4
Wounded Lovers

The laurel wreath, Petrarch confidently declaimed from the Capitoline, was immune to natural flux, verdant amid the decay of time, staunch against the bolt of judgment.^[1] It was not, however, exempt from human design, that of the laureate or of the crowd who sought and spurned him. The ruin of Petrarch's political ideal was the ruin of his poetic inspiration. The six portents of Babylonian captivity also presaged self-defeat. As with the prophet Ezekiel, his personal tragedy was indivisible from the national fate. The lioness, the ship, the laurel, the fountain, the phoenix, and the wife of his visions, all of which perished ominously, symbolized the failure of his poetry to incite virtue through the knowledge of truth veiled in fiction.

As he protested, no beast grazing in any wood was ever crueler than she for whom the poet sighed. Love impelled him to pursue in solitude the alluring voice but scattered footprints of that wandering wild creature who fled capture. It had a human visage in angelic form but the heart of a tiger or a bear. Within its eyes it held the tears of sorrow and death, so that its gaze must be avoided. Petrarch incautiously spied it naked at high noon, in full Apolline light, and for that blasphemous gaze was metamorphosed like Actaeon into a hounded stag. In that transformation into the object of his chase, the poet became the loneliest of howling beasts: "I have become a beast of the woods, remembering her beautiful face and her holy works."^[2] Like the tormented captured beast of his first portent, the ship that sank in the second also symbolized the failure of his vatic vocation. The craft of poetry was a commonplace of Roman invention. To set its sails was to compose, by voyaging in a great ship on the sea of epic or by navigating in a small boat on the river of lyric, until the sails were furled again on entering port, the completion of the poem. In piloting his craft the poet as sailor relied on experience against the dangerous winds and tides, or the cliffs and monsters that intruded upon his course. This was a popular medieval metaphor,^[3] and it pervaded Rime sparse as an image of Petrarch's

art.^[4] The destruction of the laurel by lightning in the third portent was an obvious symbol of the devastation of his poetic fame and glory. The fourth portent, in which bucolic scene the poet uniquely participated, also presaged the failure of his art in the desiccation of the fountain. Since springs issued from the lower depths, the realm of the dead, they were chthonic powers. The ancient association of prophecy and divination with secret knowledge of the underworld extended mantic powers to springs. Spirits and dream-visions were summoned from the deep.^[5] At Delphi the Pythia drank from the Castalian springs before uttering the oracles of Apollo, and perhaps because she composed these sometimes in verse, or perhaps because the Muses haunted the temple precincts, the Castalian springs became a sacred font of poetic as well as prophetic inspiration.^[6] It was the desiccation of this source that Petrarch envisioned, and his own descent to the underworld through the cleft rent by the catastrophic earthquake.

Versions of the phoenix myth, whether of its regeneration from suicidal ashes or from natural decay, universally associated its death and resurrection with the sun. In Egyptian lore the phoenix symbolized the total renewal of the solar year, which was associated with the rising of the Nile. As consecrated to the sun, the phoenix was depicted in Graeco-Roman cultures as feathered in the gold and red colors of the sunrise, its omniscient eyes glowing with a supernatural beauty. A nimbus about its head, often radiated, symbolized the sun at its zenith: Apollo beaming light to the planets. In Jewish apocalyptic literature the phoenix was the escort of the sun on its daily journey across the celestial vault. As derived from the oriental myth of the cosmic cock, the phoenix flew just ahead of the solar chariot. With its outspread wings it caught the burning rays of the sun, lest the creatures on earth below be scorched by its intensity. In Christian poetry this tradition was preserved and celebrated in Lactantius's De ave phoenice , which described the restorative immersion of the phoenix's charred body in a sacred spring each dawn. It then ascended to the top of the tree of life, where it summoned the new day with a beautiful hymn. The phoenix was thus lauded as "the venerable priest of the grove of the sun and the sole initiate of the secrets of Phoebus."^[7] In the context of these traditions of solar and even sacral symbolism of the phoenix, its contemptuous suicide in Petrarch's fifth portent presaged the sunset of his Apolline light.^[8]

In his sixth portent a snake bit the heel of a woman modeled on

Eurydice, the wife of the lyricist Orpheus, who charmed her and all Nature with his poetry. To the Ovidian features of her nuptial stroll through the meadow where she carelessly trod on the serpent,^[9] Petrarch added the topic of effictio, the description of a beautiful woman from head to toe.^[10] Her head was wreathed in an obscuring cloud, her body clad in a dazzling garment, but her bare heel was vulnerable to the bite of the tempter. This portrayal encompassed medieval allegorizations of Eurydice as either profound judgment or base concupiscence.^[11] Petrarch's figure was poetry itself, whose sublime thought pierced heaven while its lowly form was pierced by hell. The cloud that enveloped its highest parts and the garment that robed its body were synonymous with allegory in his poetics. The image of the head thrust through the clouds also resonated, however, with the scriptural metaphors of the cedars of Lebanon and of the tower of Babel itself, which were destroyed for their hubris in piercing heaven with their height. The part of the lady not veiled in allegory, the bare flesh, was prone to evil, and she perished like the fading flowers of the field. The lamenting poet desired to pursue her in death, as Orpheus had sought Eurydice even in the underworld. Petrarch understood that in espousing poetry he was wedding himself to a temporal reality: language. Yet he rejected the argument that dialectical knowledge, such as scholastic theologians preferred, was firm, immutable, and eternal. "What knowledge is without words?" he rejoined, citing the famous verses of Horace's Ars poetica: "Many terms that have fallen out of use shall be born again, and those shall fall that are now in repute, if Usage so will it, in whose hands lies the judgement, the right, and the rule of speech."^[12] He aspired to demonstrate that, although temporal, and thus variable and evanescent like Daphne fleeing, poetry still participated in the eternal, like Daphne transfixed. The symbol he invented to surmount the portent of poetic demise was the apotheosis of Laura, in which poetic truth personified triumphed over death. It was thus that Petrarch incorporated the poet's vision into the beatific vision of God.

For Petrarch eloquence was a force for moral persuasion, an active philosophy, not an aesthetic perfection. Poetry was defined by rhetoric.^[13] The initial task of rhetoric, invention, classically involved seeking out the subject with talent and ingenuity, or nature and genius.^[14] Petrarch asserted that his Laura was "all that Art, Wit [genius], and Nature and Heaven can do in this life."^[15] She was thus the perfect temporal invention. Of his genius Petrarch confessed that in his youth

it was slight and that he did not place much confidence in it. His fresh steps faltered, "afraid of the high undertaking." Yet genius and force could not avail him against the constraint of poetic inspiration, and so, compelled by Love, in the shade of the laurel his feeble genius flowered. So increased his troubles. His aspiration was Nature's highest flight on a pinion of genius, so elevating him that like a sun "'among brilliant wits [geniuses] his name shines.'" Petrarch was ultimately constrained to confess, however, that "'he flies to fall who mounts too high, nor can a man well do what the heavens deny him."' Heaven was to prove adamant to his genius. The truth he desired to view naked, like Actaeon spying at high noon on Artemis, took revenge for his audacity. When "thunderstruck and dead lay my hope that was mounting too high," he was transformed into a swan, like the mythological Cygnus, who grieved when Phaeton lost control while driving the chariot of the sun and was blasted with Jupiter's judgmental bolt. "Neither my wit [genius] nor my tongue can equal the truth," he stated. Moreover, he said, no human genius could add to the virtuous forms that adorned its celestial garments. No human genius could display on any page the honor, piety, and virtue of poetry, which ideally showed "the straight way to go to Heaven." It was vainly, then, that he strove to paint in song its extreme beauties, for he was able to hatch in with his pen only a few shaded areas. As he acknowledged, "But when I come to her divine part, which was a bright, brief sun to the world, there fails my daring, my wit [genius], and my art."^[16]

Celebrating his privileged ecstatic vision, the poet regretted that his weak mortal eyes were unable to tolerate the sight of other celestial, immortal forms. While the sun is omniscient, as Africa piously acknowledged,^[17] his poems, which only reflected that Apolline source, were mere fragments of the truth, scattered refractions of a singular light: rime sparse .

I knew (so much did Heaven open up my eyes, so much did eagerness and Love raise up my wings) things new and full of grace, but mortal, which all the stars showered on one subject.

Those many other high celestial and immortal forms, so strange and so wondrous, because they were not accommodated to my intellect, my weak sight could not endure.

Thus whatever I spoke or wrote about her, who now before God returns my prayers in exchange for praises, was a little drop from infinite depths

for one's style does not extend beyond one's wit [genius], and though one has his eyes fixed on the sun, the brighter it is the less he sees.^[18]

And, he confessed, "my wit [genius (was)] overcome by the excess of light."^[19] In vain has Love a thousand times engaged "wit [genius], time, pens, papers, inks," he declared. "Poetry has not yet reached the summit, I know it in myself and anyone knows it who up to now has spoken or written of love." So he advised, "he who knows how to think, let him esteem the silent truth which surpasses every style, and then let him sigh, 'Therefore blessed the eyes that saw her alive!'"^[20]

The lady of whom Petrarch sang as the symbol of poetic truth, he lauded as a gift of the provident and artful Creator who fashioned the universe with remarkable command. In admiration and thanksgiving he praised God. Again he acknowledged poetically, "All things with which the world is beauteous come forth good from the hand of the eternal Workman." He thus refuted Augustinus's allegation that poetry did not elevate his soul to verity and virtue. Countering the saint's charge that the poet was enraptured by mere appearance and not by true reality, Petrarch declared that his lady was to be honored not only for her beautiful visage but also for her "holy works." Heaven itself honored her, he stated, "in whom virtue and courtesy dwell."^[21]

It was in imitation of the divine paradigm of creation that Petrarch strove to create artfully and providentially. Yet his struggle for a language to express his insight—to give shape to the idea—testified to his humanity. What God accomplished by sheer will, the singular fiat, Petrarch labored for with sighs. While the pious, compassionate glance of Lady Poetry could transport him to the state of primal innocence, her disdainful look could petrify him, so that burdened with original sin he could only invoke its consequence: death. The fault was not in poetry, he explained, but in human craft, which necessarily fails to express the ideal, like Apollo's foiled designs on Daphne. Petrarch distinguished his artifice from the art of the Creator:

but I, who do not discern so far within, am dazzled by the beauty that I see about me, and if I ever return to the true splendor, my eye cannot stay still, it is so weakened by its very own fault, and not by that day when I turned toward her angelic beauty: "In the sweet time of my first age."^[22]

