Petrarca (1304–1374)

The “prince of humanists,” Francesco Petrarca, was not only, as a lyrical poet, the most illustrious heir of the Provençal troubadours, he was also a product of the curial tradition. After all, much as he came to loath it in his mature years, the highly corrupt yet equally sophisticated curial court of Avignon was Petrarca's nurturing ground, with close personal association with some of its leading figures. At the same time he also embodied in a unique and eloquent form the medieval anticourt tradition in seeking refuge from the cares of the court and the world in Vaucluse, his villa outside Milan, and Arquà, as well as in the therapeutic value he derived from his writing. We might think especially of his meditations on solitude (De ocio religiosorum De ocio religiosorum and De vita solitaria De vita solitaria ). Petrarca's method of working was also shaped by certain important modifications that his Italian predecessors introduced into the methods of literary production. The consequences were far-reaching, with a decisive impact on the literature of the courts.

Life at court was especially conducive to oral literature. We have seen how, like new incarnations of Socrates, the early bishops and the educators at imperial and episcopal chapels and cathedral schools often did not care to put their teaching down in writing, since their efficacy rested on their live voice. One of the greatest medieval poets, Wolfram von Eschenbach, stated outright that he was not one who could write. Literary life at court had been based on live performance, and verse compositions were usually delivered with musical accompaniment. Yet, even at a time when oral transmission in all genres (including those of science and philosophy) was still the general rule, remaining so until close to the end of the fifteenth century, writing started to play a more decisive role in Italy. This means that recitation at court went hand in hand with the use of the manuscript, which circulated and propagated motifs and forms beyond the courts to the more literate among the burghers.^[39] The change was soon to affect the whole Italian cultural scene, preparing the ground for making written literature the core of humanistic education.

Typically, Dante invented the difficult form of the terzina also to make sure that the scribes would be restrained from their customary rewriting of texts—a natural and perfectly legitimate aspect of the transmission of a live culture that was normally tied to a verbal, hence

constantly moving and evolving delivery. In a terzina it was not possible to introduce any substantive verbal changes without rewriting a whole canto—at least if any rhyme was affected. Any accidental dropping or interpolation of lines would have been immediately apparent by disturbing the tight movement of the rhyme structure.

The new habit of paying scrupulous attention to the precise wording of a poet's written text—a habit that was to lead to the great achievements of humanistic philology—was started by Petrarca above all others. He did so by leaving to his disciples a painstakingly accurate record of his work, page by page, word by word, variant by variant, many of the variants often marked by glosses and specific annotations as to the exact time and circumstances they were entered into a draft. He was making sure, for the first time in medieval Europe, that his writings would be regarded as ne varietur editions. His rather novel desires were heeded by the succeeding generations, and autographs of his final drafts (including the Canzoniere ) were religiously preserved, together with many a preliminary draft. This was unprecedented at a time when no autograph was ever destined to survive. Zumthor (1987: 165) notes that “we possess no autograph manuscript of poetry before the end of the fourteenth century: this means that, up to that date, of all our texts, without exception, what we perceive in our reading is the stage of reproduction, not of production.” Zumthor ignores Petrarca's case, indeed a hard one to overlook, and when he mentions Boccaccio (166) as the first to show “un véritable souci d'authenticité auctoriale,” he thinks only of his autograph corrections to the scribal copy of the Decameron (for Boccaccio, too, we have many autographs, including the Teseida complete with his glosses).

