The Three Italian Crowns

There’s a lot of Italian literary names just swirling around in my mind right now.  Cellini, Machiavelli…Castiglione, Da Vinci……Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

I’ve been reading a book of Italian Renaissance literary selections for class here these past few weeks that includes excerpts from the writings of all these great men, and I have to admit, it’s a lot to keep up with.  So today, I want to take this post here to attempt to untangle the relationship between just the last three characters in the short list I’ve italicized above – Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.  These three are referred to collectively as the “three Italian crowns.”  What I’m most interested in is what these three Italian literary greats had in common from an inspiration standpoint.

The "three Italian crowns" in the courtyard of Uffizi gallery in Florence (from left: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio)

        

Dante came first, so we’ll start with him.  Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was born in Florence to a politically active family.  He held several political office positions as a young man prior to his exile in 1302 by the Black Guelphs (a political faction that supported Pope Boniface VIII).  It was during his exile from Florence that Dante wrote his most famous and influential work, The Divine Comedy. 

The Comedy is an epic poem that consists of three parts – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.  The first part is by far the most famous, as it depicts what has now become the pop culture version of hell that we all know and love – fire and brimstone! 

Inferno also inspired the Capital Sins and Hell frescoes that line a part of the interior of Brunelleschi’s famous dome of the Florence Cathedral.  At one point during my climb to the top of the dome a few weeks ago, I was briefly sandwiched between the gruesome painting of hell on the one side and the dizzying drop to the bottom on the other.  Yikes.

Capital Sins and Hell fresco just visible on the left side of the dome.  Picture taken from the narrow walkway that runs along the inside of the cupola.

Anyways, Dante’s Divine Comedy has frequently been referred to as the major catalyst for establishing Italian as a distinctive literary language.  So…Dante is pretty important all by himself, but what does he have to do with the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio?

Well, to start with, these three men shared an intense interest in classical Greco-Roman literature and culture.  I mean, Dante puts the Roman poet Virgil in The Divine Comedy, for goodness sakes!  Virgil physically leads Dante through hell and purgatory in the poem.  Hello!!  It’s ALL about the classics here!

Petrarch actually spent a good deal of his life engaged in “…tireless efforts to locate and edit the major texts surviving from the ancient period” (ITR 1).  And Boccaccio is famous for reviving the Troilus and Cressida story in Il Filostrato (the setting for which is ancient Trojan), a work that would go on to influence the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. 

So, we’ve already established that the “three Italian crowns” shared a love for the classics.  However, in the case of all three poets, it is their works in the vernacular – Italian – that are probably the most widely celebrated today.  For Dante, it’s his epic poetry in The Divine Comedy; for Petrarch, it’s his lyric poems in Il Canzoniere; and for Boccaccio, it’s his short stories (novelle) in the Decameron. 

Whereas the three Italian crowns contributed to the revival of classical antiquity in similar ways, their contributions to the formation of the Italian literary vernacular, and the Italian literary canon, are much more unique.  Take Petrarch, for example.  His lyrical style in Il Canzoniere was quite a marked departure from Dante’s epic poetry in the Comedy. 

Alright.  So let’s get some background on Petrarch here for a moment.  Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) was born in Arezzo, Tuscany, but moved to Avignon as a young man (as his father held a clerical position tied to the exiled Papacy).  He became an authority on classical literature in his young twenties, and his Latin writings served to further his fame and reputability.  All this led to Petrarch receiving two different invitations to be crowned poet laureate – one from Rome and one from the University of Paris.  Petrarch chose Rome, “thus symbolically asserting for future generations of Renaissance humanists who flowed his model the primacy of Rome and the Latin classics…” (ITR 1).  

The work that I am most familiar with on the Petrarch front is Il Canzoniere, also known as the Rime Sparse.  This collection of 366 poems – the vast majority of them sonnets – is dedicated to Petrarch’s love, Laura.  There has been some debate in the academic world as to whether or not this Laura actually existed, but the general consensus seems to be that she did exist.  However, some skeptics still maintain the notion that Laura was only ever an idea – a figment of Petrarch’s imagination.  So, the question remains, why?  Why does it matter if Laura existed, and why would Petrarch dedicate all these poems to her…or it; the idea?

Well, maybe Laura’s physical being isn’t actually that important to Petrarch’s themes.  The introduction of my edition of the Rime Sparse situates Laura on the periphery from the outset, by stating,

“…Laura herself is not the central focus of the poetry.  Her psychology remains transcendent, mysterious (perhaps even miraculous, but that is evaded), the subject of conjecture and bewilderment except at moments represented as virtually total spiritual communion.  Rather it is the psychology of the lover that is the central theme of the book” (PLP 7)

Okay.  So Il Canzoniere is really more about the psychology behind the emotion of love, and NOT just about the romantic struggles of one pretentious Italian poet. 

