Petrarch at 700
Petrarch & His Milieu
Petrarch & His Milieu
Petrarch & His Milieu
Petrarch in Manuscript
Petrarch in Manuscript
Petrarch in Manuscript
Petrarch in Print
Petrarch in Print
Petrarch in Print
Petrarch & Censorship
Petrarch & Censorship
Petrarch & Censorship
Petrarch in Translation
Petrarch in Translation
Petrarch in Translation
Petrarch & Music
Petrarch & Music
Petrarch & Music
March 29, 2004 - May 21, 2004
Curated by Michael Ryan, Daniel Traister, and Seth Jerchower
The University of Pennsylvania celebrates the seven hundredth anniversary of Francesco Petrarca's birth in 1304 with an international conference devoted to current studies of his works. In conjunction with that conference, the libraries of Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania are jointly mounting an exhibition, Petrarch at 700. This exhibit will include some of the most important of Petrarch's works in North American libraries. Manuscripts, many of them beautifully illuminated, and printed books will display the Petrarch who was the author of Italian-language love poems that served Italian and European writers as models of love poetry for the next half-millennium. Petrarch also worked in a wide variety of other literary forms, among them invective, bucolic poetry, letters, and epic, and wrote not only in Italian but also in Latin, a language in which he became even more famous than he was in Italian. The work of censors will be displayed: not all readers approved of Petrarch's love poetry! So will the work of many artists, both those who illuminated Petrarch's manuscripts by hand and those who cut woodblocks for reproduction in printed editions of Petrarch's works. This exhibition concentrates on Petrarch's own work rather than that of his many followers. Books included date from the fifteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, and a few nineteenth-century photographs illustrate places associated with Petrarch's life.
Made possible by support from the National Italian American Foundation.
Introduction
The Center for Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania celebrated the 700th anniversary of Francesco Petrarca's birth in 1304 with an international conference, The Complete Petrarch: A Life's Work (1304-1374), April 16-17, 2004. This exhibit, mounted on the occasion of this conference, concentrates on Petrarch's own work. Petrarch wrote more than love poetry. He wrote a wide variety of forms in both Italian and Latin, among them invective, bucolic poetry, letters, and epic.
Francesco Petrarca was born in Arezzo (Tuscany) in 1304. Raised in Avignon (Provence) and educated as a lawyer, he later took minor holy orders. Writer, scholar, and diplomat, widely traveled in France, Flanders, Brabant, the Rhineland, and the entire Italian peninsula, Petrarch became a central figure in the intellectual and literary worlds of his time.
Petrarch's poetry influenced poets and writers for centuries following his death. A great poet of love, he is one of the creators of a break with the literature of his immediate medieval past. An early modern writer, he is also a modern one: "one of us." Perpetually unsatisfied, in love, art, and life, and thus constantly trying to remake his world, Petrarch simultaneously sought a stability that necessarily remained elusive: for, even as he sought it, constant reworking and revisions left his own works unstable. They literally could not appear frozen in print: he wrote before printing from movable type had reached Europe. But also he was temperamentally disinclined to finish them. Even some major projects, at least as he thought of them (such as his epic Africa), were never concluded. Always dissatisfied, he persistently reconceived and revised throughout his life.
Crowned in 1341 with the poet's laurels in Rome, he immediately placed his crown before the Tomb of the Apostle in the Basilica of St. Peter, thus emphasizing what he regarded as his major project, the linking of Classical and Christian traditions. The great plague of 1348 claimed the life of Laura, the subject of the love poems that are perhaps his greatest legacy, who died twenty-one years to the day after he had first seen her at Avignon. Eventually, the working retreat Petrarch had established in the late 1330s at Vaucluse, a few miles east of Avignon, failed him, and he lived his last years moving from place to place in Italy. He died at Arquà (near Padua) in 1374. When his body was found the next morning, we are told, his head lay on a manuscript of Virgil.
The Libraries of Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania have cooperated to mount Petrarch at 700, displaying some of the most important of Petrarch's works in North American libraries. The manuscripts and printed books date from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, and are masterpieces of the printer's and bookmaker's arts: types carefully chosen, woodcut illustrations startlingly fresh, occasionally richly bound. Many are beautifully adorned with hand-painted illustrations and illuminated initial letters. This exhibition celebrates the author whose works still inspire writers as poetic and humanistic models.
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.
The manuscripts displayed here reveal the merest fraction of the enormous tradition and equally enormous range of Petrarchan manuscripts that have survived from Petrarch's own times and the periods immediately following his own. These manuscripts were made in Italy, Germany, and France, but Petrarch's manuscript circulation was geographically far more widespread than these examples alone indicate. The examples displayed come from only three American collections, those in the Libraries at Cornell and Penn, and one exemplar from the collection of Lawrence J. Schoenberg.
Some of these manuscripts are plain, others are fancy. Some are beautifully adorned, others simply made for ease of use. Some are finished, others fragmentary. Some show a writer still at work. Others offer variant texts created by a writer rarely satisfied with his own work and almost always engaged either in trying something new or revising the old.
Every manuscript is, by definition, unique—but with a writer like Petrarch that canard takes on a certain special force. Thus this display makes evident—although one can say so only with a modicum of diffidence—that, if for most purposes Petrarch remains a writer whose textual difficulties must be investigated in those European libraries that preserve the vast majority of his manuscript remains, American libraries also contain materials needed for the ongoing effort to establish Petrarch's texts on as firm a codicological and bibliographical basis as possible.
The manuscripts exhibited here suggest how, even in an era before print made easy the widespread dissemination of literary works, some writers nonetheless managed to garner audiences throughout Europe. Petrarch became one of them while he was still alive. The sheer physical beauty of many of these manuscripts, and the evident pride in their skills shown by the scribes, illuminators, and rubricators who worked on them, offer visible proof of the hold on audiences that Petrarch quickly took. He has kept that hold as an author who continues to be read and valued for seven, now moving on to eight, centuries.
In printed form as well as in manuscript, and again considering only the books on display here, Petrarch appears in both Latin and Italian from very early dates in Italy, France, and Switzerland. His works appeared in more places than these alone, of course. And if one adds translations—a separate section in this exhibition—the geographically widespread nature of Petrarch's readership and circulation becomes ever more apparent.
Many of the printed books on display, simply as an outgrowth of their physical form, have much to say about how fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers regarded the fourteenth-century Italian writer. Some of these books are large and formidable: they exist as testaments to the cultural cachet of their contents and to the taste and standing of their owner. Others advertise the cultural standards of their printers, who used their editions of Petrarch to demonstrate their talents as bookmakers able to rise to the occasion when greatness demands to be dressed in an appropriate form. Still others indicate a book produced for the ready convenience of the reader who wants his (and, in some clear instances, her) Petrarch portable, able to sit easily in the hand. All of them—indeed, the very number of them even in this small exhibition—indicate a writer whose works stayed in heavy demand.
But they were not in demand only for show. Also notable is how many of these copies of Petrarch's various work provide considerable evidence that they were not left sitting idly on a shelf. These are used books—old used books, it is true, but used books nonetheless. Their readers have left traces on them. Occasionally these traces are distressing. Several of the books shown here have been vandalized, early in their lives, by censors offended by one thing or another they contain. More encouragingly, however, other readers have added marginalia or comments, underlinings, or other marks of emphasis, all of which indicate a writer with whose works these readers engaged in a serious way. Petrarch certainly wrote for readers. The editions of his work that started to come from the press after printing from movable type reached Europe continues to this day. He got his readers even in manuscript; he still keeps his readers today.
