dialogues between Reason, Joy, Hope and between Reason, Sorrow, Fear. This moral encyclopedia offers for every circumstance of life the example of a great man of the past, and therefore invites one to conform existence to the classical ideal. It is believed, on the basis of a testimony of Boccaccio, that the work was published at the end of 1366. i) Invectiva contra quendam magni status hominem sed nullius scientie aut virtutis: this is the exact title of the brief work, long known under the erroneous title of Invectiva contra quendam Gallum innominatum sed in dignitate positum. The personal enemy against whom the P. violently vents himself is Card. Giovanni di Caraman. The invectiva was composed during the period of his stay with the Visconti, between 1354 and 1359. l) Invectiva contra medicum: a work in four books of violent polemic against a physician, unidentified, of Pope Clement VI. More than for the venting of personal resentment, the work is of interest for its defense of poetry against science and practical activities. The first book (originally a letter with which the P. replied to a writing of the physician) was composed in '52; a rejoinder of the physician provoked another long reply from the P. (books II-IV) composed in '53. m) De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia: in this opuscule, dedicated to Donato degli Albanzani, the P. reaffirms his aversion for every science that does not adhere strictly to the moral problem and reacts against the blind and excessive deference to Aristotle. The occasion for the opuscule was given by four Venetian Averroists who had defined the P. a good man, but ignorant. Completed in 1367, the De ignorantia then received several retouchings attested by the two autographs that remain to us: Vat. lat. 3359 and Hamilt. 493. n) Epystola contra eum qui maledixit Italie: the P. maintained, in a letter to Urban V, the advisability of bringing the seat of the Church back to Rome. Fra Giovanni di Hesdin replied, interpreting the thought of those who considered residence at Avignon preferable. The P. rejoined with this letter, composed in 1373 and addressed to Uguccione da Tiene, in which he exalts Rome and the superiority of the Latins. Since the 16th century the letter has been given the erroneous title of Apologia contra cuiusdam Galli calumnias. o) Rerum familiarium libri: a collection of 350 letters, written over a period of forty years. The idea of such a collection arose in the P. as early as 1349, but the definitive form was reached only in 1366. The P. dedicated the collection to his friend Ludovico di Campania. p) Rerum senilium libri: a collection of letters in 17 books, dedicated to Francesco Nelli. It comprises ca. 125 epistles, written between 1361 and 1374. Death prevented the P. from giving the Senili the definitive form that the Familiari did not lack. q) Liber sine nomine: a collection of 19 epistles of politico-religious content and of the harshest criticism against the Avignon curia. By making public the letters in which truths unpleasant to many were openly stated, the P. wished to protect the recipients by removing their names. r) Some seventy letters that found no place in the collections prepared by the P. have been preserved for us by his admirers. These are the so-called Varie. s) Unfinished is the epistle Posteritati, in which the P. sets forth his own life up to 1351; it was probably written in 1371-72, but there are those who consider it twenty years earlier.