Here’s where I think the second major parallel (the first being an interest in the classics) between Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio can be drawn.  The vernacular writings of all three writers serve to shed light on the inter-workings of their minds.  In the case of Dante’s Divine Comedy, it’s the layered structure of hell – and who is present at each layer – that allows us access into the correspondent layers of Dante’s psyche.  In Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere, we get to know the poet through his emotions, and specifically how he deals with the emotion of love.  In Boccaccio, it’s the dynamic between male and the female characters in a group setting where the author’s opinions shine through.

Whew.  Okay, so let’s get a really quick bio on Boccaccio here:  Boccaccio was born in 1313 in or near Florence.  He moved to Naples as a young man to become a banker, but returned to Florence in 1340.  He probably began writing the Decameron in the late 1340s, around the same time that the Black Death struck Florence.  The plague is central to the 100 novella in the Decameron, as Boccaccio uses it as a  framing device to explain why the ten storyteller main characters are together in the first place (for they have fled to the Florentine countryside to be away from the infectious cityscape). 

The Decameron is entirely fictional, but, similar to Dante’s Divine Comedy, it is based on the author’s pre-conceived notion of how human beings do treat, and should be treating each other.  Boccaccio is particularly concerned with, “…the place of religion in society and a critique of the church’s human failings; the acceptance of a hearty sensuality; the admiration for wit and intelligence; and the role of women in Renaissance culture” (ITR 61). 

I would argue that the master works of all three “Italian Crowns” are intimately tied to at least one of the four major themes listed above.  Petrarch is surely concerned with “the acceptance of a hearty sensuality”, in that he attempts to come to terms with his own sensual attachment to Laura.  And Dante is interested in “the place of religion in society”, in that varying degrees of virtue and religious acceptance on Earth give way to a hierarchically organized society in the afterlife.  So what do all of these broad themes have in common?

They’re all humanist ideals.  OKAY!  Soooo what is a humanist, exactly?  The introduction of The Italian Renaissance Reader states that as a humanist, Petrarch “showed [the people of his Age] that an individual life was significant and that a person could play many roles in the world” (ITR).  So, a humanist, it seems, is a highly involved and multi-faceted individual who is concerned with the here and now.

One of the most “in-your-face” humanist proclamations comes from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, a work that I quoted in my very first blog post as being an inspiration to me as I set out on my journey to Rome.  Mirandola proclaims man to be the master of his own destiny, in that “whatever seeds each man cultivates will mature and bear their own fruit in him…” (ITR 182).  So, a humanist is not only highly involved, but also highly SELF-motivated.  Interesting. 

Now, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were nothing if not self-motivated individuals.  They were motivated by their own love of classical literature, use of the written word as a means of expressing the inner psyche, and the humanist ideal of individual worth. 

At this point, I would like to digress for a moment and go back to Petrarch’s idealized maiden of desire, Laura.  I briefly mentioned earlier that Laura was probably real, but we can’t know for sure.  What most definitely IS real is the EMOTION – and specifically the emotion of love – that saturates Petrarch’s poetry.  Petrarch spends about two-thirds of Il Canzoniere yearning for Laura in life, but the mood changes around sonnet 264.  Laura has died, and Petrarch must now let go of his desire and transition to a holy state of acceptance in the finality of death.

So what in the world does this digression have to do with humanism, and the ‘three Italian crowns’ for that matter?!  Well, to me, the last third of Il Canzoniere is an acknowledgement by Petrarch that humanistic ideals are just that – ideals created for the fleshy, mortal, human world.  Individualism is a consolation for the living. 

As humanists, the “three Italian crowns” lived very productive lives, and left a lasting legacy on the Italian language and literary canon.  They resurrected classical Greco-Roman literature and culture, they helped cultivate a strong belief in the potential of the individual, and finally, they explored human emotion at its source – by intimately weaving their words together with their own psycho-emotional experiences.  Though they’re no longer physically here with us today, the emotion – the passion – of the “three Italian crowns” lives on.  And perhaps that’s all that really matters; perhaps individual emotion is what truly makes us…human.   

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I’ve only just scratched the surface here on the ideals that bind “the three Italian crowns” together as founding fathers of the Italian vernacular and modern literary canon.  If you would like to learn more about the topic, or simply experience a “who’s who” snapshot of Italian Renaissance literature, I highly recommend checking out The Italian Renaissance Reader (ITR), edited by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Mark Musa (ISBN: 978-0-452-01013-0).  If you are interested in Petrarch specifically, I recommend you check out Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (PLP), edited by Robert M. Durling (ISBN: 0-674-66348-9).

These two books, along with notes I culled from Dr. Quinn’s classes here at the Rome Center, and some supplemental biographical info from Bio.com, are what I used to synthesize the information in this post.

As always, I appreciate anyone who read this and made it to the end!  I plan to post one more time here in the next few days before departing for the States on Saturday! 

Grazie,

Brock