No writer is immune either to censorship or (to what is not always easily distinguishable) angry response from his readers. Petrarch was not the exception who proves the rule. The 1549 Sonnets seen below is a magnificently bound volume but the splendor of its dress has not preserved its contents from the destructiveness all too clearly wreaked upon it, the work of a person deeply serious about making the text unreadable.
Stefano Colonna’s 1552 edition also shows defacement. The cause for these acts of censorship—both the 1549 and 1552 volumes exhibit what is unambiguously that, not mere anger—is obvious. Indeed, the same poems in each edition are defaced. Three of them are easier to see in the 1552 edition than in 1549: they are numbers 136, "Fiamma dal Ciel" ("Flames from heaven"), 137, "L'avara Babilonia" ("Greedy Babylon"), and 138, "Fontane di dolore" ("Font of sorrow").
Each criticizes the decadence of the papal court at Avignon, which Petrarch even compares to the Whore of Babylon—a pejorative whose sixteenth-century adoption by Protestants he could not have foreseen in the fourteenth century, when no Protestants existed. But Counter-Reformation censors clearly thought contemporary reformers likely to read Petrarch's criticism as prefiguring their criticisms of the Roman papacy of their own era, and they sought to eliminate these poems from the printed record. The uncensored state of a second copy of the 1552 edition however, indicates why the censor's life was unlikely to be an entirely happy one: you could never be certain that you had caught them all.
Not all of Petrarch's readers could read Italian or Latin. Others found him through translations into other European languages that quickly became available. Versions of his works are displayed here in French, Spanish, and German, languages into which it is easy to expect Petrarch soon to have been translated; and—a bit more surprising—Czech. His Latin Africa in Italian ottava rima is a reminder than, even in the Italian peninsula, a writer using two languages might not reach Italians who knew only one. Musical settings of Petrarch's poems exhibit yet another form of "translation."
The 1567 Spanish-language version of Petrarch's Rime, translated by Salomon Usque Hebreo and the Italian-language edition of his Rime issued in 1503 by Gershom Soncino's press at Fano suggest another aspect of Petrarch's appeal across borders perhaps less hard and fast than they now seem. Petrarch took only minor orders but was still part of the Church. Yet a later Jewish translator, like an earlier Jewish printer, found his work attractive enough—whether or not its author had been a churchman—to warrant investments of money, time, and intellectual effort. Moreover, the poet's stature allowed Spain's "Rey Catolico" to give his privilege to the "Hebreo's" translation despite the Jewish identity of the translator.
One more form of "translation," unemphasized in an exhibition that concentrates on Petrarch rather than his followers, is suggested by Alvar Gòmez's Spanish version of some of Petrarch's sonnets printed in an edition of Jorge de Montemayor. Wide dissemination of Petrarch's work in both manuscript and print, as well as the high value contemporaries and immediate successors placed on it, quickly made it a model for other writers. In England (entirely unrepresented here), Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, wrote poems deeply influenced by Petrarch generally and occasionally imitative of one or another of his poems specifically. Writers throughout Europe treated him the same way. Petrarch become a well into whose limitless resources writers could dip at will without in any way diminishing his ability to nourish other writers as well as themselves. Gòmez's versions of Petrarch permit the 1580 Antwerp Montemayor to locate that writer among all those who drank of Petrarch before heading off on their own. It gestures at an altogether different exhibition, one not "just as big as this one" but even bigger. Petrarch is only one author. The number of writers he influenced is legion.
But even one writer can be limitless, as Petrarch's followers and imitators knew. Here is a taste of Petrarch as his works begin to circumnavigate the globe.
To treat musical settings of Petrarch's poems as forms of "translation" may seem slightly far-fetched but it is actually an easy leap to make. Petrarch's poems were often set to music—and why not? Lyric poetry is originally supposed to have been composed in order to accompany the lyre, and the poet has often been conceived as a kind of singer. The anonymous composer(s?) of the Penn manuscript and Cipriano da Rore were by no means alone in finding Petrarch's lyrics appropriate for musical setting. "Pace non trovo" ("I find no peace") in the Penn manuscript, and "Vergine bella" ("Beautiful virgin") and the nine other Petrarchan poems in Cornell's two editions of Cipriano are but a few of Petrarch's poems that have been set to music. Numerous recordings currently available make it easy to hear such settings. Composers who work with Petrarchan texts include, in addition to Cipriano, Jacob Arcadelt (ca. 1505-1568), Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525?-1594), Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), Franz Schubert (1797-1828), and, more recently, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951).
This sixteenth-century anthology—its text in cursive, three hands responsible for its production—contains fourteen compositions for solo voice with unfigured bass and seven duets with continuo accompaniment. Five of the solo voice compositions set madrigal texts, one of them Petrarch's Sonnet RVF 134, "Pace non trovo e non ò da far guerra" ("I find no peace, and I've naught to wage war").
The Petrarchan iconographic tradition emphasizes, not surprisingly, the poet and his love. The engraved title-page to this early nineteenth-century Italian edition of Petrarch's poems, fancily printed on pink paper, depicts Love triumphant over his captives. Amor, the god Cupid, stands in triumphant pose, overseeing his shackled prisoners, who include men and woman, gods and mortals, sinners alike. The terzine is from the first canto of the Triumph of Love (verses 22-25):
quattro destrier vie piy che neve bianchi;
sovr'un carro di foco un garzon crudo
con arco in man e con saette a' fianchi;
("Four steeds far whiter than any snow,
and above a fiery chariot a cruel lad,
with bow in hand, and arrows by his side.")
Supposedly a bookseller's bill—but possibly a bookseller's inventory—this late 16th century price list of Italian books is a testimony to the diffusion and success of the vernacular. The ninth item is for an edition of Petrarch, at the price of "4 [lire; florins; scudi?]". Among other works on the list are the Arcadia by Jacopo Sannazzaro, and the Italian Prose of Pietro Bembo.
This volume of Cicero, one of the earliest to issue from Jenson's Venetian press, is open to one of the non-Ciceronian texts the book contains. Petrarch's "Epistola ad Ciceronem" (letter to Cicero), taken from the Renaissance writer's Familiar Letters (XXIV.3), is addressed to the Classical author who perhaps meant as much to Petrarch as any writer of any era.. The Ciceronian texts are those Petrarch himself had found (at Verona, in 1345) during his explorations of monastic libraries.
Jean de Tournes printed this lovely pocket edition of the Sonnets, the Canzone, and the Triumphs in Lyons. The text may be Italian in language but, from its title-page depiction of Petrarch and Laura within the frame of a lover's heart, through the double set of woodcuts (displayed here) that open the Triumph of Love, to the delicacy of its small size , the book is decidedly French in appearance and feel.
In contrast, Petrarch's sentiments layed far from France. One of his four invectives is hurled against "A Detractor of Italy" (Invectiva contra eum qui maledixit Italie); in it, Gallia, Roman France, is the frequent target of the Poet's verbal missiles. It was inconceivable for Petrarch that the Papacy be anywhere but Rome, and the Holy See "held captive" in Avignon. The following sonnet, presented here in translation, summarizes in full his disdain for the Avignon Papacy with a critical vehemence that, for later generations, bordered all too dangerously on heresy.
