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.

Travelogue 1244 – 29 March
The Foundering Ship

I interrupt the story of the man whose spirits were strong, a man who may have been heart-broken but who was not a sad man but, rather, a hopeful man, I interrupt to ask myself the question, why did I pick up the Richard Ford novel at the library?

Maybe it was an acknowledgement that I had failed in writing sad. A month ago, I had tested myself on a new script. It was born of a sad thought but failed to capture sadness in its language. Ford is a bona fide sad writer. It is in his language, something in his technique, inherited from Hemingway and Carver, crafted by hand. Maybe he is a happy man. Cheerful Petrarca wrote about heartache, in language that resonated for centuries.

Maybe reading Ford is for me a tender regard for sadness. Deep sadness doesn’t wash out with moods. It abides, as the Dude might say. It doesn’t succumb. The body succumbs, or the mind, before sadness does.

I haven’t finished reading the book; analysis is premature. There is an early moment that fascinates me. The overarching plot is about the dissolution of a marriage, but the moment of change is poignantly placed outside the arena of play. The husband is accused of stealing at his job, and he is fired. Later they admit they were wrong, and they offer to take him back, but he refuses. He won’t consider it. He drifts, and he thinks about other pursuits. The character is something of a meditative.

Baby Jos went through a phase of fascination with tornadoes a few years ago. I found an old drawing in pen of a tornado. She had cut the drawing out in the tornado, so there is only the spiralling winds of the tornado and, beside it, a small sailing ship. I keep that little drawing inside my laptop now, and I set it beside my screen while I write.

Travelogue 1243 – 25 March
His Twenties

Some ten years passed between meeting Laura and the first compilation of the poems that would eventually become il “Canzoniere”, the Book of Songs, the collection of Italian sonnets that would shape poetry for centuries. How did Petrarca spend those years?

He had two missions in his twenties. First, to study and write. Early on, freed from his father’s rule, he traded his study of law for the minor orders in the church, trading one career path marked for medieval intellectuals for the other. He read. He studied extensively: ultimately, his mastery of the Latin canon was nearly unmatched. He looked for guidance among the collected wisdom in Avignon. There was plenty to be had in the new papal enclave. It had quickly become an intellectual centre, following the Pope Clement V’s move there in 1309. He sought out mentors. He reminisces in later life about an old man from Florence, one Giovanni, an advisor to the pope, who urged him never to be discouraged. The road to good scholarship was a long one.

Petrarca wrote. Before he had written his first sonnet to Laura, he had already made a reputation for himself as a poet, locally (in the birthplace of the great Provençal tradition) and even among some in Italy. None of those early poems survive. When Petrarca compiled his first version of the Canzoniere, he destroyed everything that came before.

He travelled. Petrarca has been called the first tourist. Wherever he went, he stopped in monastic libraries and searched through ancient manuscripts. His early travels are in the north. In Liege, “hearing that there was a good quantity of books there, I stayed and detained my companions while I copied out one of Cicero's speeches with my own hand and another by the hand of a friend, which I afterwards published throughout Italy. And to give you a laugh, I may tell you that in this fine barbaric city it was a hard matter to find a drop of ink, and what we did get was exactly the colour of saffron."

In Paris, in 1333, he discovered a friend in Dionigi from Borgo San Sepolcro, which was a village near Arezzo, Petrarca’s birthplace. Dionigi was a friar and scholar, who taught philosophy and theology. He was an Augustinian friar, and he introduced Petrarca to the saint that would inspire a lifelong devotion, to St Augustine. He gave Petrarca a copy of the “Confessions” that the poet would treasure the rest of his life.

There were Italians everywhere; they provided scholars, artisans, soldiers, and churchmen for many courts in Europe. Working in Avignon and having studied in Bologna, Petrarca had a far-flung network that he could tap.

Travelogue 1242 – 12 March
Laura

The story starts in the church of Sainte-Claire in Avignon in France. Our young man, not more than 23 years old, catches sight of a beautiful woman during a service.