III. THE PERSONALITY

The lyrics of the "Canzoniere" are almost all on amorous subjects; but beneath the words of love's sorrow P. expresses that vaster sorrow which constitutes the secret of his personality. This is in perfect accord with that literary tradition, particularly of the stilnovisti, which advised reducing to love and to woman the meaning of every other experience. He was not a philosopher; and one of the traits that most distinctly set him apart from the stilnovisti is precisely the absence of that theorizing with a scholastic background that pervades their rhymes. But he was a psychologist; and here, on the other hand, the contacts between P. and the stilnovisti are evident: the psychological investigation of the entire course of his own spirit constitutes precisely the subject matter of the "Canzoniere." P. admits in the Secretum that he cultivated earthly passions; two above all: the love for Laura and the desire for glory. Yet in him the moral sense was no less awake, and he felt vividly the problem of human destiny; all in full correspondence with his sincere religious faith and with his aptitude, indeed his taste, for meditation. What pleases him on earth therefore acquires, in his eyes, the character of a sinful bond, and spontaneously there germinate the anguished questions he puts to himself, conscious that attachment to earthly things is irreconcilable with a full dedication to God. His brother Gherardo reached that point; he did not: "I hate my sins, but I am crushed by the mountain of miseries, and it takes my breath away. Many times I have sought to flee and have thought of shaking off the ancient yoke; but I have driven it into my bones." In reality he does not love the good as much as would be necessary to resist the suggestion of what is sinful. What remains for him? To prostrate himself before God, to implore His help and tenaciously seek to free himself, striving to break one by one the many snares that hold him bound to the earth. The hope was for a complete liberation, but since this does not come about, the "Canzoniere" remains to bear witness to the conflict between the human and the divine. Such is the essential character of Petrarchan sorrow; but the sorrow that is born of the never-resolved discord intertwines and grows complicated with other veins of sorrow. One should note, in fact: P.'s position is not that of one who, while deploring his own weakness, fully enjoys earthly things; on the contrary, he is far from finding in them complete satisfaction. To prevent this there is in P., obsessively, the sense of life's fleetingness. In every work of his one can catch the allusions to time that flies, to our living which is a precipitous rushing toward death, to the world which is itself moving toward its ineluctable end. Profound and varied is what follows from this: first of all a bewilderment that saddens his entire life, and then a preoccupation with intensely using the little time granted, and by contrast the fear of suddenly seeing what is dear vanish, and the desperate straining toward something that is not fleeting. All this provokes a state of anxiety that immensely wearies P.: a state of anxiety to which are bound a sense of exhaustion and a desire for restful peace. Only two possible roads: to find quiet either in the human or in the divine (and this has been seen to be unrealizable), or else to entrust oneself to death. But not even this: in death P. sees the supreme evil of life, the seal of the fleetingness that bewilders him, the definitive renunciation of that earthly happiness which in him is a powerful desire. This, in its most conspicuous lines, is the definition of the sentimental matter of which the "Canzoniere" is woven, but other annotations will be easy to gather when one wishes to specify the character of Petrarchan poetry. It has been several times noted in the "Canzoniere" the almost absolute absence of realistic particulars; there is lacking in it, to put it with Mazzoni, "a more vivid drawing near of the poet to a precise reality." The explanation is not difficult. P. wished to entrust to the "Canzoniere" those secret thoughts that are not tied to the various events of each day, but constitute the intimate substance of the spiritual life; they lie latent, but surface in meditation when the individual is in conversation with his own conscience. The fantasizing then brings into evidence not the course of daily life, but another course, the one that corresponds to the guiding lines of our personality. That is why in the "Canzoniere" we always see the landscape as identical and evanescent: it is that one landscape which P. dreamed of and which alone perfectly harmonized with his spiritual climate. The same may be said for the image of Laura: her attitudes, words, appearance are not those of reality, but represent a figuration constantly caressed by P.'s fantasy. And in fact the "Canzoniere" expresses the yearning for a deep and distant love, whose memory and whose regret have ended by personifying the vastest sorrow that is in the very nature of the poet. What P. contemplates does not exist in reality, and lives only, immutable, in his spirit. This is the reason why no difference whatsoever is perceived between the lyrics of the first and the second part of the "Canzoniere," which, therefore, cannot be considered as the history of an amorous affair; but rather as testimony that P.'s desires, hopes, anguish, sorrows were always the same, at thirty as at sixty. An important observation because it reveals that P.'s spiritual climate had no developments, even if the arrangement of the lyrics in the "Canzoniere" would wish to show a progressive ascent from the human to the divine; which is confirmed by the Trionfi, which likewise reveal the intent to underscore as attained that "restful harbor" always yearned for. There death is finally accepted as a serene detachment from earthly things and a calm quieting in eternal rest. But in the Trionfo dell'Eternità, which is from the last months and would wish to be the triumph of the divine, that is, of the immutable, in the face of the fleetingness of earthly things, P.'s thought turns to Laura to imagine an otherworldly world in which there is renewed, purified of what is painful, conflicting, fleeting, the course of his love. In this way P. makes the supreme, vain attempt to reconcile heaven and earth by drying up the very source of his suffering.

On the other hand, anyone who claimed to find in the "Canzoniere" the immediacy and the anguished urgency of the spiritual problems that weary P. would err. It is indeed true, rather, what many have noted: when P. analyzes and judges and undertakes to express literarily the discord and the restlessness that derives from it, he looks from on high and, so to speak, dominates his suffering. Therefore the passions that constitute the sentimental substance of the "Canzoniere" are filtered through a controlled confession characteristic of one who looks into himself in order to give himself a rational account of his own spiritual vicissitudes. And whoever observes that literary elaboration constitutes an aspect of this mastery of passion is right: the only true joy granted to P. He himself well knew it, who has St. Augustine say of one of his poems in the Secretum: "I delighted in its sweetness and marveled how so sweet a song could burst forth from among the storms of the soul."

