1. Introduction

Petrarch’s 1345 discovery of Cicero’s personal letters in Verona has long been regarded as a foundational moment in the historiography of the Renaissance, whether one takes the term as referring only to a movement associated with humanism or to the period that also goes by the name early modern.Footnote ¹ From Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) to modern histories of scholarship and Western civilization textbooks, Petrarch’s discovery represents a primal scene that has been linked to other putative Renaissance discoveries of the individual, ideas of authorship, the stylistic principle of imitatio, and, most importantly for this essay, the past.Footnote ² Since the middle of the twentieth century Petrarch’s much-celebrated new historical self-consciousness has frequently been described in terms of a contrast between a medieval Dante and a Renaissance Petrarch.Footnote ³ Whereas earlier accounts of the revival of classical culture, from Boccaccio (1313–75) and Bruni through Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), tend to associate Dante and Petrarch, most recent scholarship has followed Theodor E. Mommsen’s thesis in his classic study “Petrarch’s Conception of the Dark Ages,” where he remarks that “to realize the peculiarity of Petrarch’s standpoint, we have only to think of the entirely different picture of the past in the Divine Comedy, where Dante usually couples ancient and mediaeval figures in his representation of the various vices and virtues of man.”Footnote ⁴ The contrast continues in Thomas Greene’s influential The Light in Troy, where Greene describes what he calls “the crucial gap between Dante and Petrarch” by arguing that Petrarch “could not imagine the companionable, progressively equalizing journey together of Dante and Virgil.”Footnote ⁵ Even as scholars like Anthony Grafton, Greene, and Mary Carruthers have shown that Petrarch’s hermeneutics contains as much medieval allegorizing as Renaissance historicism, the consensus that has emerged, with apologies to T. S. Eliot, is that Dante and Petrarch divide the medieval and Renaissance worlds between them.Footnote ⁶ While it is true that Petrarch’s place as founder of Renaissance humanism has been challenged by scholars like Ron Witt, who locates Petrarch in the third generation of humanists, this has not accompanied a reassessment of Dante, who remains exiled from the idea of the Renaissance in a way that would have surprised Burckhardt.Footnote ⁷ One wonders if one of the reasons the Italian Renaissance may seem lost, to appropriate the title of Christopher Celenza’s book, is that this boundary between Dante and Petrarch is no longer contested.Footnote ⁸

This essay revisits Petrarch’s letters on his discovery of Cicero’s letters to reconsider the distance between Dante and Petrarch in terms of their respective relationships to the past and the periodization of the medieval and Renaissance, or medieval and modern, that it entails.Footnote ⁹ By examining this crucial moment, this study contributes to the rethinking of issues of periodization that is currently underway in a variety of fields, such as art history, literary studies, and cultural studies.Footnote ¹⁰ The narrative of Petrarch’s privileged place has been questioned both by historians, such as Haskins, Chenu, Weiss, and Witt, who have identified rediscoveries of antiquity at earlier moments, and by literary scholars, such as Mazzotta, Wallace, Menocal, Wojciehowski, and Simpson, who have taken a metacritical approach, interrogating the critical investments involved in making Petrarch a foundational figure.Footnote ¹¹ This study takes a different path by reexamining the images that Petrarch uses to describe his discovery. It reveals that Petrarch initially conceives of this event — and the new historical perspective it putatively inaugurates — through Dante’s characterization of Virgil. While critics have recognized Petrarch’s echo of Dante in the letter (Familiarum rerum libri 24.3) since the early twentieth century, they have not examined its significance, because of long-standing ideas about Dante’s relationship to the past (as in Greene’s idea of “the companionable, progressively equalizing journey”) and Petrarch’s own claims that he had not read Dante in order to avoid imitating him (Fam. 21.15). Both of these received ideas have been complicated by more recent research. Over the last thirty years American Dante criticism, particularly in the work of Teodolinda Barolini and Albert Ascoli, has developed a more multifaceted understanding of Dante’s relationship to the classical past that has emphasized Dante’s critical, not complacent, view of Virgil.Footnote ¹² The critical understanding of Petrarch’s relationship with Dante has also been revised over the last few decades, culminating in a recent collection of essays edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Theodore Cachey that reveals how Petrarch strategically engages his precursor to marginalize him.Footnote ¹³

This essay brings together these two critical developments to propose a different reading of the significance of Petrarch’s letters to Cicero and the historiography of the Renaissance, historicism, and the modern that it involves. By exploring how Petrarch constructs his encounter with Cicero, this study outlines Petrarch’s complex framing of this moment in the Familiares and points to the analogous strategies Petrarch deploys in his construction of both Cicero and Laura. Despite being the author of what would serve as a kind of rhetorical handbook, or, better, thesaurus, for European poetry over several centuries, Petrarch’s letters have rarely been treated as the literary artifacts that they are, even though Petrarch himself draws attention to his revisions of the letters’ literary form in the first letter of the collection, Fam. 1.1, and critics, like Rossi and Billanovich, have shown that he changes the dates of his letters.Footnote ¹⁴ While single letters in the Familiares, such as the account of his Ascent of Mt. Ventoux (Fam. 4.1), have been the subject of close analyses by scholars, the sophisticated construction of the letters to the ancients has been largely overlooked.Footnote ¹⁵ By investigating the images and framing that Petrarch uses, this investigation will illuminate the conceptual ground for Petrarch’s perception of the past.