This degree of attention to form and style, composition and structure, was formerly limited to Latin writing, and only occasionally practiced. Petrarca and his Italian predecessors methodically extended it to the vernacular, starting perhaps with Provençal. It is remarkable that this phenomenon occurred in a country relatively poor in both Latin and vernacular poetry compared with Germany, France, or England before, say, 1230. At the same time, in their respect for the letter of the literary text the Italians were guided by the invigorating example of the ancients.^[40]

Italian was to become the language of diplomacy, hence an international medium of communication, replacing Latin in this function. Knights as well as clerics had been cosmopolitan classes in the Middle Ages, but only the clerics possessed an international language, kept rela-

tively invariant and universal by its being constrained within fixed grammatical structures that were dead for the man of the street. The knights, instead, had at their disposal only regional, unstable dialects for both their everyday life and their cultural expression. Even Occitan literature, so successful internationally, had barely faced the problem of standardization, overcoming the motley situation of sharply variant dialects simply by relying on the early models from the Limousin. The Italians were the first to confront the problem squarely and to become seriously preoccupied with a “national” standard: even before Dante intervened with his De vulgari eloquentia and the doctrine of the vulgare illustre, the Sicilians had already profited from the cosmopolitan ambiance of Frederick II's court to begin a process of linguistic homogenization.

The change toward standardized wordings, carefully handed over in a strictly written record, also affected the use of ideas and forms associated with chivalric ideology, including the literature of courtesy, courtly love, and formation of the courtier, until Castiglione crystallized it in an exquisitely structured formal discourse. Petrarca's personal contribution amounted to a consolidation of much of the heritage of courtesy in a fairly fixed form within vernacular poetry, replete with standardized imagery and figures of speech: “Petrarchism” became both a lyrical mode and a behavioral ideal.

In dealing with troubadours and Minnesingers I have noted the apparent contradiction of constantly protesting total devotion while threatening a change of heart if reward was not forthcoming; I concluded that this was part and parcel of that “game of love” that was conventionally and artificially verbal and yet, at the same time, an earnest strategy for survival. In a way, we can say, Petrarca conclusively sealed that contradiction for subsequent imitators by framing his whole Canzoniere —the most consistent and prolonged expression of total dedication to an evanescent and elusive, even physically absent, ideal woman—inside the recantation of his passion as “a youthful error” in the first poem and the transcendent hymn to the Virgin in the closing poem, number 366. Beyond the Provençal heritage, this inner ambiguity was perfectly consonant with the personality of that supreme lyricist, who embedded in his lifetime's work a “discovery” of the inner tensions of the self and the contradictory nature of the psyche.^[41] What had been a witty and elegant game of survival (in the knight courtier's career) became a symbolic expression of man's ambiguous, dialectic predicament.

Despite its incompatibility with Christian love, courtly love had imposed itself on court life because of its social function. But when the amatory lyric outgrew its social boundaries, as was the case, for instance, with the early Bolognese and Tuscan poets who had no contact with any court of the Provençal or French type, the conflict stood out clearly enough to demand a solution. The Stil Nuovo doctrine of the donna angelicata came to the poets' rescue and, just as Dante had profited from that new departure for his sublime ends, so did Petrarca proceed within the new intellectual framework that had transcended the Provençal context. In other words: despite the fact that the sociological settings had become incompatible in the transition from the feudal courtly environments to the republics and signories of fourteenth-century Italy, the Stil Nuovo managed to codify the ideology of the former to the taste and understanding of the latter in a language that eventually became Petrarchan. A similar situation characterized Catholic Spain in that and the following century, where the adulterous definition of courtly love was commonly deemphasized: the lover, aristocrat or no, could look to a love within marriage, or the writer could attack the implications of a sinful passion, as did the author of the Celestina (1499).^[42] The case of Castilian and Portuguese amorous poetry is interesting for the use of Petrarchism in establishing a firm context of psychological analysis of a moral predicament, in a tense polarization between a rational sublimation of love and the condemnation of an alienating passion, futile at best, destructive at worst. In that poetry a universal ethos filled the forms inherited from a court setting that could no longer be operative, since it no longer existed.

Petrarchism grew steadily in Quattrocento Italy, and it was in courtly environments that it produced potentially aberrant forms. The outstanding example is Serafino Aquilano (d. 1500), a page at the Neapolitan court in his youth and then an acclaimed court entertainer at Urbino and northern Italian courts. In line with the progressive Christianization and Platonization of erotic poetry after Petrarca, the virtues of the lovers came to sound more and more like the standard Christian virtues. Onestade, temperanza, vergogna, continenza, and such, dominated both in stanzas of European love poetry like the Cantos de amor of the fifteenth-century Catalan poet Augias March and in pages of philosophical speculation on love like Mario Equicola's successful Libro de natura de amore (1509).

