Chapter 3

Petrarch’s Vestigia and the Presence of Absence

Many works of the ancients have become fragments.

Many works of the moderns are so at their origins.

—Friedrich Schlegel

The surge of Roman renovatio described in chapter 2 started in the 1420s, about two generations after Petrarch (1304–74). Living on the cusp between the late medieval and the early humanist worlds, Petrarch repeatedly lamented that he was born at the wrong time: “It would be better to be born either earlier or much later, for there was once and perhaps will be again a happier age. In the middle, you see, in our time, squalor and turpitude have flowed together.”1 Any study of Renaissance ruins must chronologically begin with Petrarch, for he was one of the first thinkers in the postclassical age to recognize that the signs of antiquity were scattered, dispersed, and mutilated, which necessitated their reconstruction and renovation. In this chapter I argue that Petrarch’s existential encounter with the past can be conceived of as an investigation, a search for vestigia—traces, footprints, remnants, ruins. He searched by creating poetic works that traced the vestigia of his predecessors, above all Dante and Virgil; in turn his successors paid homage to him through imitation and emulation, creating the phenomenon known as Petrarchism. In his letters and dialogues he ceaselessly meditates on the relics of antiquity and the composition of the self. Thus the poetics of ruins for Petrarch is one in which his reflection on the ruins of Rome broadens into a meditation on lost time. This discourse prompts him to compose fragmentary works that attempt to recollect his scattered self.

Intellectual historians of the Renaissance have long seen Petrarch as the forerunner of historicism and the emergence of the modern self.2 Scholars in textual criticism have long explored how Petrarch spearheaded the humanist enterprise of gathering and collecting fragments.3 In the past generation scholars in literary criticism have been attuned to the fact that in Petrarch’s verse he himself is fragmented and composed in fragments.4 My chapter brings these strands of criticism into conversation. In order to fully understand Petrarch, one must be attentive to his thoughts on ruins, for his passion for architectural fragments is symptomatic of a larger worldview that saw the world in fragments. For Petrarch poetry and ruins exist in a state of interplay, so that ruins prompt poems and poems give ruins a voice. That is why I have chosen vestigium as my entry point, for the word embraces forms of ruins beyond that of buildings and taps into the larger humanist world of present absences—a space in which the nonexistence of a thing is marked by and felt more strongly than its residual signs.

Born in exile, haunted by his love for the unattainable Laura, far away from his dead and living friends, Petrarch experienced loss as the fundamental condition of life. In one letter he says he is habituated to loss: “You will surely not deny that even absence itself has its pleasures unless perhaps we restrict all the beauty of friendship (which is indeed great) to the eyes alone and if we separate it from its abode which is in the mind” (Fam. 2.6).5 If we use vestigia (almost always in the plural) as a vector through his writings, Petrarch’s lexicon reveals a self that is fragmented by his experience of the past and a desire to repair the ravages of time by employing the contemplative exercise of writing. In the end, I want to argue, a Petrarchan poetics is nothing if not a metaphysics of impossible yearning—a yearning for a direct, unmediated encounter with an idealized object, whether it be the broken city of Rome, his spectral Laura, a faraway friend, or the tattered manuscripts of Cicero. Indeed, as the quotation suggests, since beauty in the flesh is not possible, it is up to the mind (anima) to re-create it. With the faculties of his imagination and memory, Petrarch strives to create a dimension of praesentia in which vestigial phenomena become tangible in the here and now.6

In the pages that follow we see a writer who encounters the world through a dense network of persistent vestigia. After a brief semantic history of vestigium, I argue that Petrarch’s search for Laura’s footprints in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is guided by a dissembling imitation of Dante’s work. We will see how in his epic, the Africa, Rome as a city is textualized and made whole through a careful reworking of its predecessors, Virgil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Pharsalia. I notice the kinship between contemplating ruins and writing letters in Petrarch’s epistles, which are modeled after Cicero’s, and I offer some thoughts on the relationship between gathering the fragments of Petrarch’s self in the Secretum and collecting the fragments of ancient manuscripts in his “Letters to Dead Authors.” As Schlegel says, “Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are so at their origins.”7 As Petrarch was the pivotal figure in recognizing the temporal disjuncture between antiquity and modernity, no man felt more deeply the pathos of textual and existential fragmentation.

The Traceless Etymon

In the Etymologiae Isidore of Seville writes, “Footprints [vestigia] are the traces of the feet imprinted by the soles of those who went first, so called because by means of them the paths of those who have gone before are traced [investigare], that is, recognized.”8 Yet the origins of vestigium itself are unknown, its own traces vanished. According to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, the word has some eight definitions, the most pedestrian being an index of absence, “a footprint, (in pl. also) track (left by a human being or other creature).”9 The word can be taken simply as “an imprint” or figuratively as “a mode of behavior regarded as an object of imitation or example.” It tracks celestial movement, “the path or orbit of a heavenly body,” as well as terrestrial evidence, “a visible trace or remnant of something which no longer exists, a trace or indication of the presence at any time of a person or thing.” And it has a temporal sense, “an instant in time,” when used in the phrase vestigio temporis. Vestigia can be diachronic or synchronic, material or formal, visible or invisible. They make us think of the past as a passing, whether they appear as simulacra that efface their originals or images that are shadows of their Idea.

In its figurative sense the word can connote imitation or emulation. Quintilian uses it as a model for the craft of eloquence: “Beginners should be given the material predigested, as it were, according to their individual powers; when they seem to have formed their style sufficiently on their model, brief hints [brevia vestigia] only should be given to them—a sort of track which they can follow and then proceed along under their own power without help” (Inst. 2.6.5). The Roman orator establishes a pedagogical principle of progression: capable students need not be given a complete set of examples to slavishly follow, only brevia vestigia, “brief hints,” as heuristic pointers.

As Gian Biagio Conte and Thomas M. Greene have taught an entire generation, imitation was the inexhaustible engine of literary creation in classical and Renaissance literature.10 The analogy of creative imitation as following in the footsteps of the past, in contrast to the well-known Senecan simile of writers as bees, offers a temporal model of a trajectory rather than a wandering, digestive model of incorporation.11 In this view literary development is achieved by retracing and surpassing previous vestigia by means of poetic imitation. Statius famously employs the word at the end of his Thebaid as an apparently fulsome compliment to his predecessor: Vive, precor; nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora, “Live, I pray; and tempt not the divine Aeneid, but ever follow her footsteps from afar in adoration” (12.817). Though Statius here conjoins the poetics of imitation with the rhetoric of veneration, it is certain that such tribute also implies a game of one-upmanship, given that he had just spent the previous twelve books remaking an ancient Greek tragedy in Latin verse. As we will see later, Petrarch, in his bid to become a Latin epic poet, in fact bypasses the footsteps of Virgil in favor of his forefathers Homer and Ennius. In this one move Petrarch pays respect to Virgil through his very exclusion. In a letter to Boccaccio he writes, “It is silly to trust only the ancients. The early discoverers were men too. If we should be discouraged by following too much the tracks of our predecessors [si virorum vestigiis deterremur], we should be ashamed” (Seniles 2.3).12

In the Middle Ages vestigia moved from the traces of the past to traces of the divine. Bonaventure writes in Itinerary of the Mind toward God, “The world is itself a ladder for ascending to God, we find here certain traces [vestigium], certain images, some corporeal, some spiritual, some temporal, some aeviternal; consequently some outside us, some inside.”13 The goal of his spiritual exercise is to move from these faint traces to certainty so that we may be drawn closer to the divine.

The use of vestigia in these rhetorical, epic, and theological examples is obviously figurative. In its literal sense vestigium’s closest ancient Greek equivalent is ichnos, also meaning “a track” or “footstep.” In Vitruvius’s De architectura, a text not rediscovered until 1414 by Poggio Bracciolini, “ichnography” is one of the modes of representation, a compound of ichnos (print) and graphe (writing).14 In this sense a tracing exists before an building, since the graphic marks on the architect’s sheet are the basis for the construction to come. In Guarino Guarini’s 1686 Disegni di architettura civile ed ecclesiastica the ground plan of a church is identified as vestigium S. Laurentii taurini.15 Conversely the draughtsman and engraver Étienne Du Pérac calls his drawings of Roman ruins I vestigi dell’antichità di Roma (1575). Likewise the title page of Piranesi’s 1678 Vedute of Rome reads, URBIS AETERNAE VESTIGIA E RUDERIBUS TEMPORUMQUE INIURIIS VINDICATA. Tracing thus has two important temporal connotations in architectural drawings: the prelife and the afterlife of a building. In a building’s ichnographic prospective, one could say, is already contained the projection of its liminal afterlife. As Louis Marin remarks, “The outline on the ground at the surface level is nothing but the trace that would be left by the building if it were to be destroyed by time, by the violence of meteors or men.”16 In this jagged equivalence of vestigia as foreshadowing and vestigia as detritus, past and future are telescoped; origins and end meet.

As such, the ruin has an analogous, though not entirely compatible meaning with vestigia. Vestigia are synecdoche, whereas the ruin is the image itself. Vestigia in the strict definition are formal, whereas the ruin is usually material. The ruin is an effaced semblance—the face—though it can also certainly be a part, or the “foot” of the building, as it were. Giuseppe Mazzotta has written, “Because ruins suspend the principle of identity and show that the past is out of reach, they are the material signs of time as it effaces all signs, emblems of a difference made materially immanent.”17 The ruin was the monument, as the old man was the young man.

Verbal Footsteps

Francis Bacon writes in the De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), “Certainly words are the footsteps of reason, and the footsteps tell something about the body.”18 Words themselves are only linguistic traces that contain a partial approximation of a thinker’s idea. They are also but a residuum of their historical environment. Carlo Ginzburg’s classic essay, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” maps out an investigative methodology in which observing minuscule visual details, unintentional evidence, and linguistic slips in the manner of Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes, and Freud reveals the sources of an artwork, a crime, or a psychic disturbance.19 The Italian word he uses is spie, but vestigia too captures Ginzburg’s methodology.

The verb vestigare encompasses Ginzburg’s two meanings: the search for traces and the search for something by means of traces. Thus the object of inquiry and its methodology are perfectly aligned. Vestigium is thus both model and method. In ancient rhetoric sequi vestigia is a poetic means of production, imitatio, whereas in humanist practice vestigare could be said to be the philological principle of recovery, constitutio. They have divergent goals: the first is to create something artistically new while gesturing toward the old; the second is to construct a critical edition that approximates the original as closely as possible.

Hence I wish to posit a deep analogy between the hermeneutics of ruins and the linguistics of vestigia. Contemplating a ruin and analyzing a word engage in the hermeneutic principle that posits understanding within a particular “horizon” that is determined by our own historical coordinates. We trace Petrarch’s vestigia as he traces the vestigia of the ancients and Laura. Any historical interpretation must wrestle with the fragments of the past, whether they be effaced inscriptions on an arch or the obscured lines of a text. In the conclusion of his chorographic treatise on mountains, woods, and rivers, De montibus, Boccaccio writes that it is sometimes possible to guess the ancient names of places from their current vulgar names, but “in other cases, it is especially necessary to divine from the vestiges the things that cannot be followed, but I do not want to teach that now.”20 What cannot be deduced empirically must be intuitively “divined,” and that, for Boccaccio, does not seem like something that can be taught anyway. That is why he does not want to talk about it.