It was April 6, 1327, and our hero had just experienced two life-changing events within the past year, the passing of his father and the completion of his training in law at the prestigious faculty at Bologna. He was back in Avignon, working as a clerk somewhere among the ranks of church hierarchy gathered in the city. The papacy had moved to Avignon in 1309, and Petrarca’s father had followed a few years later, because he was a notary and needed the work. His father had been friendly with Dante, but Dante had been exiled from Florence some years earlier, and Petrarca had never met him.

So Francesco catches sight of Laura, and it’s one of history’s great stories of love at first sight, and also of unrequited love. Laura is married. Petrarca tries to court her, but she refuses him. It is both important and not important to us who the real Laura is. It’s the ideal Laura that we encounter. What follows the fateful encounter at church is nearly half a century of Petrarca’s writing life and then centuries of admiration via his poetry.

It is likely that Petrarca’s Laura was a woman named Laura de Noves. We know of her because she was aristocracy, married to a count. There is at least one portrait still existing of the real Laura de Noves, beautiful, modest, blonde. She died in the first wave of the Plague.

But Laura the ideal has never passed away. This unique creation, somewhat chivalric in origin, but developing into something very human and individual, does indeed endure the way Petrarca predicted. Literature has sent forth a raiding party to retrieve the soul. Poets will now tend for the welfare of the animating spark.

Perhaps it begins when Dante writes that Virgil, an ancient poet, has led him through Christian hell, and that Beatrice, his chivalric ideal, has led him through heaven. And we are led to question whether Beatrice lives on because she is in heaven or because we are reading about her. Dante has posed us this question.

Petrarca poses us a slightly different question, something humbler, less heroic: might beauty be enough? Might a pure heart be enough? Might a lover’s devotion be enough? Would these small things save the soul of the beloved?

Shakespeare writes of his own ideated love in Sonnet 18,

“But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
    So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

By “this” he means the poem. The prestige of the artist and the artwork has grown through the Renaissance. Shakespeare is familiar with Petrarca, even if only indirectly. Renaissance proteges have played their part, poets like Vittoria Colonna.

Travelogue 1241 – 5 March
The Rhetorician

A century after its inception, the sonnet found its master. This is someone unavoidable, a figure dead centre in the road of cultural history, the indispensable man. Though one wouldn’t want to lose Dante, one could, and history would flow past him with barely a ripple. But one couldn’t tell our story without Francesco Petrarca, the father of the Renaissance, the first humanist, and the consummate poet.

I wrote a forgettable thesis about Petrarca at university, in my baccalaureate days, and he has haunted me since. Even after reading about him for months, I sense that I didn’t really understand him. His legacy is complex. His persona is complex. He is the fox to Dante’s lion. Where Dante stood tall, stood alone, stood proudly; Petrarca sought out company, linked arms with others, chatted, lectured, and sang.

It is meaningful for history that Petrarca was simply a more congenial man, someone who cared about and cultivated the opinion of others. He became the first modern poet laureate by courting important people across Italy and charming them, by exciting them with ideas. He was persuasive. He was a rhetorician. He revived the study of Cicero, one of the great rhetoricians in European history. To study Renaissance intellectual history is to study ancient Greek and Roman history. To the ancients, rhetoric was the linchpin of education. It was fundamental to politics; it was a tool in social advancement.

We in our time say we don’t like rhetoric. We are suspicious of it. Even as we make up the most manipulated societies of all time, swimming in floods of persuasion, drowning in advertising and targeted messaging, though we are subject to psy-ops nearly every day of our lives, we turn our noses up at the word “rhetoric”. It seems “inauthentic” to engage in formal rhetoric. I guess we would know from inauthentic, living in the Trump era.

The truth is, rhetoric can be a tedious study, boring. So is math, but we would never eliminate math from our curriculum. Instead, we dropped rhetoric and civics. We think we have grown beyond these topics. Never mind that in two generations, we have lost all feel for how we are governed, how our own government works; never mind that we are inarticulate in the face of oppression. Never mind that Donald Trump, a man forcing a national dialogue about dementia; a man who cannot finish a sentence; a man whose vocabulary is that of a middle-schooler; a man who cannot make an intellectual case for any one of his devastating policies, and has recourse only to primitive emotional ones; that this man is called, with great seriousness, a “great communicator”.