The Presence of the Past and the Shadows of Futurity: Petrarch, Vernacular Art Criticism, and the Anticipation of the Connoisseur

“On Monday, July 20, at the break of dawn, I was born in the city of Arezzo,” Petrarch recounts in a letter to Boccaccio, “a red-letter day for our people,” as it was that very morning that the White Guelphs stormed Florence’s gates in a failed uprising.¹ Due to this factional strife, Petrarch had been born in exile, although in February the following year he and his mother were permitted to move to the family holding of Incisa, just inside Florentine territory, where he spent his early childhood. Before leaving for that country estate, Petrarch would have been baptized in Arezzo’s Santa Maria della Pieve, just a five-minute walk from his birthplace on Viccolo dell’Orto (Fig. 1).²

The thirteenth-century façade has stolid Romanesque arches that in turn support three registers of rapidly rhythmic loggias; these arcades confound the eye with their vertiginous sense of upward climb and sequential dance. Adding to this dizzying profusion is the exuberant menagerie of whimsical interlacing and zoomorphic forms. In contrast, the columns of the ground register are more stately, crowned in antique Corinthian capitals, perhaps recycled from the town’s ancient Roman buildings. The portal through which Petrarch most likely entered is still watched over by a carved lunette of the Madonna in orans pose, identified by a nearby inscription as the work of Marchionne, dated 1216 (Fig. 2).

Also in the barrel of this entrance are polychromed statues of the labors of the months, cheerfully smiling their welcome to the initiates below. Precocious as he was, even Petrarch as an infant would have been unable to appreciate the elaborate decoration of Santa Maria. But the pieve highlights a key aspect of Duecento and Trecento experience, namely the saturation of one’s environs with art. In that summer of 1304, Petrarch was baptized not only into the Christian faith but into a visual world that linked ancient past with the Christian present, melded the sacred with the mundane, and enshrined the achievements of individual artists within spaces confirming public identity.

Figure 1.

Exterior façade of Santa Maria della Pieve, Arezzo, thirteenth century. Photo: author.

This ubiquity of art in daily experience should not be forgotten, as Petrarch’s encounters with art were crucial to his intellectual development. Examining his attitudes toward the visual arts forces us to consider issues that pervade nearly all his writing: how the man of skill and genius fits within a community, how fame is earned, how commonplaces from antiquity can interpret modern experience, how the present is measured by the past, and even how to conceive a literary production. Through his fascination with the arts, Petrarch developed a critical aesthetic vocabulary that he in turn applied to his own and others’ literary productions. Pondering Petrarch’s attitudes toward art lays bare the very bedrock of his thought.

Figure 2.

Madonna and Angels, Marchionne Aretino (fl. late twelfth/early thirteenth centuries), and Labors of the Month, 1216, from the school of Benedetto Antelami. Arezzo, Santa Maria della Pieve, central portal. Photo: author.

Petrarch’s remarks about artwork, scattered among his letters and other writings, do not present original insights but often are reworked ancient topoi. His aim, of course, was not to express novelty so much as to demonstrate his wide classical learning and urbanity. Taken together, however, these comments do more than provide a patina of classicism: they construct a set of attitudes about the evaluation of art—verbal and visual—that establishes the tone for Renaissance aesthetic evaluations. As influential as Petrarch may have been for later generations of Latin humanists, his views are quite derivative, not just from ancient latin writers but also from medieval vernacular ones. As the first part of this essay demonstrates, many of the observations that have been heralded as innovative, or at least as evidence of Petrarch’s neoclassical break with his contemporaries, were in...