The aspiration to see was not at fault, only the flaw in the eye. Bidding Love to kiss the fair form, he ruefully repeated the observation of Christ

on the somnolent disciples who failed to watch during his agony in Gethsemane: The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak (Matt. 26:41).^[23]

Augustinus had warned Franciscus that eloquence was the pursuit of the impossible, a veritable Daphne who would allure but elude him. Lecturing him on the poverty of language, the "saint" had chided, "How ashamed you should be to have spent so much time in pursuing something which cannot be attained."^[24] Petrarch was not ignorant of the evasion and elusion of language, however, as he declared even in praising the eloquence that Augustinus deprecated. He wrote:

I consider it a great accomplishment to express great concepts with words and to reveal with artistically combined words the beauty hidden in the mind. If I am not mistaken, that is precisely the highest purpose of eloquence. Though the human spirit aspires toward it, often it halts overwhelmed in the middle of the road. I would like now to tell you something that will impress you; the concept is clearly in my mind, yet I am incapable of expressing what I wish to convey to you. How astonishingly feeble is the language of mortals!^[25]

Petrarch moralized about the vice of cupidity, how it served as its own punishment by tormenting him whether its excessive desire failed or succeeded. He advised contentment with one's allotted genius and moderation in the pursuit of goals. Yet boasting that grace had almost liberated him from the throes of cupidity, Petrarch confessed that there remained "one implacable passion that holds me which so far I have neither been able or willing to check, for I flatter myself that the desire for noble things is not dishonorable." The passion? "I am unable to satisfy my thirst for books." This cupidity was not only directed toward the possession of books, which was the subject of this particular remark, but toward the production of them. While Petrarch professed that genius should not be compelled to ascend where it cannot, for otherwise, "while we long for the impossible, we neglect the possible," it was the very pursuit of the impossible that he boldly essayed. Although he acknowledged that "one must indeed be mad to attempt excellence in something which one will probably not achieve," that was precisely his affliction: madness, poetic raving. Confessing that his aspirations would exhaust the talents of Demosthenes, Homer, Cicero, and Vergil, he declared that "mortal tongue cannot reach her divine state." Yet Petrarch was driven to aspire there: "Love drives and draws his tongue, not by choice but by destiny."^[26]

Petrarch had discovered in himself the "strange pleasure that in human minds [geniuses] is often found, to love whatever strange thing brings the thickest crowd of sighs! And I am one of those whom weeping pleases." With the failure to achieve his ideal, he admitted that "dry is the vein of my accustomed wit [genius]." His genius could not avail against death, for death had "scattered the fire." Yet in reviewing his poetry he still hoped: "May my wit [genius] not displease her, may she not despise my praises." So he implored Love to extend his hand to his weary genius, that he might at least praise the heavenly state of poetry to which his ideal had flown like the soul of Scipio himself.^[27] The description of the vivid image of the laurel that initially captivated him had proved beyond his genius. "No wit [genius] or style can ever describe it," he decided. Although it escaped invention, Petrarch attempted to preserve it in another category of rhetoric, memory. "But often I return to it with memory," he disclosed. Annually the ancient wounds of love were renewed, "the new season that year by year renews on that day my ancient wounds." Seven years, ten, eleven, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, twenty, and twenty-one anniversaries are all recorded.^[28] At first glance his ideal was most beautiful:

I never saw the sun rise so fair when the sky is most free of mist, nor after a rain the heavenly arc diversify itself through the air with so many colors,

as, on the day when I took on my burden of love, I saw her face flaming transform itself, which—and I am sparing of words—no mortal thing can equal.^[29]

Yet even in remembering the inaugural vision the poet was defeated:

At times, ashamed that I do not speak in rhyme, Lady, about your beauty, I recall the time when I first saw you, such that there will never be another who pleases me;

but I find a weight that is not for my arms, a work not to be polished with my file; therefore my wit [genius], judging its strength, becomes all frozen in its workings.

Many times already have I opened my lips to speak, but then my voice has remained within my breast: but what sound could ever rise so high?

Many times have I begun to write verses, but my pen and my hand and my intellect have been vanquished in the first assault.^[30]

Petrarch nevertheless could not abandon "the first laurel, for still its sweet shade turns away from my heart any less beautiful pleasure."

Although he had explored woods and hills, he had never since discovered a tree so honored by the supernal light that it did not change seasonally.

Therefore, more and more firm from season to season, following where
I heard myself called from Heaven and guided by a mild and clear light,
I have come back always devoted to the first branches.^[31]

The laurel, which Love once planted in the poet's heart through a gaping wound in his side, was now transplanted to heaven.

The world was full of its perfect honors when God, to adorn Heaven with her, took her back to Himself, and she was a thing fit for Him.^[32]

She was now the honor of heaven, which she beautified and brightened with her presence. Her beatitude consoled the poet, "seeing that she has come so near to Him whom in her life she had always in her heart." Petrarch no longer desired to envision her with an external corporeal eye, for that would recall her from heaven to hell. Rather, "more beautiful than ever I see her with my internal eye, risen in flight with the angels to her and my eternal Lord." She who inspired the poet now delighted the heavenly king. She awakened "among the elect spirits, where the soul internalizes itself in her Maker." Indeed, the heavenly citizens marveled at her arrival there, for never had ascended from the straying earth "so lovely a soul [a vestment so adorned]."^[33] More astonishingly still, the Lord himself confirmed their saintly admiration with his divine judgment. When Petrarch prayed for the grace to praise her unexcelled virtue and beauty, the Lord responded:

there has never been a form equal to hers, not since the day when Adam first opened his eyes; and let this now suffice: weeping I say it, and do you weeping write.^[34]

While Petrarch remained a citizen of the woods, poetry had become a citizen of heaven. Poetry, of whose perfection the world had proved unworthy, was content to have exchanged her earthly abode for a heavenly one, for she was "equal to the most perfect souls." Yet "still from time to time she turns back, looking to see if I am following her, and seems to wait; and so I raise all of my desires and thoughts toward Heaven, for I hear her even pray that I may hasten," he recorded.^[35]

Gloriously enthroned in heaven, the poet's lady might now see on

the face of the omniscient Creator "my love and that pure faith for which I poured out so many tears and so much ink." Thus might she know that the poet's heart revered her on earth as in heaven, only desiring the inspirational sunlight of her eyes. He prayed to be united with her.^[36] Indeed, he wished to be rapt there in the very triumphal chariot in which he beheld his beloved laurel personified:

Then I saw them in a triumphal chariot, and my Laurel with her holy, retiring manner sitting to the side and sweetly singing.^[37]

Petrarch desired to share in this celestial triumph, for he had ever sought through poetry the beatific vision of God:^[38]

For Rachel have I served and not for Leah, nor could I live with another; and I would endure, if Heaven called us, going off with her on the chariot of Elijah.^[39]

Rachel and Leah, as the Old Testament prototypes of the New Testament characters Mary and Martha (Gen. 29:16—17; Luke 10:38—42), symbolized in medieval spiritual literature the contemplative and the active lives. As the far-sighted, patient, beautiful woman, Rachel was moralistically contrasted with the near-sighted, busy, yet fruitful Leah.^[40] Petrarch thus allied his poetic aspiration with the contemplative ideal.^[41] The laurel of which he sang was ultimately the crown of the saints, as he gazed toward "heaven where now she triumphs adorned with the laurel that her unvanquished chastity has merited."^[42] It was specifically in the chariot of Elijah that the poet sought to ascend to a rapturous triumph. With this metaphor Petrarch indicated his prophetic vocation.

In his meditation De vita solitaria Petrarch had lauded Elijah as the model of the solitary prophet. He had recounted his wondrous deeds, particularly how he was seized up to heaven from the wilderness in a flaming chariot.^[43] The biblical description of this vortiginous rapture in "a chariot of fire and horses of fire" (2 Kings 2:11) is very suggestive of the iconography of that other prophet whom Petrarch revered as the source of his poetic genius: Apollo the charioteer, who daily drives the quadriga of the burning sun across the heavens. This similarity did not escape ancient Christian theologians. Speculating on

spiritual ascension, they compared Elijah's rapture to the human mind taken up in a chariot of fire, the Spirit itself, and transported through the air to the glories of heaven. This Christian theme of apotheosis, conceived as a rapture on the chariot of Elijah, originated in Mithraism. Its initial application was to Roman emperors, precisely in relation to the solar cult Augustus established when he adopted Apollo as his personal god. From the beginning of the Roman empire, the emperor was depicted as transported in a chariot drawn by winged horses, as interpreted in this oracle to Julian: "Then a vehicle of dazzling flame will bear you to Olympus; and you will reach the eternal abode in ethereal light." This chariot of Apollo as Helios, the solar deity, was adopted in Judaic and Christian art for the conveyance of souls to heaven, as in the famous mosaic beneath the Vatican. As interpreted in conjunction with the other mosaics of deliverance in that hypogeum, the Apolline figure of Christ not only depicted "the sun of righteousness," it also prefigured the eschatological hope of Christians to rise with him. Such artistic assimilation of the chariots of Apollo (Helios) and Elijah as vehicles of spiritual ascent was confirmed by literary texts that, playing on their names 'HliaV and 'HlioV , compared the prophet with the sun. A notable example that Petrarch knew was this verse from the pen of the Christian poet Sedulius:

Elias, shining in name and merit, is worthy to shed his light on the pathways of Heaven: by the change of one letter his name in Greek becomes "sun."^[44]

Was not a vision of "the pathways of Heaven" the hieratic prayer of Vergil to the Muses?^[45] And had not Petrarch in imitation espoused poetry against asceticism as the most sublime and direct course there?^[46]

The traditional metaphor of Elijah's chariot, which Petrarch adopted as a model of spiritual ascension, served also for him to recapitulate his Apolline vocation as an inspired prophet. He would be enraptured like Elijah in a fiery chariot to a celestial triumph, where he would be crowned with the imperishable laurel of the saints. Like Apollo he would drive toward that apotheosis the very quadriga of the sun, whose rays illumined him with poetic truth. He would play the roles not only of these two prophets, but of one who was famously identified in his own apocalyptic age with both of those enlightened spirits: Francis of Assisi.

