Thwarted in his love for Laura, Petrarch instead cultivated his passion for ancient Rome. As a boy, he had become enamored of Cicero and, through him, of Roman literature. How noble the statesmen of Rome seemed, how pure its poets sounded, when compared with the scheming and cacophony at the papal court. By recovering the cultural heritage of antiquity, Petrarch hoped to nudge his own society onto a new path, and he began amassing a library of ancient poets and philosophers. In this period before the birth of printing, such works were available only in manuscript form and so were difficult to find. When foreign visitors appeared at the Colonna Palace, Petrarch urged them to seek out volumes by Cicero upon their return home. He sent similar appeals to France, Germany, Spain, and Tuscany, thus creating a network of hunters for rare books.
In his readings, Petrarch frequently came upon references to works that had not been seen for centuries. Rumors spread of caches of precious manuscripts languishing in the libraries of monasteries and cathedrals. Copied and recopied over centuries, these books were gathering—and in some cases turning to—dust. Petrarch worried that many crucial texts would be lost forever. “No one can doubt that the loss of the sweet solace of manuscripts is more damnable than commerce with demons,” he wrote. Seeing these books as the delicate captives of barbarian jailers, he set out to free them.
It is a paradox of history that medieval monks, who so shunned pagan values, became the main rescuers of pagan texts. With the fall of Rome in the fifth century, the physical infrastructure of knowledge—schools, libraries, scribes—also crumbled. As monasteries began to appear in Italy, in the sixth century, scriptoria were established to make copies of texts, both Christian and classical. The work in these copy centers was often grueling, with scribes fighting boredom, cramps, bad light, and numb fingers, but, thanks to their perseverance, much of the Latin cultural heritage was preserved on parchment and stored on the shelves of ecclesiastical libraries.
Those libraries were notoriously hard to penetrate, however. Books were objects of reverence, and the fear of theft was acute. Monasteries also worried about the subversive content of pagan works and so were reluctant to let them circulate. In the late thirteenth century, however, in the university town of Padua, a group of learned lawyers—believing that a revival of pagan literature could help rescue Christendom—began visiting those libraries in search of lost treasures. The manuscript-hunting movement was thus born. It was not until the early fourteenth century, however, when Petrarch joined in, that the hunt got under way in earnest.
Despite the many hardships that travelers in those days faced—inclement weather, rutted roads, dirty inns, ruthless highwaymen, surly customs officials, the cost of renting horses—Petrarch loved to travel. (Many consider him the first modern tourist.) If, while on the road, he happened to see a monastery in the distance, he would often make a detour, saying to himself, “Who knows if there may not be something there I want.”
His first great find came in 1333. Seeking to shake off his longing for Laura, he set out on a northern tour, traveling on the great highway to Paris. Unimpressed with that city, he quickly moved on to the Low Countries, traveling north to Ghent and then to Liège. The ecclesiastical library in that city was known for its valuable collection, and Petrarch made a companion wait while he searched it. He found two orations by Cicero that he had never heard of. One was Pro Archia, a speech given in defense of the poet Archias, who had been charged with falsely claiming to be a Roman citizen. Reading it, Petrarch was captivated. Cicero, then at the height of his fame as an orator, spoke in support not just of this one poet but of poets in general. These gifted men, he declared, performed an invaluable service by providing posterity with likenesses of heroic men—not statues or portraits of their physical selves but effigies of their “minds and characters.”
To Petrarch, such statements seemed almost subversive. The medieval Church shunned glory and achievement. It prized meekness rather than strength and retreat over activism. Yet here was Cicero saluting poets for publicizing and promoting the deeds of generals and statesmen. Cicero further acknowledged that “ambition is a universal factor in life” and that “the nobler a man is, the more susceptible is he to the sweets of fame.” Rather than “disclaim this human weakness,” we should “admit it unabashed.” This echoed Petrarch’s own longing for a life of noble acts and the honors they bring.
One phrase in Cicero’s speech in particular stood out: de studiis humanitatis—humanist studies. Cicero used the term to refer to all the liberal arts that students needed to realize their full potential as human beings and to participate fully in the life of the community. This suggested a much broader approach to education and culture than that provided by the knotty manuals of the medieval schoolroom or the convoluted exercises of the Scholastic doctors.