Sonnet, RVF 138
"Fontana di dolor, albergo d'ira"
Font of sorrow and inn of wrath,
school of error, and temple of heresy,
once Rome, now Babylon of perfidy,
the source of our many tears and sighs.
O forge of deceipt, oh dire prison,
where goodness dies, and evil's bred and nursed;
of the living a hell, and a miracle indeed
should Christ's own ire not finally wax against you.
Founded in chaste and humble poverty,
you raise your horns now, shameless whore,
against your founders? Where lies your hope?
within your wantonness? In your ill-born wealth?
Thus Constantine shall not return; may he be wrenched
from this wicked world that bears him.
This edition, a Czech-language edition of De remediis utriusque fortunae from the very beginning of the sixteenth century, has been translated by Rehor Hrubý (known as Gregorius Gelenius in the Latinized form of his name; ca. 1460-1514). Petrarch's works circulated in the Slavic east as well as the Roman west and Germanic north. His themes—as is indicated by the highly conventional title-page illustration of Fortune's Wheel to which the book is open—were familiar to a wide European audience.
Jérôme David and Giovanni Georgi made the engravings for this heavily-illustrated mid seventeenth-century book. The frontispiece (fig. 1) features an illustration of Laura in the Vaucluse. The first page (fig. 2) has a portrait of Laura Sada, or Laura de Noves (1308?-1348). Laura was an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), whose family were related to the royal house of Condé. The Marquis was well aware of his "Lauresque" ancestry, and in a chilling inversion of her symbolism, related a dream in a letter to his wife:
"Laura Sada", or Laure de Noves, was the wife of the Provengal noble Hughes de Sades, and ancestress of both Petrarch's 18th century biographer, the Abbi Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade (1705-1778), and his nephew, the marquis Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade. In the Petrarcha redivivus, Tomasini refers the legend of Laure de Sade's identity with Petrarch's Laura. Laura, as Petrarch replied to Giacomo Colonna (Familiares II, 9), is absolutely real:
Laura indeed exists: she is the truth Petrarch seeks, desires. She is the name for Petrarch's epiphany of April 6, 1327 (not Good Friday, but the historic anniversary of the crucifixion) in the church of in Saint Claire in Avignon. He was likely inspired more by the name Laure than he was by the namebearer herself: "she" already prefigured in the poetry of the Provengal troubadors. It comes as no surprise that the "Aura" (the "breeze" in Latin, exactly synonymous with anima, alma, spiritus, as well as the Greek Psyche) dies on the same date in 1348. In that year, when the great plague struck, as the 100 Years War raged on, as Petrarch's political hopes for Rome were violently dashed, his world was inexplicably dying, self-destructing. The reality and the validity of Laura is literary, epistemological, moral (or the question of morality), and psychological. Mind, psyche, soul: limbs of the Laura whose absolute human reality Petrarch could never sufficiently underscore.
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Page 140 (fig. 3) and 141 (fig. 4) from Tomasini's work illustrate sections of Petrarch's first canzone, the allegoric "Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade" (RVF 23 In the sweet season of our spring), also known as "Petrarch's Metamorphoses." Petrarch, as the anonymous narrator, is attacked by Amor, the god of Love, in a series of mythic transformations. The narrator "sings" of his woes perché cantando il duol si disacerba (verse 4, "Because song removes all bitterness from pain"), as he finds himself, for Laura, changed from a youth into a laurel (Daphne), a swan (Cycnis), stone (Battus), a spring beneath a beech (Byblis), into an echo, and finally a stag "chased by fierce dogs" (as Actaeon). The image on page 140 (fig. 3), shows Petrarch and Laura in various stances along the banks of the Sorgue, ("not the Peneus, but by a yet haughtier river", verse 48). Petrarch has just woken from a sleep, astonished to see the miracle of Laura: "Alas, what am or was I, that I must laud her as the day lauds the night, as life its end." (verses 30-31). This illustrates verses 138-139: "mi volse in dura selce; et così scossa | voce rimasi de l'antiche some" ("and turning my body to solid flint, I remained but a voice shook free from its ancient form"). On page 141 (fig. 4), Laura removes Petrarch's heart, as in verses 72-75: "Questa che col mirar gli animi fura,
m'aperse il petto, e 'l cor prese con mano, dicendo a me: Di ciò non far parola. Poi la rividi in altro habito sola," ("She who robs souls with but her gaze
opened my breast, removed my heart by hand, and warned me in verse: Say not a word of this. Then I saw her, alone, in different guise ...") |
Jérôme David and Giovanni Georgi made the engravings for this heavily-illustrated mid seventeenth-century book. The frontispiece (fig. 1) features an illustration of Laura in the Vaucluse. The first page (fig. 2) has a portrait of Laura Sada, or Laura de Noves (1308?-1348). Laura was an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), whose family were related to the royal house of Condé. The Marquis was well aware of his "Lauresque" ancestry, and in a chilling inversion of her symbolism, related a dream in a letter to his wife:
"Laura Sada", or Laure de Noves, was the wife of the Provengal noble Hughes de Sades, and ancestress of both Petrarch's 18th century biographer, the Abbi Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade (1705-1778), and his nephew, the marquis Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade. In the Petrarcha redivivus, Tomasini refers the legend of Laure de Sade's identity with Petrarch's Laura. Laura, as Petrarch replied to Giacomo Colonna (Familiares II, 9), is absolutely real:
Laura indeed exists: she is the truth Petrarch seeks, desires. She is the name for Petrarch's epiphany of April 6, 1327 (not Good Friday, but the historic anniversary of the crucifixion) in the church of in Saint Claire in Avignon. He was likely inspired more by the name Laure than he was by the namebearer herself: "she" already prefigured in the poetry of the Provengal troubadors. It comes as no surprise that the "Aura" (the "breeze" in Latin, exactly synonymous with anima, alma, spiritus, as well as the Greek Psyche) dies on the same date in 1348. In that year, when the great plague struck, as the 100 Years War raged on, as Petrarch's political hopes for Rome were violently dashed, his world was inexplicably dying, self-destructing. The reality and the validity of Laura is literary, epistemological, moral (or the question of morality), and psychological. Mind, psyche, soul: limbs of the Laura whose absolute human reality Petrarch could never sufficiently underscore.