In his Rime sparse Petrarch paralleled the celebrated birth of Laura,

his poetic symbol, with that of St. Francis. Lauding the town of Assisi, Dante had written in the Divina commedia:

From this slope, where most it breaks its steepness, a sun rose on the world.^[47]

In imitation Petrarch wrote of Laura:

And now from a small village He has given us a sun, such that Nature is thanked and the place where so beautiful a lady was born to the world.^[48]

He thus resounded the simile with which the papal bull of canonization, Mira circa nos (1228), had saluted Francis, "just as a sun shining in the church of God." The first biography of the saint had praised him as a new light sent from heaven to earth to banish the universal gloom of darkness. This theme was developed in the prologue of the Legenda maior by Bonaventure, who declared of Francis that God "set him up as a light for believers so that by bearing witness to the light he might prepare for the Lord a way of light and peace into the hearts of the faithful."

Shining with the splendor of his life and teaching, like the morning star in the midst of clouds, by his resplendent rays he guided into the light those sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, and like the rainbow shining among clouds of glory he made manifest in himself the sign of the Lord's covenant.

The first liturgy to honor Francis extended this solar imagery:

Thou of our arduous service the triumphal car and charioteer; in the sight of the friars a fiery quadriga rapt thee transformed in solar splendor; on thee radiating with signs on thee announcing the future has rested the cloven spirit of prophets.

The twin prophets were Elijah and Elisha, but it was with the fiery charioteer Elijah that Francis was especially associated. As Bonaventure expounded his praise:

And filled with the spirit of prophecy, he was also assigned an angelic ministry and was totally aflame with Seraphic fire. Like a hierarchic man he was lifted up in a fiery chariot, as will be seen quite clearly in the course of his life; therefore it can be reasonably proved that he came in the spirit and power of Elijah.^[49]

The scriptural verse "Then the prophet Elijah arose like a fire, and his word burned like a torch" (Sir. 48:1) inspired an entire class of sermons lauding Francis as a type of that prophet:

Among all the other saints of the New Testament who were like Elijah, blessed Francis was to such a degree that it truly seems possible to say concerning him what is said about John the Baptist, that he undoubtedly came in the spirit and power of Elijah. For just as Elijah will have come to convert the hearts of fathers toward sons and the hearts of sons toward fathers, so Francis came to announce peace, as the angel of true peace; and just as Elijah has been rapt to heaven in a fiery chariot so the soul of Francis has been seen rapt to heaven as a certain solar or luciform ball.^[50]

Bonaventure's Legenda maior recorded the origin of this belief in an episode from the early history of the Franciscan Order:

At about midnight while some of the friars were resting and others continued to pray, behold, a fiery chariot of wonderful brilliance entered through the door of the house and turned here and there three times through the house. A globe of light rested above it which shone like the sun and lit up the night. Those who were awake were dumbfounded, and those who were sleeping woke up terrified. They felt the brightness light up their hearts no less than their bodies, and the conscience of each was laid bare to the others by the strength of that marvellous light. As they looked into each other's hearts, they all realized together that their holy father, who was absent physically, was present in spirit (1 Cor. 5:3), transfigured in this image. And they realized that by supernatural power the Lord had shown him to them in this glowing chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:11), radiant with heavenly splendor and inflamed with burning ardor so that they might follow him like true Israelites (John 1:47). Like a second Elijah, God had made him a chariot and charioteer for spiritual men (2 Kings 2:12)^[51]

From this association of Francis with the solar prophet Elijah, there developed an identification of him as the Apocalyptic angel of the sixth seal who ascended from the sun (Rev. 6:2a). As Bonaventure continued in praise:

And so not without reason
is he considered to be symbolized by the image of the
Angel who descends from the sunrise
bearing the seal of the living God,
in the true prophecy of that other friend of the
Bridegroom, John the Apostle and Evangelist.

For "when the sixth seal was opened,"
John says in the Apocalypse,
"I saw another Angel
ascending from the rising of the sun,
having the seal of the living God."^[52]

Identifying this very seal as the stigmata of Francis, the Franciscan literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries commonly hailed him as the Apocalyptic angel of the sixth seal. In the Joachimite literature he was particularly revered as the initiator of the third state, the age of the Holy Spirit in which Babylon would be defeated.^[53]

Petrarch shared his unusual name, Francesco, which according to the hagiography signified the spread of the saint's fame.^[54] That fame originated in an espousal of Lady Poverty as a devout imitation of the nakedness of Christ crucified. As Dante celebrated this holy marriage:

Their harmony and joyous semblance made love and wonder and tender looks the cause of holy thoughts.^[55]

Petrarch numbered Francis with "those outstanding despisers of worldly goods," and in reviewing the examples of the saints as masters of the flesh he declared "no man more distinguished than Francis."^[56] In De vita solitaria he praised Francis as the prime exemplar of solitude in its triple manifestations of place, time, and mind. It was particularly the saint's singular ability to contemplate eternal verities while still in commerce, even in collision, with men that impressed Petrarch. "He travelled through wildernesses, he often passed the night in half-ruined temples, by day and among crowds he was often snatched away from the perception of present objects and, while his body was thrust hither and thither, in collision with men, his mind remained fixed on heavenly thoughts." Petrarch ascribed this sublime security to an extremely fervent love of Christ and to a body marvelously submissive to the spirit. Thus Francis, while a votary of solitude, accepted a post in populous places instead, so that he might guard the safety of the many offspring of his marriage to poverty.^[57]

Poverty was a condition of the contemplative life to which Petrarch as a poet aspired. He considered the love of poverty, together with scorning pleasures and not fearing death, as the three most magnificent acts of virtue. Such poverty need not mean penury, external want, he explained. An interior poverty that contemned wealth while daily amid

its circumstances was no less meritorious than indigence. Indeed, Petrarch considered it the mark of a more noble mind to scoff at the sight of gold than to shun its sight, just as victory over an enemy at hand was more glorious than the avoidance of one in approach. He admired those who, intent on study, "esteem an ingenuous poverty" and who "not so much hate wealth as place little value upon it. Gold neither frightens nor attracts them." He counted himself since youth among those who were striving toward this virtue and were making some progress.^[58] The mob, however, bent on cheap gain, he portrayed as mocking his effort: "Philosophy, you go poor and naked!"^[59] Against sophistry he affirmed that poverty was the necessary condition of philosophy: "Philosophers, if you do not know, spurn money: you cannot make philosophy venal. For who sells what he does not have?"^[60] He composed an epistolary dream in which the anxiety prompted by base greed for a pile of ancient gold coins discovered in a field robbed him of his true spiritual values. The moral, he concluded, was that "wealth brings more harm than good to ambitious mortals."^[61] And so for himself he averred, "Some long for riches, I seek poverty—not abject, squalid, sad, and full of fear, but tranquil, peaceful, and honorable."^[62] Petrarch described himself poetically as a "mendicant" seeking buried treasure. He even dared to appropriate to himself the epithet of St. Francis, poverello , while he graced his beloved with the epithet of St. Clare, poverella .^[63] Who was she?

O poor little song, how inelegant you are!^[64]

It was for poetry, Petrarch affirmed, that he had "exchanged Arno for Sorgue and slavish riches for free poverty."^[65] This deprecating portrait reflected the "courtly" convention of the poet as a mere beggar before his lady. It derived ultimately, however, from the Platonic doctrine that Love is the child of Poverty, and thus himself a mendicant.^[66]

Not only prophecy and poverty attracted Petrarch to Francis, but also poetry and passion. Here, unlike Augustinus, was finally a saint who was a poet, to whom creation was a source of consolation rather than censure. Francis's perspective on creation inspired an influential theology of the personal experience of God, especially through affective meditation on the incarnation of the babe in the crèche and the man on the cross, but also through intellectual perception of his vestiges in the universe and his image impressed on natural human powers as transformed by grace.^[67] It was thus by praising the exquisite creature

Laura, as the personification of poetic truth, that Petrarch dared to claim that he was a contemplative. It was thus that he boldly expected spiritual ascent in the very chariot of Elijah. As he paralleled the birth of Laura with the birth of Francis, he praised divine providence for the creation and incarnation, in which holy acts he sought to share:

He who showed infinite providence and art in His marvelous workmanship, who created this and the other hemisphere, and Jove more mild than Mars,

who, coming to earth to illuminate the pages that for many years had hidden the truth, took John from the nets and Peter, and gave them a portion of the Kingdom of Heaven;

He, when He was born, did not bestow Himself on Rome, but rather on Judea, and so beyond all other states it pleased Him always to exalt humility.

And now from a small village He has given us a sun, such that Nature is thanked and the place where so beautiful a lady was born to the world.^[68]

Francis, who himself praised the sun famously in his canticle, provided Petrarch with an exemplar for his poetic aspirations. Although the saint had never advocated erudition for his Order, within twenty-five years of his death it had achieved the status of one of the most learned institutions. With the blessing of the illustrious Bonaventure, who was confident that not only the heart but also the mind could participate in God, Franciscans lectured in theology at the universities of Oxford and Paris. Provisions were admitted to the Rule for study even by average friars, and Franciscan convents soon sheltered libraries that could have incited a humanist like Petrarch to envy.^[69] Petrarch deplored the exquisite explorations into God that the dialectical method of Franciscan theologians invented: yet the intensely affective piety that engendered nominalist reservations about the cognitive faculty also promoted an emotional, spontaneous Franciscan poetry that he could approve. An effusion celebrated the saint's memory: metrical biographies, liturgical sequences and anthems, lyrics of religious love, praises and songs, allegories and homilies in verse.^[70] This was fitting tribute, for Francis himself sang like a troubadour. As his biographer reported:

When the sweetest melody of spirit would bubble up in him, he would give exterior expression to it in French, and the breath of the divine whisper which his ear perceived in secret would burst forth in French in a song of joy. At times, as we saw with our own eyes, he would pick up a stick from the ground and putting it over his left arm, would draw

across it, as across a violin, a little bow bent by means of a string; and going through the motions of playing he would sing in French about his Lord. This whole ecstasy of joy would often end in tears and his song of gladness would be dissolved in compassion for the passion of Christ. Then the saint would bring forth continual sighs, and amid deep groanings, he would be raised up to heaven, forgetful of the lower things he held in his hand.^[71]

It was not toward heaven, however, but into the world that Francis commissioned his friars in this spirit.

