Francesco Petrarca (1304-74) is the acknowledged pioneer of the modern historical imagination of Rome. He visited the city for the first time in 1337 and went back in 1341 to be crowned with laurels as ‘‘poet and historian’’ in a ceremony on the Capitoline. His description of Roman promenades in the company of his friend Giovanni Colonna combines elements of personal observation with data from ancient (including early Christian) sources:
You and I took our walks in that city,... at every step happening on something to stir our thoughts and words. Here was the residence of Evander, here the house of Carmenta, here the cave of Cacus, here the nursing she-wolf... And here Christ came to find his fleeing lieutenant; here Peter was crucified, Paul beheaded, Lawrence grilled. . . here Silvester hid, Constantine was healed of his leprosy, Calixtus mounted his glorious bier. But why continue? Can I fix Rome for you on this poor sheet of paper? (Familiarium rerum libri (hereafter Fam.) 6. 2. 5-14, tr. Bishop 1966: 63-5)
Petrarch relied on a twelfth-century handbook for pilgrims, the Mirabilia urbis Romae, which mingled topographical and legendary information from all periods; but it was a qualified reliance. Recent Italian taste for precise imitation of ancient Latin authors had bred in him a reverence for old texts, which he now turned into a new kind of historical criticism. When Colonna identified part of the monastery of
San Gregorio on the Caelian as a ruined temple of the sun-god, Petrarch pointed to a passage in Jerome’s translation of Eusebius’ Chronicle and reclaimed the edifice (incorrectly) as the Septizonium of Septimius Severus (Weiss 1969: 33).
Historians of scholarship concede that Petrarch’s achievement was more than scholarly (e. g., Pfeiffer 1976: 8). His feats as a discoverer and collator of codices of classical Latin authors were impressive (Reynolds and Wilson 1991: 128-34), but it was a particular quality of affective imagination that enabled him to summon the Roman past in a way that would shape the vision of later generations. In a verse-epistle to Virgil he describes how he walked around Mantua in search of places known to the poet. The modern tourist recognizes the mood but, as Thomas Greene points out, ‘‘in Petrarch’s century it was a momentous acquisition.’’ He was ‘‘the first to notice that classical antiquity was very different from his own. . . world, and the first to consider antiquity more admirable’’ (Greene 1982: 90). This admiration entailed an intuition of ‘‘the possibility of a cultural alternative’’: the prospect of reconfiguring the relationship between past and present so that the former surfaced within the latter. Hence the prominence in Petrarch’s writings of a particularly tendentious idiom of‘‘archaeology,’’ applicable equally to objects, texts, and cultures. Its key metaphor is one of disinterment, ‘‘a digging up that was also a resuscitation’’ (Greene 1982: 92).
What place did Petrarch assign to early Christianity or ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ in his scheme of cultural renovation? There is a telling passage in his account of conversations that he and Colonna used to have on the roof of the Baths of Diocletian:
When we had clambered on the walls of the crumbling city, we had the broken ruins under our eyes. We talked long of the city’s history. We seemed to be divided; you seemed better informed in modern, I in ancient history, if we call ‘‘ancient’’ [antiquum] whatever preceded the celebration of Christ’s name at Rome and its veneration by Roman emperors, ‘‘modern’’ [noovum] everything from then until our own day. (Fam. 6. 2. 16, tr. Bishop 1966: 66, modified)
The distinction between ‘‘ancient’’ and ‘‘modern’’ - which here excludes any ‘‘middle’’ age - would be conventional, but for the lateness and sharpness of the caesura. The reference to Christian emperors dictates a Constantinian date for the start of the modern age. Instead of a single era dating from the Incarnation, Petrarch imagines an ancient Roman time that would end with the onset of imperial Christianity. From their Tetrarchic belvedere, Francesco and Giovanni have seen the shadow of a new historiography.
For Petrarch, ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ would have comprised the period from Augustus to Constantine. As a historian, he did not venture far into it. ‘‘What else, then, is all history if not the praise of Rome?’’ he once famously asked; but his chief historical work, a De viris illustribus, begins with Romulus and breaks off with Cato. Challenged to justify the omission of famous men of recent generations, he replied that he did not wish to ‘‘drive his pen so far and through such regions of darkness’ (Fam. 20. 8. 11). This ‘‘darkness’’ first of all enshrouded Rome. In Petrarch’s incomplete epic the Africa, the elder Scipio carries his prophecy of Rome’s future greatness no further than the emperor Titus, because he cannot bear to relate how rule passed later into the hands of men of African and Spanish descent (2. 274-8). Not for this Roman poet and patriot the comfortable myth of the empire’s successive ‘‘translations’’ into more recent polities. The second century already announced a Dark Age. ‘‘[I]t is clear,’’ wrote the grandson of the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen, ‘‘that Petrarch discarded the whole history of the Roman Empire during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages because within that age, everywhere in the western world, had come into power ‘barbarous’ nations which brought even Rome and the Romans under their domination’’ (Mommsen 1942: 236). In Petrarch, we trace the origins of the modern consciousness of Rome’s fall and its cultural consequences: ‘‘By setting up the ‘decline of empire’ as a dividing point and by passing over the traditional marks either of the foundation of the Empire or of the birth of Christ, [he] introduced a new chronological demarcation in history’’ (Mommsen 1942: 239). In so doing, he gave the cue to a tradition of Italian humanist historiography that began with Flavio Biondo’s Historiae ab inclinatione romani imperii (completed in 1453), which in its turn paved the way for Gibbon (D’Elia 1967: 35-40; Demandt 1984: 96-7).