Petrarch’s joy at discovering these long-lost works was tempered by his sorrow at their condition: mutilated, mildewed, faded, and riddled with errors. In the quiet of his study, he developed a method to correct those errors and produce a text as close to the original as possible. He had an early success with Livy’s History of Rome. This work was a primary source of information about imperial Rome, but only 35 of its 142 books had survived, and even they were badly mangled. Petrarch had at hand two copies—one from the cathedral in Chartres, the other from the library of the Sorbonne in Paris. Drawing on his knowledge of Latin grammar, classical style, and Roman history, he compared the manuscripts and, where they differed, deduced the superior reading. He also wove together Livy’s account of three different decades into a single coherent narrative. The finished version was more complete and accurate than any other version then available. With this work, Petrarch helped inaugurate the discipline of critical textual editing—an essential tool of modern scholarship, and one that Erasmus would apply to radical effect.
In his efforts to revive the Roman heritage, Petrarch decided to visit its seat. After sailing from Marseilles in late December 1336, he was in Rome by March 1337. He was dismayed to see how far the Eternal City had fallen. Its population—around a million at its imperial height—had declined to about 20,000, many of them beggars and prostitutes taking shelter among the broken palaces, collapsed temples, and decapitated columns. With a medieval guidebook in hand, Petrarch wandered amid the ruins, seeking out landmarks of Rome’s pagan and Christian past. Passing the moss-covered temples, the hovels around the Pantheon, the goats drinking from marble sarcophagi, he conjured up great moments from the Roman past: here Brutus prepared vengeance for his offended honor; there Cincinnatus plowed when he was summoned to be dictator; here Peter was crucified; there Paul was beheaded. Climbing to the roof of the Baths of Diocletian, Petrarch would gaze out on the shattered city and recall the glittering metropolis that had once been.
Back in Avignon, Petrarch found its hypocrisy and filth more repulsive than ever, so he moved twenty miles to Vaucluse, the site of a famous fountain. There, living in a simple cottage, he became one of history’s first literary recluses. His main companions were his books, which, he wrote, were like living persons to him, except that they never bored him and were always obedient to his command. He loved the serenity of the landscape—Petrarch wrote frequently of his fondness for nature—but he detested the hordes of visitors to the fountain.
Still in Rome’s thrall, Petrarch pondered how he might promote its glory. He came up with the idea of restoring the ancient tradition of crowning poets with laurel leaves on the Capitoline Hill. And he had the perfect candidate: himself. Now in his midthirties, Petrarch was largely unknown in Rome, but his reputation as a Latinist was spreading, and he worked his connections to arrange such an honor. When in September 1340 a messenger arrived with an invitation from the Roman Senate to come to the city to be crowned poet laureate, Petrarch feigned surprise, but he immediately began preparing for the journey.
The event took place on Easter Day 1341. Petrarch entered the Senatorial Palace on the Capitoline Hill and ascended to the audience chamber on the secon
d floor. There he gave an oration in which he extolled the contributions that poets can make to society. After the laurel crown was placed on his head, he recited a sonnet on the heroes of Rome, then declared himself a Roman citizen. In doing so, Petrarch hoped to send a signal to others that seeking glory was not something to be ashamed of. More generally, he sought to remind the world of the cultural brilliance that Rome had once radiated and could give off again.
Petrarch’s oration on the Capitoline Hill is commonly considered the starting point of the literary Renaissance in Italy. But another episode in his life, though less dramatic, would prove even more consequential. In 1345, while visiting the cathedral library in Verona, he discovered a codex of Cicero’s letters to his friend Atticus and several other acquaintances. (A codex is a hand-copied manuscript bound together in the form of a book.) These letters had been lost for centuries, but Petrarch knew of them from references in other works. Reading them, he was shocked. Instead of the sage statesman and eloquent orator with whom he was familiar, he encountered the private, everyday Cicero, who offered unguarded comments on political affairs, contemporary figures, his own comings and goings, and his business dealings. Cicero came across as combative, self-glorifying, vacillating, ruthlessly ambitious, and, in not a few cases, unscrupulous.