Petrarch likewise recognizes that much of the past has vanished and that which remains is difficult to decipher. We will see that to understand the self too one must recover its past through reflection, something equally problematic. Vestigia is thus the perfect word to encapsulate Petrarch’s philological and spiritual hermeneutics.

Laura’s Footprints

In Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the two senses of vestigia—literal footprints and models of imitation—operate in tandem on a literary and metaliterary level. The footprints are Laura’s and the model is Dante’s. Each poem documents Petrarch’s vain search for Laura from the traces of her orme, “footprints.” Petrarch’s poetry begins with the imago of Laura born from the moment of the innamoramento, supposedly on Good Friday, 6 April 1327, in the Church of St. Claire in Avignon. Her scattered footprints evoke her original presence, and the entire narrative within the collection is the repeated attempt to capture this singular being. As Robert M. Durling writes, “Absence is an experience of scattering, presence one of synthesis; the image of Laura in the memory is a principle of integration.”21

Petrarch’s great predecessor in writing about an unrequited love, of course, is Dante. The relationship of the two poets has been the basis of lively debate in Italian literary studies since Natalino Sapegno’s “Tra Dante e il Petrarca” and Giuseppe Billanovich’s “Tra Dante e Petrarca.”22 Gianfranco Contini, in his influential “Un’interpretazione di Dante,” argues that the presence of the Commedia in literary history is so deep that its influence works on a level of involuntary mnemonics, echoing Petrarch’s own admission of ab ignorante, where the presence of a resonant word signals a “memory-click” through thematic analogy or scattered interference.23 Paolo Trovato has meticulously documented the “dantismi” in the Fragmenta.24 For Marco Santagata, Dante is Petrarch’s maestro negato, ignored and disavowed master.25 And the collection Petrarch and Dante explores the various themes of theology, “anti-Dantism,” and poetic rivalry.26

My contribution to this tradition is to map the differences between the semantics of vestigia in Dante and Petrarch as indicative of their divergent worldviews. For Dante vestigia are the scattered traces of a fallen world that one must absolve and transcend.27 So too for Petrarch, but he immerses himself in and indulges in them, finds consolation from them, and seeks to make them immanent. In this section I trace the trajectory of his movements in the Fragmenta through some instances of vestigio and its forms. The absent presence of Laura gives us the occasion to think about the operation of Petrarch’s desires and his way of articulating them through the traces of Dante.

Petrarch’s tracking of a beloved’s footprints has an immediate poetic precedent in Dante: toward the incandescent end of Paradiso, moments before he is to receive his divine revelation, the poet gives thanks to Beatrice for aiding him in his journey: “O lady who gives strength to all my hope and who allowed yourself, for my salvation, to leave your footprints there in Hell,” O donna in cui la mia speranza vige, / E che soffristi per la mia salute / In inferno lasciar le tue vestige (Par. 31.80–81). Toward the penitential conclusion of the Fragmenta, Laura comes to Petrarch in a dream and announces, “From the cloudless empyrean Heaven and from those holy places I have come, and I come only to console you,” Dal sereno / Ciel empireo et di quelle sante parti mi mossi, et vengo sol per consolarti (Rvf 359.9–11). The pathos of these lines is in the monosyllabic “sol”; Beatrice offers Dante salvation, whereas Laura offers only “consolation” and nothing more. Laura’s footprints never actually lead to her embodied presence, only an oneiric phantasm. In the final moments of the Fragmenta there is only regret for lost time. Christian Moevs explains, “For Dante the self is metaphysically rooted in a non-contingent reality, for Petrarch it is an evanescent locus of thought and desire, irreducibly other than both God and the world.”28

The first appearance of vestigio is in Rvf 35:

Solo et pensoso i piú deserti campi

vo mesurando a passi tardi et lenti,

et gli occhi porto per fuggire intenti

ove vestigio human la rena stampi. (1–3)29

Alone and filled with care, I go measuring the most deserted fields with steps delaying and slow, and I keep my eyes alert so as to flee from where any human footprints marks the sand.30

The poetic conceit of this sonnet ostensibly is that Petrarch the lover flees from the social world, where nobody understands him, and escapes to the “mountains and shores and rivers and woods,” monti et piagge / et fiumi et selve (lines 9–10), natural surroundings that mirror his internal desolation. Nevertheless he remains unable to escape the personified, omnipresent Love, who accompanies him incessantly: “Love . . . always comes along discoursing with me and I with him,” Amor . . . sempre / ragionando con meco, et io con lui (lines 13–4).

It seems that Petrarch cannot escape the vestigie of his predecessor in the vernacular either. On the textual level the sonnet resonates subtly yet unmistakably with the sounds of Dante. Passi tardi et lenti echoes che giva intorno assai con lenti passi of Inferno 23.59 and Noi andavam con passi lenti e scarsi of Purgatorio 20.16. Aspre and selvagge correspond to esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte of Inferno 1.5, and Non han sì aspri sterpi né sì folti / quelle fiere selvagge of Inferno 13.7–8. The sonnet suggests that after Dante, try as one might, there is no way to talk about Love except through him, for even the conceit of ch’Amor non venga sempre ragionando con meco corresponds to Dante’s own Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia.31 The difference between the aspre and selvagge woods of Dante and Petrarch is that, in Dante, they are a site of error and confusion, whereas for Petrarch they are the sylvan sources of refuge and comfort.

In a well-known letter to Boccaccio in Fam. 21.15, Petrarch discusses the vexed issues of conscious and unconscious influences:

This one thing I do wish to make clear, if any of my vernacular writings resembles, or is identical to, anything of his or anyone else’s, it cannot be attributed to theft or imitation, which I have avoided like reefs, especially in vernacular works, but to pure chance or similarity of mind, as Tullius calls it, which caused me unwittingly to follow in another’s footsteps [iisdem vestigiis ab ignorante concursum].32

Answering the charge leveled against him that he disparages the author of the Commedia, Petrarch explains that he bears no envy for him. He says later in the same letter that Dante (never named explicitly) and his father were even friends.33 As stated in his prose and demonstrated in his poetry, Petrarchan imitations display their derivation from the original texts but, having done so, proceed to distance themselves from these very texts and force us to recognize the poetic distance traversed. Petrarch’s appropriation of Dante in the Canzoniere is of such subtlety, accomplished with the slightest allusions in lexical, acoustical, and syntactic shading, that its very imitation is an art of dissimulation: “I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, imitating them not only in my memory but in my marrow, and they have so become one with my mind that were I never to read them for the remainder of my life, they would cling to me, having taken root in the innermost recesses of my mind” (Fam. 22.2).34

The difference between Laura’s footprints and Beatrice’s cannot be any clearer than in the second instance of vestigio in Rvf 125. Here Laura’s footsteps touch the earth, whereas Beatrice’s are in Hell. The latter leads one toward freedom from earthly desire; the former intensifies it:

Ben sai che sì bel piede

non toccò terra unquancho

come quel di che già segnata fosti,

onde’l cor lasso riede

col tormentoso fiancho

a partir teco i lor pensier’ nascosti.

Così avestù riposti

de’ be’ vestigi sparsi

anchor tra’ fiori et l’erba

che la mia vita acerba

lagrimando trovasse ove acquetarsi! (125.53–63)

You know well that so beautiful a foot never touched the earth as on that day when you were marked by hers, wherefore my weary heart comes back with my tormented flanks to share with you their hidden cares. Would you had hidden away some lovely footprints still among the flowers and grass, that my bitter life might weeping find a place to become calm!

This poem is perhaps the clearest representation of Petrarch’s signature poetics of presence-absence.35 He seeks the signs of her presence in the impression she has left on other things, nature herself. The absence of Laura only underscores Petrarch’s despair; his verses are insufficient to portray his lady, and his formerly “sweet graceful rhymes,” dolci rime leggiadre (125.27) are now “harsh” and “naked” (parlo in rime aspre et di dolcezza ignude; 125.16). But if Laura fails to leave her dulcet stamp on Petrarch’s verses, her influence on the natural world is, according to the poet, plain to see.

In seeking the traces of Laura in the natural world, Petrarch in Rvf 165 fantasizes that Laura’s footsteps have magical generative powers: “As her white foot through the green grass virtuously moves its sweet steps, a power that all around her opens and renews; the flower seems to issue from her tender soles,” come ’l candido pie’ per l’erba fresca / i dolci passi honestamente move, / vertù che ’ntorno i fiori apra et rinove / de le tenere piante sue per ch’esca (165.1–4). The failure to find Laura from her footprints means that Petrarch must turn to the natural environment in order to find her traces. Her attributes are scattered throughout the world, and the world begins to embody the epiphenomena of her features.36

Though the pathetic fallacy of projecting the troubles of the interior mind onto the outside world might be a lovely poetic conceit, doctrinally speaking it borders on the blasphemous, for in medieval theology the term vestigia was often used to describe the traces of God in a fallen world, not the traces of a beloved lady. Bonaventure in Itinerarium Mentis in Deum says we may rise to knowledge of God per vestigia or in vestigiis. The mind in contemplating God has three distinct grades: the senses, which discerns the traces (vestigia) of the divine in the world; reason, which examines the soul itself, the ultimate “trace” of the divine Being; and pure intellect (intelligentia), which progresses from the earthly realm to grasp the divine cause:

All creatures of this sensible world lead the mind of the one contemplating and attaining wisdom to the eternal God; for they are shadows, echoes and pictures, the traces [vestigia], simulacra, and reflections of that First Principle most powerful, wisest, and best; of that light and plenitude; of that art productive, exemplifying, and ordering, given to us for looking upon God.37

Bonaventure’s vestigia are about the presence of spirit in matter aspiring toward its transcendental creator, in contrast to the lateral direction of vestigia in the ancient authors and Petrarch. In its theological sense vestigia signifies both the absence of divine totality and traces of its partial presence.

Instead of seeing the vestigia trinitatis in the created world, in the manner of Bonaventure, Petrarch sees nature as containing vestigia laurae, as it were. From the traces of Laura left in nature, Petrarch, by association, proceeds to say that nature—the flowers, grass, meadows, rivers—will now manifest his psyche, burning with la mia fiamma. The poet is not interested in nature qua nature, but only as a reflection or refraction of Laura. The search for literal vestigia leads not to the divine creator of the footprints but to a projection of the beloved’s attributes that permeate the natural world. Such projection is a desperate attempt to imbue the world with her presence, to reify her absent signs. The vestigia of Laura, to take John Freccero’s influential insight, become idolatrous, for they create a circular referentiality that prevents the mind from ascending to a higher order.38

Finally, in the grand canzone Rvf 360, vestigio no longer means footprints but something like “the persistence of memory.” Santagata has studied how, in the final months of Petrarch’s life, in 1373–74, the poet obsessively renumbered the last poems of the collection.39 In the final arrangement the poems labeled 360 to 366 form a kind of penitential progression that leads to an unfulfilled conversion. Rvf 360 is staged as an interrogation between the poet and an adversarial Love, each pleading their case before the tribunal of Reason. Love defends his actions:

Et per dir a l’estremo il gran servigio,

da mille acti inhonesti l’ò ritratto,

ché mai per alcun pacto

a lui piacer non poteo cosa vile

giovene schivo et vergognoso in atto

et in penser poi che fatto era uom ligio

di lei ch’alto vestigio

l’impresse al core, et fecel suo simìle. (360.121–28)

And, to tell finally my greatest service, from a thousand vicious acts I have drawn him back, for low things could never please him in any way (a young man shy and shamefast in act and in thought) once he had become the vassal of her who impressed a deep mark upon his heart and made him similar to herself.