His heart was then full of so much sweetness and consolation that he wanted Brother Pacificus, who in the world had been the king of poets and the most courtly master of song, to go through the world with a few pious and spiritual friars to preach and sing the praises of God. The best preacher would deliver the sermon, then all would sing the "Praises of the Lord," as true jongleurs of God. At the end of the song, the preacher would say to the people: "We are the jongleurs of God, and the only reward we want is to see you lead a truly penitent life."^[72]

In Petrarch's promotion of repentance his poetic symbol waned from the salute to the rising sun that had expressed his matutinal hopes. Although he aspired toward his sun like a butterfly seeking the light, it fatally vanquished his desire, like that of the simple insect who flies into someone's eyes and dies while inflicting pain. "So bright is her face with celestial light that your sight cannot rest on it," Fortune had advised him. In gazing on that countenance with yearning, his power of sight was indeed extinguished, leaving him blinded like "a nocturnal bird in the sun."^[73] The poet confessed: "As the sun dazzles him who looks on it fixedly, thus desire, which keeps no proportion with itself, is lost in an object too immense."^[74] The death of the lady extinguished the sun that used to dazzle him. The sun was eclipsed. It fell from the sky; rather it rose to heaven, returning to "the highest Sun." Amid celestial rejoicing in her radiance, she was there "bright and happy in the Light that rains salvation and life." At her loss the poet burned more than the sand of Ethiopia under the hottest sun.^[75] Now it was his fidelity to her memory that shone. "Brighter than the sun is my faithfulness to my lady and to the world," he affirmed. "And if my rhymes have any power, among noble intellects your name will be consecrated to eternal memory."^[76]

Yet the resolution of Petrarch's poetics transcended the conventional translation of its ideal from earth to heaven in the triumph of Laura and the categorical shift of its rhetoric from invention to memory in an

annual recollection. Eloquence had been defined by Augustinus as the pursuit of the unattainable, and the saint had scolded the poet for wasting time on it when language was such a poor vehicle of truth.^[77] In his Apolline guise of pursuing the desirably alluring but chastely elusive truth the poetic laurel symbolized, Petrarch was embodying the ideal orator. As Cicero had declaimed, perfect eloquence was an ideal not sensorily perceived but intellectually and imaginatively apprehended. It was comparable to Plato's ideas and to the ideas in the mind of the artist.^[78] While Petrarch acknowledged and lamented in himself the vanity of the poetic pursuit of this ideal, he also acknowledged and lamented the equal futility of a flight from poetry. Confessing this to Augustinus, Franciscus cited Vergil's figure of Dido:

Even as a hind, smitten by an arrow, which, all unwary, amid the Cretan woods, a shepherd hunting with darts has pierced from afar, leaving in her the winged steel, unknowing: she in flight ranges the Dictaean woods and glades, but fast to her side clings the deadly shaft.

"I am," he said, "even as that deer. I have fled, but I bear everywhere my wound within me."^[79]

The source of this wound Petrarch described in poetic conceit as darts shot by Love from Laura's eyes.^[80] "Your weapons were those eyes from which came forth arrows lit with invisible fire, and they feared reason but little, for no human defense avails against Heaven."^[81] This sweet glance inflicted a wound that only love could heal. Petrarch judged it incurable, however.^[82] This was the supreme adynaton of the vision of the sixth of April: "Every impossible thing will happen before another than she or Death heals the wound that Love made in my heart with her lovely eyes."^[83] The shaft pierced his inward parts deeply, penetrating to his heart. He both hated and loved the wound, which he called cruel and bitter, yet contenting and sweet, indeed bittersweet. It was through this wound that his heart overflowed with eternal tears, the tears that watered his poetry, although he deemed it just that Love should rather wash the wounds of his soul.^[84]

Although classically the laurel had therapeutic qualities,^[85] there was no cure to be discovered in grasping poetically at its branches, only exacerbation of the wound. The desire that impelled the poet was "only to come to the laurel, whence one gathers bitter fruit that, being tasted, afflicts one's wounds more than it comforts them."^[86] The fruit, as Petrarch announced in the initial poem of Rime sparse, was shame,

repentance, and the knowledge of the evanescence of worldly pleasures. The sylvan citizen exited the woods he had so swiftly entered in pursuit of that bough, both limping and lamenting "the wounds I received in that wood thick with thorns; on account of them it is my lot to come out lame, and I entered with so swift a course." He prayed to the Apolline Christ:

Full of snares and thorns is the course that I must complete, where a light, free foot would be in need, one whole in every place. But you, Lord, who have all pity's [piety's] praise, let your sun vanquish this my strange shadow.^[87]

The imagery of wound and thorn, sun and shade, converged in Christ, who is crucified Savior and the sun of righteousness. Both attributes were Apolline. It was precisely as the wounded one that Christ healed others, a venerable tradition Petrarch repeated in his exhortation to "recall the wounds with which our wounds were healed."^[88] Apollo too was the god of medicine.^[89] These medicinal and solar aspects of Christ were united in the prophetic verse that informed Petrarch's poetics: "But for you who fear my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings" (Mal. 4:2).

The wounding of the poet in the side^[90] imitated the driving of the spear into the side of the crucified Christ, from which gash had flowed blood and water (John 19:34). Petrarch's wound extended to his very heart, and from it too flowed water, "eternal tears." Yet the poet had twice been transfixed, once by love, once by piety:

That high lord before whom one cannot hide or flee or make any defense had kindled my mind to sweet pleasure with a burning arrow of love;

and, although the first blow was bitter and mortal in itself, to advance his undertaking he took a dart of pity [piety]; and from both sides he pierces and assails my heart.

One wound burns and pours forth smoke and flame; the other, tears, which sorrow distills through my eyes on account of your suffering state.

Nor in spite of those two fountains does any spark decrease of the fire that inflames me; rather my pity [piety] increases my desire.^[91]

This poem revealed Petrarch's wonder at the wounded Christ, whose inescapable glance of love inflamed him with passion and inflicted him with sorrow: the burning and the weeping that pervaded his verse. The poet was inspired to his art not only by love of the truth to which it

aesthetically aspires, but also by piety, in Vergil's sense of a ritual and relational conformity of man and God that included familial affection and reverence and extended to patriotic loyalty to the state.^[92] It was to heal the wounded Italian people that Petrarch sustained his own amorous wounds, in poetic imitation of the crucified Christ.

Petrarch believed emphatically that Christ was undergoing a second crucifixion in Rome.^[93] He traced the decline of the state from dignity to infamy directly to the removal of the papacy to Avignon with an arrogance of power. "What at the outset had been a wound capable of treatment has finally grown putrid," he complained, "for, I confess, the ugly sore had begun to fester even before our own time, as we know from our forefathers. . . . Now it's coming to a head, and all the pus is bursting forth in our day." The only remedy was to implore Christ for justice.^[94] This entreaty became a prophetic mission for the poet Petrarch. "In the way of wounded lovers," he wrote, "the more desperately we love the more hopefully we complain."^[95] And so he portrayed a wounded Roman matron who bared to her Christian husband a breast lacerated with a thousand sores, pitiful wounds as numerous as the city's violated temples and citadels.^[96] In "Spirto gentil" he pleaded for the oppressed Roman throng crying for relief and evoked this miserable scene: "The terrified poor people show you their wounds by thousands and thousands, which would make Hannibal, not to speak of anyone else, pity them."^[97] Again, he lamented, in his outstanding political poem, "Italia mia":

My Italy, although speech does not aid those mortal wounds of which in your lovely body I see so many, I wish at least my sighs to be such as Tiber and Arno hope for, and Po where I now sit sorrowful and sad.

Immediately he begged God, whose pity had occasioned the incarnation of Christ, to regard these wounds mercifully and to soften the hearts that war had hardened, so that peace might be restored.^[98] His own sighs—his poems—breathed forth to heaven and to Italy.

The epic Africa, designed to inspire Italy's repentance through self-knowledge of its past glory, probed a mass of wounds: the wounds of Scipio's father and of his slain Roman comrades; the self-inflicted wound of Lucretia, whose violated chastity had inspired republican liberty; the amorous wound of Massinissa for Sophonisba; the wounds of the Roman and Carthaginian armies, remembered, revealed, and realized; and crucifixion as the fate of Hannibal and of those Roman

soldiers who had unpatriotically deserted their posts.^[99] It was Scipio's dream-vision of his wounded father that motivated the epic:

Then lo, from the calm welkin high above,
clad in a cloud, appeared to him the shade
and visage of his noble sire, who there
displayed to his beloved son his heart
and breast and flank, transfixed by countless spears.

Urging the son to brandish the fallen arms again for Rome, the father stated:

                    "The task shall fall
to you, my son, and all the honor too
which by the waging of a righteous war
will make you equal to the gods. I swear
by these most justly sacred wounds, through which
I paid the debt I owed the fatherland
and which laid open to my martial soul
the way to Heaven—solemnly I swear
that as the foeman pierced my limbs and while
my soul took flight, no other balm I found
save that I knew that in my house survived
a glorious avenger. And this hope
at once allayed the fears that filled by heart
and made more sweet the bitterness of death."

The wounds upon which the father swore his hope and honor moved the son:

As thus his father spoke, young Scipio gazed
with mournful eyes upon him, marking all
the dreadful wounds that scarred him head to heel;
his filial heart was stirred and a rich flood
of tears gushed forth. Permitting not his sire
further discourse, he broke in with these words:
"Alas, what see I here? Say, father, who
has pierced your bosom with so cruel a thrust?
What impious hand has dared to violate
that brow, by all revered? I pray, disclose
these things to me; for naught else have I ears."

