Dante and Petrarch: Last of the old, first of the new
La divina commedia di Dante, Domenico di Michelino, 1465
Less than a decade separates two of the grandest literary masterworks of the Italian Trecento. Dante Alighieri had freshly penned the last cantos of his Divine Comedy (1308-20), when Petrarch, a sprightly 22-year-old much lulled by the glory his idol’s magnum opus had earned him, set to work on a lifelong project of his own: his Canzoniere (1327-68).
This chronological proximity, as well as other, admittedly noteworthy similitudes may at first tempt the reader to place the two poetic tomes side by side, as literary sister-stars in the firmament of the fourteenth-century literary revival, and yet this would be to ignore the yawning aesthetic chasm that divides them. In style, content and philosophical intention, there is enough differing them to place them, not only in different generic categories, but indeed in different metaphysical paradigms.
Where Dante is the culmination of the Medieval Weltanschauung, the literary equivalent of pious St Aquinas, Petrarch is the brash, forward-thinking humanist. Where Dante’s view of poetic enlightenment is ascending to the Empyrean and basking in God’s heavenly light, for Petrarch, it is to scale the slopes of Mt Parnassus and flirt with the Greek muses.
The Divine Comedy is Dante’s testament to love, just as the Canzoniere is Petrarch’s, but their ideas of love couldn’t be more different. Where Dante venerates the virgin-like Beatrice à la twelfth-century trouvère – from afar, never daring to touch or even approach her – Petrarch, human-all-too-human, swings like a manic pendulum for his Laura, between adoration and malediction, never knowing at what point to rest.
Where Petrarch celebrates the pleasures of the flesh, Dante frowns upon them. Against the numerous poems in the Canzoniere that testify to Laura’s physical beauty (72, 127, 308), we can weigh Canto V of the Inferno, where Dante has trapped the ‘carnal’ in an eternal whirlwind. St. Augustine, with his stern disapproval of a life ‘lived according to the flesh’[1], hovers attentively over Dante, eyeing his every move. Petrarch, on the other hand, seems to have developed a degree of immunity to him.
Dante laces his Magnum Opus with all the dogmatic trappings of thirteenth-century scholasticism, which, in the Paradiso (Canto X), he renders explicit by introducing no less than Aquinas as first among the Church fathers. His journey through the afterlife is itself, of course, one long allegory, one that points toward a very Christian message of salvation through caritas and the Logos. He ascends toward Heaven as a humble servant, aware of his modest place in the universe, and prostrated in front of the Almighty.
In Petrarch, no such self-abnegation is noted. Where Dante’s Comedy is a pilgrim’s voyage, the Canzoniere is the journey of a poet and a lover. As he moves from one sonnet to the next, rather than flagellating himself for his humanity, he celebrates it. At moments, Petrarch’s indulgence in the foibles of the human condition reach Byronic levels. While he simultaneously bemoans and glorifies his inner demons, suffering becomes the proud rostrum from which he delivers his humanistic orations. He is like an anachronistic Romantic hero who makes a pyre of his woes and dances gleefully around the flames.
Dante opens the Divine Comedy in his famous ‘wild wood’ (selva selvaggia), and immediately the stage is set for a dark night of the soul. The wood, of course, is readymade allegory. He has wandered into a metaphysical darkness, ‘lost his way’ in the Augustinian sense of having been lured away from god’s right path (diretta via) by earthly temptations. At the height of his disorientation, he stumbles on a hill over whose peak the sun – symbol of god’s redemption – seems briefly to be rising. Seized with a vain hope, he rushes to climb toward the light, but his efforts at instant salvation are thwarted. In the words the poet Virgil, who serves as Dante’s guide through the underworld: “He must go by another way who would escape / this wilderness (Canto I: 89-90). Such a grand prize as redemption will not be so easily granted.
Contrast Dante’s heavenly mysticism with the terrestrial tone of the opening of the Canzoniere:
for all the ways in which I weep and speak
between vain hopes, between vain suffering,
in anyone who knows love through its trials,
in them, may I find pity and forgiveness. (1: 5-8)
Petrarch’s plea for forgiveness is telling; where Dante turns to god’s light, Petrarch instead appeals to his fellow man. Human errors require human absolution. It is here, in the very first sonnet, that he renders his audience and, therefore, his purpose explicit. He seeks to exult, through poetry, the beauty and savagery of the human experience, and for this he needs a reader who will understand him, who’s experienced those trials of which he speaks; a human not an ascetic.
Six Tuscan Poets, Giorgio Vasari, 1554
Petrarch’s theme is thus announced with immediate clarity; his is a journey, not through heaven and hell, but through courts and bedchambers, through streets and marketplaces. The toils and triumphs of the soul are replaced by those of the heart, mind and flesh. It is human not divine love that preoccupies him; a love that inspires and wounds rather than redeems you; the kind that – in the words of James Davidson – “puts your life off track, robs you of common sense, and robs you of sleep at night”[1]; something closer to the pagan eros than the Christian agape.
The Christian/pagan distinction here is key. Where Dante’s love is simple and monolithic, like the fin’ amore of the courtly romances or the unadulterated love of god for his creation, Petrarch’s is complex and multifaceted, almost polytheistic in composition. Where Beatrice evokes the cognates ‘blessèd’, ‘beatitudinous’ and even ‘beatified’, Laura derives her name from the laurel, a pagan symbol of wisdom and poetry.
