Petrarch 1.0

The homes or the graves of great writers; descriptions, portraits, or death masks that indicate their physical appearance; the places in which they lived: these kinds of remains, and more, long ago achieved an odd sort of iconic status. They show no signs of losing that status with the passage of time. Indeed, their attractions for literary pilgrims may now be as great as, perhaps even greater than, those of Canterbury or Compostela for pilgrims of a more traditional sort. Visitors to Mantua or Naples (the birthplace and tomb of Virgil), Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare country), Salem, Massachusetts (the house of seven gables), or Camden, New Jersey (Walt Whitman's house), all participate in rites of literary veneration. Gullio, a character in an anonymous play called The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, exclaims, "O sweet Mr Shakspeare, Ile have his picture in my study at the courte" (3.1.132-3). That play was performed no later than 1603, well over a decade before sweet Mr. Shakespeare had been laid in the ground at Stratford's Church of the Holy Trinity. Its author probably intended to be read ironically. But time has been ironic with the author and Gullio now speaks for all readers who hope that images will allow them to imagine what their favorite writers looked like and where they lived.

The printed objects displayed here fill just these kinds of needs. Here are represented Petrarch and of Laura. Did they "really" look like this? What would that notion mean?—and does it matter? A reader who may never get to Arquà can look at another of the books displayed here and "see" the tomb that houses Petrarch's mortal remains. Its image appears in a guidebook for travelers fortunate enough to actually visit the site—and for readers who may never get there personally. A sixteenth-century edition of the Italian works that contains a schematic map of Avignon and Vaucluse feeds this same "lust of the eye" (as 1 John 2:16 calls it) characteristic of readers who wonder what the places in which Petrarch lived, or the poet himself, might have looked like.

The writer's "true" milieu may be the books in which his works continue to be printed and read. But the ordinary human appetite for ways in which to contextualize, perhaps even to "humanize," those writers we continue to read makes such evocations of them and their world a fitting place to start this exhibition. This is especially so for a writer who, aged 700 this year, is in many respects very far away from us, no matter how close to him our familiarity with his words may make him feel.