2. Framing the Discovery of Cicero

In the frame of the Familiares, Petrarch insists that the letters to the ancients will scandalize his readers, that he has a relationship to time that is different from his contemporaries’, and that he has a new attitude toward authority. In Fam. 1.1 Petrarch highlights the importance of his discovery of Cicero’s letters, explaining that Cicero’s letters not only serve as the rhetorical model for the collection, but also gave him a new intimate understanding of the past, which he describes emphatically using the word offendere.Footnote ¹⁶ Petrarch writes: “In such difficulties [of life] Cicero revealed himself so weak that while I take pleasure in his style [stilo] I often feel offended by what he says [sententia offendar]. When I read his letters I feel as offended as I feel enticed [offensus]. Indeed, beside myself, in a fit of anger I wrote to him as if he were a friend living in my time with an intimacy that I consider proper because of my deep and immediate acquaintance with his thought. I thus reminded him of those things he had written that had offended [offenderer] me, forgetting, as it were, the gap of time.”Footnote ¹⁷ Petrarch distinguishes between Cicero’s stilum, which he admires, and his sententia, which so “offends” him that he erases time by writing directly to Cicero in the first of a series of what become the letters to ancient authors. He warns his reader about these letters that occupy the end of the collection “so that the reader will not be filled with undue wonder when he comes upon them.”Footnote ¹⁸ Petrarch thus underlines the novelty not only of what he read, but also of his reaction to it. When Petrarch reminds the reader about these letters again at the end of the collection, he once again emphasizes their exceptional status as violations of the collection’s chronological order: “I have arranged this work not according to subject but chronologically, with the exception of the last letters addressed to illustrious ancients, which I consciously brought together in one place because of their unity of character, and with the exception of the first letter, which, though written later, preceded its companions to serve as a preface; nearly all the others are arranged chronologically.”Footnote ¹⁹

The play with multiple timeframes in this description, with its careful coordination and distinction between the temporality of reading and the time of composition, also characterizes the first letter of book 24 itself, where Petrarch addresses time’s inescapability: “Thirty years ago — how time does fly! — and yet if I cast a glance backward to consider them all together, those thirty years seem as so many days, so many hours, but when I consider them singly, disentangling the mass of my labors, they seem so many centuries.”Footnote ²⁰ Petrarch suggests how one’s perception of time depends on one’s perspective, which he expresses through the dialectical relationship between part and whole that animates his collection of vernacular poems, including its title, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf).Footnote ²¹ Considered as a continuum, time can seem insignificant, but taken individually each moment can appear to be a century.Footnote ²² Petrarch continues to play with temporal perspective in this letter, comparing a man’s life to that of an insect that lives a single day: “Let us divide times as we wish, let us multiply the number of years, let us invent names for the ages, yet man’s entire life is as a single day, and that not a full summer day but a winter one, in which one dies in the morning, another at midday, another a little later, and another in the evening: one is young and blooming, another physically powerful, still another parched and wasted.”Footnote ²³ Given Petrarch’s play with the scales of time in this letter, it would be tempting to extend Petrarch’s analogy to historical ages, but Petrarch’s concern here is very much on a human scale.

Throughout the rest of Fam. 24.1, Petrarch insists that his relationship to time differs from that of his contemporaries, but not because he preferred the past, as he suggests elsewhere, but because he interpreted those works differently.Footnote ²⁴ Since his youth he has been able to “perceive a hidden meaning in the words unnoticed by my fellow students or even by my teacher, learned though he was in the elements of the arts. I would listen to Virgil proclaiming his divine words, ‘The beautiful first day of our lifetime flees wretched mortals, illnesses follow and sad old age, and the sufferings of a merciless death’; and elsewhere, ‘Brief and unalterable is the span of life’; and again, ‘But meanwhile time flies: and it flies never to return.’”Footnote ²⁵ In contrast to his contemporaries, Petrarch claims that he “would note not the verbal facility but the substance of the thought.”Footnote ²⁶ Petrarch would apply these ideas, moreover, to his own life, as his works and marginalia demonstrate.Footnote ²⁷ Petrarch frames this difference in terms of a conflict of authority that he explores in the next letter as well, emphasizing that this unique perspective gave rise to a new kind of authority that was based not on tradition but on his own experiences: “In this regard I have no need of poet or philosopher; I am my own witness and my own sufficient authority.”Footnote ²⁸ He continues: “I had previously believed learned men, now I believe myself, now I know what I once believed. For they learned merely by living, seeing, and observing, and proclaimed it to their followers as one warns travelers about an unsafe bridge.”Footnote ²⁹ Just as these authorities were only men, Petrarch can likewise be an authority not only for himself, but also potentially for others. To use another popular medieval image of the relationship between past and present, Petrarch does not stand on the shoulders of giants.Footnote ³⁰

