Petrarch and Laura, the laurel, the breeze and love turned into poetry

Of Laura we know almost everything Petrarch wished to tell us and almost nothing of what we would like to know. For more than forty years the poet wrote about her, first living and then dead, building around her name the most imitated book of love poetry in European history. Yet the woman's historical identity remains uncertain, and perhaps it has remained so on purpose.

A date and a church

Francesco Petrarca, born in Arezzo in 1304, grew up in Provence, where his family had moved in the wake of the papal court at Avignon. In a note written in his own hand in the manuscript of Virgil that he owned, now kept in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, he recorded that he had seen Laura for the first time on 6 April 1327, in the church of Saint Clare in Avignon.

In the same note he recorded her death, on 6 April 1348, at the height of the great plague. The coincidence of dates, exactly twenty-one years apart, and the link with Good Friday, which the poet names in his verses as the day of the first meeting, show how deeply love was interwoven for him with the calendar and with religious memory.

The Canzoniere

Petrarch called his collection in Latin Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, fragments of things in the vernacular, almost belittling it. It contains 366 poems, mostly sonnets, but also canzoni, sestinas, ballads and madrigals. It is divided into two parts, the poems in the life and in the death of Laura, and the poet went on correcting and reordering it until his last years.

The book does not tell a story in the modern sense. Laura never answers the poet, and her figure emerges from recurring details: the golden hair, the eyes, the voice, the landscape of Vaucluse, near the source of the Sorgue, where Petrarch withdrew to write. Famous is the sonnet beginning «Erano i capei d'oro a l'aura sparsi», her golden hair loosed to the breeze, in which the memory of youthful beauty mingles with passing time.

The play on the name

Laura's name lends itself to many puns that Petrarch exploits constantly. It becomes l'aura, the gentle breeze; il lauro, the laurel sacred to Apollo and symbol of poetic glory; and l'oro, the gold of her hair. On 8 April 1341 Petrarch received the poets' laurel crown on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, and love for the woman and the desire for fame ended up merging in the same plant.

In the Secretum, a Latin dialogue with Saint Augustine, Petrarch accuses himself of this love as an obstacle to salvation. The Canzoniere itself closes with a canzone to the Virgin, in which the poet asks forgiveness for having lost himself in pursuit of a mortal beauty. The conflict between earthly desire and spiritual aspiration is the true theme of the collection.

Who Laura was

In 1764 the abbé Jacques-François de Sade proposed identifying her with Laure de Noves, wife of Hugues de Sade and an ancestor of his family. The hypothesis was very successful but has not been proved. Some contemporaries already suspected that Laura was merely a poetic invention, and Petrarch had to defend himself in a letter to his friend Giacomo Colonna, insisting that she was a real woman.

Real or partly imagined, Laura gave shape to centuries of poetry. After Pietro Bembo, in the 16th century, held up Petrarch as the model of poetic language, Petrarchism spread throughout Europe, from Ronsard to Shakespeare. That is why the woman glimpsed in a church in Avignon has become the muse par excellence of Western lyric poetry.