The son's pious lamentation moved the father:

Then did his father in affectionate
embrace enfold him, comforting his woe
with exhortations and these solemn words:

"I pray you put aside your tears and grief
untimely and ill suited to this place.
If looking on these wounds of mine so sorely
troubles your heart, if you would care to learn
what ills shall yet befall the fatherland,
then heed me, for I purpose to reveal
in brief discourse much matter you should hear."^[100]

Petrarch intended this poetic display of the wounds of the elder Scipio to move the sons of Rome to its defense in filial piety. He justified this patriotic proposal by an appeal to the wounds of another father, "whose guiltless flesh we see scarred by five gaping wounds."^[101] This was the invocation of Africa to the Apolline Christ, the "all-highest Father," whose victory over death established Rome as the seat of church and state.^[102] In pondering the dream-vision of his wounded father, Scipio thus imitated the plea of Christ from the cross to his own Father. His cry, "Forgive your maddened land that knows not what it does,"^[103] echoed the narrative of another passion: "And Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do'" (Luke 23: 34).^[104] It was in the service of knowledge, Delphic wisdom, that Petrarch essayed his poetry. In acknowledging his own failures to shoulder the prophetic yoke, he prayed thus to the Apolline Christ by the same Vergilian invocation that had introduced Africa:

Father of Heaven, after the lost days, after the nights spent raving with that fierce desire that was lit in my heart when I looked on those gestures so lovely to my hurt,

let it please you at last that with your light I may return to a different life and to more beautiful undertakings, so that, having spread his nets in vain, my harsh adversary may be disarmed.

Now turns, my Lord, the eleventh year that I have been subject to the pitiless yoke that which is always most fierce to the most submissive:

have mercy on my unworthy pain, lead my wandering thoughts back to a better place, remind them that today you were on the Cross.^[105]

Petrarch looked for enlightenment toward the cross, just as light beamed from the Apolline symbol of the carbuncle in his epic palace of truth. The palace of Syphax, whose glorious description embellished Africa,^[106] was studded with rare glowing gems, illumined by one at the apex of its vaulted roof:

                  A great carbuncle, placed
in the mid-point, with splendor like the sun's

effulgence, banished every shadow. Well
you might have deemed its lustre could avail
to generate the day and banish night—
true image of our Phoebus.^[107]

The association of the carbuncle with the sun, and hence by allusion with Apollo, was suggested by its self-luminous quality.^[108] As a reflector of eternal light it was in medieval allegory, as in Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose, a natural mirror of God.^[109] Such allegory was surpassed by the ordinary Christian symbolism of the carbuncle, however. The deep red color of this garnet signified blood and suffering, so that the stone was symbolic of Christ's passion, and also of martyrdom. Medieval crosses were set with five carbuncles to represent the wounds of the crucified Christ.^[110] Thus the edifice of truth in Petrarch's national epic adumbrated symbolically at its apex the passion of Christ.

In the initial sonnet of enamorment Petrarch dated his vocation by the pathetic fallacy of a solar eclipse of shame at the crucifixion of the Creator:

It was the day when the sun's rays
turned pale with grief for his
Maker when I was taken [seized] . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                     . . . and so my
misfortunes began in the midst of the universal woe.^[111]

Petrarch likened his quest for the manifestation of the ideal form in singular appearances to a pilgrimage for the veneration of Veronica's veil:

The little white-haired pale old man leaves the sweet place where he has filled out his age and his fear-stricken little family, who watch their dear father disappear;

thence dragging his ancient flanks through the last days of his life, as much as he can he helps himself with good will, broken by the years and tired by the road;

and he comes to Rome, following his desire, to gaze on the likeness of Him whom he hopes to see again up there in Heaven.

Thus, alas, at times I go searching in others, Lady, as much as is possible for your longed-for true form.^[112]

This image of Christ was no carbuncle but rather the vernicle, the most venerated relic at the vacant See of St. Peter in Rome. According

to legend a pious woman had wiped the face of Christ as he struggled up Calvary under the weight of his cross. In gratitude he had left on her cloth a perfect likeness of his face. Dante in the empyrean had compared his own vision of St. Bernard, as the personification of contemplation, with a pilgrim's sight of Veronica's veil:

As is he who comes perchance from Croatia to look on our Veronica, and whose old hunger is not sated, but says in thought so long as it is shown, "My Lord Jesus Christ, true God, was then your semblance like to this?" such was I, gazing on the living charity of him who, in this world, in contemplation tasted of that peace.^[113]

As a pilgrim to Rome during the jubilee year, Petrarch himself anticipated such a fortunate viewing of the vernicle, the most popular image for indulgence in the fourteenth century.^[114] In his poetry he did not merely imitate the rapturous wonder of the pilgrim, however. He did gaze on the very veil, the image of Christ crucified, precisely in searching for a glimpse of the true poetic form he desired. In his struggle for perfection, personal and poetic, the example of Christ struggling up Calvary chastised him:

I go on thinking and in thought pity for myself assails me, so strong that it often leads me to a weeping different from my accustomed one: for, seeing every day the end coming near, a thousand times I have asked God for those wings with which our intellect raises itself from this mortal prison to Heaven.

Such prayer did not avail him. Unlike Christ, who fell on the way under the weight of the cross and was assisted by Veronica, Petrarch was "able to stand": "But until now no prayer or sigh or weeping of mine has helped me; and that is just, for he who, able to stand, has fallen along the way deserves to lie on the ground against his will." He hoped, nevertheless, while trembling at his human frailty and buffeted by contrary counsels, in the embrace of the crucified Christ: "Those merciful arms in which I trust I see still open."^[115] The divine passion consoled and strengthened him: "Nor do I fear the threats of death, which the King suffered with worse pain in order to make me constant and strong in following Him."^[116] He could even boldly summon death, for: "He who was not stingy of His blood, who broke with His foot the Tartarean gates, with His death seems to strengthen me."^[117]

Petrarch professed this piety in a lengthy letter of consolation to his patron Cardinal Colonna:

Yet for a learned and religious man in dealing with all the hardships and griefs which cannot be avoided in this moral life it is an admittedly much sweeter, more pleasant, and more worthy medicine to recall the hardships and griefs that Christ suffered for us. Likewise it is appropriate to recall the wounds with which our wounds were healed, and that we were snatched from the danger of an eternal death; to recall the nails and the spear and the most precious blood in which our filth was cleansed as in a bath and through which we were reborn and were mildly warned to spurn earthly burdens with a lofty mind and to fear nothing except the punishment of eternal damnation with its infinite sufferings.^[118]

It was with the very passion and death of Christ that Petrarch associated his own suffering as a poet and finally the ruin of his aspiration. As the inscription on the flyleaf of his manuscript of Vergil recorded this death:

The laurel, illustrious through its own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, that light was withdrawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate. The rumor reached me in Parma, in the same year, on the morning of the 19th day of May, in a letter from my Ludovicus. Its chaste and lovely form was laid to rest at vesper time, on the same day on which it died, in the place of the Brothers Minor.^[119]

Perhaps this notice did memorialize Laura de Noves or another noble woman who succumbed to the greatest natural disaster in European history, the second pandemic of Y. pestis . In its virulent strains of bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plague, it had traveled from the Gobi desert by commercial routes and ecological chains to the port of Marseilles, which it reached in January 1348.^[120] It then coursed the fifty miles up the Rhône river to Avignon, whose congestion guaranteed its rapid dissemination and an excessive mortality. Although the figures are preposterous, in the initial three days 1,800 were reported dead. The constant daily total was said to be 400; in sum, 150,000 in that city alone reputedly died.^[121] Each parish except Saint-Etienne had its own modest cemetery adjoining the church, and outside the ancient walls of the city

was a cemetery that received the bodies of the paupers from the nearby hospices.^[122] When these filled, the putrefying corpses were dumped into the Rhône until pits could be dug for the mass burials of "herded souls," as one witness reported. The pope himself purchased a large field that was consecrated as a cemetery, and in the six weeks from 13 March, 11,000 corpses were said to have been interred in that single graveyard alone: half the estimated actual population of Avignon. Fear of contagion prompted a scandalous desertion of the sick even by their intimate family. Those who did not die of pestilence perished from neglect; in despair, many were even buried alive. Others—Jews—were burnt for allegedly poisoning the wells. Those who had not fled to the environs of the city processed about in sackcloth and ashes lamenting and flagellating themselves in penitence for a pest whose origin the rude populace could only ascribe to an enraged deity. By 27 April, 62,000 were reported buried in Avignon. According to a contemporaneous chronicle, on that last day of March and the first two days of April, more than 450 died daily. Although the tallies are hyperbolic, if "Laura" succumbed on the sixth of April, she died during the peak of the plague.^[123]

In Parma, where Petrarch was then in attendance as a canon of the cathedral, an estimated 40,000 died.^[124] The poet recorded his shock:

Funerals meet my terrified eyes, wherever I turn them,
Horror piles upon horror, the churches crowded with coffins,
Echo to loud lamentations, while countless bodies unburied,
Noble and peasant alike, all lie in the open, unhonored.^[125]

It is fantastic to suppose that amid so horrific a scene, which by the extravagant tallies reported 150,000 dead in Avignon, the precise hours of one woman's death and burial would have been recorded. Compounding this rarity is the fabulous coincidence of her death on the same day, and at the same hour, in the same city as the poet first envisioned her. Petrarch's inscription may have memorialized a human victim, but he wrote "laurel" not "Laura." The death of the laurel, the evergreen symbol of eternity legendarily immune from the judgment of Zeus, was an adynaton, a hyperbolic impossibility. The semantics of Petrarch's memorial allows the deposition of a corpse (corpus ) in a grave (locum ). The faithful were indeed permitted to use Franciscan churches as burial places, although the practice was a particular grievance of the secular clergy, who resented it as an encroach-

ment on their pastoral rights.^[126] In the fourteenth century letters of fraternity, which united a lay person to the Order as a "co-brother" or "co-sister" were common. Among the privileges of these documents, the right to be buried in the habit of a Friar Minor was granted to notable and distinguished persons.^[127] It may be that like other wealthy nobles Laura was borne to her grave there in the custom the plague enforced—without candles and without mourners, by hired ruffians who were lavishly rewarded for a service families shunned.^[128]