|
Page 140 (fig. 3) and 141 (fig. 4) from Tomasini's work illustrate sections of Petrarch's first canzone, the allegoric "Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade" (RVF 23 In the sweet season of our spring), also known as "Petrarch's Metamorphoses." Petrarch, as the anonymous narrator, is attacked by Amor, the god of Love, in a series of mythic transformations. The narrator "sings" of his woes perché cantando il duol si disacerba (verse 4, "Because song removes all bitterness from pain"), as he finds himself, for Laura, changed from a youth into a laurel (Daphne), a swan (Cycnis), stone (Battus), a spring beneath a beech (Byblis), into an echo, and finally a stag "chased by fierce dogs" (as Actaeon). The image on page 140 (fig. 3), shows Petrarch and Laura in various stances along the banks of the Sorgue, ("not the Peneus, but by a yet haughtier river", verse 48). Petrarch has just woken from a sleep, astonished to see the miracle of Laura: "Alas, what am or was I, that I must laud her as the day lauds the night, as life its end." (verses 30-31). This illustrates verses 138-139: "mi volse in dura selce; et così scossa | voce rimasi de l'antiche some" ("and turning my body to solid flint, I remained but a voice shook free from its ancient form"). On page 141 (fig. 4), Laura removes Petrarch's heart, as in verses 72-75: "Questa che col mirar gli animi fura,
m'aperse il petto, e 'l cor prese con mano, dicendo a me: Di ciò non far parola. Poi la rividi in altro habito sola," ("She who robs souls with but her gaze
opened my breast, removed my heart by hand, and warned me in verse: Say not a word of this. Then I saw her, alone, in different guise ...") |
Jérôme David and Giovanni Georgi made the engravings for this heavily-illustrated mid seventeenth-century book. The frontispiece (fig. 1) features an illustration of Laura in the Vaucluse. The first page (fig. 2) has a portrait of Laura Sada, or Laura de Noves (1308?-1348). Laura was an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), whose family were related to the royal house of Condé. The Marquis was well aware of his "Lauresque" ancestry, and in a chilling inversion of her symbolism, related a dream in a letter to his wife:
"Laura Sada", or Laure de Noves, was the wife of the Provengal noble Hughes de Sades, and ancestress of both Petrarch's 18th century biographer, the Abbi Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade (1705-1778), and his nephew, the marquis Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade. In the Petrarcha redivivus, Tomasini refers the legend of Laure de Sade's identity with Petrarch's Laura. Laura, as Petrarch replied to Giacomo Colonna (Familiares II, 9), is absolutely real:
Laura indeed exists: she is the truth Petrarch seeks, desires. She is the name for Petrarch's epiphany of April 6, 1327 (not Good Friday, but the historic anniversary of the crucifixion) in the church of in Saint Claire in Avignon. He was likely inspired more by the name Laure than he was by the namebearer herself: "she" already prefigured in the poetry of the Provengal troubadors. It comes as no surprise that the "Aura" (the "breeze" in Latin, exactly synonymous with anima, alma, spiritus, as well as the Greek Psyche) dies on the same date in 1348. In that year, when the great plague struck, as the 100 Years War raged on, as Petrarch's political hopes for Rome were violently dashed, his world was inexplicably dying, self-destructing. The reality and the validity of Laura is literary, epistemological, moral (or the question of morality), and psychological. Mind, psyche, soul: limbs of the Laura whose absolute human reality Petrarch could never sufficiently underscore.
|
Page 140 (fig. 3) and 141 (fig. 4) from Tomasini's work illustrate sections of Petrarch's first canzone, the allegoric "Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade" (RVF 23 In the sweet season of our spring), also known as "Petrarch's Metamorphoses." Petrarch, as the anonymous narrator, is attacked by Amor, the god of Love, in a series of mythic transformations. The narrator "sings" of his woes perché cantando il duol si disacerba (verse 4, "Because song removes all bitterness from pain"), as he finds himself, for Laura, changed from a youth into a laurel (Daphne), a swan (Cycnis), stone (Battus), a spring beneath a beech (Byblis), into an echo, and finally a stag "chased by fierce dogs" (as Actaeon). The image on page 140 (fig. 3), shows Petrarch and Laura in various stances along the banks of the Sorgue, ("not the Peneus, but by a yet haughtier river", verse 48). Petrarch has just woken from a sleep, astonished to see the miracle of Laura: "Alas, what am or was I, that I must laud her as the day lauds the night, as life its end." (verses 30-31). This illustrates verses 138-139: "mi volse in dura selce; et così scossa | voce rimasi de l'antiche some" ("and turning my body to solid flint, I remained but a voice shook free from its ancient form"). On page 141 (fig. 4), Laura removes Petrarch's heart, as in verses 72-75: "Questa che col mirar gli animi fura,
m'aperse il petto, e 'l cor prese con mano, dicendo a me: Di ciò non far parola. Poi la rividi in altro habito sola," ("She who robs souls with but her gaze
opened my breast, removed my heart by hand, and warned me in verse: Say not a word of this. Then I saw her, alone, in different guise ...") |
Jérôme David and Giovanni Georgi made the engravings for this heavily-illustrated mid seventeenth-century book. The frontispiece (fig. 1) features an illustration of Laura in the Vaucluse. The first page (fig. 2) has a portrait of Laura Sada, or Laura de Noves (1308?-1348). Laura was an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), whose family were related to the royal house of Condé. The Marquis was well aware of his "Lauresque" ancestry, and in a chilling inversion of her symbolism, related a dream in a letter to his wife:
"Laura Sada", or Laure de Noves, was the wife of the Provengal noble Hughes de Sades, and ancestress of both Petrarch's 18th century biographer, the Abbi Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade (1705-1778), and his nephew, the marquis Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade. In the Petrarcha redivivus, Tomasini refers the legend of Laure de Sade's identity with Petrarch's Laura. Laura, as Petrarch replied to Giacomo Colonna (Familiares II, 9), is absolutely real:
Laura indeed exists: she is the truth Petrarch seeks, desires. She is the name for Petrarch's epiphany of April 6, 1327 (not Good Friday, but the historic anniversary of the crucifixion) in the church of in Saint Claire in Avignon. He was likely inspired more by the name Laure than he was by the namebearer herself: "she" already prefigured in the poetry of the Provengal troubadors. It comes as no surprise that the "Aura" (the "breeze" in Latin, exactly synonymous with anima, alma, spiritus, as well as the Greek Psyche) dies on the same date in 1348. In that year, when the great plague struck, as the 100 Years War raged on, as Petrarch's political hopes for Rome were violently dashed, his world was inexplicably dying, self-destructing. The reality and the validity of Laura is literary, epistemological, moral (or the question of morality), and psychological. Mind, psyche, soul: limbs of the Laura whose absolute human reality Petrarch could never sufficiently underscore.
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Page 140 (fig. 3) and 141 (fig. 4) from Tomasini's work illustrate sections of Petrarch's first canzone, the allegoric "Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade" (RVF 23 In the sweet season of our spring), also known as "Petrarch's Metamorphoses." Petrarch, as the anonymous narrator, is attacked by Amor, the god of Love, in a series of mythic transformations. The narrator "sings" of his woes perché cantando il duol si disacerba (verse 4, "Because song removes all bitterness from pain"), as he finds himself, for Laura, changed from a youth into a laurel (Daphne), a swan (Cycnis), stone (Battus), a spring beneath a beech (Byblis), into an echo, and finally a stag "chased by fierce dogs" (as Actaeon). The image on page 140 (fig. 3), shows Petrarch and Laura in various stances along the banks of the Sorgue, ("not the Peneus, but by a yet haughtier river", verse 48). Petrarch has just woken from a sleep, astonished to see the miracle of Laura: "Alas, what am or was I, that I must laud her as the day lauds the night, as life its end." (verses 30-31). This illustrates verses 138-139: "mi volse in dura selce; et così scossa | voce rimasi de l'antiche some" ("and turning my body to solid flint, I remained but a voice shook free from its ancient form"). On page 141 (fig. 4), Laura removes Petrarch's heart, as in verses 72-75: "Questa che col mirar gli animi fura,
m'aperse il petto, e 'l cor prese con mano, dicendo a me: Di ciò non far parola. Poi la rividi in altro habito sola," ("She who robs souls with but her gaze
opened my breast, removed my heart by hand, and warned me in verse: Say not a word of this. Then I saw her, alone, in different guise ...") |
This fifteenth-century edition of Petrarch's poetry was once thought to have issued (like the previous book) from Jenson's press but now appears to have been the work of Gabriele di Pietro. As can be seen from the opening leaf, to which the book is open, it has been treated to some extensive decoration. Such adornment, even of printed books, was often undertaken with books that presented culturally significant works. Audiences wished to make certain that the physical products they acquired displayed both their own as well as the work's elite nature.