This attachment to a remote Roman past came at a price:
I devoted myself especially to the study of antiquity [Petrarch writes], for I always disliked our own age - so much so, that had it not been for the love of those dear to me [amor carorum], I would have preferred to have been born in any other time than our own. In order to forget my own times, I have always tried to place myself mentally in another age. (Letter to Posterity, Musa 1985: 3)
In the same breath he recalls how belatedly he had come to a true appreciation of ‘‘sacred [i. e., biblical and Christian] literature.’’ There is a tension between the equally stylized confessions of a youthful passion for pagan poetry and an unnatural passion for antiquity. Petrarch’s ‘‘antiquity’’ predated imperially sanctioned Roman Christianity. How did he retain his affection for that past while turning to a ‘‘sacred literature’’ that he associated with the writings of the church Fathers, especially Augustine (Trinkaus 1970: 565-8)? Was it love for certain early Christian authors, considered by him as contemporaries, that kept him from migrating forever into an imaginary old Roman world? The ambivalence at the heart of such passages reflects a conflict between two imaginations of time. While his major works project a public, secular, Roman, historiographical scheme of time, Petrarch reserved for himself a private, Christian, nonhistorical sphere. According to Ronald Witt, the ‘‘single-minded secularism of Petrarch’s conception of public time’’ created ‘‘an enormous and persistent contradiction’’ that ran throughout his life; by excluding most of Christian history it ‘‘robbed him of any way to interpret Jerome or his beloved Augustine as anything beyond participants in a world in decline.’’ Those Christian giants ‘‘appeared in his writings... in a private time without continuity with its past’’ (Witt 2000: 282).
Witt’s hypothesis of Petrarchan double time is borne out by the difference in literary genres chosen by this writer for communion with his most cherished ancient pagan authors and with Augustine. In the final book of his Letters on Familiar Matters, he addresses himself in verse or prose to (among others) Cicero, Seneca, Livy, Horace, Virgil, and Homer. Several of the letters are subscribed from a place in
Italy ‘‘here above [apud superos]' and dated from the Incarnation. Whereas Dante could still imagine himself conversing with pagan auctores in a shared landscape (‘‘there below”) and a unitary, Christian era, Petrarch uses the act of epistolography to mark the historical and cultural distance separating him from his illustrious predecessors. These are truly epistolae, tokens of longing and lack. ‘‘I have spoken of many things as if to one present,” he confides at the end of a letter to Homer, ‘‘but as I step back from the ardour of my fancy I realize how far away you are and fear that you may have trouble reading so much in that place of darkness” (Fam. 24. 12. 42).
With his favorite Christian authors it is otherwise. None receives a familiar letter and, when Petrarch does commune with one of them in a text of his own, it is a dialogue ostensibly for his eyes only. This is the Secretum, in which ‘‘Franciscus” confers with a man whom he instantly recognizes as Augustine. Here the genre serves to erase rather than to emphasize the textual medium. The Secretum is a fictive record of conversation in a shared present, the opposite of epistolary encounter: Franciscus and Augustinus are no more separated by history than the conversation partners of Augustine's Soliloquia. Since it is a new understanding of the distinctness of the past that makes Petrarch's letters to classical authors poignant, we should not simply equate his relationships with them and the ‘‘conjuring up [sic] of Augustine in the Secretum' (Gouwens 1998: 65). The imputation of necromancy is false. When Petrarch raises the dead, he gives his revenant a ghostly visage (Africa 9. 169). Augustinus, however, walks into Franciscus' waking life, looking as of old in Hippo; the Renaissance tropes of disinterment and resuscitation do not apply. This saintly father appears neither as a spirit nor in a resurrection body but as an old man (grandaevus), as if transported directly from the 430 s to the 1340s. We are not far from the miraculous world of letters in which ‘‘Jerome” could drop in on ‘‘Augustine” to explain an awkward point in theology.
Admittedly, the Secretum is an isolated work, and even there the ambitions of humanist philology are exhibited in ways completely alien to the medieval hagio-graphical tradition (Quillen 1998: 182-216). The illusions of dialogue aside, Petrarch communes with Augustine through the books that transmitted his works. In the celebrated account of the ascent of Mont Ventoux (Fam. 4. 1), he has the Confessions in hand. Books are the indispensable, corporeal medium both of his perception and of his possession of ‘‘famous men” from earlier centuries; at times they are surrogates for their authors (Findlen 1998: 92-3). Titles of works by Augustine (alone of the church Fathers) appear on the list of Petrarch's ‘‘Favorite Books [Libri mei peculiares]' with those of works by Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, and others (Ullman 1955: 117-37). Yet Augustine is never straightforwardly of the latter company, never ‘‘classical” in the historically articulated sense in which those writers represented for Petrarch the culture of antiquity (pace Rabil 1988a). Not only are Augustine’s works ranked apart in the list of ‘‘Favorite Books”: the list itself appears on the flyleaf of a codex containing his De vera religione. Petrarch's intimacy with Augustine was of a more everyday kind than the strange familiarity that he sought to establish, through his own texts as much as theirs, with the great literary exemplars of a lost Roman past. Pierre de Nolhac devoted a chapter, after others on Petrarch's knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin authors, to his acquaintance with ‘‘The Fathers of the Church and Modern Authors.’’ The conjunction is still good. However pregnant with future worlds of feeling and expression Petrarch’s readings of Augustine may be, the latter still stood inside Petrarch’s inherited culture, in the shared ‘‘unhistorical’’ time of what we now call the western Middle Ages (compare Bergvall 2001: 33-69; Stock 2001: 71-85; Fubini 2003: 43-65).
World History
