thumb|'''Francesco Petrarca'''
thumb|left|'''Francesco Petrarca'''
'''Francesco Petrarca''' (Padove, talijanski pjesnik

Studirao je Bologni. Putovao je Francuskom, Njemačkom, Italijom, a možda je bio i u Španjolskoj i Engleskoj. Na jednom putovanju otkrio je dragocjena Ciceronova pisma. 

Sin firentinskoga građanina, koji je poput Dantea bio prognan iz rodnoga grada, Francesco Petrarca je mladost proveo u Avignonu, raskošnom sjedištu papinskoga dvora. Tu se na Veliki petak, 6. travnja 1327. zagledao u Lauru de Sade, i ostao joj zauvijek odan, pa i nakon njezine smrti, iako mu ona nije uzvraćala ljubav. Njoj u slavu piše pjesme, od kojih je izabrani dio skupio potkraj života u zbirku skromna naslova ''Rasute rime''. Zbirka sadrži 366 pjesama, među kojima su najbrojniji soneti. 

Više nego povijest neuslišane ljubavi, Petrarkin je kanconijer ispovijest čovjeka koji se, živeći na izmaku srednjega vijeka, neodlučan lomio nad dilemom: kako uskladiti nove, prethumanističke ideale s tradicionalnom kršćanskom ideologijom, kako riješiti suprotnosti između zemaljske i nebeske ljubavi, između neodoljive težnje za srećom u ovom životu i iracionalnog straha od smrti i vječnog prokletstva. 

U Petrarkinu ''Kanconijeru'' sintetizirana su nastojanja i tendencije dugogodišnje tradicije. Na njega će se, kao u savršeni uzor, ugledati nebrojeni nastavljači i epigoni. Za života je bio cijenjen i poznat po latinskim djelima, a najviše po epu ''Afrika''. Taj mu je spjev, u kojem je opjevao Drugi punski rat, pribavio najveće književno priznanje onoga doba, lovorov vijenac, kojim je 1341. svečano okrunjen na rimskom Kapitolu. 

== Vanjske poveznice ==
*  [http://www.intratext.com/y/ITA1326.HTM ''Canzoniere''], integralni tekst (digitalna knjižnica ''IntraText'')
*  [http://www.intratext.com/y/ITA1327.HTM ''Trionfi''], integralni tekst (digitalna knjižnica ''IntraText'')
*  [http://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/p/petrarca/de_secreto_conflictu_curarum_mearum/pdf/de_sec_p.pdf ''Secretum''], integralni tekst (digitalna knjižnica ''Liberliber'')
*''De remediis utriusque fortunae'', Cremonae, B. de Misintis ac Caesaris Parmensis, 1492. (Vicifons)
Petrarca, Francesco
Petrarca, Francesco
Petrarca

{{Infobox Writer <!-- for more information see :Template:Infobox Writer/doc -->
 | name        = Francesco Petrarca 
 | image       = Francesco-Petrarca.jpg
 | imagesize   = 150 px
 | caption     = 
 | pseudonym   = 
 | birthdate  = 
 | birthplace = Arezzo
 | deathdate  = 
 | deathplace = Arquà Petrarca
 | occupation  = Renaissance humanist
 | nationality = Italian
 | period      = Early Renaissance
}}
'''Francesco Petrarca ''' (English as '''Petrarch''', was an Italian scholar, Renaissance humanists. Petrarch is often popularly called the "father of humanism".<ref>There are many popular examples, for a recent one [http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=15299 this review] of  Carol Quillen's ''Rereading the Renaissance'' </ref> Based on Petrarch's works, and to a lesser extent those of Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio, Pietro Bembo in the 16th century created the model for the modern Italian language, later endorsed by the Accademia della Crusca. Petrarch is credited with developing the sonnet. His sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poems.
Petrarch was also known for being one of the first people to call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages.

==Biography==
250px|thumb|left|Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo.
Petrarch says he was born on ''Garden Street'' of the city of Arezzo, just at the dawn on a Monday. He was the son of Ser Petracco. He spent his early childhood in the village of Incisa, near Florence. Petrarch spent much of his early life at Avignon and nearby Carpentras, where his family moved to follow Pope Clement V who moved there in 1309 to begin the Avignon Papacy. He studied law at Montpellier (1316–20) and Bologna (1320–23) with a lifelong friend and schoolmate called Guido Sette. Because his father was in the profession of law he insisted that he and his brother study law also. Petrarch however was primarily interested in writing and Latin literature and considered this seven years wasted. Additionally he proclaimed that through legal manipulation his guardians robbed him of his small property inheritance in Florence which only reinforced his dislike for the legal system. Protesting he declared, "I couldn't face making a merchandise of my mind", as he viewed the legal system as the art of selling justice. <ref>J.H. Plumb, ''The Italian Renaissance'', 1961; Chapter XI by Morris Bishop "Petrarch", pp. 161-162; New York, publisher American Heritage ISBN 0-618-12738-0</ref>  

Petrarch was a prolific letter writer and counted Boccaccio among his notable friends to whom he wrote often. After the death of their parents, Petrarch and his brother Gherardo went back to Africa'', an epic in Latin about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus, Petrarch emerged as a European celebrity.  On April 8, 1341, he became the first poet laureate since antiquity and was crowned on the holy grounds of Rome's Capitol. He was the first laureate of the tradition in modern times to be given this honor.<ref>Plumb, p. 164</ref>