The defacer of these Sonnets has not drawn dutiful but inoffensive thin lines through the text to indicate offending passages while nonetheless leaving them legible for the delectation of the venturesome reader. Pieces of paper pasted over crossed-out passages, found elsewhere in the volume, as well as the furious ink curlicues that cover both text and occasional lines even of commentary, make vividly clear that the perpetrator wanted these passages permanently effaced.
The defacer of these Sonnets has not drawn dutiful but inoffensive thin lines through the text to indicate offending passages while nonetheless leaving them legible for the delectation of the venturesome reader. Pieces of paper pasted over crossed-out passages, found elsewhere in the volume, as well as the furious ink curlicues that cover both text and occasional lines even of commentary, make vividly clear that the perpetrator wanted these passages permanently effaced.
This 1532 edition reprints an earlier Spanish version of the Triumphs printed in 1526. The text is in verse, translated by Antonio de Obregón y Cerecedo (16th century), accompanied by the commentary of Bernard Ilicini (that is, Bernardo Lapini, fl. 1475). The volume is open to the Triumph of Fame.
In the Canzone "Quando il soave mio conforto" (RVF 359, "When my sweetest comfort . . ."), a nocturnal Laura appears at Petrarch's bedside. He asks her "Whence comes thou now, o happy soul?" (verse 6). As she answers him, "From that serene, celestial heaven, from those sacred realms I stirred to bring you consolation." (verses 9-11), she takes from her breast "Un ramoscel di palma | et un di lauro . . .", limbs of palm and laurel. The palm symbolizes devotion to Christ; the laurel, sacred to Apollo, devotion to poetry. This figure of Laura is represented in the printer's mark to this edition.
The text on the scroll reads "Virtus dei donum" ("Virtue is the gift of God"). The text framing the printer's mark reads "Questa in ciel ci conduce, in terra honora" ("She brings us to heaven, and honors us on Earth").
Donato degli Albanazi (ca. 1326-ca. 1411) translated De viris illustribus into Italian and Felix Antiquarius and Innocens Ziletus printed the book in Pojano. They clearly intended their large and sumptuous edition for adornment by illuminators, rubricators, and others—binders among them—who would ultimately produce a physical product worthy of the book's contents (and of its owners; see, e.g., previous book). This copy of their 1476 imprint, like many other of the Cornell University Library books on display in this exhibition, comes from the Petrarch collection gathered by Willard Fiske, now the heart of Cornell's magnificent Petrarch Collection. Its printed strapwork still awaits such decorative ministrations although, in the nineteenth century, the English firm of Bedford put the book into the kind of "collector's binding" then thought appropriate for such a work. The assumptions that underlie this physical production suggest Petrarch's status—partly achieved in his own lifetime but continuing to grow even within the first century of his death—in Italian and European print culture.
The Marquis de Sade was not the only member of the Sade family proud of its descent from Petrarch's Laura. The Marquis' literary uncle, Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade, wrote often about Petrarch. His Mémoires pour la vie de François Petrarque were translated into English by Mrs. Susannah Dawson Dobson (d. 1795). The lavishly-produced volumes exhibited here present J.-F.-P.-A. de Sade's anonymous translation of Petrarch's poetry into French.
The Marquis de Sade was not the only member of the Sade family proud of its descent from Petrarch's Laura. The Marquis' literary uncle, Jacques-François-Paul-Aldonce de Sade, wrote often about Petrarch. His Mémoires pour la vie de François Petrarque were translated into English by Mrs. Susannah Dawson Dobson (d. 1795). The lavishly-produced volumes exhibited here present J.-F.-P.-A. de Sade's anonymous translation of Petrarch's poetry into French.
Guido Martellotti's "most probable hypothesis" about this manuscript—apparently the sole surviving exemplar of the Petrarchan text it contains—is that it is "a rough sketch written by Petrarch in a moment of enthusiasm for his theme, and left unfinished among his papers." Martellotti's study, published in 1974 for the 600th anniversary of Petrarch's death, relates the sketch to the life of Scipio in Petrarch's De viris illustribus.
Donato degli Albanazi (ca. 1326-ca. 1411) translated De viris illustribus into Italian and Felix Antiquarius and Innocens Ziletus printed the book in Pojano. They clearly intended their large and sumptuous edition for adornment by illuminators, rubricators, and others — binders among them — who would ultimately produce a physical product worthy of the book's contents (and of its owners; see, e.g., previous book). This copy of their 1476 imprint, like many other of the Cornell University Library books on display in this exhibition, comes from the Petrarch collection gathered by Willard Fiske, now the heart of Cornell's magnificent Petrarch Collection. Its printed strapwork still awaits such decorative ministrations although, in the nineteenth century, the English firm of Bedford put the book into the kind of "collector's binding" then thought appropriate for such a work. The assumptions that underlie this physical production suggest Petrarch's status — partly achieved in his own lifetime but continuing to grow even within the first century of his death — in Italian and European print culture.
Colonna, in the persona of Laura, to whom the work is "attributed", engages Petrarch in a lengthy tenzone, a literary joust, played against Petrarch's own poems, verses, and words. The poems so effectively censored here (and utterly illegible) are based on the order and words of the "Babylonia" sonnets (RVF 136-138), as can still be seen in the commentary.
This Stefano Colonna is not the Roman senator of the same name, Stefano Colonna the Elder, the father of Petrarch's early patrons in Avignon: Giacomo Bishop of Lombez, the Cardinal Giovanni, and Stefano the Younger. Petrarch's sonnet "Gloriosa columna" ("Glorious column" RVF 10) is dedicated to the elder Stefano, who outlived all his sons, living to the age of 100 (also of note the letter of consolation that Petrarch wrote to him in September 1348, following the death of his sons, Familiares VIII, 1). Giovanni Colonna was among the many of Petrarch's close friends to die in the plague of 1348, for whom (with Laura) the elegiac sonnet "Rotta h l'alta colonna e 'l verde lauro" [RVF 269, "The lofty column, the green laurel, felled . . ."] was written. Stefano the younger died in battle in 1347, while fighting the troups of Cola di Rienzo. Petrarch's association with the Colonna family goes back to his days as a student in Bologna, where he befriended the young Giacomo, who would be elected Bishop of Lombez in 1328 by Pope John XXII, in recognition for having nailed the excommunication of the emperor Ludwig of Bavaria to the door of a Roman church.
The Stefano of this work, Lord of Palestrina and "Roman Gentleman" as the title states, was a 16th century descendent of the same Roman family. He was a mercenary who served Cosimo I de' Medici as lieutenant general of the Tuscan army. Also a member of the Florentine Academy, he was the subject of one of painter Angelo Bronzino's most celebrated portraits.
Colonna, in the persona of Laura, to whom the work is "attributed", engages Petrarch in a lengthy tenzone, a literary joust, played against Petrarch's own poems, verses, and words. The poems so effectively censored here (and utterly illegible) are based on the order and words of the "Babylonia" sonnets (RVF 136-138), as can still be seen in the commentary.