Vestigio here means an affect, an emotive affect arising from past experience, close to the Virgilian sense of agnosco veteris vestigia flammae, “I recognize the traces of old love” (Aen. 4.23).40 The famous line of Dido is found in book 4 of the Aeneid, when she confesses her burning lust for Aeneas, thus breaking her vow of fidelity to her dead husband, Sichaeus. Here we have a micro-confrontation with the author of the Commedia by way of their Latin master. Upon seeing Beatrice in the culminating cantos of the Purgatorio, Dante translates Dido’s fateful utterance but crucially changes one word: conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma (30.48, my emphasis). Why? Virgilian vestigia are more akin to a retrograde contagion, whereas Dante’s segni are Augustinian, which is to say ultimately redemptive, promising an eventual reunification between the signifying and signified. Simone Marchesi calls this reinterpreted line a “transvaluated fragment of a salvaged text.”41 Petrarch’s small but unmistakable lexical replacement of vestigia for segni indicates his kinship with Dido’s tragic, suicidal eros rather than Dante’s pure, sublime charity.

Admittedly Petrarch’s formulation in Rvf 360 is not exactly a direct citation of either the Aeneid or Purgatorio, but this is a prime example of Contini’s “memory-click.” Petrarch restages this drama of literary transmutation through the voice of the god Love, embedding it in a relative clause that describes the effects that Laura has on him, she “who impressed a deep mark [alto vestigio] upon his heart.” His love is equated with Dido’s illicit desire and opposed to Dante’s. The poet’s allusive gestures are so pervasive, the Virgilian and the Dantean atmosphere so suffused, that this single resonant word reverberates singingly in an ambience of thick intertextuality. As the affect of rekindled passion spreads from lover to lover, the poetic practice of allusion becomes contagious, forming a nexus of cultural topoi that spans the literary tradition. In short, instead of Dante’s emphasis on vestigia as a transcendental vector of divine love, Petrarch insists on vestigia as recursive traces of the sorrowful past.

There is more. Vestigio here also bears theological traces. Thomas Aquinas teaches that in creatures great and small there is a “vestige” of the Trinity. But the “image of God” truly resides in the highest part of man, his intellect:

While in all creatures there is some kind of likeness to God, in the rational creature alone we find a likeness of “image,” whereas in other creatures we find a likeness by way of a “trace” [in aliis autem creaturis per modum vestigii]. Now the intellect or mind is that whereby the rational creature excels other creatures; wherefore this image of God is not found even in the rational creature except in the mind; while in the other parts, which the rational creature may happen to possess, we find the likeness of a “trace” [similitudo vestigii], as in other creatures to which, in reference to such parts, the rational creature can be likened.42

In Rvf 360 Love makes his plea to the highest human faculty praised by the Angelic Doctor, in front of the throne of “the queen who holds the divine part of our nature,” a la reina / che la parte divina / tien di nostra natura (v. 2–4). He implicitly gestures toward the medieval tradition of vestigia trinitatis, claiming that the vestigio of Laura has been inscribed in the heart of the creature Petrarch, while he has neglected the image of God dwelling in his intellect. By saying that Petrarch has made himself a vassal (uom ligio) of Laura, Love turns the feudal, sacramental relationship between a subordinate and his earthly lord into the erotic bond of subservience.43 Thus the highest sense of vestigio in the Fragmenta is the coalescence of the tragic presence of Virgilian passion along with the theological absence of imago Dei.

In conclusion, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta articulates a poetics of the search for lost time. This is accomplished by the construction of Laura’s vestigi sparsi, which indicate her absence through a nonsemblant signification. The poems as they are collected become the imperfect record of Petrarch’s psychic disintegration. Indeed as the words from the first line of the poem declare (and now the received Italian title), his poetry is but rime sparse, scattered rhymes gathered into a collection. But even the name rime sparse is oxymoronic, for sparse is centrifugal, whereas rime is centripetal. Since the technical function of rima is the linkage of two final syllables with homophony in the last word of continuous verses, a conjoining of sonic semblance with semantic arbitrariness, its operation is based on identity and difference. As Teodolinda Barolini argues, the Petrarchan problematic is a “metaphysical issue of the one and the many. Singular versus plural, whole versus fragment.”44 The act of writing for Petrarch is an attempt to bring into a textual order the scattering of time.

The Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as such are the vestigia of vestigia, the fragments of fragments. The entire archive of Petrarchan poetry is driven by a passion for articulating the ruins of desire, the ruins of time, and the ruins of the self. It is not time, desire, and self that are made metaphorical ruins; rather ruins are literalizations of the fragmented self through time. The search for the whole, whether the body of Laura, the broken monuments of Rome, or lost voices from antiquity, finds only shadows, ruins, and fragments, ending in frustration. The erotics of absence is the poetics of ruins. The lover’s discourse is the poetics of ruins.

The Textual City

I have explored how Petrarch the erotic poet retraces the footsteps of Dante’s Beatrice through Laura. Now I consider how Petrarch the epic poet in the Africa retraces the footsteps of Virgil, Statius, and Lucan. In a twist of allusive logic, Petrarch at the end of his epic follows the ancient precedent of Ennius’s dream of Homer, in which the epic poet proclaims his own future greatness in a work in which he himself becomes a character.45 The fictive Ennius in the Africa describes his epic mission thus:

Vestigia famae

Rara sequens, quantum licuit per secula retro

Omnia pervigili studio vagus ipse cucurri,

Donec ad extremas animo rapiente tenebras

Perventum primosque viros, quos Fama perenni

Fessa via longe ignotos post terga reliquit. (Africa 9.133–38)

Following the sparse footsteps of Fame, with unsleeping application I made my wandering way where possible backwards through all the centuries, until my hurrying spirit brought me to the remotest shades and those great men whom Fame, exhausted by her ceaseless traveling, left forgotten far behind her.46

This formulation of vestigia famae / rara sequens is also Lucan’s description of Caesar searching for Pompey after the battle of Pharsalus: “in vain he followed Pompey’s scattered traces over the land,” cuius uestigia frustra / terris sparsa (9.952–53). Thus in this one expression Petrarch conjoins the beginning and the end of the Latin epic tradition. Moreover these two uses resonate with the famous envoi of Statius’s Thebaid: Nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta, sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora, “Live, I pray; and essay not the divine Aeneid, but ever follow her footsteps from afar in adoration” (Theb. 12.817). As Philip Hardie observes, “Statius’ poem follows at a respectful distance Aeneas’ instructions to his wife Creusa at Aeneid 2.711 longe seruet uestigia coniunx ‘Let my wife follow at a distance.’ Ennius’ pursuit of Fama’s footsteps back into the past, however, repeats Aeneas’ own attempt to retrace his wife’s footsteps when she disappears, Aen. 2.753–4 uestigia retro / obseruata sequor per noctem et lumine lustro ‘I retraced and followed my footsteps through the night, scanning them with my eyes.’”47 Footsteps follow footsteps, epic follows epic.

Petrarch himself acknowledges in Fam. 3.18, “It was the respectful and humble testimonial by the poet Statius Pampinius to the Aeneid of Virgil, whose footsteps deserved so much to be followed and worshipped, that informed his Thebaid as it was about to be published.”48 Through the voice of Ennius vestigia famae / rara sequens encapsulate Petrarch’s lifelong project of reviving antiquity. From writing the Africa to editing the manuscript of Livy to accidentally discovering the letters of Cicero, Petrarch’s intellectual mission has been none other than to retrace the vanished traces of Rome. A few lines after Ennius’s speech, Petrarch in his own voice laments his belatedness: Ipse ego ter centum labentibus ordine lustris / Dumosam tentare viam et vestigia rara / Viribus imparibus fidens utcumque peregi (Africa 9.404–6), “I myself after the lapse of fifteen hundred years trusting in my unequal abilities to attempt that path through the scrub following those sparse footsteps, achieved it in my fashion” (9.563–68). It is precisely this sense of historical alienation that gives him the license for such poetic audacity, for in no uncertain terms Petrarch declares that he has written the first epic in Latin since antiquity.

The literal footsteps of travelers to Rome follow these vestigia rara in the epic tradition. Indeed one of the most resonant episodes of Petrarchan imitation occurs in book 8 of the Africa, when the Carthaginians are being led around Rome. This passage follows the walk of Evander and Aeneas in book 8 of the Aeneid and Caesar’s tour of Troy with an anonymous guide in book 9 of the Pharsalia.49 In these three perambulations time past and time present coexist within a single topographic narrative.

Characteristic of these textual walks is the notion that the ideal Rome never exists in the present—it is either not yet built or already in ruins. Present Rome exists either as an archaeological repository or a pregnant projection. Freud’s famous analogy of the archaeology of Rome and mental life makes clear that each sedimented layer of memory contains traces of what lies beneath it; so in poetic Rome, each text, by virtue of its imitative and allusive nature, contains within itself traces of its epic precursors.50 In Petrarch the perfect Rome exists for but a moment; in Virgil the ideal Rome is projected to the future; in Lucan Rome is shattered, always already in the past.

In book 8 of the Africa the Carthaginian envoys are led on their tour of Rome.51 After defeat by Scipio’s army at the decisive battle of Zama, Carthage accepts the terms of surrender and sends a mission to Rome, where Hasdrubal makes a plea for clemency on behalf of his vanquished people. He asks to be shown the site of Rome: “Now that we stand here within your walls, it is our ardent wish to look upon your captives and to meet your citizens” (8.1203–6), Nos vestre cupidos admittite menibus urbis / Captivosque videre date et cognoscere cives (8.851–56).

Their wish is granted. Their itinerary is an inventory of Rome’s greatest hits: they pass through the Via Appia, the Palatine, the hut of Evander, and the birthplace of Romulus, before making their way to the Aventine, Capitoline, Temple of Jupiter, Esquiline, Quirinal:

Appia marmoreo suscepit limine porta

Prima viros; magno mox obvia menia giro

Pallantea vident, quo structa est regia monte

Evandri primusque nove locus inclitus urbis;

Hic elementa notis impressa. (8.862–66)

First are they welcomed by the Appian Gate

With marble threshold, whence they may perceive

The Palatine with ancient walls disposed

In a huge circle. On that hill was built

Evander’s palace; on that famous site

First rose the newborn city. Here the guide

Points out the traces of the early town

Still visible to an experienced eye. (8.1221–28)

In all they visit some forty sites, almost every one of which has a literary precedent in the Aeneid and Livy.52 The tour becomes in effect a fulfillment of Anchises’s prophecy to his son: “Under his auspices, my son, shall that glorious Rome extend her empire to earth’s ends, her ambitions to the skies, and shall embrace seven hills with a single city’s wall,” En huius, nate, auspiciis illa incluta Roma / imperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo, / septemque una sibi muro circumdabit arces (Aen. 6.778–83).