Petrarch’s idea of reading for moral instruction, of course, is not really as novel as he claims. In his Moral Epistle 108, Seneca had already used the same passage from Virgil’s Georgics about time’s flight that Petrarch cites to distinguish between how grammarians (or philologists) and philosophers interpret texts. Seneca argues that whereas the grammarian scrutinizes Virgil’s use of the word fugit, the philosopher attends to the substance of the thought the verses express.Footnote ³¹ Petrarch knew Seneca’s letter well and in his Ambrosian Virgil he transcribes the relevant passages from it next to the pertinent verses of the Georgics.Footnote ³² Grafton has shown that Justus Lipsius uses this same passage from Seneca to challenge Scaliger’s philological historicism and Petrarch’s point here seems to be similar.Footnote ³³ Petrarch’s new hermeneutics is less historicist than it is philosophical. Such a view would be very much in keeping with what are usually characterized as medieval interpretive modes, and several scholars, such as Grafton and Greene, have noted Petrarch’s mix of the allegorical and historical.

Petrarch’s description of the reception of his discovery in the next letter, Fam. 24.2, dated 13 May 1351, continues to distinguish his perception of the past from his contemporaries’ and to reinforce his claim that the letters to the ancients will cause his readers to marvel. Petrarch recounts, or stages, the scandal the letter produced by describing a conversation about Cicero among a group of friends outside Vicenza.Footnote ³⁴ He writes:

Although the logic of this scene would seem to dictate that Petrarch should have Cicero’s letters fetched as evidence, he has his own letters brought out instead. This choice suggests that Petrarch’s reaction to the discovery is just as important as the letters he discovered, which puts Petrarch’s letters on the same plane as Cicero’s.Footnote ³⁶ Just as Cicero’s sententia scandalizes Petrarch, Petrarch’s new sententia about Cicero causes its own scandal.

Petrarch underlines his new critical relationship to Cicero by contrasting it with the old man who persists in thinking that Cicero is a god.Footnote ³⁷ Petrarch associates his new way with reason as opposed to an old mode based on authority:

Petrarch dismisses the inherited view of Cicero that he had believed as a boy and certain obstinate old men continue to hold, setting that old view against the reason of his new view of Cicero as a historical, fallible man. By making Cicero into a fallible man, and arguing that ancient authors had “learned merely by living, seeing, and observing, and proclaimed it to their followers as one warns travelers about an unsafe bridge,” Petrarch prepares conceptual space so that he can become an authority.Footnote ³⁹

3. Shades of Dante’s Virgil in Petrarch’s Cicero

Having established his putatively novel hermeneutics in Fam. 24.1 and his association with reason against old authorities in Fam. 24.2, Petrarch has constructed the frame that will give his discovery of Cicero’s manuscript its meaning.Footnote ⁴⁰ Reading Cicero’s letters, Petrarch is surprised to find not a sage philosopher, but a fickle and changeable political operator: “While for some time I had known the kind of teacher [preceptor] you were for others, now finally I realize what kind of guide you were for yourself.”Footnote ⁴¹ Petrarch laments that the anxieties and impulsiveness he finds in Cicero’s letters do not suit Cicero’s age or profession: “O wretched and distressed spirit, or to use your own words, O rash [preceps] and ill-fated elder.”Footnote ⁴² Disappointed that his preceptor was in fact preceps, Petrarch expresses his newly complex vision of Cicero with the image of the night traveler bearing a lantern: “Alas, forgetful of brotherly suggestions and so many of your own salutary precepts, like a traveler by night, bearing a light in the darkness, to those who followed you you showed the way on which you yourself had quite miserably fallen.”Footnote ⁴³ Cicero bore the light of philosophical truth but his letters reveal that he was not illuminated by them and was carried off to a death unworthy of a philosopher.

