Public Poems, Private Expenditures: Petrarch as Homo Economicus

Petrarch’s Italian poems undeniably project a view of private selfhood, almost unique and certainly innovative at their time of composition. What we consider to be “private” in this representation of selfhood is also a function of Petrarch’s labor, skill, craftsmanship, and artistry to make “public”—that is, to publish—his writing for a literate readership. As the private becomes public, however, it acquires an economic valence deeply connected to a Petrarchan aesthetics. The medieval Latin noun aeconomus or yconomus derives from the Greek oikonomos meaning “household management,” referring to one’s private ordering of income and expenditures, an administration of personal or family resources which later acquires a public application with respect to the administration of a business, a community, a corporate body, a state. I want to argue that Petrarch’s aesthetic moves from a vaguely Platonic theory based upon intuition and the power of visionary furor to an Aristotelian or Horatian concept of art as a matter of craft and mechanical skill, and that as it does so it intersects with late medieval economic theories of labor and utility value as they give way to ever more elaborate methods of calculation, quantification, and measurement in economic practice.

From the start a tension between the Platonic and Aristotelian aesthetics animates Petrarch’s fourteenth-century Rime sparse, and each relates differently to economic issues figured in the text. In Petrarch’s time, the coordinates for these aesthetics seem only barely emergent, while their economic implications appear still rooted in medieval theological assumptions. On the one hand, the Platonic formulation would correspond to an earlier, largely Augustinian view in which art, like wealth, reflects God’s plenitude and abundance as a gift to humankind, and is therefore a good. The artist’s specially privileged visionary furor reflects the natural inequality of human beings whom God endows with a variety of economic gifts and talents that are highly developed in some and less so in others, imposing on their recipients the moral obligation to use them toward productive ends. On the other hand, the Aristotelian formulation would correspond to a later, largely Scholastic view in which art consists of a particular skill or mechanical handiwork that might be exercised for profit in proportion to the amount of labor expended on it or to the degree of satisfaction or utility value inherent in it. The artist’s skill derives from training, specialization, and accomplishment, suggesting habits of thought and rational analysis deployed for purposeful gain in the public marketplace.

The differences between these views appear to be encoded in sonnets 77 and 78 in his Rime sparse, fairly precocious examples of the poet’s thoughts about poetry dating from his earliest surviving compositions in Italian around the early 1330s. At least, commentators on Petrarch’s poetry two centuries later thought it so. For one, the sixteenth-century academician Giovan Battista Gelli (d. 1563) delivered a lecture in 1548 at the Florentine Academy on these poems in which he argued for them as expressions of a Platonic and an Aristotelian aesthetics respectively.¹ Gelli was the author of several witty and parodic dialogues (notably La Circe, 1549), of a commentary on the first twenty-six cantos of Dante’s Inferno, and of seven philosophical lectures on Petrarch’s rime, and he pursues as his recurrent theme the idea of an unresolved tension between opposites that generates productively hybrid, mutable forms.²

Petrarch’s two poems set the coordinates for this argument, and both deal with a now lost miniature portrait of Laura that the fourteenth-century artist Simone Martini illuminated on parchment. The first argues that Simone must have been transported to heaven when he began Laura’s portrait.

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

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 giù del suo bel viso.

L’opra fu ben di...