Petrarch (1304 - 1374) was an Italian poet, scholar and letter-writer, widely described as the father of humanism. [1] His Italian lyric sequence, the Canzoniere, established the sonnet form and the conventions of love poetry that dominated European verse for three centuries, while his recovery and study of classical Latin texts set the intellectual programme of the Renaissance. [2]
Early life and education
Francesco Petrarca was born in Arezzo in July 1304. His father, a notary, had been exiled from Florence in the same political upheaval that banished Dante, and in 1312 the family settled near Avignon, where the papal court had relocated. [1]
At his father's insistence Petrarch studied law at Montpellier and Bologna, but he had no interest in the subject and abandoned it after his father's death in 1326, turning to classical literature. He took minor ecclesiastical orders, which provided benefices and an income without requiring him to serve a parish, and entered the household of the powerful Colonna family. [3]
Laura and the Canzoniere
Petrarch dated his poetic vocation to 1327, when, by his own account, he first saw in a church in Avignon the woman he called Laura. Her identity has never been established, but she became the organising figure of his Italian verse. [2]
The Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, known as the Canzoniere, gathers 366 poems, most of them sonnets, divided between those written during Laura's lifetime and those after her death in the plague of 1348. The sequence traces not a courtship but a psychology: desire, self-reproach, the conflict between earthly love and salvation, and the passage of time. [1]
Through imitators such as Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Petrarchan imagery supplied the standard vocabulary of Renaissance love poetry, and later its standard target for parody. [3]
Humanism and Latin works
Petrarch regarded his Latin writing as his serious work. He composed the epic Africa on Scipio Africanus, the biographical compendium De viris illustribus, and the introspective dialogue Secretum, in which he examines his own failings before an imagined Saint Augustine. [2]
He searched monastic libraries for lost classical manuscripts and in 1345 found at Verona a collection of Cicero's letters to Atticus, a discovery that reshaped the understanding of Roman intellectual life and encouraged his own extensive published correspondence. He argued that the centuries between the fall of Rome and his own age were a period of decline, an idea that gave rise to the notion of the Dark Ages and to the periodisation of European history still in use. [1]
His account of climbing Mont Ventoux in 1336, written as a letter, has often been read as an early expression of the modern individual's response to landscape and to his own interior life. [3]
Later life and legacy
On 8 April 1341 Petrarch was crowned with the laurel in Rome, the first poet so honoured since antiquity, an event he had arranged and treated as the revival of a classical institution. [2] He travelled widely in the service of Italian courts, campaigned for the return of the papacy to Rome, and spent his last years at Arquà, where he died in July 1374.
Petrarch's combination of philological rigour, classical enthusiasm and self-examination defined humanism as a programme for the next two centuries. His Italian poetry and his Latin scholarship together make him, with Dante and Boccaccio, one of the three founding figures of Italian literature. [1]