Commenting on this image of the traveler in his recent The Birth of the Past, Schiffman writes: “One wonders — as perhaps Petrarch intended — from whom he borrowed this striking image. (And what greater delight than to beguile readers into thinking his own words those of an ancient!)”Footnote ⁴⁴ The most likely source for Petrarch’s image, however, is not a classical author, as Schiffman suspects, but a modern vernacular one, Dante. As Rossi was the first to note in a 1904 article,Footnote ⁴⁵ the image of the figure who carries a light that illuminates the path for those that follow echoes Statius’s description of Virgil in Purgatorio 22: “You did as one who walks at night, who carries the light behind him and does not help himself, but instructs the persons coming after, when you said: ‘The age begins anew; justice returns and the first human time, and a new offspring comes down from Heaven.’”Footnote ⁴⁶

To describe Statius’s conversion through reading Virgil’s fourth eclogue, Dante has Statius adopt the poetics of light that radiates from Plato’s cave into the Gospel of John and the works of Augustine, and join it to the ancient poet’s own image of the footsteps to figure succession at the end of the Thebaid: “Live, I pray; and essay not the divine Aeneid, but ever follow her footsteps from afar in adoration.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The image of the poet bearing a lantern also contrasts with the earlier portrait in Inferno 28 of Bertran de Born, who bears his own head like a lantern to demonstrate the logic of the contrapasso.Footnote ⁴⁸ Implied in this disparity between Virgil and Bertran de Born is the difference between the limbo of the classical poets, whose nobile castello illuminates hell and whose penalty is privation, and the punishments of hell proper. The more natural relationship between poetic body and lamp in Dante’s Virgil, however, also reflects a critique, since Dante uses it to distinguish between the fallible author and his salvific text.Footnote ⁴⁹

Statius’s image of the poet who illuminates the path but is not illuminated expresses in concentrated form the complexity of Dante’s relationship to the classical past, particularly with regard to Virgil. Whereas critics have often emphasized Dante’s claims of continuity and companionship that he dramatizes in his encounter with the classical poets in Inferno 4, Dante makes the critical nature of this relationship quite clear, beginning with Virgil’s failure at the Walls of Dis, which the Pilgrim pointedly recalls to Virgil later in the poem when he addresses him: “Master, you who overcome all things, save the hard demons who came out against us at the gate.”Footnote ⁵⁰ As the work of Barolini in particular has shown, one of the main narrative threads of Dante’s overdetermined poem is his concentrated effort to critique and surpass Virgil, which is correlated with developing a new intimacy with him.Footnote ⁵¹ Like Dante, Petrarch uses the image to express a complex relationship toward the classical past, represented by Cicero instead of Virgil, whose achievements he admires but whose limitations he also emphasizes.

The Dantean derivation of this image is reinforced by Petrarch’s explicit, which once again uses Dante’s characterization of Virgil in the Commedia to describe Cicero. Petrarch signs the letter “in the year 1345 from the birth of that Lord whom you never knew.”Footnote ⁵² This echo of Dante’s address to Virgil, “by that God whom you did not know,” suggests a connection between the Statius episode and Inferno 1 that one finds in Dante’s Trecento commentators, like Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imola, who use these passages to gloss each other, since Virgil’s lack of illumination is related to his lack of faith.Footnote ⁵³ Petrarch’s attention to Cicero’s lack of faith emphasizes, as Witt has noted, the theological divide between them, which is very much in keeping with the meaning of Dante’s episode, and Petrarch returns to this topic of Cicero’s lack of faith elsewhere in reference to his discovery of Cicero and uses Virgil as an explicit parallel.Footnote ⁵⁴

The combination of these two Dantean quotations in Petrarch’s letter suggests that Petrarch’s model for his critical view of Cicero is Dante, whose supposedly uncritical relationship to the past is often used in contrast to Petrarch’s. Indeed, critics have been remarkably resistant to examining these Dantean echoes in Petrarch’s letter.Footnote ⁵⁵ Two years after Rossi first proposed that Dante was Petrarch’s likely source, Carrara rebuffed the idea, suggesting instead a passage from (now pseudo-)Augustine’s De symbolo that had been viewed as one of the potential sources for Dante’s passage at least since Tommaseo in 1837.Footnote ⁵⁶ More recently, critics seem to have accepted the Dantean source of the allusion, but even scholars, like Dotti and Feo, who have recognized both of these Dantean quotations in the letter, have not investigated their significance.Footnote ⁵⁷

That Petrarch might quote Dante here is something of an embarrassment for several related reasons. Petrarch’s quotation of Dante calls into question Petrarch’s claim about not having read Dante in order to avoid imitating him in a letter to Boccaccio (Fam. 21.15) — a claim that scholars have increasingly contested — and it challenges the novelty of Petrarch’s historical perspective.Footnote ⁵⁸ In his letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch justifies not possessing a copy of the Commedia by explaining that at the time he feared “becoming an unwilling or unconscious imitator” of Dante, so he avoided reading him.Footnote ⁵⁹ He then emphatically asserts: “This one thing I do wish to make clear, for 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 unwitting to follow in another’s footsteps. If you ever believe me about anything, believe me now; nothing can be more true.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In two later letters (Fam. 22.2 and 23.19) that, like Fam. 21.15, are addressed to Boccaccio, Petrarch continues to develop his theory of imitation; in Fam. 23.19, he distinguishes between poets, who borrow elements of style and ideas that they conceal, and mere apes, whose use of actual words is “glaring.”Footnote ⁶¹ Although these letters explicitly address his accidental imitation of Ovid and Virgil in his Buccolicum carmen, Dante does not seem to be far from Petrarch’s mind. Petrarch’s borrowing from Dante in the letter to Cicero is remarkable, then, because Petrarch insists on the letter’s novelty — the new hermeneutics of 24.1 and his reason opposed to old authorities in 24.2 — and insists earlier in the collection that he avoided reading Dante to escape his influence (Fam. 21.15).Footnote ⁶²