This Stefano Colonna is not the Roman senator of the same name, Stefano Colonna the Elder, the father of Petrarch's early patrons in Avignon: Giacomo Bishop of Lombez, the Cardinal Giovanni, and Stefano the Younger. Petrarch's sonnet "Gloriosa columna" ("Glorious column" RVF 10) is dedicated to the elder Stefano, who outlived all his sons, living to the age of 100 (also of note the letter of consolation that Petrarch wrote to him in September 1348, following the death of his sons, Familiares VIII, 1). Giovanni Colonna was among the many of Petrarch's close friends to die in the plague of 1348, for whom (with Laura) the elegiac sonnet "Rotta h l'alta colonna e 'l verde lauro" [RVF 269, "The lofty column, the green laurel, felled . . ."] was written. Stefano the younger died in battle in 1347, while fighting the troups of Cola di Rienzo. Petrarch's association with the Colonna family goes back to his days as a student in Bologna, where he befriended the young Giacomo, who would be elected Bishop of Lombez in 1328 by Pope John XXII, in recognition for having nailed the excommunication of the emperor Ludwig of Bavaria to the door of a Roman church.
The Stefano of this work, Lord of Palestrina and "Roman Gentleman" as the title states, was a 16th century descendent of the same Roman family. He was a mercenary who served Cosimo I de' Medici as lieutenant general of the Tuscan army. Also a member of the Florentine Academy, he was the subject of one of painter Angelo Bronzino's most celebrated portraits.
Selections from Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae appear in Niclas von Wyle's anthology of translations, a stunning exemplar of an illustrated German sixteenth-century book. Compare the treatment of Fortune's Wheel in the Prague 1501 Czech-language translation of De remediis. Show-through from the too heavily inked verso of the 1536 Augsburg edition slightly mars the effect of the woodcut but, if one makes allowances for the problems caused by sixteenth-century technological deficiencies, this illustration can be recognized as a witty, precise, and merciless depiction of the fate of those who trust to rise by Fortuna's grace.
Donato degli Albanazi (ca. 1326-ca. 1411) translated De viris illustribus into Italian and Felix Antiquarius and Innocens Ziletus printed the book in Pojano. They clearly intended their large and sumptuous edition for adornment by illuminators, rubricators, and others—binders among them—who would ultimately produce a physical product worthy of the book's contents (and of its owners; see, e.g., previous book). This copy of their 1476 imprint, like many other of the Cornell University Library books on display in this exhibition, comes from the Petrarch collection gathered by Willard Fiske, now the heart of Cornell's magnificent Petrarch Collection. Its printed strapwork still awaits such decorative ministrations although, in the nineteenth century, the English firm of Bedford put the book into the kind of "collector's binding" then thought appropriate for such a work. The assumptions that underlie this physical production suggest Petrarch's status—partly achieved in his own lifetime but continuing to grow even within the first century of his death—in Italian and European print culture.
Sites associated with Petrarch became literary shrines. This contemporary early 19th-century view of Petrarch's tomb is from a descriptive guidebook for travelers to Petrarch's Arquà. Now called Arquà Petrarca, the town—located in the Euganean Hills a bit southwest of Padua—preserves the poet's home and tomb. He died here in 1374. Petrarch's tomb was built by his son-in-law, Francescuolo da Brossano, six years after the Poet's death.
Sumptuously produced in a humanistic hand on vellum, this fifteenth-century manuscript contains the Triumphs, the Sonnets and the Canzone, and an index. At the 1859 Libri sale, it fetched £178/0/0—a somewhat lower price than a copy of the 1501 Aldine printed edition of Petrarch auctioned at the same sale.
The book is open to a historiated initial with borders that depicts Petrarch dreaming while Time retreats on crutches. The partially defaced coat of arms visible at the bottom of the leaf appears to represent the arms of Scanderbeg impaling Albania.
It may therefore indicate that this manuscript once belonged to Giorgio Scanderbeg—also known as George (or Gjergj) Kastrioti, he organized a league of Albanian princes and, as their commander, successfully defended Albania against some thirteen Turkish invasions between 1444 and 1466; he is an Albanian national hero—or his son Giovanni.
Sumptuously produced in a humanistic hand on vellum, this fifteenth-century manuscript contains the Triumphs, the Sonnets and the Canzone, and an index. At the 1859 Libri sale, it fetched £178/0/0—a somewhat lower price than a copy of the 1501 Aldine printed edition of Petrarch auctioned at the same sale.
The book is open to a historiated initial with borders that depicts Petrarch dreaming while Time retreats on crutches. The partially defaced coat of arms visible at the bottom of the leaf appears to represent the arms of Scanderbeg impaling Albania.
It may therefore indicate that this manuscript once belonged to Giorgio Scanderbeg—also known as George (or Gjergj) Kastrioti, he organized a league of Albanian princes and, as their commander, successfully defended Albania against some thirteen Turkish invasions between 1444 and 1466; he is an Albanian national hero—or his son Giovanni.
Sumptuously produced in a humanistic hand on vellum, this fifteenth-century manuscript contains the Triumphs, the Sonnets and the Canzone, and an index. At the 1859 Libri sale, it fetched £178/0/0—a somewhat lower price than a copy of the 1501 Aldine printed edition of Petrarch auctioned at the same sale.
The book is open to a historiated initial with borders that depicts Petrarch dreaming while Time retreats on crutches. The partially defaced coat of arms visible at the bottom of the leaf appears to represent the arms of Scanderbeg impaling Albania.
It may therefore indicate that this manuscript once belonged to Giorgio Scanderbeg—also known as George (or Gjergj) Kastrioti, he organized a league of Albanian princes and, as their commander, successfully defended Albania against some thirteen Turkish invasions between 1444 and 1466; he is an Albanian national hero—or his son Giovanni.
Vasquin Phileul (1522-ca. 1582) translated the Canzoniere into French, relying on the arrangement of Alessandro Vellutello (16th century). The Triumphs occupy a fourth book. (Vellutello's commentary is used, for instance elsewhere in this exhibition, but that book is open to a map, not the commentary.) As the opening to "The first book of Laura" makes clear, Phileul guides his readers' understanding by noting the "argument" of each sonnet.
The volume is open to "De hereditatis expectatione" and "De alchimia." Note the printed capital "C". As printing methods rapidly develop, presses are able to handle multiple copies of fixed ornaments, such as initial letters. This allows for less expensive decorated editions, but contributes to the decline of manuscript arts and culture.
Like Niclas von Wyle’s translations from Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others, this German translation of De rebus memorandis is an exceptionally elaborate piece of bookmaking. Its title-page is printed in red and black and each of the books into which Petrarch's text is broken is preceded by a woodcut. The book is open to a tailpiece and highly wrought initial. These adornments are indicative of the cultural significance that sixteenth-century German readers attached to such texts as Petrarch's.
Like Niclas von Wyle’s translations from Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others, this German translation of De rebus memorandis is an exceptionally elaborate piece of bookmaking. Its title-page is printed in red and black and each of the books into which Petrarch's text is broken is preceded by a woodcut. The book is open to a tailpiece and highly wrought initial. These adornments are indicative of the cultural significance that sixteenth-century German readers attached to such texts as Petrarch's.
