Travelogue 1247 – 19 April
La Beltà 

Per mirar Policleto a prova fiso
con gli altri ch’ebber fama di quell’arte
mill’anni, non vedrian la minor parte
de la beltà che m’ave il cor conquiso.

This is how Sonnet 77 of Petrarca’s “Canzoniere” begins. There doesn’t seem to be agreement on which of Petrarca’s sonnets in the “Canzoniere” was written first. But I will follow the lead of one scholar, who identifies this sonnet as the earliest.

Petrarca’s first compilation of his “rime sparse”, his stray poems, took place in 1336, and it included 23 of his own poems, and two by friends. What we now know as Sonnets 77 and 78 would seem to be the first recorded into that manuscript.

The music of this stanza already feels different to me than what we have seen before. It seems softer, more melodic. It flows more naturally. It’s more personal, I would say. Dante’s love is cosmic and symbolic. Amor himself must participate. The Sicilians were courtly; their love was mystical. Petrarca’s is human.

We still must start with a classical reference, of course, in this instance to the famous sculptor of Ancient Greece, Polyclitus. That visionary artist, along with all his peers, could have gazed a thousand years and never seen the smallest portion of the beauty that had conquered Petrarca’s heart. So says the first stanza.

But, fortunately, Petrarca’s friend, the painter Simone Martini, perhaps inspired by heaven, captured something of Laura’s true loveliness.

Ma certo il mio Simon fu in paradiso
(onde questa gentil donna si parte),
ivi la vide, et la ritrasse in carte
per far fede qua giu del suo bel viso.

Travelogue 1246 – 7 April

The Colonna Connection

The Colonna family played a role in Petrarca’s life. That started in Bologna, where young Giacomo Colonna was also studying. Years later, Giacomo became the Bishop of Lombez, a town in the southwest of France. He invited Petrarca to his new see, and they became close. When Petrarca returned to Avignon, he took up residence at the home of Giacomo’s brother, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. He lived there for seven years. This branch of the Colonna family was very kind to Petrarca.

The father of Giovanni and Giacomo was Stefano, a Senator of Rome. Stefano had a brother, Agapito. The children of these two brothers would form two major branches of the family. Stefano’s progeny led to the “Palestrina” branch. It was Agapito’s line that would produce many of the famous Colonna of the future, including Pope Martin V in the next century, and including Vittoria.

When we arrive at the fateful year of 1336, where I began a few weeks ago, we find Petrarca living in Avignon with the Cardinal and finally making a first compilation of the poems that would become the “Canzoniere”.

Giacomo had already returned to Rome a few years earlier, in order to defuse a crisis between his family and the Orsini family. This feud between families had defined much of the medieval history of the city of Rome. An attempted ambush of Giacomo’s father, Stefano, had turned badly for the Orsini, and their leader had been killed. Only Giacomo’s leadership in Rome and Giovanni’s relationship with the Pope in Avignon calmed the situation.

With Rome secured, Giacomo sent his invitation to Petrarca, “Come to Rome”. This was a dream come true for Petrarca. He rushed down, via boat out of Marseilles, and via Civitavecchia. For fear of Orsini partisans, he had to sit some weeks in Capranica, north of Rome, until Giacomo could come with troops to fetch him.

He found Rome glorious. He wrote to the Cardinal, “You may well be looking for an outpouring of eloquence now that I have arrived in Rome. Well, I have found a vast theme, which may serve perhaps for future writing ; but just now I dare not attempt anything, for I am overwhelmed by the miracle of the mighty things around me, and sink under the weight of astonishment.”

The theme was the life of Scipio Africanus, hero of the Second Punic War, and this theme would form the substance of his work, “Africa”, a long epic poem in Latin about the man and about the ancient republic. Though Petrarca never finished this poem, it became his most famous project, and it formed the basis for his claim to be named Poet Laureate five years later.

Travelogue 1245 – 1 April

Morality

Arthur Miller said once in an interview that what distinguished the great playwrights through time was a “fierce moral sensibility”. He said that that sensibility was “unquenchable”.

I find that interesting. It would imply that the not-so-great playwrights, like me, have at least the ambition of a “moral sensibility”. I would not have thought so.

In the 1990s, one could still speak of morality without blushing. Miller himself had survived one of the great moral reckonings of the American polity, the postwar Communist scare. While sorting the new world order – the one Trump is so busy disassembling, – some Americans had nothing better to do than inventing conspiracies involving Russian spies and saboteurs lurking around every corner.

Morality has lost some of its stature. It’s unfashionable. On the right, American primacy is amoral. America is good just because it’s America, a kind of circular, sola fide argument from modern nationalism. Connoisseurs on the left have found morality too distastefully bourgeois to entertain. Artists have used morality as a whipping boy for generations. At a time when dusty, old-time morality could come in handy, we struggle with it, like with a bulky sweater from the bottom of the drawer.

When I was young, I might have followed those trends. Morality was for simple minds. But life grinds slowly and patiently on, and the precious intellectual spaces we create end up under its wheel some time. Every choice becomes a moral one. To the extent that I am a philosopher at all, I realise that I am a moral philosopher. Metaphysics have come to bore me. The human project seems the valid one. And morality unfolds with increasing complexity. Aesthetics and rhetoric become moral sciences, our choices and our connections with others.

Doesn’t metaphysics follow moral thought, anyway? Physicists have established that observation shapes reality. And we have found ourselves stuck on the wave-vs-particle conundrum for a half-century or more: what is the nature of a photon or a subatomic unit? It seems it can be both, or either. If it’s a particle, it’s a thing; if it’s a wave, it’s an event.

For most of its history (the time we have been aware of it), the atom has been a thing. We are materialists, and I suppose it took a materialistic society to analyse things, to want to break them down into their composite parts. We discovered nothing moral down there, in the depths of the atomic and sub-atomic … until we discovered that things might be (quantum) events. In the shift, there is a challenge. Inside an event is an action, and inside action is a decision. Plato might disagree that there is no decision in things, but we have lost any sensitivity to that.

Is there a decision inside quantum events? Who knows, but there might be an opportunity in thinking so.