Less important than catching Petrarch in a lie about his debts to Dante, or reigniting what Ferguson once condescendingly referred to as “the revolt of the medievalists,” is that Petrarch’s crucial encounter with Cicero, around which the whole of the Familiares is structured, occurs through Dante.Footnote ⁶³ When Dante claims in Inferno 1 that Virgil was “one who seemed faint from a long silence,” he is not suggesting that Virgil was unread in the medieval period but that none had understood him as well as Dante does.Footnote ⁶⁴ What is interesting here is not primarily the question of precedence, but the perhaps more incredible fact of the way Dante’s vernacular text informs Petrarch’s Latin humanism. Instead of pushing back the boundary of the Renaissance by positing some set of criteria that would define a new historical or critical relationship to the past, what Petrarch’s borrowing shows is that he understood Dante’s innovation and used it to structure his own expression of his relationship to antiquity.

In his Unearthing the Past, Leonard Barkan follows Foucault when he notes the importance of considering “the conditions that made discovery possible and gave it meanings” in order to explain why certain remarkable statues that had reemerged, like the Torso Belvedere, were not celebrated in the same way that the Laocoon was.Footnote ⁶⁵ Likewise, the novelty of Petrarch’s relationship to the past did not simply appear off of the library’s shelves. As Eugenio Garin puts it, humanism is characterized not by “the discovery of new classical texts,” but “its attitude to the civilization of the past,” which “consists rather in a well marked historical consciousness.”Footnote ⁶⁶ By recycling the image Dante has Statius use to distinguish between the condemned author and salvific text in order to express his new relationship with Cicero, Petrarch reveals how Dante had shaped his perception of the past.Footnote ⁶⁷ In other words, Dante created the conditions of possibility that allowed for the emergence of Petrarch’s new perspective, since the language that Petrarch uses to express the disjunction or discontinuity is Dante’s own.

Petrarch’s worries about imitation in those two letters to Boccaccio (Fam. 22.2 and 23.19) would lend themselves to an interpretation of this relationship in terms of the so-called anxiety of influence, but the problem is that Dante is hidden in plain sight, as Ascoli has observed of another of Petrarch’s borrowings from Dante.Footnote ⁶⁸ Another interpretation could take this passage as a conscious invocation of Dante that might be part of the same double move that one finds in Dante’s Commedia, whereby a critique of the classical past is also an engagement with modern literary culture. Just as Dante’s use of Statius to show Virgil’s limits serves as the classical parallel to Dante’s own relationship with Cavalcanti, already recounted in similar terms in the Vita nuova and then continued in the Commedia, Petrarch’s use of Cicero may also have a modern component in his relationship with Dante.Footnote ⁶⁹ While this idea that Petrarch is using the classical past to reflect on his own place in literary history is intriguing, more interesting than adding to the catalogue of quotations would be that Petrarch, at least, sees Dante as a predecessor for his own idea of history, whose novelty he emphasizes.Footnote ⁷⁰

Petrarch’s extensive borrowing from the Statius-Virgil episode suggests that he understood Dante’s critical relationship to antiquity, and he may well have recognized that its inclusion is one of the fundamental novelties of Dante’s poem. Dozens of otherworld journeys before Dante put clerics in hell, but none had classical figures. As Alison Morgan notes in her comparative study of otherworld visions, arguing against Curtius’s claim that Dante’s inclusion of contemporary figures was the novelty: “the Comedy contains a lesser, not a greater, proportion of contemporary characters than the visions, and that Dante’s originality lies not here but rather in the inclusion of classical figures, who are totally unrepresented in the earlier medieval texts.”Footnote ⁷¹ Dante’s treatment of Virgil is exemplary of this new attitude.

Dante’s relationship with Virgil, moreover, has all the hallmarks of Petrarch’s relationship with Cicero: it has a historical basis, involves an imagined intimacy, and entails a critical relationship toward the classical figure.Footnote ⁷² Dante establishes a critical relationship with Virgil that is based on both a historical understanding of the poet that dispenses with the legendary elements that developed in the medieval period (Virgil explains, “I was born sub Iulio, though it was late, and I lived in Rome under the good Augustus in the time of the false and lying gods”) and an imagined intimacy with him, since over the course of the poem Virgil is not only the Pilgrim’s guide and teacher, but also figured as his mother and father at the moment of his disappearance.Footnote ⁷³ Even, or especially, against the allegorical background of the first canto, Dante insists on representing Virgil as a real person.Footnote ⁷⁴ A comparison with Brunetto Latini’s treatment of Ovid in his Tesoretto brings the novelty of Dante’s treatment into relief. Brunetto treats Ovid as an authoritative magister who, in keeping with the other allegorical figures such as Nature that populate Brunetto’s poem, helps to put the poet-traveler back on the right path: “But Ovid through artistry / Gave me the mastery, / So that I found the way / From which I had strayed.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The complexity of Dante’s treatment of Virgil, then, provides the paradigm or model for Petrarch’s multifaceted relationship with Cicero.