Written in a cursive hand, this German manuscript presents a Latin dialogue between two characters called Idyota and Sapientia. The work, although it is found in numerous early editions of Petrarch, is now thought to derive largely from a text by Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). Nonetheless, even works now only doubtfully ascribed to Petrarch influenced the ways in which readers responded to him. They form part of the tradition that constitutes "Petrarch."
"The great library of Charles Spencer, third Earl of Sunderland (1674-1722)," Seymour de Ricci writes in his 1930 study of English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts, "contained only a few manuscripts and some 20,000 printed books: it was particularly strong in incunabula (many being printed on vellum)." The Aldine Petrarch, a 1501 edition of the Rime, is a post-incunable. ("Incunables," or "incunabula," are printed books that date from before 1501; "post-incunables" date from 1501 to about 1520.) But this copy, "post" or not, comes from the Sunderland Library at Blenheim, is indeed printed on vellum, and is also a very pretty piece of early printed bookmaking from the press of Aldo Manuzio, one of the greatest printers of his time.
"The great library of Charles Spencer, third Earl of Sunderland (1674-1722)," Seymour de Ricci writes in his 1930 study of English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts, "contained only a few manuscripts and some 20,000 printed books: it was particularly strong in incunabula (many being printed on vellum)." The Aldine Petrarch, a 1501 edition of the Rime, is a post-incunable. ("Incunables," or "incunabula," are printed books that date from before 1501; "post-incunables" date from 1501 to about 1520.) But this copy, "post" or not, comes from the Sunderland Library at Blenheim, is indeed printed on vellum, and is also a very pretty piece of early printed bookmaking from the press of Aldo Manuzio, one of the greatest printers of his time.
Another issue of this same translation into Spanish of the Rime, also dated 1567, goes undisplayed. It identifies the translator as Salusque Lusitano (i.e., "from the Lusitanian, or Spanish, peninsula"). This is the same name by which the dedication to Alexander Farnese (Prince of Parma and commander of King Philip II of Spain's armies in the Low Countries) is signed, both in that issue and in this one. But the title-page of this copy calls the translator Salomon Usque Hebreo (i.e., "the Jew"; fl. 1567). The book nonetheless appears, as the title-page verso notes, "Con Privilegio del Rey Catolico" (he is listed alongside two noble ladies). That, and the attentive reading this book has received—indicated by the extensive marginal notes written in the margins of the leaves to which the book is open—suggest that a Jewish translator apparently posed no serious issues even three quarters of a century after a reunited Spain had expelled its Jews. The Bevilaqua family of printers had a long history of involvement with Petrarchan texts; see, e.g., the third, 1503 edition of his collected Latin works.
The Printer's Mark depicts the Allegory of Venice, showing Venus shackled to the Venetian Orb. The text in the scroll reads "Suspiranda omnis fortuna", that is "Sighing over every fortune", under the aegis of Petrarchan style and imagery.
Written in a "bastard hand", a hybrid script formed from Gothic and cursive styles, this manuscript comes from northern France where three different scribes worked to produce it. It contains four of Petrarch's works, as well as a work by Alphonsus de Aragon (n.d.). It is open to a small red and blue initial marking a section of Petrarch's "De contemptu mundi."
The family that would later be called the Soncinos fled Speyer (a town in the Rhineland) in the wake of a general edict of 1435 expelling that town's Jews. Assisted by Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, they eventually settled in Soncino, the town in northern Italy from which they took the name by which they are now known. There, after a stint as bankers, the family turned in the early 1480s to printing. Joshua Solomon Soncino's nephews, Moses and Gershom, assisted him in this business. The peripatetic Gershom eventually worked not only in Soncino but also in Brescia, Barco, Pesaro, Ortona, Rimini, Cesena, Salonica, and Constantinople, as well as Fano, a town in the central Italian Marches where his Petrarch appeared. Gershom published books in Hebrew but his publications also included works of Humanism, Italian literature, Christian theology, Pope Pius II's "Hymn to the Virgin," and state documents. His handsomely printed edition of the Rime—in a veritable coup against Aldus, Soncino had a new and magnificent humanist cursive typeface designed by Francesco Griffo of Bologna; the edition itself was dedicated to Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli's model of the new "prince"—was intended to stand comparison—and thus to compete with—the Aldine Rime printed in Venice in 1501.
The family that would later be called the Soncinos fled Speyer (a town in the Rhineland) in the wake of a general edict of 1435 expelling that town's Jews. Assisted by Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, they eventually settled in Soncino, the town in northern Italy from which they took the name by which they are now known. There, after a stint as bankers, the family turned in the early 1480s to printing. Joshua Solomon Soncino's nephews, Moses and Gershom, assisted him in this business. The peripatetic Gershom eventually worked not only in Soncino but also in Brescia, Barco, Pesaro, Ortona, Rimini, Cesena, Salonica, and Constantinople, as well as Fano, a town in the central Italian Marches where his Petrarch appeared. Gershom published books in Hebrew but his publications also included works of Humanism, Italian literature, Christian theology, Pope Pius II's "Hymn to the Virgin," and state documents. His handsomely printed edition of the Rime—in a veritable coup against Aldus, Soncino had a new and magnificent humanist cursive typeface designed by Francesco Griffo of Bologna; the edition itself was dedicated to Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli's model of the new "prince"—was intended to stand comparison—and thus to compete with—the Aldine Rime printed in Venice in 1501.
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One hardly thinks of Petrarch as needing translation into Italian—but of course his epic Africa, composed in Latin, was not immediately accessible to Italianate readers who lacked a reading knowledge of the older language. In 1570, Fabio Maretti "most faithfully" translated three of the poem's nine books into Italian ottava rima. This was the verse form which Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) had established as the standard for Italian romance and epic in his mid fourteenth-century poems, Il filostrato and Teseida. Its stature as the appropriate verse form for epic had been further solidified by both Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), in Orlando furioso (1516), and Torquato Tasso (1544-1594), in Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Anglophone readers may know the form best from its use by Byron (1788-1824) in Don Juan (1819-1824.) Farri printed his Italian-language translation of the Africa alongside Petrarch's Latin. |
This manuscript, written in a Gothic script, binds together three apparently unrelated works. One is a misogynist alphabet comprising quotations from classical and Biblical text. Another collects excerpts from Aristotle with marginal commentary. The volume is open to Petrarch's seven penitential psalms.
This book contains Montemayor's Diana, Alcida y Sylvano, and Piramo y Tisbe, and it concludes with his sonnets. The sonnets, however, are preceded by the Spanish-language translation, by Alvar Gómez (b. ca. 1488), of Petrarch's Triumph of Love. Gomez's translation is the only work not by Montemayor in this book. Its presence seems intended to make clear to any reader the literary genealogy of Montemayor's sonnets, rooted in Petrarch's, that conclude this volume.
A Humanistic hand has written the text of this expensively-produced vellum manuscript of texts drawn from the Rime. It contains the "Memorabilia quedam de Laura" (Fol. 1 recto.), the Sonnets Fol. 7 recto., the Triumphs, and an index.
On May 19th, 1348, Petrarch received a letter from his close friend Ludwig van Kempen (his "Socrates"). The letter is itself lost, but Petrarch noted in the flyleaf to his manuscript of Virgil (now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and decorated by another of Petrarch's friends, the Sienese painter Simone Martini, 1285-1344), the following:
A Humanistic hand has written the text of this expensively-produced vellum manuscript of texts drawn from the Rime. It contains the "Memorabilia quedam de Laura" (Fol. 1 recto.), the Sonnets Fol. 7 recto., the Triumphs, and an index.