Beatrice is remote and inaccessible, like the ideal form of love itself. When Dante finally locates her in the Purgatorio (Canto XXX), her arrival is heralded by a choir of angels. She appears in a ‘cloud of flowers’ (nuvola di fiori) with her face wreathed in an ‘immaculate veil’ (candido vel), preventing an unworthy Dante from gazing upon her. She remains silent for what seems like an eternity and, when she finally deigns to speak, it is not to express her joy at seeing Dante, but to reprimand his shortcomings:
He turned his steps aside from the True Way,
pursuing the false images of good
that promise what they never wholly pay (130-2)
She is the divine judge, a heavenly ideal neither Dante nor any human can live up to, but must always strive for.
Petrarch, on the other hand, is never quite sure where to locate his Laura, whether to exult or damn her. In poem 72, he praises her eyes as those ‘divine two lights’ (due divine luci) that ‘lead to heaven’ (al ciel conduce). Moments later, we see him cursing the very place he met her:
Forever more I shall detest the window
from where Love shot at me thousands of arrows (86: 1-2)
At times, Petrarch plunges from bliss to woe within the same poem:
Love and my own good fortune had so blessed me
with that embroidery of silk and gold
that I was near the summit of my joy
as I said to myself: “Think who has worn this!”
Nor does that day ever return to mind
that made me rich and poor at the same time
that I’m not moved by anger and by grief,
full of my shame and of my amorous scorn (202: 1-8)
At others, all he needs is a single stanza:
Sweet anger, sweet disdain, sweet times of peace,
sweet harm, sweet torment, and sweet weight,
sweet spoken words and sweetly understood,
now full of a sweet breeze, now sweetest sparks! (205: 1-4)
These last verses in particular give Petrarch the air of a chaotic, character-splitting borderliner who oscillates, in his appraisals of his belovèd, from one extreme to another, from idealisation to demonisation. This ‘human, all-too-human’ love has much less to do with Dante’s godly ideal than with the tragedies of Euripides and the deranged, manic characters of Greek myth.
Petrarch’s debt to the Ancients, in fact, was no secret; his veneration of Virgil and Cicero in particular bordered on the idolatrous. In his Coronation Oration, a speech he delivered on the day of his crowing as poet laureate in 1341, he speaks of the wordsmith’s task in overtly pagan terms, as being inspired by a “divinely-given energy” that “infuses itself in the poet’s spirit”[3] – the energy here in question being an allusion to Cicero’s “divine in-breathing”[4].
Dante, too, was inspired by the Ancients, but his relationship with pagan wisdom is much less straightforward. While with one breath he lauds their literary flair and learning, with the other he tut-tuts their blindness to christian truth. He chooses Virgil as his guide, yes, but which Virgil exactly? From the get-go, it’s clear this is no historically authentic exhumation, but a christianised upgrade; Dante’s Virgil pulsates with the theological energy of Augustine and Aquinas.
Within the broader allegorical framework of the Comedy, Virgil represents reason, but not as Descartes would have described it. This is reason as it was conceived by the Medievals: limited, fallible and not to be trusted in high-order matters like truth, where it ought to take back seat to divine word. At points, this view is merely hinted at. At others, it is proclaimed loud and clear:
He is insane who dreams that he may learn
by mortal reasoning the boundless orbit
Three Persons in One Substance fill and turn. (Purg., Canto III)
It is for this reason that Virgil can take Dante only so far. Reason alone is not sufficient for anyone to access the holiest of mysteries, to “eat of the bread of angels”[5]. Since he worshipped false gods in his earthly life, Virgil cannot see the one true god in the this one. Thus in Purgatory’s seventh cornice, just shy of the Earthly Paradise (Canto XVIII), Virgil reaches the “limit of [his] discernment”[6], and so hands Dante over to Beatrice, divine love personified:
And [Virgil] to me: “As far as reason sees,
I can reply. The rest you must ask Beatrice.
The answer lies within faith’s mysteries. (46-48)
On a related note, it is telling of Dante’s ambivalent approach to Classical learning that he should have decided to consign the great poets of antiquity, whose artistry he so admired, to limbo instead of the one of the deeper circles of hell[7]. These are the so-called ‘virtuous pagans’, who, in light of “the signature of honour they left on earth” are “granted ease in Hell out of God’s favour” (Inf., Canto IV, 76-78). Unable to bring himself to condemn them outright, and knowing he can’t redeem them either, Dante settled for a lenient middle ground.
It can with little exaggeration be said that Dante is the last of the old in literature and Petrarch, the first of the new. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a medieval allegory through and through, a culmination of centuries-old tradition that produced, among others, Beowulf, de Troyes’ Arthurian romances and the Lais of Marie de France. As was the case with his progenitors, Dante’s interest in human nature goes only as far as his theo-centricity will allow. His chief focus is not the human but the divine. Or, better – how man must relate to the divine.
With Petrarch comes a notable shift. His Canzoniere is not allegory but autobiography. It is a poet’s quest for immortality through legacy rather than redemption, a tale of human rather than divine glory. Where Dante’s poetic meter and structure are divinely inspired, Petrarch’s Canzoniere follows the ebbs and flows of the poet’s own life. If ever there was a ‘first man’ of the Renaissance, a first man of the new Europe and, therefore, of the new West, surely Petrarch would have to be it.
[1] City of God, Book Fourteenth
[2] The Greeks and Greek Love, Phoenix Paperback, London, 2008, p. 15
[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/460017?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, p. 1243
[4] Cicero: Oration for Aulus Licinias Archias
[5] Paradiso, Canto II
[6] Canto XXVII: 127-129
[7] Inferno, Canto IV