Dante’s account of the Statius-Virgil encounter also informs the final book of Petrarch’s Africa, which often features as another major piece of textual evidence for Petrarch’s new attitude toward the past.Footnote ⁷⁶ Critics have shown how Petrarch uses elements from Statius’s encounter with Virgil for Ennius’s dream of Homer with its prostration and failed embrace, but the whole book is replete with Dantean echoes.Footnote ⁷⁷ The following verses are most often cited as exemplary of Petrarch’s new vision of antiquity:

Critics have often identified this passage as marking “the moment at which the metaphor of light and darkness lost its original religious value and came to have a literary connotation.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In the second volume of his Renaissance in Italy, entitled The Revival of Learning, Symonds uses the verses as the epigraph and motto that he regards as “a prophecy of the Renaissance.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In his Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Panofsky considers these verses as conveying Petrarch’s “Copernican discovery” of antiquity. He comments that “in transferring to the state of intellectual culture precisely those terms which the theologians, the Church Fathers and Holy Writ itself had applied to the state of the soul (lux and sol as opposed to nox and tenebrae, ‘wakefulness’ as opposed to ‘slumber,’ ‘seeing’ as opposed to ‘blindness’), and then maintaining that the Roman pagans had been in the light whereas the Christians had walked in darkness, he revolutionized the interpretation of history no less radically than Copernicus, two hundred years later, was to revolutionize the interpretation of the physical universe.”Footnote ⁸¹

The claim that this “original pure brilliance” refers to antiquity is not universal, however. Bernardo, for example, claims that these verses were added after Robert of Anjou’s death (1343) and that it is his death that brings on the new darkness.Footnote ⁸² Bernardo’s historicist reading of these lines has not found much traction, however. Thomas Greene adopts Panofsky’s image of Petrarch’s “Copernican leap,” contrasting Dante’s image of antiquity in limbo with these verses of the Africa.Footnote ⁸³ Instead of “the companionable, progressively equalizing journey together of Dante and Virgil,” he argues that “the ending of the Africa reveals a different fantasized itinerary, wherein the future writer will walk back against time, free and guiltless, into the luminous fields of antiquity.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Having just quoted Inferno 4 on the previous page, it is surprising that Greene does not mention the connection between those luminous fields and Dante’s limbo, which also grants light to classical antiquity. Just as the image of the traveler who bears light for his followers simultaneously aims to honor a predecessor while also acknowledging his limitations, limbo shines forth in the darkness. As discussed above, the relationship of lantern to poet distinguishes Bertran de Born from Virgil and the punishments of hell from the privations of limbo. Indeed, the whole point of Dante’s image, in contrast to contemporary configurations of Virgil that one finds in John of Salisbury, is that Virgil does bear a light, which reflects the light of classical culture whose very presence in limbo is Dante’s heterodox innovation.Footnote ⁸⁵

4. Reframing Dante and the Traces of Cicero and Laura

In his second letter to Cicero (Fam. 24.4), dated six months later, 19 December 1345, Petrarch aims to avoid Dante by adducing a classical, indeed Ciceronian, source for his critique of Cicero, but he also reinforces the implied parallel between Dante’s Virgil and his own Cicero. Apologizing for his intemperate earlier letter, Petrarch notes that his distinction between Cicero’s life and his genius or language follows Cicero’s own complex attitude toward Epicurus, whose life Cicero had praised, even as he had criticized his thought.Footnote ⁸⁶ Petrarch’s letter then takes a surprising turn. Petrarch claims that while Cicero was his leader (dux) in prose, he had another master in poetry, Virgil.Footnote ⁸⁷ Following a story he had found in Servius’s commentary on Virgil, he reminds Cicero of his own proclamation that Virgil was “magne spes altera Rome” (“second hope of mighty Rome”), which Virgil inserts into the Aeneid 12.168.Footnote ⁸⁸ While alter clearly has a diachronic sense when used by Virgil in Eclogues 5.49 and Giovanni del Virgilio, who applies it to Dante, in Carmina 3.33–34, Petrarch uses alter to suggest not temporal succession (and supersession), whereby Dante or Statius surpasses Virgil just as Petrarch surpasses Cicero, but synchronic alternatives along generic lines.Footnote ⁸⁹ In Fam. 24.3, Petrarch embraces time and succession because, even as it reveals his dependence on Dante, it allows for his superiority, but in Fam. 24.4, he seeks to erase time by establishing two alternative spheres of eloquence: poetry and prose.Footnote ⁹⁰

