Petrarch as the Father of Humanism and one of the Initiators of Renaissance

Petrarch’s lyrical poetry:

Rime sparse (Scattered Rhymes): a collection of 366 poems, out of which 317 are
sonnets; they were called “Il Canzoniere” in the 16th cent.
Allegorical Triumphs (Triomphi): not inished, but hugely in luential for 2 centuries
after Petrarch’s death

Petrarch attributed much more importance to his writings in Latin than to his Italian
poetry, but it is interesting to note that he became more famous for his Italian poetry
than for his scholarly work in Latin. Petrarch himself would probably have been a
little surprised by this turn of events and perhaps even a little disappointed.

Most of Petrarch’s lyrical poetry revolves around a female igure called Laura, who
might have been a real igure, if we are to consider Petrarch’s accounts of meeting
her, but no real evidence of her existence has been found. Even though he wrote
poems in Italian for a good period of his life, Petrarch doesn’t seem to have attached
particular importance to these writings and even claimed once that he wrote
vernacular love poems and songs only in the wilder days of his youth. This attitude
might be partially explained by the fact that vernacular was still considered an
inferior language to Latin during his lifetime and the Tuscan dialect in which he was
writing was still a provincial idiom with no recognized grammar. However, in spite of
his deprecating views on writing vernacular love poetry, Petrarch continued to work
throughout his lifetime on the collection of poems that would become known as the
Canzoniere. All of Petrarch’s writings, except his love poems, were written in Latin,
the scholarly accepted language at the time.

The irst surviving version of the Canzoniere (the Chigi manuscript) was a copy
owned by Boccaccio, who copied it from a text that Petrarch gave him around
1362-1363. In later versions, Petrarch would add poems at the end of the two parts,
usually with revisions to the order of the previous version. The inal version of the
Canzoniere was inished months before his death and it’s partially written by him
and partially by his scribe Giovanni Malpaghini.

During the last two decades of his life, Petrarch also worked on another vernacular
work, a series of six allegorical poems called Triumphs, which remained un inished.

The inal version of the Canzoniere consists of 366 poems divided into two uneven
parts: Poems 1-263 and Poems 264-366. Out of these, his sonnets are the most
famous (317 poems). He considers his Canzoniere just rhymes (Rime) and unlike
Dante, he does not consider himself an Italian poet. However, his poems would
become very in luential in the formation of the Italian language, not because the
author set up to establish literary or linguistic norms or dogma, but through the
sheer aesthetic power of his verses and the ease and order of their language.
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