The doctrine of P., who sought refuge in the ancient world, finding the age in which he lived contemptible, and the sympathy with which he approached that great past, caused an enormous quantity of material derived from classical sources to flow into his writings. Four groups may be distinguished: there are quotations of others' words with the explicit declaration of the source; then reminiscences: setting within the sentence some expression of a classical author in pursuit of elegance; then derivations from others' pages subjected to profound verbal alteration; there are finally — and this is the group that closely concerns the poet in the vernacular — the elements that are profoundly relived by P. and that, filtering through his taste, culture and spiritual climate, emerge in his writings as something new and entirely Petrarchan. Thus he endeavors to achieve for poetry in the vernacular that new dignity which would place it alongside Latin. To give it regularity, composure; a movement not harsh and convoluted, but smooth and lucid; to select the lexicon, and make it choice, harmonious; to wrap it in a new music that would have the soul of a melodious elegy. Thus P. handed down to the centuries the Italian poetic language, accompanied by the taste for noble and modulated expression, in an aristocratic and somewhat precious climate.

The aspiration toward an ideal world, removed from the insufficiency of concrete reality, is at the root of Petrarchan humanism, the study of antiquity out of hatred for the present and the search for a spiritual perfection that P. sees neither in himself nor around himself.

In a letter to Boccaccio P. affirms with pride: « I believe that in our times no one has had more interest than I in what is ancient ». Not, however, a simple antiquarian interest, but a living love for an epoch that he seeks to understand in its spirit, restoring to it, with the warmth of his own enthusiasm, plasticity and immediacy, defining its particulars in a research that is not that of the collector or the scholar, but of one who strives to give life again to a lost world. Hence there is visible in him the constant interest in arriving at possessing in its integrity that ancient world with which he is in love: the effort to adapt his own Latin to ancient models; the care in subjecting to critical scrutiny the information he gathers about the classical world; the diligence in seeking to discover lost texts. His philological activity is condensed in these three directions: the three that humanism would bring to perfection.

But meanwhile his method, the joy of discoveries, the regret for what he has lost, the contempt, the annoyance, the impatience for what hinders and damages, are in P. the same as those of the generations that gathered his humanistic legacy. Not only that: but everywhere he seeks someone to second him. The dense network of friendships allows him to create a school: he, the master, many and enthusiastic the disciples; among whom the greatest: Boccaccio. P.'s friendship with the Certaldese constitutes therefore something fundamental for the history of our letters: in their work a taste and a cultural orientation take shape that will be for centuries the very soul of literary civilization. But P.'s humanism stands out particularly in the rigorous criterion with which he selects his own books. P. is annoyed by dialectic, by scholastic treatises, by a science that forgets the problems of man; he holds in suspicion the medieval authors who, lacking critical discernment, do not know how to distinguish the true from the false, and report inaccurate or fantastic information; he hates, finally, the writers who offend with the coarseness of their style his ideal of a Latin purified of medieval harshness through the study of classical models: Seneca and Cicero, in particular. Therefore, despite the vastness of his culture, P. is a man of few books; few at least those that he cites: the ancients, all those he can (but how many he longed for that remained inaccessible to him), the Fathers of the Church, and some medieval work that constituted an indispensable instrument of study.

This effort of P. toward antiquity does not manifest itself only in philological activity; there is another fundamental aspect of his humanism: the love for the lost antiquity traces for him the master lines according to which he constructs his life. The arrangement of his epistolary is modeled on the example of Cicero; with the Africa he intends to renew the epic genre already very great in Rome; the polemical works offer him the opportunity to show that he succeeds well in every literary genre, like certain of his ancient models; in the historical and moral works he realizes the reconciliation of the ethical and Christian intent with classical matter; in the De viris he wants to be a historian like Livy and to make a display of style and critical spirit. Constant, on the other hand, is the care with which P. compares the events of his own life with the examples furnished him by the ancient world: whether it be a matter of justifying with an illustrious precedent some aspect of himself or some ineluctable fact, or whether he is induced to act in a determined way by the classical example that stands before him. Not by chance is P. the author of that book most fortunate throughout the Renaissance, the De remediis utriusque fortune, which offers for every vicissitude of life a counsel validated by the example of a great personage. It is thus that literature serves life; indeed it is thus that literature and life end up fusing in that synthesis that is typical of the humanistic movement. On the other hand, no conflict between his humanism and his Christianity. The ancients lacked the true faith, it is true; but the old and the new world are not in conflict when one speaks of virtue. The moral problem is therefore the field in which P. feels he can find a continuity between classicism and Christianity. The humanistic conception of life is perceived particularly in the taste for the otium of the ancients. P. entrusted the praise of solitude to many of his pages: from the De vita solitaria to the De otio religiosorum, from the Invectivae contra medicum to the Seniles; and the long sojourns at Valchiusa, at Selvapiana, at Arquà confirm on the practical plane what the pages say: the tendency toward the solitary life, in the quiet of the countryside, far from the busy and noisy cities. He loved solitude, then; not however that of the misanthrope who hates and flees men, nor that of the ascetic who in the hermitage realizes his contemplative ideal. He desires it comforted by literary studies, gladdened by the sight of beautiful nature, made human by the frequent visits of friends. On the whole an aristocratic and humanistic ideal that singularly accords with certain motifs of P.'s personality: egoism, first of all, which wants every comfort assured, the taste for what is beautiful and harmonious, the moral sense that hates turbid vice and despises every greed, the love of glory, finally, since in the otium the writer realizes the ideal conditions for his own literary activity. And here too fifteenth-century humanism owes everything to P.