Petrarch's semantics equally allows for the deposit of a body of writings (corpus ) in the Franciscan place (locum ). His immediate reference to the soul's ascent to heaven in imitation of Scipio Africanus suggests that Ludwig's letter may have conveyed that in Petrarch's absence he had left a manuscript, perhaps Africa, in the Franciscan convent as a precaution against its loss or destruction during the plague. The reputation of that particular Franciscan convent suggests a rhetorical reference, however. Founded in 1227, it was a famous fortress of the Conventual movement, which represented the majority of the Order in the conflicts over absolute poverty. During the curial investigations that commanded the Spiritual leaders to Avignon, they shunned the place, choosing to live rather in the hermitage of St. Lazare in the vicinity and in an abandoned church near Malaucène. It was in the same Franciscan convent in Avignon that John XXII had imprisoned the band of Spirituals who upon his election importuned him for a hearing of their grievances. When the pope, in a more conciliatory manner, tried to persuade their leader, Ubertino da Casale, to spend several nights in the convent as a gesture of solidarity with the Conventuals, the reformer ironically stated his contempt for their laxity: "If I stayed with them for one day only I should need neither yours nor anyone else's provision in this life."^[129]

Symbolically the Franciscan convent in Avignon, in which Petrarch's laurel was buried, represented the antithesis of the church of St. Clare, in which he had initially envisioned it. Like Francis, Clare of Assisi had renounced her familial luxury for the privations of poverty, both individual and corporate. She wrested from Innocent III the "privilege of poverty," the special right of owning nothing at all, and she remained tenacious to that principle in great penury and austerity. Although later the papacy opposed this policy and some foundations of her Order were required to accept gifts of property, the convents of the Claresses were, in contradiction to those of the Conventuals, bas-

tions of the original Franciscan ideal of utter abnegation.^[130] They were also, like all foundations of religious women in that era, strict enclosures. Unlike the male Friars Minor, who were itinerant, their female counterparts were governed by rigid rules concerning silence, the use of the parlor, and of the grille. The door to the cloister was secured by double iron locks with bolts and bars, and guarded by the portress. "And by no means," stated the Rule of St. Clare, "shall it be opened to anyone who wishes to enter, except to those who have been granted permission by the Supreme Pontiff or by our Lord Cardinal." With such permission the bishop was allowed to celebrate Mass within the enclosure, as for the blessing of an abbess or the consecration of a nun. The entry of other males, however, such as workmen or pallbearers, was strictly regulated by the prudence of the abbess. Even the chaplain, who was not admitted to the convent without a companion, was required to remain in an open place, only being allowed within the enclosure to administer the sacraments of the sick.^[131]

The grille that separated the cloister from its environs was covered by a wooden door, which was usually secured by two iron locks, bolts, and bars. It was kept open during the recitation of the Divine Office, however,^[132] and so perhaps Petrarch was an interloper at the psalms of the Claresses on 6 April 1327, when and where he noticed Laura at matins. It must have been the convent of Claresses that Petrarch indicated, for there was no other "church of St. Clare" in Avignon. The seven parishes of that city were Saint-Pierre, Saint-Didier, Notre- Dame-le-Principale, Saint-Geniès, Saint-Symphorien, Saint-Etienne, and Saint-Agricol.^[133] Petrarch's location of the vision of Laura in the church of St. Clare was more probably symbolic than factual, however, an imitation of Dante's vision of Beatrice in the church of the Holy Trinity of Florence. In both cases the poets did not so much see these women, if ever they did, as envision "beatitude" and the "laurel."

The association of St. Clare with Petrarch's poetic vocation was Apolline. While Francesco meant "fame," Chiara from the Latin clarus meant "clear," also "bright, shining, brilliant," like the very sun. According to legend the saint was so christened because her mother's prayer for a safe childbirth was greeted with this celestial voice: "Fear not, woman, for you shall bring forth without danger a light which shall greatly illumine the world."^[134] The papal bull of her canonization, Clara claris praeclara, glorified the metaphor: "O Clare, endowed with so many titles of clarity! Clear even before your conversion, clearer in

your manner of living, exceedingly clear in your enclosed life, and brilliant in splendor after the course of your mortal life. In Clare, a clear mirror is given to the entire world."^[135] Apollo's epithet "Delian," referring to his birthplace at Delos, where he slew the monster Python, also meant "clear." There was, moreover, a famous Apolline sanctuary in Asia Minor at Claros, which name is phonetically suggestive of clarus .^[136]

When the clarity of vision that marked Petrarch's vatic vocation failed, he reported his ideal as put to rest in the Franciscan "place." This need not refer to a physical site such as lodgings or a grave. The noun locus was also the term for a rhetorical topic, from which all poetry was invented. The rhetorical "place" or topic so famous to the Franciscan Order was the wounds of Christ. Devotion to Christ crucified was the singular medieval piety promoted by the Franciscan movement. The passion was not the monopoly of that Order, but it was its particular mark. Once, when the young ascetic Francis of Assisi was praying fervently with total absorption in God, there appeared to him Christ crucified. At this vision his soul so melted that whenever he recalled this internal impression he would weep and groan. The evangelical invitation "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Matt. 16:24) became his personal precept. In imitation of the nudity of Christ crucified, he mortified his own flesh, nursed the rotting flesh of lepers, and embraced absolute poverty as his only lady. The wounds of love Francis experienced spiritually were manifested corporeally when he received the stigmata. As he was praying on Mt. Alverno near the feast of the exaltation of the holy cross, an angelic man descended. He was in the sublime image of a seraph who bore between his fiery, dazzling wings a crucified man who inflamed Francis internally and signed him externally. In joy and terror Francis was transformed wholly into an image of the crucified Christ: in the midst of his hands and feet round, black nailheads appeared, while on his right side a gash exuded fresh blood, as if it had been transfixed by a lance.^[137] Petrarch's own wonder at "that amazing proof of the holy stigmata of Christ, or the limbs that gave evidence of the wound of his mind"^[138] repeated Franciscan hagiography, which regarded the external signs as an exterior manifestation of Francis's interior state.^[139]

Meditation on Christ crucified, as a major motif of fourteenth-century piety, literature, and art, ranged from sentimentality to mysticism. Its vivid realism was embraced with an emotional intensity that

could become physical brutality. The fascination with the passion seems to have been a beautiful horror that was cathartic in a century of ugly horrors. It was an enormously popular devotion.^[140] The Colonna family, into whose service Petrarch entered and whose patronage he enjoyed, was one exemplar of this universal piety. Early in the thirteenth century Giovanni Colonna shipped from the east the column (colonna ) at which Christ had been scourged during his passion, and erected it in S. Prassede, Rome, for veneration. It was he who influenced Innocent III to accept the Franciscans officially, and he increasingly involved his family in the development of the Order.^[141] Outstanding in Franciscan piety was Margherita Colonna (c. 1255–80), sister of the Roman senator Giovanni and the cardinal Giacomo, who was venerated in the Colonna territories as a saint. The hagiography narrated holy conversations between Margherita and Giacomo modeled on that of Monica and Augustine at Ostia. In these they were aroused to ecstasy by discussing whether Thomas the doubting apostle had indeed put his finger in Christ's wounds at the invitation: "'Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing'" (John 20:27). Later in a vision or dream Margherita heard the sound of the apostle's cry at the sight of Christ's wounds. Later still she herself had a vision of the crucified that left her ill. Renouncing marriage, she garbed herself as a Claress and tended the sick, especially the leprous, in typical Franciscan ministry.^[142]

This realism in Franciscan meditation on the wounds of Christ as the very apertures to mystical ecstasy was vividly displayed in a letter of Bonaventure to a Poor Clare:

Draw near, dear handmaiden, with loving feet to Jesus wounded, to Jesus crowned with thorns, to Jesus fastened to the gibbet of the cross; and be not content, as the blessed apostle Thomas was, merely to see in his hands the print of the nails or to thrust your hand into his side; but rather go right in, through the opening in his side, to the very heart of Jesus where, transformed by the most burning love for Christ, held by the nails of divine love, pierced by the lance of profound charity, and wounded by the sword of deep compassion, you will know no other wish or desire or hope of consolation except to die with Christ upon the cross, so that you can say with St. Paul: "I am crucified with Christ. . . . I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."^[143]

St. Clare, whose rule these women obeyed, was herself devoted to the wounds of Christ. Her exhortations to novices to bewail the crucifixion were punctuated with tears. She frequently recited a prayer on

the five wounds of Christ and also the Office of the Cross that St. Francis had composed. Her affective meditation on the passion enraptured her into such ecstasy that she herself seemed "crucified with Christ." By the sign of the cross Clare reputedly worked many miracles of healing. As the legend by her contemporaneous biographer recounted her fervent love: "Deep and full of tenderness was her lament over the Passion of the Lord. His holy wounds were for her at times a source of sorrowful affections, at others a reason to flee sweeter joys. The tears of the suffering Christ inebriated her, and her memory often recalled to her Him whom love had impressed so deeply on her heart."^[144] Like Francis, his female counterpart was celebrated in verse, in hymn, and in liturgy,^[145] and her rare chaste beauty was painted among the saints of Assisi by the very artist who legendarily portrayed Petrarch's Laura, Simone Martini.^[146]

It was in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, Petrarch declared, that he had been wounded by Love as rays of light darted from Laura's eyes. He thus located the inaugural vision of his vatic vocation in the church of the poor, humble, chaste servant Clare in repudiation of the greedy, arrogant, meretricious papal court of that same city. The symbolic dating of the vision to the liturgy of Good Friday allied his vocation with the passion of Christ. The incisive image of the Avignon papacy whose repentance Petrarch prophetically implored was not that of the tawdry harlot or the abandoned flock, nor of the shipwreck, the labyrinth, or the inferno (all of which he also evoked),^[147] but rather the visage of the crucified Christ, with whom and for whom the poet pleaded. He indicted the rebellious papal court as "swollen with the blood of Christ." He imputed to it the hailing of Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ with a kiss, and the mockery of the Jews who vested him with a purple cloak, crowned him with thorns, spat, and jeered. "In a savage judgment," he wrote, "they decreed that he was neither God nor king, and deserved neither divine nor human honours, but rather that he was 'guilty of death' [Matt. 26:26], a blasphemer who merited blows and execution. What else, I ask," Petrarch reflected on Avignon,

goes on daily among these enemies of Christ, these Pharisees of our own time? Day and night they exalt Christ's name with the highest praises, they vest him in purple and gold, they deck him with gems, they salute him and prostrate themselves before him in worship, and meanwhile they buy him and sell him, hold an auction on him, crown

him with thorns of base wealth as though with his eyes thus veiled he will not see, befoul him with spittle from the filthiest mouths, taunt him with their viperous hissing, and wound him with the lance of their poisonous deeds. With all their strength they drag him again and again to Calvary—scoffed at, naked, helpless, scourged—and to blasphemous applause they nail him once again to the cross.^[148]