Petrarch renders this passage a scene of high pathos for both the Carthaginians and the reader. Quintilian writes in the Institutio about the visual power of verbal art:

The person who will show the greatest power in the expression of emotions will be the person who has properly formed what the Greeks call phantasiai (let us call them “visions”), by which the images of absent things are presented to the mind in such a way that we seem actually to see them with our eyes and have them physically present to us. (6.2.29)53

For Quintilian the ideal orator strives to overcome the distance between the audience and the historical past by using his rhetorical enargeia. The relationship between the reader and Petrarch and the relationship between the Carthaginians and their guide operate through the power of Roman rhetoric: the poet is using enargeia to persuade his readers, while the guide is simultaneously using his narratio to describe Rome: “Here the guide points out the traces of the early town still visible to an experienced eye.” The crucial difference is that whereas the Carthaginians see physical Rome and are ignorant of her history, the reader reads the textual Rome of Petrarch and, after seven books on the subject, is fully aware of her past.

Keeping in mind the intertextuality of the poem, we can usefully contrast the defeated Carthaginians gazing at the sites of Rome with another defeated race, the Trojans. In book 8 of the Aeneid, the only book in which the action occurs on the actual site of the future Rome, the father of the Roman people contemplates the future site of his empire. Through Aeneas’s eyes, the reader sees the ante-Rome that was and the future Augustan Rome that will be.

In their walk from Ara Maxima to Evander’s house on the Palatine in book 8, Evander treats Aeneas to a foundation narrative of the land’s mythohistory, topography, and institutions. There are even pre-Roman natural ruins: “Now first look at this rocky overhanging cliff, how the masses are scattered afar, how the mountain-dwelling stands desolate, and the crags have toppled down in mighty ruin!,” Iam primum saxis suspensam hanc aspice rupem, / disiectae procul ut moles desertaque montis / stat domus et scopuli ingentem traxere ruinam (8.190–92). Scholars generally agree that Virgil’s vision of early Rome is interfaced with the Augustan transformation of the city.54 The tour narrative exists on two levels of focalization: the sites that Evander shows Aeneas emphasize the past—the site of Rome before the city of Rome—while Virgil’s parenthetical asides (“where valiant Romulus restored an asylum,” quem Romulus acer asylum rettulit [342]; “golden now, then bristling with woodland thickets,” aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis [348]; “they saw the cattle everywhere, lowing in the Forum of Rome and the chic Carinae,” passimque armenta videbant / Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis [361]) point out to the reader resonances with the present Rome. We are shown multiple imaginary Romes: the Latin past and the imperial future, origin and apogee.55 Virgil conjures a double temporality: what is the future to the characters in the text is simply the present to the Augustan reader.

For Virgil, Troy is the city that was, Rome the city that will be. As such, the sites are etiological as well as teleological. For Lucan, conversely, Rome is already the ruined city.56 When Caesar visits the birthplace of his ancestors, Anchisae thalamos, in book 9 of Pharsalia, ancient poetry revisits its own birthplace, Troy, the ground zero of epic. Thus Lucan plays with the points of departure and arrival of the classical tradition: Virgil’s epic begins at Troy and ends on the threshold of a nascent Rome. Lucan’s epic begins on the threshold of a tottering Rome, with Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, before making its way back to Troy, the original site of civilizational collapse.

Caesar’s Trojan tour is an accident. He thought he was chasing his enemy but instead ended up at the birthplace of history. In this resonant detour, instead of discovering Pompey’s “scattered traces,” vestigia (9.952), he happens upon “the mighty traces” of the walls of Troy, magnaque Phoebi quaerit vestigia muri (9.965). Troy is the site of broken myths and desolate ruins. What is left of the “burnt-out” city is nothing but a name: nomen memorabile. As such, the return to Troy is as much a textual as a geographic tour. As de Certeau in his essay “Walking in the City,” says, “Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserves, remaining in an enigmatic state.”57 Like Aeneas, Caesar is a mirator famae and remains completely silent, marking one of his rare quasi-reflective moments. But unlike his predecessor, there is no grand prophecy here. In fact Lucan’s snapshots of the Trojan legends stress the divorce of mortal effort and divine guidance: the days when gods would make love to mortals (Venus and Anchises; Jupiter and Ganymede) or care about their opinions (the Judgment of Paris) are clearly in the past (9.970–74). In Lucan it is as if the poet is announcing that his is the age of the Götterdämmerung, a postmythical, post-Homeric age; there is no contact whatsoever between mortals and immortals. So Rome, by extension, is stripped of its divine mandate. Lucan’s destroyed Troy proleptically reminds us of a scene in Dante’s Purgatorio: Vedeva Troia in cenere e in caverne; / O Ilïón, come te basso e vile / Mostrava il segno che lì si discerne! (12.61–63), “I saw Troy in ashes and in cavernous pits: Oh Ilion, how cast down and and vile it showed you—sculpture which is there discerned!”58 In Lucan’s description two lapidary half-lines in the same metrical position stand out as gnomic remarks: etiam periere ruinae, “even the ruins have perished” (9.968) and nullum est sine nomine saxum, “No stone is without a name” (9.973). Both are insights into the very meaning of the textual city: the materiality of the past can be comprehended only by its literary representation. Etiam periere ruinae is the archaeologist’s worst nightmare but the poet’s golden opportunity. If the coming to be of a thing is its being brought to perfection, then the ruin is a nothing. How, then, does poetry express something that is no longer there? And what does it mean for stones to have names? In his capacious Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination, Francesco Orlando describes Troy as the Ur-city of the monitorio solenne, the category of the solemn-admonitory: “This is a decisive moment in the history of this category. Here the solemn-admonitory is contaminated by the vegetal sterile-noxious far harsher than the herds and flocks of the Greek epigrams: under its crushing weight the end of the ruins themselves—theme within the theme—unfolds.”59 In my reading Lucan is mainly concerned with the mutability of the material world: etiam periere ruinae testifies to a fate worse than the unidentifiable corpses in the anecdote about Simonides, the inventor of the art of memory (De or. 2.86.351–53). Here even the mangled monuments have disappeared. Simmel’s brief but luminous essay, “The Ruin,” discussed in chapter 2, is also helpful here: “Architecture is the only art in which the great struggle between the will of the spirit and the necessity of nature issues into real peace, in which the soul in its upward striving and nature in its gravity are held in balance.” The ruin is a Hegelian “cosmic tragedy” in which “the balance between nature and spirit, which the building manifested, shifts in favor of nature. . . . The decay appears as nature’s revenge for the spirit’s having violated it by making a form in its own image.”60 What remains is suspended between the downward thrust of Natur and the upward thrust of Geist.

For Lucan poetry will have to supplement nature’s deficiencies. Even as ruins themselves perish, as stones return to their pre-anthropomorphic existence and are reabsorbed into nature, the fleeting creations of architecture still endure in poetry. Indeed nullum est sine nomine saxum implies that Troy is an overdetermined tourist spot of literary, historical, and mythic attraction. In Roman culture the fate of a place is inextricably tied to the origins of its name—nomen est omen. The Sibylline oracle written in Greek had already prophesied Rome’s end through paronomasia: “Samos too will be a pile of sand [sammos], and Delos will disappear [adelos]), and Rome will be a narrow street [rume].”61 Lucan plays with this by saying tibi, Roma, ruenti (Phar. 7.418). The prophecy of Anchises in book 6 of the Aeneid similarly functions on the principles of naming:

Hi tibi Nomentum et Gabios urbemque Fidenam,

Hi Collatinas imponent montibus arces,

Pometios Castrumque Inui Bolamque Coramque;

Haec tum nomina erunt, nunc sunt sine nomine terrae. (Aen. 6.773–76)

These to your honor will build Nomentum and Gabii and Fidena’s town; these shall crown hills with Collatia’s towers, and Pometii, the Fort of Inuus, Bola and Cora: one day to be famous names, these now are nameless places.

In response it is precisely this Virgilian nomenclature that Lucan will betray in his rewriting of the epic genre: Tunc omne Latium / Fabula nomen erit; Gabios Veiosque Coramque / Pulvere vix tectae poterunt monstrare ruinae (Phar. 7.391–93), “Then all the Latin name will be a fable: Gabii, Veii, Cora hardly will be indicated by their dust-covered ruins.” The Latin nomen of Virgil becomes nothing but a fabula. Caesar destroys not only Rome, the constructed order of society, but by extension the natural order of the universe. Time is not the only agent of destruction, but man too: “It is not devouring time which has eroded and abandoned to decay these memorials of the past: it is the crime of civil war we see, so many empty cities,” non aetas haec carpsit edax monimentaque rerum / putria destituit: crimen civile videmus / tot vacuas urbes (7.397–99).

As Lucan’s Caesar has made Rome into a landscape of destruction and ruin, he in turn is frequently described with the verb ruere, as heedlessly rushing headlong and without forethought. The noun ruina and the verb ruere both denote that ruins and ruining are simultaneously a condition and a process, that is, aftermath and cause. Latin authors often conflate the rushing impulsive motion, the verb, with its effects, the noun. Horace is sensitive to the valences of the word and plays on the ruination that is caused by the civil war in Rome: “Yet another generation is already being ground down by civil wars, / and through its own strength Rome itself hastens ruin,” Altera iam teritur bellis civilibus aetas / suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit (Epod. 16.1–2). In Stoic thought the physical activity of rushing is accompanied by a corresponding mental state, often with moral overtones. Ruere, like furor and ira, is often used in contrast to moderatio. The action of ruere implies impetuous and hotheaded behavior in the face of overwhelming odds. In ancient Rome this term was strongly opprobrious. It meant the opposite of the Stoic ideals of forbearance and discipline, of the life led according to ratio—in short, the perfect word to describe Lucan’s Caesar.62

Immediately after Caesar’s prayer, Lucan offers his own envoi:

O sacer et magnus vatum labor! omnia fato

Eripis et populis donas mortalibus aevum.

Invidia sacrae, Caesar, ne tangere famae. . . .

Venturi me teque legent; Pharsalia nostra

Vivet, et a nullo tenebris damnabimur aevo. (9.980–83, 985–86)

O how sacred and immense the task of bards! You snatch everything

From fate and give eternity to mortal people.

Caesar, do not be touched by envy of their sacred fame. . . .

The future generations will read you and me, our Pharsalia shall live on, and no age will ever doom us to oblivion.

Lucan’s point is that just as the tourist needs the help of a guide through an unfamiliar terrain, the student of history is ultimately dependent on texts. It is the task of the poet to inscribe the past into the semiotic absence of the ruin in order to make stones speak their names again.