Petrarch’s two letters to Cicero (Fam. 24.3–4) thus adopt strategies of narrative and nonnarrative that Barolini has identified as defining, dialectical poles in Petrarch’s lyrics.Footnote ⁹¹ In Fam. 24.3 he embraces the narrative of supersession that he takes from Dante, while in Fam. 24.4 he adopts a synchronic strategy of generic models. Petrarch himself suggests a parallel between his classical studies and his poetry for Laura in the only letter of the Familiares that explicitly discusses her, Fam. 2.9.Footnote ⁹² In this letter Petrarch addresses the problem of the place of the classics for a Christian intellectual, which he discusses through the lens of Jerome’s dream of coming before God to be accused of being a Ciceronian. In the larger context of the millennial confrontation between classical and Christian works, beginning with Tertullian who thinks that the correct response to the question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” is “nothing,” Petrarch aligns himself with Augustine who, according to Petrarch, never had Jerome’s anxieties and was even converted through reading Cicero’s now-lost Hortenius.Footnote ⁹³ In the next part of the letter, Petrarch turns to defending the reality of Laura.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is remarkable that these two parts of the letter have been so rarely connected. To insist on the reality of Laura, whose name associates her with the classical laurea, is, in a sense, to insist on the reality of the past. As Barolini suggestively remarks in a comparison of Dante and Petrarch: “Unlike Beatrice, who exists in an iconic present until she dies, when she is reborn into an even more potent present tense, Laura exists primarily in the past.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Indeed, following the association Petrarch implies in Fam. 2.9, one could argue that Laura is the past.

The link between Laura and the classical past that Petrarch suggests in Fam. 2.9 is corroborated by two other shared features of his relationships with Laura and Cicero: an emphasis on the dates of the encounters and the persistence of the wounds that both encounters inflict. Petrarch’s emphasis on the date in the explicit to Fam. 24.3 not only echoes Dante’s description of Virgil in Inferno 1, as already mentioned, but also represents the first time in the whole collection, after over 300 letters, that Petrarch includes the year, thus situating in time the forgetting of time (temporum oblitus) brought on by this discovery.Footnote ⁹⁶ Petrarch’s emphasis on the precise date recalls the notation of his first vision of Laura on 6 April 1327 when, he writes, “I entered the labyrinth, nor do I see where I may escape,” using an image that provides the title for this essay.Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, both encounters result in wounds. While the wounds from his love for Laura fit into the conventions of lyric discourse, the Ciceronian wound is new. According to Petrarch, the codex containing his transcriptions of the Ciceronian letters he discovered continually attacked him.Footnote ⁹⁸ The connection between this literal wound inflicted by the Ciceronian volume, which he describes in his letter to Boccaccio about the incident (Lettera Dispersa 46), is made by his use of the same verb offendere that he had deployed for his intellectual wound in Fam. 1.1.Footnote ⁹⁹ As he puts it at the end of Fam. 21.10: “My beloved Cicero has now wounded my leg as he once did my heart.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Just as they are united by precise dating and shared effect, the discursive spheres contaminate as well. Petrarch’s pursuit of Laura’s traces and his hunt for the classical past share an erotics most visible in the later letters to Virgil and Homer.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In his letter to Virgil (Fam. 24.11), for example, Petrarch both implicitly questions Dante’s placement of the classical poet in the otherworld and traces Virgil’s footsteps just as he does Laura’s in “Chiare, fresche, et dolci acque” (Rvf 126) and throughout the second half of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.Footnote ¹⁰² In the letter to Homer (Fam. 24.12), which includes yet another discussion of the distinction between Virgil and Cicero in their respective genres, Petrarch first describes himself as like Penelope waiting for Ulysses to return and then turns Homer into a Laura-like beloved with streaming hair: “Already I had gradually lost all hope, for, aside from some opening lines of several of your poems, in which I viewed you as one beholds from a distance the uncertain and shimmering look of a desired friend or a glimpse of his streaming hair, nothing of yours had reached me in Latin.”Footnote ¹⁰³

