Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [12]
That was not Boccaccio’s intention, far from it. His frivolous youth, during which his best fiction was produced, was succeeded by an increasingly thoughtful and even pious maturity and old age. It is a fact we have to recognize that these masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even later, waxed and waned in the intensity of their religious passions. Behind an increasingly this-worldly Renaissance veneer, there was a medieval substructure, which emerged powerfully when the veneer wore thin, as it tended to do with age. From Dante onward, these great men had one foot in the exciting Renaissance present and the other firmly in the medieval past, with its superstitions and credal certitudes.
The split personality, the Janus face, the rival tugging of past, present and future were epitomized in Boccaccio’s lifelong comrade, Francesco Petrarca (1304–74). He was older than his friend, better educated, pursued an intermittent career in the service of the papacy, then in exile in Avignon, and was a far more dedicated and gifted poet. He too had a muse, Laura (and also, while holding a canonry, sired a daughter). But while Dante was essentially an epic poet, Petrarch was a lyricist. His fourteen-line sonnet still survives as a form, and he invented others. He could compose and arrange short lyrics in sequence and gather them together in a coherent anthology. Thus he aspired to revive the cult of poetry as the highest art form, after what he saw as a gap of an entire millennium. The world recognized his efforts, and in 1341 he was publicly crowned poet on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, like his antique predecessors, though he was careful to deposit the laurel wreath on the tomb of St. Peter in the ancient basilica bearing his name.
Petrarch was directly concerned with the rebirth of classical culture by hunting down manuscripts of lost classics in old monastic libraries. It is often said that the Renaissance was fueled by the arrival of manuscripts from Byzantium. So it was. But most of classic literature had been there all the time, in crumbling scrolls and ancient codices covered with dust, preserved—if barely—by pious but ignorant monks who knew not what treasures they guarded. Petrarch was much more widely traveled than either Dante or Boccaccio. In 1333 he voyaged through the Rhineland, Flanders, Brabant and France, meeting scholars and ransacking libraries. In Liège, for instance, he discovered copies of two lost speeches by Cicero. At Verona in 1345 he stumbled on a far more dramatic find, Cicero’s letters to Atticus, Brutus and Quintus—texts that brought the great orator to life for the first time. This discovery persuaded Petrarch to take more trouble with his own letters, and he thus became responsible for the revival of another art form. His own letters were preserved, collected and edited, then in due course published. Petrarch liked scholarly seclusion as well as furious activity and gregariousness. He had a country retreat in the Vaucluse, and later at Arquà in the hills near Venice, where his delightful house, beloved of Byron, Shelley and other Romantic poets, conjures up his spirit to modern visitors who trouble to go there—it is the Renaissance itself, in brick and plaster and stone, though not without a whispering of the Middle Ages too.
Even more evocative, however, and more suggestive of what the early Renaissance was all about, are the manuscripts that survive in Petrarch’s own hand. He was not only a great poet but a calligrapher—an