On May 19th, 1348, Petrarch received a letter from his close friend Ludwig van Kempen (his "Socrates"). The letter is itself lost, but Petrarch noted in the flyleaf to his manuscript of Virgil (now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and decorated by another of Petrarch's friends, the Sienese painter Simone Martini, 1285-1344), the following:
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Petrarch's Italian faces Catanusi's translations into French prose. The volume is intended to demonstrate, as Catanusi (n.d.) writes in "Aux Lecteurs," why "for more than three centuries this poet has been esteemed throughout the world . . . by the greatest Princes of Europe." The "extraordinary" honors he received even "astonished himself." Not only Princes but also "les Gens de lettres" ("men of letters") regard him highly, Catanusi adds. Correct then, he remains correct now. His is surely the right note on which to conclude an exhibition that celebrates the moment when Petrarch's works embark on their eighth century. |
The scribe who wrote this manuscript, Franciscus Gennay—about whom nothing, not even work on other manuscripts, is known—signed it in four places and dated it 1409. He was particularly interested in matters that concern Bologna and Cesena. An early owner of the book came from Mantua ("Dompnus Paulus de Mantua scripsit."). These two facts encourage assignment of the manuscript's origins to north Italy. Paul of Mantua's signature appears at the end of Petrarch's letter to his brother, a Carthusian monk to whose spiritual state Petrarch contrasts his own. The book is open to the letter's beginning (f. 138v). The bottom of the leaf on the right shows repair to the vellum; above it, a reader (Paul himself?) has drawn a marginal finger pointing to a "sentence," a moral apothegm: "To beginners all things appear difficult . . ." Other Petrarchan texts, among them several of the Canzoniere, also appear in this volume. Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) is one of its previous owners.
This volume is open to the illustration that adorns the Triumph of Eternity, also called (here entitled "Triumphus Divinitatis"). Such books may have functioned as markers of status for their early owners, but those owners often paid genuine attention to the texts their books contained: they were not simply books which owners were satisfied to use as mere embellishments to a shelf, as a kind of "furniture." In this copy, such attentiveness is indicated by the handwritten additions visible to the coat of arms. Moreover, the initials of Christ have also been added, in a little cartouche, below the initials "IHS" [which stand for "in hoc signo"].
This volume is open to the illustration that adorns the Triumph of Eternity, also called (here entitled "Triumphus Divinitatis"). Such books may have functioned as markers of status for their early owners, but those owners often paid genuine attention to the texts their books contained: they were not simply books which owners were satisfied to use as mere embellishments to a shelf, as a kind of "furniture." In this copy, such attentiveness is indicated by the handwritten additions visible to the coat of arms. Moreover, the initials of Christ have also been added, in a little cartouche, below the initials "IHS" [which stand for "in hoc signo"].
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This edition of the Rime is distinguished by the stunning map of Avignon and Vaucluse to which the book is open. The map is an old-fashioned "visual aid" that attempts to give readers of Petrarch's poetry a sense of how to locate Petrarch and Laura in their home environment, to vivify aspects of the Petrarchan text and of Petrarch's life. |
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This edition of the Rime is distinguished by the stunning map of Avignon and Vaucluse to which the book is open. The map is an old-fashioned "visual aid" that attempts to give readers of Petrarch's poetry a sense of how to locate Petrarch and Laura in their home environment, to vivify aspects of the Petrarchan text and of Petrarch's life. |
Two English women (unless their names represent the single and married names of the same person, "Eliza. Tomlins" and "Eliz. Smallry")—both of them, as their handwriting suggests, of the late eighteenth-century in their dates—owned this copy of a sixteenth-century Italian edition of Petrarch. One of them (if they are indeed two different people) has appended a marginal explanatory note to her copy of this book. It reads, in part: "The famous Petrarch is the original of the kind of little poem called the sonnet, & has fill'd a whole book with them in honour of his Laura . . . "
Two English women (unless their names represent the single and married names of the same person, "Eliza. Tomlins" and "Eliz. Smallry")—both of them, as their handwriting suggests, of the late eighteenth-century in their dates—owned this copy of a sixteenth-century Italian edition of Petrarch. One of them (if they are indeed two different people) has appended a marginal explanatory note to her copy of this book. It reads, in part: "The famous Petrarch is the original of the kind of little poem called the sonnet, & has fill'd a whole book with them in honour of his Laura . . . "
These volumes—the fourth edition of Petrarch's collected works—are the first to contain his vernacular (Italian) poetry alongside his Latin compositions. Johannes Herold (1514-1567) edited this edition, which was printed in Basel by Sebastian Henricpetri. The image features the beginning of to Petrarch's Latin epic, the Africa, based on the exploits and triumphs of Scipio Africanus in the second Punic War. It is worth pointing out that while the volumes contain over 1400 pages, Petrarch's Italian works occupy fewer than 80.
This separately-published volume is one of a series that reprinted the texts established for the Basel edition. Le Preux brought them all together in 1610 as a two-volume set of "selections" from Petrarch, and made up a general title-page for the 1610 volumes. Its contents had, however, originally been printed between 1602 and 1610. The portability of this little book is obvious. What is slightly surprising is the elaborately tooled and clasped pigskin binding the volume wears. That binding is evidence, from the early years of the seventeenth century, of the cultural prestige that continued to accrue to Petrarch.
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Two editions of the Vite dating from the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reprint a history of Rome's emperors and popes from Julius Caesar (100[?]-44 B.C.E.) to Pius III (Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, 1440-1503, and Pope for a brief period in the last two months of his life). The Vite is one of several works attributed to Petrarch. One might have supposed that the author's death in 1374 would have made even the most credulous of early modern readers suspect the likelihood of his having written anything about a Pope not born until 1440. Yet this work was printed, marketed, and apparently accepted as Petrarch's for many years (like "De vera sapientia). The Vite's seventeenth-century printer notes that he follows a fifteenth-century printed edition whose authority, by implication, he has no reason to suspect. But printers might have attributed such works to Petrarch merely to promote their sale. No matter: they contributed, as did works whose authorship is now uncontested, to the impression his readers had of Petrarch. They remain worthy of attention for contributing to the ways in which the fourteenth-century author not only survived but was also made -- more or less literally manufactured -- by the works circulated under his name in both manuscript and print. |
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Two editions of the Vite dating from the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reprint a history of Rome's emperors and popes from Julius Caesar (100[?]-44 B.C.E.) to Pius III (Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, 1440-1503, and Pope for a brief period in the last two months of his life). The Vite is one of several works attributed to Petrarch. One might have supposed that the author's death in 1374 would have made even the most credulous of early modern readers suspect the likelihood of his having written anything about a Pope not born until 1440. Yet this work was printed, marketed, and apparently accepted as Petrarch's for many years (like "De vera sapientia). The Vite's seventeenth-century printer notes that he follows a fifteenth-century printed edition whose authority, by implication, he has no reason to suspect. But printers might have attributed such works to Petrarch merely to promote their sale. No matter: they contributed, as did works whose authorship is now uncontested, to the impression his readers had of Petrarch. They remain worthy of attention for contributing to the ways in which the fourteenth-century author not only survived but was also made -- more or less literally manufactured -- by the works circulated under his name in both manuscript and print. |