John Addington Symonds

“ The tendency to honour men of letters and to patronize the arts which distinguished Italian princes throughout the Renaissance period first manifested itself in the attitude assumed by Visconti and Carraresi to Petrarch.
When the jubilee of 1350 was proclaimed, Petrarch made a pilgrimage to Rome, passing and returning through Florence, where he established a firm friendship with Boccaccio. It has been well remarked that, while all his other friendships are shadowy and dim, this one alone stands out with clearness. Each of the two friends had a distinguished personality. ”

“ Petrarch’s ideal of humanism was essentially a noble one He regarded the orator and the poet as teachers, bound to complete themselves by education, and to exhibit to the world an image of perfected personality in prose and verse of studied beauty. Self-culture and self-effectuation seemed to him the highest aims of man. ”

“ In this effort to realize his truest self Petrarch was eminently successful. Much as he effected by restoring to the world a sound conception of learning, and by rousing that genuine love and curiosity which led to the revival, he did even more by impressing on the age his own full-formed and striking personality. ”

“ The point to notice in this complex personality is that Petrarch’s ideal remained always literary. As philosopher, politician, historian, essayist, orator, he aimed at lucid and harmonious expression—not, indeed, neglecting the importance of the material he undertook to treat, but approaching his task in the spirit of an artist rather than a thinker or a man of action. ”

“ When we attempt to estimate Petrarch’s position in the history of modern culture, the first thing which strikes us is that he was even less eminent as an Italian poet than as the founder of Humanism, the inaugurator of the Renaissance in Italy. ”

“ As an author Petrarch must be considered from two points of view—first as a writer of Latin verse and prose, secondly as an Italian lyrist. In the former capacity he was speedily outstripped by more fortunate scholars His eclogues and epistles and the epic of Africa, on which he set such store, exhibit a comparatively limited command of Latin metre. His treatises, orations, and familiar letters, though remarkable for a prose style which is eminently characteristic of the man, are not distinguished by purity of diction. ”

“ Much might be written about the peculiar position held by Petrarch between the metaphysical lyrists of Tuscany and the more realistic amorists of succeeding generations. True in this respect also to his anticipation of the coming age, he was the first Italian poet of love to free himself from allegory and mysticism. Yet he was far from approaching the analysis of emotion with the directness of a Heine or De Musset. Though we believe in the reality of Laura, we derive no clear conception either of her person or her character. She is not so much a woman as woman in the abstract ”

“ That he felt the beauties of nature keenly is certain, and he frequently touches them with obvious appreciation Yet he has written nothing so characteristic of Vaucluse as to be inapplicable to any solitude where there are woods and water The Canzoniere is therefore one long melodious monody poured from the poet’s soul, with the indefinite form of a beautiful woman seated in a lovely landscape, a perpetual object of delightful contemplation This disengagement from local circumstance without the sacrifice of emotional sincerity is a merit in Petrarch, but it became a fault in his imitators. ”

“ No one professed a more austere morality, and few medieval writers indulged in cruder satire on the female sex; yet he passed some years in the society of a concubine, and his living masterpiece of art is the apotheosis of chivalrous passion for a woman. ”

“ Petrarch’s inner life after this date is mainly occupied with the passion which he celebrated in his Italian poems, and with the friendships which his Latin epistles dimly reveal to us Besides the bishop of Lombez he was now on terms of intimacy with another member of the great Colonna family, the cardinal Giovanni. A German, Ludwig, whom he called Socrates, and a Roman, Lello, who received from him the classic name of Laellius were among his best-loved associates. Avignon was the chief seat of his residence up to the year of 1333, when he became restless and undertook his first long journey. ”

“ Each played a foremost part in the revival of learning. Boccaccio carried his admiration for Petrarch to the point of worship Petrarch repaid him with sympathy, counsel in literary studies, and moral support which helped to elevate and purify the younger poet's over sensuous nature. It was Boccaccio who in the spring of 1351 brought to Petrarch, then resident with the Carrara family at Padua, an invitation from the seignior of Florence to accept the rectorship of their recently founded university. ”

“ It was in this capacity of an independent man of letters, highly placed and favoured at one of the most wealthy courts of Europe, that he addressed epistles to the emperor Charles IV. upon the distracted state of Italy, and entreated him to resume the old Ghibelline policy of Imperial interference. Charles IV. passed through Mantua in the autumn of 1354. There Petrarch made his acquaintance, and, finding him a man unfit for any noble enterprise, declined attending him to Rome. When Charles returned to Germany, after assuming the crowns in Rome and Milan. ”

“ By bringing the men of his own generation into sympathetic contact with antiquity, he gave a decisive impulse to that European movement which restored freedom. self-consciousness, and the faculty of progress to the human intellect. ”

“ He began to think of quitting the world, and pondered a plan for establishing a kind of humanistic convent, where he might dedicate himself, in the company of kindred spirits, to still severer studies and a closer communion with God. ”