The desolate scenes of Troy in the Pharsalia bear comparison with the Temple of Juno in Aeneid 2. As representations they are nothing but names and empty pictures. Indeed the last line of the fresco depicting Troilus can be read as a metaphor of inscription. In the verse “his trailing spearpoint scribbles in the dust,” versa pulvis inscribitur hasta (Aen. 1.479), the noun versa could be reflective of Virgil’s own verses, and inscribere “to write on” or “inscribe.” Françoise Meltzer writes:

Troilus’s spearpoint, careening senselessly in the dust as it does, produces no writing—this is a measure of the warrior’s helplessness—but does leave its mark in the dust, a mark the fresco imitates by representation. Here is truly the image of an image: for the scribble of the spearhead at once mirrors the tragedy of Troy and the trace left by the tragedy—a trace the frescoes reiterate. This trace—inscription that is not writing per se, but rather recording—insists upon memory and therefore makes the slaughter of Troy an event with meaning.63

Likewise Lucan inscribes the trope of the ruin into his own text. Though the ruins themselves have been “ruined,” Lucan must write so that the names of the original buildings will not perish. For all their sifting and brushing, archaeologists cannot re-create the ancient sites; thus the poet becomes the final guardian of memory. Buildings turn to ruins, ruins turn to stones, stones turn to dust, and dust turns to nothing. It is the poet’s burden to record what might disappear—the ruin—in what might be longer lasting: the text.

Let us return to Petrarch. At the end of the Africa the poet is thinking about the fate of his creation. In a remarkable act of poetic authorization and self-fulfilling prophecy, Petrarch audaciously inserts himself into the narrative. On a ship bound to Rome, Ennius recounts to Scipio a dream he had in which he talked to Homer about a later poet who happens to be none other than Petrarch himself:

Agnosco iuvenem sera de gente nepotum,

Quem, regio Italie, quemve ultima proferet etas.

Francisco cui nomen erit; qui grania facta,

Vidisti que cunta oculis, ceu corpus in unum

Colliget. . . .

Titulusque poematis illi

Africa. (9.220–24, 234–35)

I recognize the youth as one of a late line of progeny

Whom Italy will bear in times to come. . . .

He will be called Franciscus;

And all the glorious exploits you have seen

He will assemble in one volume. . . .

And he will call his poem Africa.

This dream visitation spells out Petrarch’s theory of poetic legitimation. The nearest vernacular precedent to this spectral communion of the poets is Dante’s self-induction into the august company of Homer, Lucan, Ovid, Horace, and Virgil in Inferno 4. Marchesi has shown that Dante’s shadowy simultaneity is radically different from Petrarch’s view of antiquity as “dischronicity.”64 In Petrarch’s choice of Homer and Ennius, he in effect bypasses and effaces Virgil in order to retrieve earlier models who stand, respectively, at the beginning of Greek and Latin poetry. Ironically Ennius exists in fragments, and Petrarch could not read Greek. In his letter to “Homer,” collected in the last book of the Familiares, he writes, “I realize how far removed you are, and I fear that it may prove annoying for you to read so many things in the shadows” (24.12).65 Only in the imaginative space of his poetry can he reanimate the dead and dream of how one poet talks to another poet who happens to be the dreamer himself.

Memory and Melancholia

I have described several epic walks in Rome. Now I turn to the famous letter—Familiares 6.2—in which Petrarch himself walks these very grounds, this time with his friend Giovanni Colonna.66 The sequere vestigia that was only imaginative before becomes literal as Petrarch treads on the same geographic ground as his favorite authors. In his epic Petrarch is seeking a synoptic and synchronic vision of Rome at its apogee. As we have seen, such vision comes only to the awed and defeated “other.” Here it comes to the writer himself, a temporal “other,” to be sure, but a fully knowing one who appreciates the obsolescent grandeur of the city’s decay.

Composed in 1337 or 1341 the letter is written as a response to Colonna’s request that Petrarch recount some of the walks they took and the talks they had.67 The activity of tracing turns metaphoric in the epistolary; Petrarch says that the “affectionate greetings” of letters are “like footsteps of the spirit” (Fam. 21.15).68 Beginning with a leisurely meditation on how one should love truth itself rather than follow a particular school of philosophy, Petrarch then gives a staggering chronological list of some eighty sites that they frequented. Climbing to the top of the Diocletian Baths, they reminisce about the sweep of history and the tasks of moral philosophy. He ends by wryly telling Colonna that he cannot say everything he wants in the short space of a letter and that it will be followed in due time by an entire treatise on the subject of their conversation.

Since the Renaissance this letter has been recognized as one of the era’s founding manifestos. The line “For who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?,” Quis enim dubitare potest quin illico surrectura sit, si ceperit se Roma cognoscere? became a rallying cry for rebirth. Poggio Bracciolini and Antonio Loschi were inspired to take similar walks, as were Raphael and Castiglione, Donatello and Brunelleschi.69 Edward Gibbon at the conclusion of his monumental work recounts Petrarch’s and his followers’ walks as a prelude to his own etiology: “As I sat musing amid the ruins of the capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”70 Jacob Burckhardt begins with this Petrarchan anecdote in the section “Recovery of Antiquity” in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.71

The letter has continued to elicit a number of brilliant readings. Greene writes that Petrarch summons “the archeological, necromantic metaphor of disinterment, a digging up that was also a resuscitation or a reincarnation or a rebirth.” He proposes that Petrarch engages in the activity of “subreading: a decipherment of the latent or hidden or indecipherable object of historical knowledge beneath the surface.”72 Leonard Barkan argues that Petrarch draws his technique of telescoping Rome from the opposite direction of Virgil; whereas Evander guides Aeneas through a pre-created Rome, “Petrarch takes advantage of centuries of ruin and further obliterates the landmarks so that they become little more than an excuse for demonstrating his discursive ability to envisage the golden age.”73 Mazzotta writes, “The dual perspective on history, pagan and Christian, shows that history is not a homogeneous totality or a monolith: there are in the same theater of history, on the contrary, divergent lines, diversified chronologies, and residual layers buried under or scattered over the ground.”74

As insightful as these readings are, they all ignore the basic genre of the text as an epistle. My contribution to this conversation is to posit that Petrarch’s exercise of letter writing deeply informs and is intertwined with his ruminations on ruins. Letter writing in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries was dominated by the ars notarie, mostly business transactions written in simple Latin concerning the contractual details of sales, legal obligations, political or diplomatic agreements.75 With the rise of ars dictaminis and his rediscovery of Cicero’s informal, gossipy Ad Atticum in Verona, Petrarch begins cultivating a warm, friendly, domestic style in the mid-1340s.76 Cicero writes, “Letter-writing was invented just in order that we might inform those at a distance if there were anything which it was important for them or for ourselves that they should know” (Ad familiares 2.4.1). Historically, then, Petrarch’s Familiares as a collection of letters can be situated between this shift from the medieval formal, scribal method of dictation to the more personal, intimate style typical of the humanists. Petrarch’s letter presents a double nostalgia: he laments both the disappearance of the magnificence of Roman antiquity and the intimate moments of an abiding friendship. Wandering amid Roman ruins and writing to friends are analogous experiences—the condition of absence prompts the desire to re-create presence. At the core of both is the act of reaching out from the temporality of the present into the recesses of memory in order to stave off oblivion.

Writing a letter signals this double absence. Horace’s sermones are “one half of a dialogue” since by definition the addressee is not there.77 The purpose of Petrarch’s letter is the melancholic pleasure of “recreating,” in both senses of the word, what was once two-halves of a dialogue. Colonna is to “enjoy” himself, and Petrarch is to “summon into being” a disappeared conversation. In the next letter, also to Colonna, Petrarch writes, “While I seem to be conversing with you, I have forgotten that I am writing a letter” (Fam. 6.3).78 We see him trying to bridge a number of interstitial gaps: first, the fictive vision of Rome as a whole, from the dizzying grandeur of the empire to its abject squalor during its “Babylonian captivity”; second, the distance between the original day spent wandering in the city and its retelling in writing (or dictation) at his desk; third, a further gap in time between when he finishes the letter and when Colonna receives it; fourth, still more time elapses before the document is revised and gathered with many others in the Rerum familiarum libri.79

Letters about the ancients, letters to the dead, letters to posterity, letters to absent friends: for Petrarch the literary epistle serves as a grand nexus, a meeting point for minds separated by time and space. Petrarch’s bid to fuse past, present, and future is encapsulated in the fact that he self-anthologizes these letters, thus constructing multiple audiences: the original recipient of the individual letter; the dedicatee of the Familiares, “Socrates,” Petrarch’s friend Ludwig van Kempen; and future readers, whom Petrarch addresses in the “Letter to Posterity” as “most worthy reader, whoever you are” (Seniles 18.1).80 Kathy Eden, in recuperating the rhetorical concept of oikeion or familiaritas, calls letter writing the cultivation of an ethical and social bond of “intimacy.”81 Petrarch’s ambition was to reach across what Wai-Chee Dimock would call “deep time,” the potentiality of literature to span generational divides.82 The Epistola posteritati, belonging to the poet’s later years, expresses this tenuous possibility: “You may perhaps have heard something about me, although even this is uncertain [dubium sit], whether a slight and obscure name can penetrate far in space and time [perventurum sit].”83 Of course the hope is a fragile one, since it is tempered by the subjunctive sit, repeated twice; just as Petrarch knows that the transmission of classical authors is fraught with uncertainty, contingency, and loss, so is the process by which future readers will save and remember him. His letters may end up as broken as the monuments of Rome.

The letter begins and is punctuated with verbs in the imperfect: deambulabamus, “we used to walk”; vagabamur, “we used to wander”; and solebamus, “we used to stop.” The first-person plural inclusive instantly creates a bond between Colonna and the author, thus making him an equal participant in the production of memory. The activity of walking and wandering, like memory itself, is always past progressive, incomplete, an ongoing activity. In the second sentence of the letter, the first verb, deambulare, “to go for a walk” without a specific direction, is replaced with obambulare, a purposeful “to walk up so as to meet,” which is part of Petrarch’s perypateticum morem, his peripatetic custom. Showing off his erudition Petrarch alludes to the ancient Greek tradition of walking about while teaching. For the philosophers to think is to walk. For Augustine, whom Petrarch read deeply, to think is to remember.84 The argument of the letter, beginning as if in midthought, is as circuitous as his walks.

When Petrarch walks around Rome and gazes longingly at the many ruins, his wanderings trigger a first-order recollection; the dissolved architecture as material memory points to the glory of ancient Rome. When he remembers it in the letter, his walk becomes a second-order recollection, a memory of a memory. The letter itself is further constructed as a series of dialectical oppositions: present and past, sects of philosophy and the nonpartisan search for veritas, the light of Christianity and the darkness of antiquity, self and friend, leisure and business, solitude and company, wandering and sitting, writing and conversation, chatting and silence, the articulate and the ineffable, what is given and what is promised.

