The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch

Petrarch’s Vision

chapter seven The ModernTouch Petrarch’s Vision OnApril 26, 1336, Petrarch climbed MontVentoux in Provence to see the view. It might not seem that noteworthy an event to a modern mind but it was one of those moments that marked the beginning of the end for the medieval way of understanding the world. Petrarch, who has often been called “the first modern man,” knew he was doing something novel. He wrote afterwards that he was the first person since antiquity to climb a mountain purely for the sake of the panorama that awaited at the summit.“My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer,”he declared with a sense of his great originality (1898:308). The climb had been prompted by an account in Livy’s History of Rome in which Philip of Macedon is said to have seen two seas from the summit of Mount Haemus inThessaly.It surprised Petrarch that commentators on this event were content to consider the possibility of such a view without endeavoring to see for themselves. This incited him to do what others had failed to do,but at a point closer to home. Hence by gazing out from the summit of MontVentoux, Petrarch demonstrated his own visual mastery of the world. Perhaps for Petrarch, who was among the first to think of the medieval period as an age of darkness, his visionary expedition was a step toward the age of pure radiance he looked forward to in a more enlightened future (Mommsen 2002: 234). Although Petrarch credited himself with keen vision, he was at first dazed by “the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of the great sweep of view spread out before me” at the summit. Almost like a blind man learning to see, Petrarch slowly distinguished the vast landscape below him,struck by the ability of sight to present clearly to his eyes places that it would take days of exertion Classen_Text.indd 147 3/15/12 2:48 PM ...