Considering the wounds of Christ, Petrarch prayed: "Then turning again and again to the crucified one who is my delight, with mournful voice and tearful eyes I cry out: Oh good Jesus, you are too indulgent. What can this be? 'Arise! why do you sleep? Arise! Do not cast us off forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and our oppression?'" (Ps. 43:23). The poet begged his protector to regard the sufferings of the faithful and to revenge the deeds the enemy perpetrated against them in his holy name, or at least to assuage them before evil prevailed. Considering the divine indifference and hesitation, Petrarch wondered whether the Lord failed to see the evil, or if he had converted the love that had prompted his death on the cross into hatred, or whether he persisted in vision and love but had lost the strength to succor men. Without his omnipotence, the poet lamented, there was no hope. It would not be divine to fear the strength of the enemy or to destroy the faithful in mercy toward the wicked. Mindful of creation and of providence, Petrarch curtailed his quarrel with the silent crucifix and pleaded for Christ's advent. "Come, our one hope, and as we say in our daily prayer, 'make haste to help us.' Destroy the world's many evils, we pray, or else destroy the world itself."^[149]

This apostrophe to Christ crucified, which composed the seventh letter of his Liber sine nomine, Petrarch expanded in the lamentation of the twelfth: "Woe to your people, oh Christ Jesus, woe to your people, oh Christ! Oh fount of mercies, let us come before you to bewail our misfortunes. In the way of wounded lovers, the more desperately we love the more hopefully we complain." The complaint, he expounded, was not that of men but of worms, nor that of arrogant accusers but of humble petitioners. Petrarch protested to Christ about the shame of the faithful, insolently mocked by their enemies as proof of abandonment by God. He pondered the indulgence, neglect, hatred, even cruel dalliance with which the Savior seemed to regard the sufferings of the people. Let anger, however justly deserved, yield to mercy, he pleaded in lengthy prayer.^[150] Again in the seventeenth letter he cried out: "You, oh Christ, you who can change things, you from whom all empires on

earth, in heaven, or in hell are held at your will, you who, even in silence, hear this complaint which is not just my own but is made especially on behalf of all your people, hearken to us if it is just, we pray." Petrarch justified his complaint of oppression under a harsh, ignorant, and detestable papacy by appealing to the scriptural verse, "Thou hast made us like sheep for the slaughter" (Ps. 44:11a). "What have we who used to be lords of nations been turned into, if not sheep to be eaten? If only we were merely sheep to be sheared, or milked—but no, we are sheep to be eaten. We let ourselves be chewed, consumed, devoured," he protested. Yet he blamed the torpor of the people themselves for this, since the devouring lions despised the people only superficially while they feared them profoundly, he believed.^[151]

This pastoral imagery was again prophetic, as especially derived from Ezekiel's oracle against the false shepherds of Israel (Ezek. 34:1–16, cf. Jer. 23:1–4), to which Christ had contrasted his own role as the good shepherd (John 10:1–18). The prophet castigated the shepherds for exploiting the flock while so neglecting its care as to allow it to be scattered and devoured by wild beasts, the foreign nations. For this dereliction of duty he pronounced Yahweh's climactic rejection of Israel's political leaders and his promise of a rescue and rest for the populace that would restore them to their own land.^[152] Such representation of sovereign and subject by the metaphor of shepherd and flock was familiar throughout the ancient Near East, as in the introduction to the celebrated Babylonian code of law, where Hammurabi described himself as the shepherd of men who supplied their pasture and water and destroyed the wicked who would prey on the weak.^[153] Now Petrarch, surveying a similar scene, appropriated this pastoral motif. It sustained his Carmen bucolicum, the covert parallel to his Liber sine nomine . The sixth and seventh eclogues attacked the Avignon papacy under the allegories of the good shepherd (St. Peter) reproaching the roguish pastor (Clement VI) for the ravagement of the pasturage and flock, and of the pope and his Babylonian whore inspecting the curial remnant of a plague-stricken flock.^[154]

Petrarch regarded the plague as an apocalyptic sign whose misfortunes exceeded anything in all the centuries since Noah's ark. Lamenting this extraordinary vengeance of God, he demanded:

How [will] posterity [be able to] believe that there was once a time without floods, without fire either from heaven or from earth, without wars, or other visible disaster, in which not only this or that part of the

world, but almost all of it remained without a dweller? When was anything similar either seen or heard? In what chronicles did anyone ever read that dwellings were emptied, cities abandoned, countrysides filthy, fields laden with bodies and a dreadful and vast solitude filled the earth? Consult the historians: they are silent; question the scientists: they are stupefied; ask the philosophers: they shrug their shoulders, they wrinkle their brows and they order silence by holding their finger to their lips."^[155]

Yet the plague was perhaps not the sole disaster behind the symbolic burial of Laura in the Franciscan grave or the reposal of the laurel in the wounds of Christ. The plague was not the only momentous visitor to Avignon that month. On 13 March 1348 Joanna, queen of Naples, to whose territory Avignon belonged, entered the city. She had fled her Italian capital in January before a rapidly advancing Hungarian army intent on invasion and, like the very pest, had journeyed by ship to Provence. On 20 March she was solemnly received at the papal court; on 27 March the pope authorized her to marry her lover, Louis, prince of Taranto. As early as April she negotiated with Clement VI for the sale of Avignon to the papacy, a transaction settled on 9 June for 80,000 gold florins. A receipt detailing the disposition of the papal money was recorded in Naples on 10 July, and on the 23d of that month the pope formally took possession of Avignon. Charles IV ratified the sale in November.^[156] Meanwhile, by 27 April the pope had since fled the infested city for the castle of Stella, two leagues distant.^[157]

It was the rumor of these negotiations in April 1348 for the sale of Avignon to the papacy that killed Petrarch's cherished ideal of Roman restoration and Italian peace. With that political finality the inspiration for his patriotic epic waned. His correspondence recorded the demise of Africa . To an inquirer he sighed that he anticipated its conclusion with difficulty; the adynaton of counting sand or stars would be easier. "For me indeed it would be simpler to count the sands of the sea and the stars of the heavens than all the obstacles envious fortune has put in the way of my labors. I myself await its end, uncertain as to whether I [have] spent sleepless nights utterly in vain or whether at least some joy, though late, is reserved for me for my labor." In exhaustion he reflected on the ambitious undertaking: "I started my Africa with such great energy and effort that now, as I try to apply the file to what I started, I seem to shudder at my boldness and at the great framework I laid." To yet another inquirer he promised the first glimpse of the

manuscript, "if ever it does see the light," and he explained that "it is being delayed by the owner's laziness and by fortune's countless obstacles." He intended to retard its public appearance until it had matured with age and improved with revision. While he confided that his genius "daily undergoes extraordinary change," he considered, nevertheless, that "unless I am mistaken I have now become whatever was destined for me from above, although until the last day I shall not desist from pressing forward as much as I am able."^[158]

The epic Africa, whose success or failure Petrarch believed would alone resolve the question of his fame, long inspired his dedication to poetry. Yet the initial ardor that had impelled his ascent of the Capitoline had diminished. He had undertaken Africa, he said, "with a spirit that burned more than Africa ever does during the dog days," but the work had now long weighed heavily upon him. Nevertheless, he believed that it alone would "either lessen or quench the thirst in my heart, if there is any hope for that." Again to an inquirer he declined to share the manuscript, offering these excuses:

My Scipio is not fully developed in the poem, and my Africa, which I have long possessed and cultivated with greater toil than I thought possible, has still not been given its final hoeing. I have not yet broken down its useless clods with my rake; I have not yet evened off with a harrow the mounds of my uncultivated fields; my pruner has not yet checked the growth of the overgrown vine leaves or my sickle its thorny hedges. Therefore do as you please with everything else I possess, but for this work alone you must have patience. Allow me, while there is still time, before making you the possessor of African land, to review it and revise it a little to the extent that my tired and fragile talent [genius] will permit.

Whether or not Petrarch, who termed himself its "solicitous cultivator,"^[159] did patiently tend to these tasks is uncertain. Those were his final explicit intentions about the completion of Africa . Ultimately, like Vergil judging his Aeneid, he wanted it burned.

Of the difficulties besetting a poet, Petrarch had cited three in his coronation speech: lack of inspiration, the adversity of fortune, and the disdain of men.^[160] It was adverse fortune, he emphasized, that obstructed the composition ofAfrica . Just as fame, idealized as the woman Laura, had incited him to his arduous labor, so fortune, realized as the woman Joanna, discouraged it. Petrarch consistently portrayed Joanna in his Liber sine nomine as Semiramis, the legendary Assyrian queen who

had founded ancient Babylon.^[161] Depicting Avignon as its infernal Western counterpart, populated with reincarnations of the nefarious cast of old, he identified Joanna as "Semiramis with her quiver." "I see," he observed, "how this imitation Semiramis covers her head with a man's crown, and with what artifice she dazzles the eyes of all bystanders; and how, defiled by incestuous embraces, she tramples men underfoot."^[162] This portrayal reflected the popular belief that an adulterous Joanna had conspired in the murder of her husband, Andrew of Hungary, on the verge of his coronation as her consort in the kingdom of Naples.^[163]

Petrarch had known Joanna since 1343, when, upon the death of King Robert, he had served as papal envoy to ascertain the state of the Neapolitan court. She was then a minor, and with her consort, Prince Andrew, was governed by a regency that had usurped power. Petrarch was horrified at the degradation of the court, which so contrasted with its splendor at his original visit for the poetic examination. Already upon the death of King Robert, Petrarch had voiced "fear that those other presentiments of mine may also come true, presentiments which my distressed mind, always a too certain prophet of evils, now suggests to me." As he elaborated his fear: "I am really alarmed about the youthfulness of the young queen, and of the new king, about the age and intent of the other queen, about the talents and ways of the courtiers. I wish that I could be a lying prophet about these things, but I see two lambs entrusted to the care of a multitude of wolves, and I see a kingdom without a king."^[164]

Upon his diplomatic arrival at the Neapolitan court, Petrarch's alarm exploded: "Alas, what a shame, what a monster! May God remove this kind of plague from Italian skies! I thought that Christ was despised at Memphis, Babylon, and Mecca." The provoker of this anger was a Friar Robert, ostentatiously and arrogantly of the Spiritual band of Franciscans, for which that court was a famous haven, yet hypocritically wealthy and influential. It was he, Petrarch discovered, who treacherously controlled the kingdom.^[165] Upon the assassination of Andrew of Hungary, reputedly by Joanna, the poet proved that he had been no lying prophet in his outcry to the Apolline Christ: "But you, oh Christ, sun of justice [righteousness], who see all and illumine the universe with your eternal rays, why did you suffer this cloud of infamy to lie upon our lands when you could so easily (unless these transgressions of men are obstacles for you) have broken through the

offensive vapors of hatred hardened by the misty cold of the night with the glowing brilliance of your love?"