Finally Bembo managed to canonize Petrarca along classicizing lines. Thanks mostly to Bembo's authoritative endorsement in his 1525 Prose della volgar lingua,^[43] Petrarca's model of frustrated love as the noblest

form of love, his latter-day interpretation of courtly love taken out of its social context, became archetypal for much of the subsequent European lyric. His success must not make us oblivious to the availability of other options both at his time and before, as if it had been a foregone conclusion. For not only could a frankly uncourtly view of love be presented (or perhaps advocated) even in such an extended treatment as the Roman de la rose, but a chivalric dressing could be used for transparent uncourtois allegories disguising daydreams about subduing a woman with knightly force instead of worshipping her lofty resistance. Typically, at least as early as 1214 a festival at Treviso included a victorious siege by young males of a Castle of Love held by fair maidens.^[44]

Petrarca brought to its most consummate level the habit of composing “logically” rather than by succession of lyrical moods—a habit which has been observed in the passage from the earlier Provençal, French, and German lyric to the more mature Italian lyrical modes, especially with the Stil Nuovo. But above all Petrarca should also enter our discourse for his more technical contribution of turning some typical chivalric and courtois clichés into a method of lyrical expression—what became the main ingredients of European Petrarchism in the lyric, including the conventionalized uses that can be termed “manneristic.”^[45] I am referring, first, to his adoption of courtois motifs in the form of stylistic antitheses and oxymora as well as the symmetries of his “correlaciones plurimembres,” to use Dámaso Alonso's terms. An impressive example of the compositional structures that Petrarca canonized is Giacomo da Lentini's (fl. 1233–1240) “Lo basilisco a lo speco lucente.” There, the first known Sicilian poet exploited the form of the sonnet, which he invented, for the most architectonic compositional format it could encompass. He did so by using not only a correlative pattern (in the quatrains) but also a recapitulation of its members (in the tercets), all of it in the midst of continuous antitheses.^[46] Antithesis abounds in Giacomo as well as its most concentrated form, the oxymoron: see, for example, the sonnet “Chi non avesse mai veduto foco,” ending with a most effective pre-Petrarchan antithetical treatment of his relationship to Love and the beloved: “Certo l'Amore fa gran vilania, / che non distingue te che vai gabando; / a me, che servo, non dà isbaldimento,” “Surely Love does wrong: / he does not subdue you, who only mock, / he has no reward for me, who truly serve,” reminiscent of the close of more than one of Petrarca's most memorable sonnets.^[47] Likewise in Rinaldo d'Aquino's canzone “Amorosa donna fina”: “d'uno foco che non pare / che 'n la neve fa 'llumare, / ed incende tra lo ghiaccio,” “with a fire that does not show, / that shows its light in the

snow, / and flares up inside the ice”; and in Guido delle Colonne's (b. ca. 1210) “che fa lo foco nascere di neve,” “which makes fire arise out of the snow” (canzone “Anchor che l'aigua per lo foco lassi”).^[48] These are paradoxical antitheses in the form of adynata of a kin with Petrarca's “icy fire.”^[49]

We have noticed that such figures were also common in the earlier French, Provençal, and German poets. One more striking, final example is the famous passage in Gottfried's Tristan (vv. 60–64) where the poet espouses the true love of his tragic couple, and where we find even the equivalent of Petrarca's neologism dolceamara, “bittersweet”:

ir süeze sur, ir liebez leit,
ir herzeliep, ir senede not,
ir liebez leben, ir leiden tot,
ir lieben tot, ir leidez leben:
dem lebene si min leben ergeben.

(Their sweet bitterness, their loving sorrow,
their hearts' love, their yearning misery,
their loving life, their wretched death,
their loving death, their wretched life:
let my life be devoted to that life.)
(W. T. H. Jackson's trans., 1971: 54)

And again

daz honegende gellet,
daz süezende siuret,
daz touwende viuret,
daz senftende smerzet.