The perambulations through Rome fill Petrarch with an irrepressible longing for antiquity: “At each step there was present something which would excite our tongue and mind.”85 Petrarch, who had previously experienced Romanitas only through its textual remnants, now believes the actual sites to be the real aide-mémoire to the past. Running the historical gamut from the Palace of Evander to the martyrdom of Pope Calixtus, the millennial events are presented as an inventory marked with contiguities, discontinuities, proximities, and juxtapositions. Their divagating itinerary, unlike the Carthaginian tour, is simply impossible geographically. It can occur only through writing; that is, the expression of linearity can happen only in the direction of the sentence. As such, their directionless roaming is wrested from discursive chaos into semichronological order by virtue of syntax. Petrarch’s panorama of the city, a visual summoning of Roman history, is framed by anaphora of demonstrative pronouns, as in the Africa. The repetition of his, hic, hinc—close to eighty times—rises to the pitch of litany: hic Evandri regia, hic Carmentis edes, hic Caci spelunca. This multiplication of locative deixis in effect utilizes the rhetoric of places as an index of memory. The absence of predication in this list creates a sense of the atemporal present. In the words of de Certeau, “Demonstratives indicate the invisible identities of the visible: it is the very definition of place.” 86

Interestingly Petrarch does not describe the physical surroundings of the hic et nunc at all, only what has happened. Scholars such as Roberto Weiss and Angelo Mazzocco have read in this letter antiquarian sentiments, but my take is that he feels more melancholy for the lost day than for the physical monuments; they are merely place markers for the events that have transpired.87 Later humanists would certainly notice the materiality of the ruins: overgrown weeds, multilayered encrusted walls, tottering cornices.88 Not so Petrarch. He is less interested in their status as material things than as historical signs.

For Barkan, Petrarch is summoning the “golden age” of Rome through the poetics of Virgil. Most notably in his Invectives he adulates Rome as “head of the world, queen of the cities, seat of empire, citadel of the universal faith, source of every memorable model of virtue.”89 But here Petrarch’s view turns out to be quite dim: he begins by saying that Varro and Cicero lacked the true light of Christianity; therefore they “often stumbled over an immovable stone in the manner of the blind.” Their lack of spiritual illumination is manifested later in their ethical depravity, the horrors spiraling from the pre-Rome of Evander to its foundation and its Republican and Imperial periods. The rhetorical turns, detours, and repetitions intensify, moving from the initial leisurely rhythms of walking to a feverish cascade of historical events. The cumulative effect is vertiginous. Winding down his serpentine annals, Petrarch finishes with the arrival of Christianity and an enumeration of early martyrdoms: the crucifixion of St. Peter, the beheading of St. Paul, the violation of St. Agnes, the grilling of St. Lawrence, the immolation of Pope Calixtus. No wonder Rome fell.

After such wretched retrospection, the climb to the roof of the Diocletian Baths gives them fresh air, a new horizon, silence, rest. The focus shifts from vita activa to vita contemplativa. The flow of time invites them to a deeper reflection: “As in our travels through the remains of a broken city, there too, as we sat, the fragments of the ruins lay before our eyes,” Et euntibus per menia fracte urbis et illic sedentibus, ruinarum fragmenta sub oculis erant. Grammatically the double et denotes that ruins surround them, from up top to down below. This means that they could not transcend the ruins—they just experienced them from different points of view, first as a horizontal itinerary and then as a panoramic elevation. But in the sequential order of prose Petrarch does not write this insight until well after their ascent. Ruins are experienced everywhere but can be perceived only from a distance, sub oculis, by casting down your eyes.

The phrase ruinarum fragmenta expresses the material allegory of Petrarch’s vision of history. Etymologically fragments are something broken (frangere, “to break into pieces, shatter, fracture”), and in Petrarch’s conception of the “dark ages,” history itself is ruptured. He says to Colonna, “Our conversation was concerned largely with history which we seemed to have divined among us, I being more expert, it seemed, in the ancient [antiquis], by which we meant the time before the Roman rulers celebrated and venerated the name of Christ, and you in recent [novis] times, by which we meant the time from then to the present” (my emphasis). It is here that Petrarch makes the momentous distinction between antiquity and modernity (i.e., “the Middle Ages”), paganism and Christianity, thus giving him the reputation of being “the first modern man.”90 Only in Rome does he realize that there are deep strata of historical time. His pronouncement that he is more expert in antiquis and Colonna more expert in novis opens the chasm of history, a history that is reflected in the negative space of architecture and the emptiness of urban space.91

While they wander, they are excited. But while they sit, they are melancholic. Petrarch ruefully emphasizes the impossibility of re-creating the ephemeral day. Their shared memory has become as fragmented as the broken city itself: “Give me back that place, that idle mood, that day, that attention of yours, that particular vein of my talent and I could do what I did then. But all things are changed: the place is not present, the day has passed, the idle mood is gone. Instead of your face I see mute words.” Redde mihi illum locum, illud otium, illam diem, illam attentationem tuam, illam ingenii mei venam: potero quod unquam potui. Sed mutata sunt omnia; locus abest, dies abiit, otium periit, pro facie tua mutas litteras aspicio. The author cannot render into script the evanescence of oral discourse that once flowed so spontaneously. Interestingly whereas the catalogue passage of remote history cited above is punctuated by the closer demonstrative of hic, here their more recent day is described ironically with the more remote ille, perhaps suggesting that Petrarch is even more nostalgic about their shared intimacy than the grand events of history. In contrast to the entangled, excited plethora of hic in the catalogue scene, here there is a measured clarity in the forms of ille. The parallel construction of locus abest, dies abiit, otium periit also suggests a quiet regularity. Finally the impossibility of renarration is suggested as the passage calls into question the rhetorical efficacy of grammatical repetition: silent letters cannot replicate living voices.

Colonna originally wanted Petrarch to answer his question about their last topic of conversation—the origins of the liberal and mechanical arts—when the aura of Rome made Petrarch loquacious. Now very far away from that, he is in a less expansive mood. His response is cloaked in playful evasion, teasingly postponing what Colonna had requested: “Let us put off what remains until another day.” Petrarch wants to send him to do his own homework, claiming that he himself has nothing original to say about the matter: “I would say nothing new, nothing that was really mine.” The project would require too much time, “and the letter is already too long.” Reflecting on the reflections of time at the site of a ruin, Petrarch reflects on the present impossibility and promises a future project: “It requires a book which I shall undertake when fortune returns me to my solitude.” The future book containing “what was written by others and followed by my conjectures” never appeared. All these excuses are different ways of saying that philosophy and ruin-gazing in life can lead to much chatter, but recounting such experiences is ineffable.

Collection and Fragments

In the final lines of the Secretum, a dialogue begun after Fam. 6.2, Franciscus says to Augustinus that after he has finished composing his Africa and De viris illustribus, “I will collect the scattered fragments of my soul [sparsa animae fragmenta recolligam], and I will diligently focus on myself alone.”92 This notion of re-collecting or gathering the soul through memory is also found in the historical Augustine. In the Confessions we find similar formulations: “I will collect myself [colligens me a dispersione] out of that broken state in which my very being was torn asunder because I was turned away from Thee” (2.1); “Nor in all these things that my mind traverses in search of You, do I find any sure place for my mind save in you, in whom all my scattered parts are gathered [in te, quo colligantur sparsa mea]” (10.40).93 He calls the house of his soul a ruin.94

Petrarch’s and Augustine’s formulations of colligere fragmenta are ultimately derived from the Vulgate Gospels. After feeding the five thousand by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus commands his disciples to gather up what was not eaten: “Collect these leftover fragments lest they perish,” Colligite quae superaverunt fragmenta ne pereant (John 6:12). These miraculous fragments have a double meaning: the broken parts of the original and the remainders produced by distribution. On the one hand, these preserved fragments are from the boy’s initial offering of the seemingly inadequate five fish and twelve loaves. On the other, as leftovers of an improvised feast, the twelve basketfuls (!) are more noteworthy for their exponential abundance, the supply exceeding the demand. As a signum pointing to the divinity of Jesus and God’s plentitude, the excess of the sign’s materiality mirrors the inexhaustibility of its referent.95

According to A. C. Dionisotti, fragmenta in ancient letters always refer to material things—pieces of food, stone, metal, bone, wood, clothing—not portions of discourse.96 The corporal sense of fragmenta shifts to the textual in the early Christian exegetical tradition, when it takes on a figurative meaning: the choice bits of God’s word on which one meditates. For Augustine the five loaves symbolize the Pentateuch, and the twelve baskets the apostles: “What are those fragments, if not what the people were unable to chew? So they refer to hidden areas of understanding, which the multitude is unable to grasp.”97 Bernard of Clairvaux interprets this as a hermeneutic story, turning it into reading scripture itself: the act of breaking down the bread into fragmenta stands for the allegorical breaking down of the biblical text, so that it can feed men’s minds. For Caesarius of Heisterbach the fragmenta become individual saintly or virtuous acts, exempla virtutum, which is the duty of the clergy, fratribus literatis, to expound to the illiterate lay.98 In this transmission from the miracle to biblical text to exegesis to sermonizing, fragments undergo a metabolism of event, representation, and dissemination.

Petrarch turns this biblical metaphor into a humanist exercise of biographical reflection by consuming and digesting his own past. Rather than the carefully selected passages of scripture, his fragments are his own creation. And the activity of collection helps him think about the process of compositions both massive and tiny:

Meanwhile, so that my stay in the country should not be useless, I am gathering fragments of past meditations [cogitationum consumptarum fragmenta recolligo] in order to add something each day to my major works, if possible, or to complete some minor ones. I have consumed and digested, so that every day may either add something to larger projects or complete a minuscule one. (Fam. 13.6)99

Petrarch’s insistence on collecting his cogitationum consumptarum fragmenta helps explain why he chose Rerum vulgarium fragmenta for the title of his poetic anthology. Each of the 366 poems is the little “something” that is gathered into the grand collection. Though the scattered attributes of Laura recorded in the poems—feet, hands, limbs, hair—are constructed from Petrarch’s memory, the true subject of the Rime sparse is not Laura, but Petrarch himself, for it is he who is fragmented.100

On the clean surface of the modern printed text, the Canzoniere stands as a beautifully wrought poetic artifact. The number 366 speaks of a highly organized pattern of the days of the year. The poems are polished formally and lexically. Petrarch labored at them for more than forty years. In what sense, then, are the poems rime sparse and fragmenta?

We can understand the collection of poems as fragments when we consider what the genre of the collection meant before Petrarch. Medieval songbooks, as Marisa Galvez has recently shown, contain a heterogeneous assemblage of lyric, music, images, and other texts that were communally produced and received.101 Before Petrarch there is indeed evidence of a single-authored poetic anthology as a unified body, such as Guittone, but it was also customary to keep different metrical forms separated in different sections of a manuscript.102 As far as the earliest codices attest, sonnets have always existed as a sequence. Moreover sonnet sequences (the corone) were already present in the Duecento, such as those of Folgore da San Gimignano. Finally, before Dante came up with the tercet and Boccaccio responded with the octave, the sonnet was considered the governing narrative form in verse.103

In the wake of Dante’s Vita nuova, Petrarch’s was the first collection of lyrics to be deliberately arranged according to a predetermined sequential order. By omitting the prose commentary of Vita nuova, Petrarch perfected the independent sonnet sequence. Thus his greatest formal accomplishment lies in the idea itself of a unified collection. Yet Petrarch spent the last forty years of his life obsessively recompiling, adding, redacting, and re-editing the Fragmenta. In Dante’s early work the prose narrative acts as his commentary on his verses; the libellus is presented as a youthful piece that the author of the Commedia never cared to revise.104 Whereas Dante documents his unidirectional transformation in his prose, Petrarch’s thoughts are ever recursive, exposed in the surviving marginalia and postilla of the Vaticano Latino 3196. The elder Petrarch looks back on his life, in effect becoming the silent philologist of his young self. His frequent expressions of his own alterity in time in the poems—“I was in part another man from what I am now,” quand’era in parte altr’uon da quel chi’i’ sono (Rvf 1.1)—are both reflected and dissolved by his own editorial practices. Thus the Secretum’s locution “I gather the scattered fragments of my soul,” Sparsa animae fragmenta recolligam, offers an existential gloss on the “rime sparse” of the first sonnet.105 Tellingly in Rvf 23 Petrarch describes himself as Actaeon, the paradigmatic character of dismemberment. In Ovid he is chased by his own dogs, one of which is appropriately called Ichnobates, “seeking for traces” in Greek (Met. 3.208). Petrarch is both the master and the dog. The poems are rime sparse and fragmenta because the author himself is scattered and fragmented.