This apostrophe to Christ as the prophesied "sun of righteousness" was also reflected in Petrarch's prophetic office, as he regretted that his presentiment of the deed could not avert its inexorable fatality. As he enumerated its portents: "Disturbing clouds shaded serious faces; stubborn winds pressed upon disturbed hearts; glowing eyes flashed; mouths thundered and uttered menaces; it was almost as though ungodly hands were hurling lightning. The seas of the royal court were sometimes swollen with anger; at times a horrible glow and clashing of waves resounded and foul birds and strange portents seemed widely to encompass your shores." These dire omens of evil intimidated their witnesses, reducing them to public silence and private whispers, he recalled. "In short," he wrote, evoking the classical omen of judgment, "minds were benumbed by the eyes as if struck by the dreadful light of a close thunderbolt."

In this electric atmosphere Petrarch alone dared to speak out. "Unless I am mistaken," he declared, "no one feared more openly than I and grieved more freely. No one looked more closely at those portents of the court, and struck out more obstinately either with his tongue or with his pen. Alas, how great and how evident is the truth of Proverbs! 'Let him who wishes to be a truthful prophet prophesy evil.'" Petrarch stated that his own prophecy was as accurate as a dart. "Who therefore among those who hold these views," he asked, "should be surprised that just as a spear hurled within a crowd of people cannot stray, the same holds for a prophecy released amid such an accumulation of evils, thus would the prophecy strike the truth?" He recalled how, near the death of King Robert, "I either orally when I was present or through letters when I was absent, and not long after his death, again orally, revealed not without visible disturbance what I felt and what I feared would be coming as if I were certain of the future. For I saw the foundation of the kingdom being shaken from the top, and I saw before my eyes the serious misfortunes befalling the collapsing kingdom."

He admitted that, amid these gloomy conjectures, he did not foresee that the initial fall of the kingdom of Naples would be that of the innocent head of Andrew. Yet he did recall his having prophesied about a lamb among wolves. "Would that my prediction had been less true!" he regretted. At the climax of an ensuing condemnation of

Naples for this vulpine crime, Petrarch pleaded with Christ, the sun of righteousness, for just vengeance. He mentioned a presentiment of evil multiplied, which he did not describe "in order to avoid once again being more correct than I wish to be or appearing to be a prophet of doom."^[166] Now, in exchange for papal approval of a marriage that might consolidate and control Naples again, Joanna had sold Avignon, establishing the new Babylon. The papacy now legally owned the territory it had appropriated and could settle there forever, mindless of Rome.

Petrarch sought consolation in another woman, whose prayers might persuade "the sun of righteousness," as his poetry had failed to. The final poem of his Rime sparse, numbered 366, was projected beyond the calendar year with its inexorable solar revolution toward eternity. It addressed the Apocalyptic woman who writhed in labor with her portentous son (Rev. 12:1–6):^[167]

Beautiful Virgin who, clothed with the sun and crowned with the stars, so pleased the highest Sun that in you He hid His light: love drives me to speak words of you, but I do not know how to begin without your help and His who loving placed Himself in you.

The Marian invocations progressed with luminous imagery. As wise, the Virgin carried "the brightest lamp"; as pure, she "lightens this life and adorns the other," worthy to be hailed as the "shining noble window of Heaven"; as full of every grace, she bore "the Sun of justice [righteousness], who makes bright the world though it is full of dark and thick errors."^[168]

Rarely in theology or in art before the fourteenth century was the Apocalyptic woman thus identified with the Virgin. The iconographical type developed from the Madonna of humility, so named because she was depicted in a revolutionary pose for a sacred personage: seated on the ground. The earliest extant example of this dethronement is a fresco by Simone Martini, the very portraitist of "Laura," executed between 1339 and 1343 in the tympanum of the Roman portal of Notre-Dame-des-Doms, precisely the cathedral of Avignon. There in a semicircular lunette was an elegant Madonna seated on the ground before the cloth of honor held by two angels. In her lap was the Christ Child, who uncommonly bore this inscribed scroll: "Ego Sum Lux Mundi" (I am the light of the world). Another example by Martini, now lost, promoted a Simonesque type celebrated throughout Europe

as a devotional image. This combined the Madonna of humility with the ancient type of the lactating Virgin.^[169]

The iconography of the Apocalyptic woman thus comprised important elements of Petrarch's poetry: Laura as the young matron seated on the grass in Rime sparse,^[170] the adynaton of the lactating Virgin in Africa,^[171] and the Apolline Christ as radiating the aesthetic light of this inspiration. This concluding poem to the Virgin was no sop. Petrarch composed it from meditation on Martini's fresco in the ecclesiastical see of the detested city, Avignon. Although the Madonna's pose has been considered unprecedented for a sacred personage in classical or medieval art, the ancient cult of the Magna Mater, who was painted importantly in Africa,^[172] suggests differently. Cybele, when seated, was enthroned; but Attis, her consort, was seated or recumbent on the ground. A local Gaulish example is the depiction of Attis in his Phrygian cap seated half-recumbent on the ground between two trees, from a "House of Attis" discovered with the sanctuary of Bona Dei at St-Rémy-de-Provence.^[173] His posture is similar to that of Jesse's in Christian iconography. Martini had allegorized that prophecy as the frontispiece of Petrarch's manuscript of Vergil, substituting the poet for Jesse.^[174] Is not his Madonna of humility in the fresco a natural development of that type? The shoot (virga ) that was to grow from the stump ofJesse (Is. 11:1) was traditionally identified as the Virgin (virgo ), who bore as the fruit of her womb the Christ Child. Martini's concept of the Madonna as seated on the ground is coherent with this prophetic iconography and with its emphasis on the humble origins of the Messiah.

The Madonna of humility is seated on the ground because she is that tree. On the frontispiece is the same tree, which Vergil prophesies, the laurel. Martini's "lofty concept," as Petrarch phrased and praised it in Rime sparse, was the symbolic laurel. This laurel of the frontispiece and of the fresco is the famous "portrait of Laura," lost for centuries because assumed to be the actual portrait of an illicitly loved matron of Avignon.^[175] It is symbolic rather, and its human archetype is the Madonna of humility. Petrarch's salute to the "Beautiful Virgin" is thus an appropriate conclusion to Rime sparse, which began with an invocation to Apollo. In the medieval Ovide moralisé Apollo was Christ as the light of the world who illumines everyone and is master of every art. For love of humanity he joined himself in the incarnation to Mary, just as Apollo desired to unite with Daphne. She was a symbolic laurel.^[176]

Poetic truth had been in its personification as Laura "angelic," angelic in form and in quality.^[177] An angel, however, was but the intermediate being between the human and divine orders. Through the adynaton of the virgin mother, Petrarch sought Christ, in whom the human and the divine had been united in incarnation. He petitioned from that source of illumination upon a darkened humanity the righteousness of repentance, as he gathered up the fragments of his poetic soul—rhymes, leaves, tears, and hopes—rendering himself and his scattered sheep repentant unto God.^[178] Failing the advent of justice upon a world still unripe for final judgment, he sought repose. As Petrarch had once expressed this longing in a consideration of the hasty journey of life: "The goal is not the threshold of death but of eternal life, truly hidden because of our sins yet revealed by the blood of Christ and opened by His wounds. Oh, would that we be allowed to sleep there in peace, would that after lengthy and countless labors we may finally rest in Him who in a most unique manner provided us with a hope that could not be false, coming as it did from Him!"^[179]

Petrarch's prophetic summons of the Avignon papacy to repentance was established in his personal conversion, which he acknowledged as a call from a gracious God. Encumbered by sin and by habit, the poet feared failure and so prayed for divine guidance of his frail nature.^[180] He recalled the friendship of Christ, who once delivered man and now invited him to share his glory. And so Petrarch prayed for an ecstatic repose in him:

I am so weary under the ancient bundle of my sins and bitter habit that I am much afraid I shall fail on the way and fall into the hands of my enemy.

True, a great Friend did come to free me, in His highest and ineffable graciousness; then He flew out of my sight so that I strive in vain to see Him.

But His voice still resounds down here: "O you who labor, here is the way; come to me, if the pass is not blocked by another."

What grace, what love, or what destiny will give me wings like a dove, that I may rest and lift myself up from the earth?^[181]

It was in the final poem, however, where Petrarch did rest in prayer after the 365 days of his creation, that the mysticism that was a literary convention in his claims of poetic rapture became a personal aspiration. There he addressed "mother, daughter, and bride, O glorious

Virgin, Lady of that King who has loosed our bonds and made the world free and happy, in whose holy wounds I pray you to quiet my heart, O true bringer of happiness."^[182]

In that act of seeking entry into the wounds of Christ that loosed his adamantine chains, Petrarch imagined the mystical response that justified his poetry against the ascetical carping of a mock Augustine.^[183] In union with the wounds of the Savior he had sought forgiveness for the wounds of sin in a conversion that was merely purgative. Petrarch also sought mystical consolation for the wounds of love. The natal genius identified by medieval moralizers as concupiscence was here elevated toward a love that was not carnal but spiritual. So it was in poetic imitation of the divine passion^[184] of an Apolline Christ, suspended on the cross like the psalmist's lyre on a tree in Babylon, that Petrarch in his genius invented his books: the prophetic labors of love.^[185]