(love's gall, with honey fraught,
  bitterness, sweet though tart,
  pain, soothing though it smart,
fire, quenching though it burn.)
(vv. 11,884–11,887 Ranke ed.,
  11,888–11,891 Zeydel 1948 trans.)

Indeed, Gottfried favored antitheses and oxymora throughout, climaxing in the definitional one he adapted from Thomas: “Isot ma drue, Isot mamie, / en vus ma mort, en vus ma vie!” (19,409 f., in French in his text).^[50] He had called Isolt Tristan's “living death,” “sin lebender tot” (14,468).

I have picked up (in chap. 4) a few precedents for the conceit of the heart or soul detached from the lover, which Petrarca transmitted to his Quattrocento imitators and beyond. In sonnet 16, “Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo,” he is away from his beloved and wonders how it can be that his limbs are detached from the spirit that sustains them: “come posson queste membra / da lo spirito lor viver lontane?” Besides Provençal, French, and German antecedents, he had Italian ones as well. Listen to Rinaldo d'Aquino (“Amorosa donna fina”): “che vita po l'omo avere, / se lo cor non è con lui? / Lo meo cor non è co' mico, / ched eo tutto lo v'ho dato.” (How can one live without a heart? Mine is not with me, since I have given it entirely to you.) Of course, the roles could also be reversed, and Guido delle Colonne, in the canzone already quoted, could say that “he thought the soul happily dwelling inside his body was really his lady's own”: “Lo spirito ch'i' aggio, und'eo mi sporto, / credo lo vostro sia, / che nel meo petto stia / e abiti con meco in gran diporto.”^[51] Traditional motifs that embody the notions of sweet enslavement and liberation through poetic singing come down from the troubadours all the way to the most recent models, like Guittone d'Arezzo (ca. 1253–1294): “come l'augel doici canti consono, / ch'è preso in gabbia e sosten moiti guai,” “I sing sweet songs like the bird who is kept in a cage and suffers much woe”(sonnet “Dolcezza alcuna,” ending with the antithesis “credendomi appressare, io m'allontano,” “in the illusion of coming closer I drift further away”). Or take the motif of the pilgrim who looks for the sacred relics as the poet looks for the likes of his beloved (see Petrarca's “Movesi il vecchierel”), as in Lapo Gianni's (ca. 1250–1328 or later) sonnet “Sì come i Magi a guida della stella”: “Sì come i Magi a guida della Stella / girono inver' le parti d'Orïente / per adorar lo Segnor ch'era nato, / così mi guidò Amore a veder quella.” (Just as the Magi, guided by the star, / turned toward the East /in order to worship the newly born Lord, / so Love guided me to behold that woman.)^[52]

As Dante had done, so did Petrarca often couple cortesia with onestade. See, for example, Canzoniere 338: 1–5: “Lasciato ài, Morte,  . . . cortesia in bando et onestade in fondo,” and again in 351: 5 f.: “Gentil parlar, in cui chiaro refulse / con somma cortesia somma onestate.” Similarly, the frequent occurrence of convenevole and decoro as attributes of true beauty in Renaissance critical theory reminds us of Cicero's key concept of decorum, with the applications we have noted.^[53]

I shall conclude by summarizing the main threads of my argument on Petrarca's specific role. Seigniorial courts had been a fitting environ-

ment for oral culture both in the curial setting of clerical teaching for ecclesiastical and administrative instruction and in the social relationships that fostered troubadour poetry as live singing of the lady's praises. In Italy the new political setting of the Frederician court of Palermo as well as the new social and professional setting of notarial circles that produced the Stil Nuovo brought about a decided privileging of the written text, fixed and transmitted by copying and reading rather than reciting and singing. Petrarca inherited the curial and courtly traditions in this new “grammatological” form, and radically crystallized it by making the Petrarchan lover part of a written elitist culture with canonized, universalized motifs of high love—a trademark of the new educated man of the world.