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.
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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.
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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.
. . . . .
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