Equally close are the contacts between humanism and P.'s attitude toward political problems. In a Romantic and Risorgimento climate a very severe judgment arose: without a precise line his thought, contradictory his practical activity, insincere his declarations of patriotism. And little credence was given to his accents of love for Italy and to his laments over her wounds, judging them the fruit of « an inspiration that was hardly serious and largely literary ». Even today it is repeated that P., enclosed in the egoism of his own humanistic and cenobitic ideal, subordinates everything to it and praises whatever can favor it, and is indignant at whatever can disturb it. But in the numerous pages on political subjects, which constitute no small part of his Latin production, it is not difficult to find the proofs of a clear thought and a most ardent sentiment. Several times he proclaims himself a Roman citizen with pride, and puts forward that faith and that reverence which lead him to venerate and love Rome above every other city. To one who points out to him how decayed the Rome of his times is in comparison with the ancient one, he replies: « The walls and the palaces have fallen into ruin, but the glory of her name remains immortal ». And he extols Rome as « capital of the world, queen of all cities, seat of the Empire, stronghold of the Catholic faith, source of every memorable example ». To the well-being of peoples in universal peace and in the wisdom of a just government, according to P., only the dominion of Rome can provide, once she has returned to being mistress of the world with the help of all Italian forces. Execrable, therefore, in his eyes is everything that delays or impedes the restoration of the ancient Empire: the discords among the citizens of Rome itself, the struggles among the Italian cities, the fruit of local ambitions that do not know how to take account of the general interest, the exile of the Church, kept far from Rome through the predominance of the French clergy, the recalcitrance of the « barbarian » peoples to the august Roman dominion, the indolence and somnolence of the Italians. Most praiseworthy and inspiring, on the other hand, appeared to him every attempt to restore to Rome and to Italy dignity and power. At the news of the attempt of Cola di Rienzo, who had renewed the ancient Roman republic, he extolled the enterprise and lamented it down to the last days of his life. He recalled how « by his counsel and deed alone, not Rome alone but all Italy rose to such a hope, and the Italian name resounded on high, and the glory of Rome shone forth beautiful with new light ». Thus in 1352; and more than twenty years later likewise: « How suddenly all Italy arose; how illustrious and terrible the Roman name reached to the ends of the world! ». P. thought that the first step toward the restoration of the ancient Empire, indispensable for the orderly coexistence of men, was the calming of the discords in Rome itself; and that to the city, classical and Christian, dignity and power should be restored by the presence of the Church no less than of the Empire.

Returning to Rome, the Pontiff would have restored « to himself Rome, to Rome peace, to Italy and to the world decorum and the end of misfortunes ». For this he entreated Benedict XII and then Clement VI and finally Urban V, joining his voice to those of St. Catherine and St. Bridget in the invocation that implored the return of the Pontiff there where Peter had died, in the city sanctified by the blood of so many martyrs. Urban had granted so great an expectation, but only for a short time, and to the Pontiff, who had embarked once more for exile, P. cried out most bitterly: « Quo vadis, Domine? ». This conception of a classical and Christian Rome, seat of the Empire and of the Church, teacher of justice and piety to the world, also resolves for P. the problem of liberty. Several times he declares, in fact, that true liberty is enjoyed only under the government of a mild and just king. But unfortunately, observes P., such a government does not exist in the world; and therefore « tyranny is everywhere; if there are no tyrants, the peoples play the tyrant ».

When one seeks to grasp panoramically the influence exercised by P. on the determination of literary civilization, one has the sensation of being before one of the most notable currents in the history of the human spirit. To P. as poet and humanist, Renaissance Italy owes everything: the poetic language, taste, the way of conceiving life, the character of culture. In our nineteenth century there was an attempt to create the myth of Dante as tutelary deity of much of our literature; it is an error: to Petrarchism, on the other hand, are owed those resonances that in the fabric of the centuries have constituted a profound unifying character. - See pl. LXXXIII.

Pier Giorgio Ricci