Laura de Noves
Laura is unreachable – the few physical descriptions are vague, almost impalpable as the love he pines for, and such is perhaps the power of his verse, which lives off the melodies it evokes against the fading, diaphanous image that is no more consistent than a ghost. Francesco De Sanctis remarks much the same thing in his Storia della lera italiana, and contemporary critics agree on the powerful music of his verse. Perhaps the poet was inspired by a famous singer he met in Veneto around 1350’s.[24] Gianfranco Contini, in a famous essay on Petrarch’s language (“Preliminari sulla lingua del Petrarca”. Petrarca, Canzoniere. Turin, Einaudi, 1964) has spoken of linguistic indeterminacy – Petrarch never rises above the “bel pié” (her lovely foot): Laura is too holy to be painted; she is an awe-inspiring goddess. Sensuality and passion are suggested rather by the rhythm and music that shape the vague contours of the lady.
Dante
Dante Alighieri, detail from a Luca Signorelli fresco in the chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto.
Petrarch’s is a world apart from Dante and his Divina Commedia. In spite of the metaphysical subject, the Commedia is deeply rooted in the cultural and social milieu of turn-of-the-century Florence: Dante’s rise to power (1300) and exile (1302), his political passions call for a “violent” use of language, where he uses all the registers, from low and trivial to sublime and philosophical. Petrarch confessed to Boccaccio that he had never read the Commedia, remarks Contini, wondering whether this was true or Petrarch wanted to distance himself from Dante. Dante’s language evolves as he grows old, from the courtly love of his early stilnovistic Rime and Vita nuova to the Convivio and Divina Commedia, where Beatrice is sanctified as the goddess of philosophy – the philosophy announced by the Donna Gentile at the death of Beatrice.
The Term Paper on Dante Aligieries The Inferno
My interest in the Divine Comedy was sparked in the art room in my Freshman year by a series of old Prints done on the "Inferno". Those prints have inspired me to drawings and prints of my own, and I saw this as an opportunity to get a real look at my inspiration. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265. Little is known about his early education, but scholars believe that he received formal ...
Petrarch polished and perfected the sonnet form inherited from Giacomo da Lentini and which Dante widely used in his Vita nuova to popularise the new courtly love of the Dolce Stil Novo. The tercet benefits from Dante’s terza rima (compare the Divina Commedia), the quatrains prefer the ABBA-ABBA to the ABAB-ABAB scheme of the Sicilians. The imperfect rhymes of u with closed o and i with closed e (inherited from Guittone’s mistaken rendering of Sicilian verse) are excluded, but the rhyme of open and closed o is kept. Finally, Petrarch’s enjambment creates longer semantic units by connecting one line to the following. The vast majority (317) of Petrarch’s 366 poems collected in the Canzoniere (dedicated to Laura) were sonnets, and the Petrarchan sonnet still bears his name.
Philosophy
Statue of Petrarch on the Uffizi Palace, in Florence
Petrarch is traditionally called the father of Humanism and considered by many to be the “father of the Renaissance.” He was the first to offer a combination of abstract entities of classical culture and Christian philosophy. In his work Secretum meum he points out that secular achievements did not necessarily preclude an authentic relationship with God. Petrarch argued instead that God had given humans their vast intellectual and creative potential to be used to their fullest.[26] He inspired humanist philosophy which led to the intellectual flowering of the Renaissance. He believed in the immense moral and practical value of the study of ancient history and literature – that is, the study of human thought and action. Petrarch was a devout Catholic and did not see a conflict between realizing humanity’s potential and having religious faith.
The Essay on Analysis of Petrarch’s Sonnet 134
Based on the persona’s love that is unreciprocated by his beloved, the Poet illustrates in this sonnet, an internal conflict in the persona. The wholly bitter tone establishes a holistically integrating theme of being torn apart for love and also an atmosphere of histrionic resentment engorged with Petrarch’s hyperbolized emotions. Divided into an octet and a sestet, which are respectively divided ...
A highly introspective man, he shaped the nascent humanist movement a great deal because many of the internal conflicts and musings expressed in his writings were seized upon by Renaissance humanist philosophers and argued continually for the next 200 years. For example, Petrarch struggled with the proper relation between the active and contemplative life, and tended to emphasize the importance of solitude and study. Later the politician and thinker Leonardo Bruni argued for the active life, or “civic humanism”. As a result, a number of political, military, and religious leaders during the Renaissance were inculcated with the notion that their pursuit of personal fulfillment should be grounded in classical example and philosophical contemplation.
Legacy
Petrarch’s Tomb Arquà Petrarca
The Romantic composer Franz Liszt set three of Petrarch’s Sonnets (47, 104, and 123) to music for voice, Tre sonetti del Petrarca, which he later would transcribe for solo piano for inclusion in the suite Années de Pèlerinage.
In November, 2003, it was announced that pathological anatomists would be exhuming Petrarch’s body from his casket in Arquà Petrarca, in order to verify 19th-century reports that he had stood 1.83 meters (about six feet), which would have been very tall for his period. The team from the University of Padua also hoped to reconstruct his cranium in order to generate a computerized image of his features to coincide with his 700th birthday. The tomb had been opened previously in 1873 by Professor Giovanni Canestrini, also of Padua University. When the tomb was opened, the skull was discovered in fragments and a DNA test revealed that the skull was not Petrarch’s, prompting calls for the return of Petrarch’s skull.