Inexpletum

When Marsilio Ficino asserted in the fifteenth century that “bodies are shadows and vestiges of the soul and mind” (I corpi sono ombre et vestigi dell’anima e della menti), Petrarch might have replied, So is writing.106 In the unbound collection that has come to us as “Il Codice degli Abbozzi,” Vaticano Latino 3196, the poems are emendated, corrected, rewritten, shuffled until the very night of Petrarch’s death.107 In the postilla appearing on c. 5r, on what would become poem 211 in the Fragmenta, Petrarch scribbled that it almost didn’t make the cut:

Miru(m), h(un)c ca(n)cell(atum) (et) da(m)natu(m) p(ost) m(u)ltos a(n)nos, ca(s)u relege(n)s, absoluj (et) tr(anscripsi) i(n) ord(ine) stati(m), no(n) obst(ante) 1369 Iu(n)ii 22, hora 23, uen(er)is, pauc(a) p(ost)ea, die 27, i(n) uesp(er)is, mutauj fine[m] . . . h(oc) f . . . e(r)it a.

Amazing. By chance rereading this deleted and rejected sonnet after the many years, I readmitted it and transcribed it immediate into the order, notwithstanding . . . Friday 22 June 1369 at 5 a.m. A little later, the 27th, in the evening, I changed the ending.108

Earlier I described Petrarchan poetic imitation as following in the footsteps of ancient authors; now his marginalia reveal the tiny tracks of his own thoughts. Even the abbreviations themselves are vestigia, the incomplete parts of whole words.109 Though he says he rescued this poem by “chance,” the statement is undercut by the remarkable specificity within the poem, which ends with Mille trecento ventisette, a punto / su l’ora prima, il di sesto d’aprile, / nel laberinto entrai, né veggio ond’esca, “One thousand three hundred twenty-seven, exactly at the first hour of the sixth day of April, I entered the labyrinth, nor do I see where I may get out of it” (Rvf 211.12–14). Besides the Virgil flyleaf, this is the only reference to the exact date of his falling in love. It seems that forty-two years, two months, and twenty-two days later, Petrarch is still trapped in the “labyrinth.”

In a letter to his friend Philippe de Cabassoles, who had requested copies of some old verses, Petrarch complained:

It was difficult to find them among my other writings, still more to find them in my memory. . . . Eventually, by means of the datings that I habitually use in filing them away, with toil and dust I found them, and they now come to you as they were, half mangled and dirty [semilaceri ut erant et squalentes], nor am I changing anything in them although I could change much, so that you may see not what I am but what I was, and so with a certain delight you may recall the first essays of our youth. (Seniles 15.15)110

His writings now are “half mangled and dirty,” semilaceri et squalentes, whereas in another letter he calls those of Quintilian completely “mutilated and mangled,” discerptus et lacer, thus underscoring the contingencies of manuscripts, whether they be ancient or modern. Whatever its state of disfiguration, textual materiality reflects the different chapters of an author’s life or afterlife. For Petrarch this demonstrates that the self can never be fully captured in writing but only as snapshots in time, recoverable only thanks to one’s haphazard filing habits. It is impossible to fix the endless flux of life into a collection of texts, or, as Petrarch suggests here, it might not even be appropriate to mend their textual holes or clean their grime since they are indices of the author’s historicity.

Earlier I showed that Petrarch’s use of the imperfect tense in Familiares 6.2—deambulabamus, vagabamur, and solebamus—was a function of past progressive memory. We may well say that the “imperfect” embodies an aesthetic category too, thus initiating the Renaissance practice of the non finito.111 It is significant that Michelangelo chiseled on his Pietà, MICHAEL.A[N]GELUS.BONATORUS.FLOREN[INUS].FACIEBAT, with the verb in the imperfect tense rather than the usual perfect, fecit.112 We usually think of the ruin and the fragment as things that happen post factum; buildings and poems were once whole, and now, due to the destructive agent of time or the hands of man, they lie in waste. But Petrarch’s compositions are fragments before they can even be completed, much less ruined. Life and art are always capable of correction, improvement, emendation, and erasure, hence Michelangelo’s aesthetics (and grammar and theology) of the imperfect. The title of Familiares 18.7 is “To Francesco of the Church of the Holy Apostles, that unpolished works are often more pleasing to the intellect.”113 All of Petrarch’s immense collections—Fragmenta, Familiares, the Africa—are unfinished, proleptic ruins, not to mention all the books he planned to write but did not get around to.114 The pervading anxiety in the Secretum is that a life’s work is left uncompleted (labores . . . interruptos), the Africa half-finished (semiexplicitam), and the self as inexpletum, “unfulfilled,” “incomplete.”115 Would not Petrarch agree with Goethe that “literature is a fragment of fragments; only the smallest proportion of what took place and what was said was written down, while only the smallest proportion of what was written down has survived”?116

Traces of Methodology

Gerard Passannante’s recent The Lucretian Renaissance has an illuminating discussion of vestigia from Lucretius to Montaigne to Bacon as a method of tracing the ideas of the past as well as a way to think about the swerve—the clinamen—of the classical tradition. Passannante points out, “For readers from Petrarch onward, the figure of vestigia and the proverbial pack of hounds were Renaissance clichés that applied widely to the book hunter seeking out the remains of textual traditions or the humanist filling in the holes of corrupted manuscripts.”117 Lucretius explains his methodology thus:

Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci

sunt, per quae possis cognoscere cetera tute.

namque canes ut montivagae persaepe ferai

naribus inveniunt intectas fronde quietes,

cum semel institerunt vestigia certa viai,

sic alid ex alio per te tute ipse videre

talibus in rebus poteris caecasque latebras

insinuare omnis et verum protrahere inde. (1.402–9)

But for a keen-scented mind, these little tracks [vestigia] are enough to enable you to recognize the others for yourself. For as hounds very often find by their scent the leaf-hidden resting-place of the mountain-ranging quarry, when once they have hit upon certain traces [vestigia] of its path, so will you be able for yourself to see one thing after another in such matters as these, and to penetrate all unseen hiding-places, and draw forth the truth from them.

So far there are four paradigms for investigating something: Quintilian’s pedagogy by means of partial models; Lucretius’s deciphering the hidden arguments of a philosophical text; Bonaventure’s traces of the divine that marks the earthly world; and the humanist’s philological reconstruction of a received text. Let me add one more: the fashioning of the self in an autobiographical text. Montaigne in “Of Vanity” explains his psychology of self-representation by quoting from De rerum natura: “At all events, in these memoirs, if you look around, you will find that I have said everything or suggested everything. What I cannot express I point to with my finger: Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci / Sunt, per quae possis cognoscere cetera tute.”118 Using the lines of Lucretius not to illustrate the enterprise of philosophy but to describe his own autobiographical project (which in any case might be the same for the author of the Essais), Montaigne in this characteristically sly move privileges ineffable gestures over dazzling verbal exhibition.

Petrarch’s textual works anticipate Montaigne’s essays as incomplete self-portraits that reveal too much and too little.119 Investigation is pressed to its epistemological limits: if self-writing leaves only traces, perhaps unknown even to the author himself, how does the philologist decipher the clues in order to establish a critical edition? Can his erudition bypass the biographic fallacy?

Investigation opens up two directions, what today we would call a historicist one, in which we create the past “as it was,” independent of us, and a hermeneutic one, in which there is a coproduction of meaning in the dialectical encounter between the text and the reader. As illuminated by Anthony Grafton, in the humanism of early modernity there were those who saw the study of the past as scientific and those who saw history as a form of pedagogical training in eloquence and virtue.120 Petrarch perhaps straddles both: he recognizes that to understand antiquity one must recover the original senses of words and texts, hence his meticulous reconstruction of Livy and his revival of the classical Latin style.121 But as we have seen, he also made the enterprise intensely personal and ethical. So far my own idiosyncratic choice of using vestigia as the verbal lens to comprehend Petrarch reveals his mind as much as it reflects our own judgments. We are not interested in vestiges only because they tell us what the past was like, but also because, in their ambiguity, they allow us to interpret the past according to our own interests, precisely as Petrarch himself did.122

The divergent scholarly approaches to Vaticano Latino 3195 codex in the past sixty years prove to be a direct descendant of the two methods of interpretation outlined by Grafton—the scientific and the hermeneutic. Ernest Hatch Wilkins’s study “The Making of the Canzoniere” embodies the former, influencing an entire generation with his conjecture that there were at least nine forms of the collection, from its primitive state in 1336 to its last form as the Vaticano Latino 3195 in 1374.123 Recent critics have offered major correctives to this received wisdom. Pleading for more theoretical approach, Barolini bristles against such strict scientific chronology and instead reads Petrarch’s fluid divisions as “a way of probing into the very nature of transition.”124 H. Wayne Storey, examining the Vaticano Latino 3195 under ultraviolet light, discovered that the text was full of erasures and corrections by both Petrarch’s and later hands; thus he questions the nature of a “final” or last copy of an authorial work.125 As such, the irresolution of Petrarch’s own traces becomes an allegory of the philological debate about his compositions.

“My Rome, My Athens”

Humanism is able to posit a past and the possibility of its continuation, in altered form, in the present. Seeking a way out of the historicist dilemma, Petrarch wants to peer beyond the ruin into the perfect Roman temple. His desire to speak to the dead by writing letters to them is a yearning for this sort of unmediated presence. He writes to Cicero as “if he was a friend living in my time with an intimacy that I consider proper because of my deep and immediate acquaintance with his thought” (Fam. 1.1).126 For the humanist writing to and conversing with others are the means by which one forges one’s identity.127 Reading in turn becomes a solitary meditation in which one can commune with the past. Sharing one’s readings with friends becomes the process of actualizing in conversation what was interior understanding. Meditation on ruins is another humanist exercise. Contemplating disappeared architecture both intensifies and bridges the gulf between the experience of everyday life and the hallowed world of antiquity.