The more time he spent in Cicero’s company, however, the more Petrarch came to admire him. Written in colloquial yet engaging Latin, his letters offered an inside look at his efforts to cope with the chaos engulfing the Roman republic as it slid toward dictatorship. No less engaging were Cicero’s observations about daily life—the books he read, the dinner parties he attended, the delight he took in his country villas, and, finally, the grief he felt over the death of his beloved daughter, Tullia. Impressed with Cicero’s gift for self-revelation, Petrarch came to see him as not simply a spokesman for the classical past but a real person driven by fears, ambitions, and appetites.
Cicero’s letters showed Petrarch how the ordinary occurrences of everyday life could become the stuff of literature, and he began using his own correspondence to offer opinions about people, places, events, and ideas, with a larger audience—and posterity—in mind. In this way, he helped focus new attention on the art of letter writing (which Erasmus would further advance). More generally, Cicero’s letters fed Petrarch’s absorption with the unique nature of his own sentiments, and in his letters he offered a carefully crafted image of himself. It was an early expression of the individualism that Jacob Burckhardt, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, identified as one of the era’s defining traits.
More profoundly, Cicero’s writings gave Petrarch a new perspective on man and his place in society. The medieval Church was concerned overwhelmingly with man’s relationship to God and how the faithful could through his grace attain salvation. Cicero was more concerned with man’s relation to man. All humans, he believed, belong to a universal brotherhood irrespective of state, race, or caste (though Cicero himself owned slaves), and every individual has a spark of the divine. “Just as the horse is designed by nature for running, the ox for plowing, and the dog for running,” Cicero wrote in De finibus, “so man, as Aristotle observes, is born for two purposes: thought and action.” In contrast to the medieval values of hierarchy, obedience, and self-denial, Cicero championed civic engagement and public service. Studia humanitatis offered a curriculum through which such values could be imparted.
Because Cicero and other Roman thinkers derived most of their ideas from the Greeks, Petrarch set out to learn their language. Since the division of the Roman Empire in the third century, the knowledge of Greek had gradually faded from the Latin West. Petrarch made only limited progress, however. After one diplomat presented him with a volume of Homer, he recalled in a letter how he would sometimes clasp the work to his breast and sigh, “O great man, how gladly would I hear you speak!”
For all his admiration for pagan literature, Petrarch remained a devout Christian, believing that “on the Gospel alone” could “all true learning” be built. When he was around forty, he experienced a spiritual crisis brought on by his inability to control his physical urges, especially sexual ones. For support and consolation, he turned to Augustine’s Confessions. Carrying the book around with him, he would consult it in moments of despair. In a famous episode that took place in 1336, Petrarch scaled Mont Ventoux in Provence; on reaching the summit, he opened his copy of the Confessions at random and alighted on a passage that admonished men for admiring mountains while losing sight of their own souls. At that moment, he wrote, he began turning from worldly things. In his Secretum (“My Secret Book”), Petrarch engaged in an imaginary dialogue with Augustine. Over and over, the African bishop chastises him for pursuing fame and love rather than devoting himself fully to God. Ultimately, the Secretum expressed the conflict Petrarch felt between the ideals of medieval withdrawal and those of secular engagement, and he would spend his remaining years trying to reconcile them—to blend Cicero and Christ.
At that he would never quite succeed. As Petrarch’s piety increased, so did his prickliness, vanity, and self-absorption. While his physical fires faded, his lust for fame continued to burn, and he never found a way to square his yearning for laurels and applause with his belief in humility and contemplation. Petrarch had pointed the way toward a new vision; it would fall to his successors to define it.