These parallels suggest the continuities between Petrarch’s vernacular and Latin production, but the traces of the classics are different from the traces of Laura, of course, because they can be discovered in book form. (And one could argue that Petrarch’s collection of his vernacular lyrics for Laura in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is a complementary attempt to give book form to her traces: he makes a book to contain the past Laura just as he tries to recover books from the actual past.) At the end of Fam. 24.4 Petrarch underlines his interest in the material remains of the past with a list of Cicero’s books that have survived or have been lost: “here are the titles of those whose loss is most to be deplored: De republica, De re familiari, De re militari, De laude philosophie, De consolatione, and De gloria, although my feeling is one of faint hope for the last ones rather than total despair.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ At least one of Petrarch’s contemporaries and followers was particularly attracted to this material information. In his copy of the Familiares, Lapo da Castiglionchio the Elder (1316–81) marks this passage in particular and rewrites the lists of titles in the lower margin.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This precision may be the real difference between Dante and Petrarch. As in his reconstruction of Livy, Petrarch developed new philological and scholarly techniques that Dante does not seem to have imagined.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ What is new is less the historical self-consciousness than its taking form and expression in certain methods that would be identified with modern scholarship.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Petrarch’s catalogue suggests that he is interested in a new set of questions and concerns, but the way he describes his historical self-consciousness derives from Dante. Petrarch’s anticipation of modes of modern scholarship make him a far safer (and imitable) model than Dante’s visionary encounter with the classical, contemporary, and celestial. Whereas Dante sees all substances and accidents bound by love in a single volume, Petrarch provides a model for historical inquiry that was not based on a vision that transcends history. In a sense, Petrarch’s hunt for material texts literalizes Dante’s “cercar lo tuo volume” (Inf. 1.84), from “searching through” Virgil’s volume to searching for Cicero’s.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Entering the labyrinth of the library is not without its perils: one can be wounded both intellectually and physically.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Petrarch’s quotation of Dante suggests that the accent has been misplaced in the historiography: it is not a new vision of the past, but a different materialization of it that will take on new forms and practices.Footnote ¹¹⁰ For Petrarch, the book is not only an ideal form from which one transcribes, as it is for Dante at the beginning of the Vita nuova, or which can be used as a symbol, as it is at the end of the Paradiso, but also a material object that may contain the past.

5. The Afterlife of the Image: Boccaccio and Bruni

Although Petrarch never saw his period as one of rebirth, he does seem to have imagined such an age would follow him, and many later writers would give Petrarch a privileged position in this historical development.Footnote ¹¹¹ In his De Vita Petracchi, however, Boccaccio portrays Petrarch as fulfilling the prophecy of Virgil’s Eclogue 4 since Petrarch’s coronation “surely seemed to everyone that the reign and happy times of Saturn, lost a long time before, had returned.”Footnote ¹¹² According to Petrarch’s account, Boccaccio also seems to have claimed that Petrarch was the equal of both Virgil in poetry and Cicero in prose, and Salutati made the same assertion.Footnote ¹¹³ Later biographies of Petrarch will be more ambivalent in their praise.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Whereas Boccaccio saw Petrarch as fulfilling Virgil’s prophecy, Leonardo Bruni sees Petrarch as a prophet. In his Life of Petrarch, he writes: “Francesco Petrarca was the first with a talent sufficient to recognize and call back to light the antique elegance of the lost and extinguished style. Admitted it was not perfect in him, yet it was he by himself who saw and opened the way to its perfection, for he rediscovered the works of Cicero, savored and understood them; he adapted himself as much as he could and as much as he knew how to that most elegant and perfect eloquence. Surely he did enough just in showing the way to those who followed it after him.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ More or less repeating Petrarch’s own claims in Fam. 1.1, Bruni connects Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero and the idea of imitation, but he also adds a limitation: Petrarch was the first to bring back the light, but did not perfect it; instead he opened the way for others to follow.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Bruni thus puts Petrarch into the same position that Petrarch had placed Cicero, and Dante had Virgil.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The danger of the model of supersession is that one can also be surpassed.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Like Bruni, later authors would also celebrate Petrarch using the same delimiting praise that Petrarch had used for Cicero, and Dante for Virgil.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Other scholars would see him as “the prophet of the new age, the ancestor of the modern world” (Voigt), Columbus (Symonds), Moses (Baron), and Copernicus (Panofsky, Greene, Schiffman).Footnote ¹²⁰ For these critics, Petrarch is a foundational but also transitional figure. Their images express the idea that Petrarch saw something new but did not fully realize what it was. For Kristeller, “Petrarch was both medieval and modern, and as he once stated himself, he looked backward and forward at the same time, as if placed at the frontier of two countries.”Footnote ¹²¹ In other words, Petrarch was, as Ascoli has argued, in the middle.Footnote ¹²²

In an argument that has frequently been quoted by other scholars, Thomas Greene claims that Petrarch was “the first to notice that classical antiquity was very different from his own medieval world, and the first to consider antiquity more admirable. Even if anticipations of these attitudes may be found, he was the first to publicize them so effectively as to influence profoundly his immediate posterity.”Footnote ¹²³ This article has argued that Dante’s vision of history also had its influence, most prominently on Petrarch himself. Petrarch may foresee future ways of looking at the past in the scholarly methods and forms he develops, but he perceives and describes his relation to that past through a Dantean lens. Petrarch’s borrowing from Dante in his first letter to Cicero does not make Petrarch more medieval, but reveals instead how the complexity of Dante’s construction of his relationship to the past informed the Renaissance idea of history, as his multifaceted portrait of Virgil with its historical basis, its imagined intimacy, its light, and its failings shaped Petrarch’s construction of his Cicero.