In a letter written during his habitual solitary stays in Vaucluse, Petrarch gives an extraordinary account of his self-imposed exile:

Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland; here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings, wherein I marvel at their accomplishments and their spirits or at their customs and lives or at their eloquence and genius. I gather them from every land and every age in this narrow valley, conversing with them more willingly than with those who think they are alive because they see traces of their stale breath in the frosty air. (Fam. 15.3)128

From the depths of his contemplation Petrarch conjures a utopia. Here the vestigia are even more evanescent than the tracks on the ground—they are the “stale breath in the frosty air.” This spellbinding summoning of spirits ancient and modern, far and near, can be positioned between Dante’s self-induction into the spectral circle of ancient poets in the Inferno 3 and Machiavelli’s nocturnal communion with ancient authors recounted in his famous letter to Francesco Vettori. Petrarch is decidedly closer to the author of the Discourses on Livy, for whereas Dante banishes the worthy pagans to the kingdom of shadows, Machiavelli revivifies them in the darkness of his library. For four hours nightly he casts off his tattered street clothes, dons regal garments, and enters the visionary court of ancient men, who receive him, he says, “with affection. . . . I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me.”129 Petrarch is even more expansive, because he commingles not only with the august thinkers of antiquity but also recent intimate friends. By isolating certain nearly forgotten moments in the human past and by endeavoring to establish communication with them, Petrarch paved the path toward the humanist movement as a universal, transhistorical community.130 The ruins of Rome that devastated him earlier dissolve here, replaced with the perfect synchronic society of “my Rome, my Athens.” His virtual republic of letters crosses time and space, and, in a twist of self-aggrandizing rhetoric, he thinks he is the only one to recognize his imaginary society’s true genius. By the mimetic powers of his imagination, all signs of the historical abyss—traces, ruins, fragments, even death itself—are filled with the plentitude of friendship and tradition. The emptiness of vestigia is, at least for a moment, filled by the fullness of presence.

Immortality and Destruction

On Easter Sunday, 8 April 1341, on the Capitoline Hill, the Senate of Rome crowned Petrarch poet laureate. Inspired by the solemnity of the occasion, he declared, “We are drawn by the places, I do not know how, where there remain vestiges of those we love or admire,” Movemur enim nescio quo pacto locis ipsis, in quibus eorum quos diligimus aut admiramur adsunt vestigia.131 This sentence is in fact lifted verbatim from Cicero’s De legibus:

We are drawn by the places, I do not know how, where there remain vestiges of those we love or admire. [Movemur enim nescio quo pacto locis ipsis, in quibus eorum quos diligimus aut admiramur adsunt vestigia.] My beloved Athens delights me not so much by the stunning monuments or the exquisite works of antiquity found there, but rather by recalling to my mind great men—where each one lived, where he used to sit and carry on disputations; why, I even enjoy looking on their graves.132

In Cicero places serve as the catalysts not only of memory but also of associations and imaginations. Set in the locus amoenus of Cicero’s villa at Arpinum, the dialogue also recalls how important a leisurely setting is to philosophical inquiry. Like Petrarch, Cicero cares much less for the “stunning monuments” of architecture than for the monumental thoughts of “great men.”

Petrarch’s oration, however, is not about philosophy but about “the poet’s reward,” which includes immortality, “immortality of the poet’s own name and the immortality of the names of those whom he celebrates.” Petrarch invokes the familiar Latin boasts of poetic everlastingness: Ovid at the end of the Metamorphoses, Statius at the end of the Thebaid, Virgil as he remembers Nisus and Eurylaus, Lucan in his ninth book of Pharsalia, and Horace in his fourth book of the Odes.133 In the trajectory of citation from Cicero to the poets, Petrarch gathers a set of ambitions about permanence and succession. Yet his exercise is pure citation, without assimilation or alteration. This is what Greene calls the “reproductive or sacramental; it celebrates an enshrined primary text by rehearsing it liturgically, as though no other form of celebration could be worthy of its dignity.”134 In its exact repetition Petrarch the celebrant and the celebrated reproduces but does not remake.

Petrarch’s intoning of poets’ immortal longings is a sort of ritual summons that installs him as a new vates for Rome, the apotheosis of sequere vestigia, as it were. He explains:

There have indeed been many men who in their lifetime were glorious and memorable for what they wrought in writings or in arms, whose names have nevertheless fallen into oblivion for this one reason, that they did not succeed in expressing in the stable and enduring style of a true man of letters what it was that they really had in their minds and spirits.135

Expressing the highest aspiration of verse, the poetic immortality topos promises not the fixity of the text but its open future horizon. Cultural survival and flourishing is based not on fixed replication but on poetic multiplicity. Standing in the midst of Roman ruins and believing himself the first poet since Statius to be crowned with laurels, Petrarch here fulfills the Latin poet’s prophecy of survival and pleads for his own immortality.

At least one contemporary reader paid heed to Petrarch’s call. Gathered at the start of the Vaticano Latino 3196 are a couple of poems addressed to Petrarch, one of which is by Giacomo Colonna, the brother of Giovanni:

Se le parti del corpo mio destrutte

Et ritornate in athomi et faville

Per infinita quantità di mille

Fossino lingue et in sermon ridutte. . . .

Quanto lo corpo et le mie membra foro

Allegre et quanto la mia mente leta,

Odendo dir che nel romano foro

Del novo et degno fiorentin poeta

Sopra le tempie verdeggiava illoro,

Non porian contar né porre meta.136

If the parts of my body, destroyed and reduced to atoms and sparks of fire by infinite thousands, were all tongues and brought to speech . . . they could not recount or reach the end of telling how much my body and my limbs were delighted and how happy my mind was, hearing tell that in the Roman Forum, on the temples of the new and worthy Florentine poet there grew green a laurel wreath.137

With this memorable sonnet Colonna can be considered one of the first proponents of Petrarchism, the poetic movement that engulfed literary Europe from the moment of its creation to the time of Shakespeare.138 Rehearsing the sparagmos topos and monumentalizing the poet as a new Florentine temple in the Roman Forum, in one stroke Colonna epitomizes the Petrarchan conventions of dismemberment and perpetuation.

In the Secretum, however, we find a very different story. Though the dating of the text is difficult, most scholars agree that Petrarch drafted it in 1347, six years after the laureate address, and revised it continuously until 1353.139 In the dialogue Augustinus, a fictional Augustine, criticizes Petrarch for his excessive longing for the “worthless” immortality of fame that blocks his path to true spiritual immortality. Writing might last longer than human life, but it too will someday end:

Add the decay of tombs, which can be shattered, as Juvenal said, “by the evil strength of a sterile fig branch.” In your Africa, you elegantly called this “a second death.” And so, if I might here address you in the same words that you made another speak, “Soon the bust will lie in ruins, and the inscribed marble will fall in shattered stone; from this, my son, you will suffer a second death.” This is bright and immortal glory, this glory that totters at the blow of a single stone? Add the destruction of books in which your name has been written either by your own or another’s hand. Although the memory of books lasts longer than that of tombs, and thus books seem longer-lived, their destruction nonetheless is inevitable, because of the innumerable calamities of nature and fortune alike, to which books, like everything else, are subject.140

Augustinus, quoting Petrarch’s own words from the Africa, enacts multiple frames of ironic self-citation. Petrarch has co-opted the historical Augustine, putting into his mouth lines from his own Latin epic, saying, “I might here address you in the same words that there you made another speak.” Augustinus says that Franciscus writes too much and thus forgets the soul, making a paradox of Petrarch’s entire vocation and questioning humanism’s very principle of studying the classical past for self-cultivation. Yet we must remember these are all Petrarch’s own words. He writes that he is writing too much. He remembers that he forgets his soul. The dialogue becomes a self-referential game of refracted mirrors.141 If the hubristic bid for poetic immortality is declaimed so assuredly in the laureation, the deepest fear of its destruction is anticipated in the Secretum. Later Augustinus commands Franciscus, “Let the sight of an ancient building make you think: ‘Where are the people whose hands built this?’ When you see a newer building, think, ‘Where will those who built this soon be?’”142

Indeed after Petrarch’s death his considerable library was dispersed.143 At a certain point in the dialogue Franciscus complains of the harshness of Fortune, of how, “in a single day, with one wicked stroke, she dashed me to pieces along with my hopes, my resources, my family, my home.” Commentators are unclear of the precise event to which Petrarch refers. Perhaps it was the fire that destroyed his house in Vaucluse in 1353, or it could be the confiscation of his father’s property after death by the city of Florence in 1326, which deprived Petrarch of his inheritance.144 Augustinus responds to him:

If you consider, in truth, not the disasters of private families only, but the ruins also of empires from the beginning of history, with which you are so well acquainted; and if you call to mind the tragedies you have read, you will not perhaps be so sorely offended when you see your own humble roof brought to naught along with so many palaces of kings. Now pray go on, for these few warning words will open to you a field of meditation.145

Whatever the cause of Petrarch’s sudden catastrophe, Augustinus aligns the individual with the universal by framing personal tragedy alongside the vast sweep of fallen empires. The ironic swipe contained in the conditional construction, with the modifiers “with which you are so well acquainted” and “you have read,” suggests that Petrarch himself is having difficulty finding consolation from exemplary history, which he incessantly urges others to do in his letters. Not even the long meditations on historical calamities can help the expert on ruins with his own catastrophe.

In his final work, Triumph of Eternity, Petrarch yearns for an eternity now, when “‘Yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow,’ ‘morn’ and ‘eve,’ / ‘Before and ‘soon,’ will pass like fleeting shadows, / ‘Has been,’ ‘shall be,’ and ‘was’ exist no more,” Dianzi, adesso, ier, diman, mattino e sera, tutti in un punto passeran com’ombra; / non avrà loco “fu,” “sarà,” ned “era” (lines 65–67).146 The metaphysics of yearning I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter would find its ultimate fulfillment in this eternal present. Sub specie aeternitatis poetry is no longer necessary, whatever its boasts of immortality. All of the discourses surrounding vestigia—from his erotics of Laura in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta to his epic construction of Rome in the Africa, from his poetics of ruins in his Familiares to his contemplation of time in the Secretum—can be measured by the yawning distance from this blessed state of eternity. In the mundane world, however, the humanist enterprise of historical recovery is still necessary. Ruined architecture is just one cipher of yesterday. Ancient texts, also ruined, are the material objects that enhance Petrarch’s capacity to imagine such a world. His exercise of the historical imagination begins with sensible vestigia, proceeds by way of them to the past, which is then experienced as a spiritual absence. The ruin is one such vestigial material, an external object that reflects an internal condition, and meditations on it set into motion Petrarch’s existential encounter with the past.

Plate 1. Maarten van Heemskerck, Self-Portrait with the Colosseum, 1553. Oil on panel. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK/Art Resource, New York.

Plate 2. Tommaso Laureti, Triumph of Christianity, 1585. Fresco. Sala di Costantino, Vatican. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Plate 3. Li Cheng, Reading the Stele, Northern Song dynasty, mid-tenth century. Ink and light color on silk. Osaka Municipal Museum. Google Art Project.

Plate 4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, detail of ruins, Allegory of Good and Bad Government, ca. 1338–40. Fresco. Palazzo Publico, Siena. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Plate 5. Sandro Botticelli, The Adoration of the Magi , ca. 1478–82. Tempera and oil on panel. National Gallery, Washington, DC. NGA.

Plate 6. Herman Posthumus, Landscape with Ancient Ruins, 1536. Oil. Liechtenstein. Princely Collection of Vaduz-Vienna.

Plate 7. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563. Oil on oak. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

Plate 8. Roma, directed by Federico Fellini, 1972. Fox Pictures.