Foremost among them was Giovanni Boccaccio. He and Petrarch first met in 1350, when Petrarch, on his way to Rome to celebrate the Jubilee year, passed through Florence, where Boccaccio lived. Thus began one of the most famous literary friendships in history. Already at work on The Decameron, Boccaccio began, under Petrarch’s tutelage, to write in Latin. He compiled a sprawling encyclopedia of the pagan gods that would become a standard reference work for five centuries. Catching from Petrarch the book-collecting fever, Boccaccio became a frequent visitor to monastic libraries; at Monte Cassino, he helped recover some long-lost codices of Tacitus. Boccaccio also began studying Greek and, after gaining some fluency, worked with a tutor to make rough Latin translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he presented to Petrarch as gifts.
Thanks to Boccaccio’s influence, Florence became the center of humanist studies in Italy. In 1397, Manuel Chrysoloras, a leading Byzantine classical scholar, arrived to teach Greek, and over the next five years he trained a cadre of students who helped revive the Greek tradition. In the mid-fifteenth century, a modern version of Plato’s Academy was established in the city, helping spark a new wave of enthusiasm for Platonic philosophy. Books were venerated like saintly relics, and scholars seeking fame schemed their way into monastic libraries in the hope of finding long-neglected classics. Florence became known as the Athens on the Arno, a city of freedom and refinement in which men of talent and ambition could cultivate literature, the arts, and their careers.
From Florence, the movement spread to Venice, Verona, Milan, and, finally, Rome itself. After the end of the Great Schism in 1417 and the return of the papacy to Rome, humanists were appointed to many key positions, and every bull and brief was given a fine Ciceronian gloss. Then, in 1447, Rome got a humanist pope. As a poor young scholar, Nicholas V had discovered several important manuscripts, and as pontiff he drew on the full resources of his office to expand his collection. At the time of his death, in 1455, it had several thousand volumes; bequeathed to the Church, they became the basis for the Vatican Library.
A century after Petrarch was crowned on the Capitoline Hill, then, his vision of restoring Rome to its traditional place as the center of Western civilization was becoming a reality. Across Italy, humanists congratulated themselves on having banished the Dark Ages and replaced them with an era of eloquence and wisdom; from the north, aspiring scholars came by the thousand to catch a glint of the brilliant blaze. In the end, though, the humanists fell well short of their goal. In their push to recover the past, they became enslaved to it; they did not simply study the ancients but idolized them, and much of their work was mannere
d and contrived. Rome became an arena for courtly intrigue, libelous attacks, and venomous feuds set off by disagreements over tenses and punctuation. Dependent on ruling elites for jobs and patronage, the humanists for the most part kowtowed to them. Thus wedded to the status quo, they were unable to develop a compelling alternative.
There was one notable exception: Lorenzo Valla. If Petrarch was the founding father of humanism, Valla was its enfant terrible. Of all the Italian humanists, this pioneering philologist would have the strongest influence on Erasmus. Whereas Petrarch was charming and engaging, Valla was combative and obnoxious. During his brief life (1407 to 1457), he had to keep constantly on the move to elude his enemies. Intellectually, however, no other Renaissance figure could match him.
Valla’s specialty was grammar. Educated in Greek and Latin by the top schoolmasters of his day, he used his knowledge of syntax and semantics to decipher documents and decode texts. His most famous feat was his debunking of the so-called Donation of Constantine—a hallowed document cited by generations of popes to justify their involvement in temporal affairs. In it, the emperor Constantine, on his deathbed, ceded sweeping powers and properties to Sylvester I (pontiff from 314 to 335), including control of Rome, Italy, and all of the western provinces of the empire, to be held in perpetuity by the Roman See. From the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, the Donation had been generally accepted as genuine.
Valla set out to demolish it. In On the Falsely Believed and Fictitious Donation of Constantine, he first pointed out the implausibility of an emperor’s signing away such claims, then offered a string of examples of anachronistic language in the document. For instance, it used the word “satraps,” even though this term was not applied to higher officials in Rome until the mid-eighth century. “Numbskull, blockhead!” he wrote. “Whoever heard of satraps being mentioned in the councils of the Romans?” On the basis of such blunders, Valla pronounced the Donation a forgery, speculating that it had been drafted in the eighth century to bolster the papacy’s claims in its conflict with the Carolingian emperors. (Subsequent research has borne him out.) Valla’s literary sleuthing thus helped undermine a central pillar of papal authority.
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