Petrarch and Laura: the Canzoniere and the invention of Petrarchism

In a note written on the flyleaf of his Virgil, now kept in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Francesco Petrarca recorded two dates: 6 April 1327, the day he first saw Laura in the church of Saint Clare in Avignon, and 6 April 1348, the day she died, during the Great Plague. Between these two anniversaries unfolds the story of the Canzoniere.

Who Laura was

Petrarch never reveals the woman's identity. In the eighteenth century the Abbé de Sade proposed recognising her as Laure de Noves, wife of Hugues de Sade and an ancestor of his family, but the hypothesis is unproven. Some contemporaries already suspected that Laura was a poetic fiction, and Petrarch had to defend himself against this insinuation in a letter to his friend Giacomo Colonna.

The lady's name lies at the centre of constant wordplay. Laura recalls the lauro, the laurel, plant of Apollo and of poetic glory, the aura, the breath of the wind, and even the oro, the gold of her hair. In the sonnet «Erano i capei d'oro a l'aura sparsi», her golden hair was loosed to the breeze, these echoes intertwine in the memory of her first appearance. Love for the woman and the desire for poetic fame, crowned on the Capitol in 1341, end up coinciding.

The book of fragments

Petrarch gave the collection a Latin title, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, fragments of things in the vernacular, as if to belittle the poems written in Italian compared with the Latin works on which he based his fame. In reality he worked on it for decades, revising and ordering the texts until the last years of his life. The manuscript Vaticanus Latinus 3195, partly in his own hand, preserves its most advanced form.

The collection comprises 366 poems, the great majority sonnets, but also canzoni, sestinas, ballate and madrigals. It is traditionally divided into two parts, poems in Laura's life and poems after her death. The opening sonnet, «Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono», you who hear in scattered rhymes the sound, presents the whole book as the account of a youthful error, of which the poet is ashamed and for which he asks to be understood and forgiven.

A divided love

Love for Laura is marked by a continual conflict between earthly desire and religious aspiration. Petrarch analysed it also in the Secretum, a Latin dialogue in which Saint Augustine rebukes him for loving a mortal creature more than the Creator. In the Canzoniere this inner tearing becomes a psychology of contrasts, expressed in famous antitheses such as «Pace non trovo, et non ò da far guerra», I find no peace, and have no means for war.

The landscape of Provence, and in particular the valley of Vaucluse, where the poet withdrew to study and write, becomes a mirror of the soul. In the sonnet «Solo et pensoso i più deserti campi», alone and pensive through the most deserted fields, the poet seeks solitary places to escape the gaze of others, but Love follows him everywhere and goes on speaking to him. Nature is both refuge and witness of his unrest.

The Canzoniere became the model of European lyric for more than two centuries. In 1525 Pietro Bembo, in his Prose della volgar lingua, proposed Petrarch as the example to imitate for vernacular poetry, and Petrarchism spread to France, Spain, England and beyond. The love sonnet, with its antitheses and its unattainable lady, still bears the imprint of his lesson.