He traveled widely in Europe and served as an ambassador and has been called "the first tourist" <ref>NSA Family Encyclopedia, ''Petrarch, Francesco'', Volume 11, page 240, Standard Education Corp. 1992</ref> because he traveled just for the pleasure alone,<ref>Bishop, Morris ''Petrarch and his World'', p. 92; Indiana University Press 1963, ISBN 0804617309</ref> which was the basic reason why he climbed Mont Ventoux.<ref name="autogenerated1">Plumb, p. 163</ref> During his travels, he collected crumbling Latin manuscripts and was a prime mover in the recovery of knowledge from writers of Rome and Greece. He encouraged and advised Greek; Homer, Petrarch  said, "was dumb to him, while he was deaf to Homer".<ref>''tuttotempolibero.altervista.org//poesia/trecento/francescopetrarca/epistolefamiliares.html Ep. Fam.'' 18.2 §9</ref> In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of Cicero's letters not previously known to have existed, the collection ''ad Atticum''.  He remarked:

:''Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect.  Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.''

Disdaining what he believed to be the ignorance of the centuries preceding the era in which he lived, Petrarch is credited with creating the concept of a historical "Dark Ages".<ref>[http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-5037%28194301%294%3A1%3C49%3ASROTQO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W Renaissance or Prenaissance], ''Journal of the History of Ideas'', Vol. 4, No. 1. (Jan., 1943), pp. 69-74; Theodore E. Mommsen, "Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages" ''Speculum'' '''17'''.2 (April 1942:226-242); JSTOR link to a collection of several letters in the same issue. </ref>
thumb|right|300px|Summit of Mont Ventous
Petrarch claimed that on April 26, 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux (1,909 m; 6,263 ft). He wrote an account of the trip, composed considerably later as a letter to his friend Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. The accuracy of Petrarch's account is open to question; particularly the assertion that he was the first to climb a mountain for pleasure since Philip V of Macedon, and that an aged peasant had warned him off the unclimbable mountain. Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before, and other ascents are recorded from the Middle Ages, including Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne. Jakob Burckhardt's rhapsody on the subject has been often repeated since. <ref>Lynn Thorndike, [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-5037%28194301%294%3A1%3C49%3ASROTQO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W Renaissance or Prenaissance], ''Journal of the History of Ideas'', Vol. 4, No. 1. (Jan., 1943), pp. 69-74. JSTOR link to a collection of several letters in the same issue. </ref> 

J.H. Plumb writes in his book ''The Italian Renaissance'' of Morris Bishop's version of Petrarch's Ascent of Mont Ventoux showing Petrarch's climb in 1336 was epoch making. <ref>Nicolson, Marjorie Hope; ''Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite,'' p. 49; ISBN 0295975776</ref> This was because Petrarch did this climb on his own volition and not because anything was forced upon him. Petrarch's letter of the ascent to his confessor,<ref>[http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_letters.html?s=pet17.html Familiares 4.1]</ref> the monk Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, rings of aesthetic gratification to grandeur and majesty, <ref>[http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-8129(199310)108%3A5%3C1050%3APATPOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H JSTOR: Petrarch at the Peak of Fame]</ref> a modern attitude that is quoted to this day in many books and journals pertaining to mountaineering.<ref>McLaughlin, Edward Tompkins; ''Studies in Medieval Life and Literature,'' p. 6, New York G.P. Putnam's Sons 1894</ref> 
:"For pleasure alone he climbed Mount Ventoux, which rises to more than six thousand feet, beyond Vaucluse. It was no great feat, of course; but he was the first recorded Alpinist of modern times, the first to climb a mountain merely for the delight of looking from its top. (Or almost the first; for in a high pasture he met an old shepherd, who said that fifty years before he had attained the summit, and had got nothing from it save toil and repentance and torn clothing.) Petrarch was dazed and stirred by the view of the Alps, the mountains around Lyons, the Rhone, the Bay of Marseilles. He took St Augustine's ''Confessions'' from his pocket and reflected that his climb was merely an allegory of aspiration towards a better life." <ref name="autogenerated1" />

The later part of his life he spent in journeying through northern Italy as an international scholar and poet-diplomat. Petrarch's career in the Church did not allow him to marry, but he did father two children by a woman or women unknown to posterity. A son, Giovanni, was born in 1337, and a daughter, Francesca, was born in 1343. Both he later legitimized.<ref>Plumb, p. 165</ref> 

Giovanni died of the plague in 1361. Francesca married Francescuolo da Brossano (who was later named executor of Petrarch's Last Will and Testament) that same year. In 1362, shortly after the birth of a daughter, Eletta (same name as Petrarch's mother), they joined Petrarch in Venice, to flee the plague then ravaging parts of Europe. A second grandchild, Francesco, was born in 1366, but died before his second birthday. Francesca and her family lived with Petrarch in Venice for five years from 1362 - 1367 at Palazzo Molina; although Petrarch continued to travel in those years. 

About 1368 Petrarch and his daughter Francesca (with her family) moved and settled in Arquà in the Euganean Hills on July 19, 1374 - just one day short of his seventieth birthday.

Petrarch's will (dated florins to Boccaccio "to buy a warm winter dressing gown"; various legacies (a horse, a silver cup, a lute, a Madonna) to his brother and his friends; his house in Vaucluse to its caretaker;  for his soul, and for the poor; and the bulk of his estate to his son-in-law, Francescuolo da Brossano, who is to give half of it to "the person to whom, as he knows, I wish it to go"; presumably his daughter, Francesca, Brossano's wife.  The will mentions neither the property in Arquà, nor his library; Petrarch's library of notable manuscripts was already promised to Venice, in exchange for the Palazzo Molina.  This arrangement was probably cancelled when he moved to Padua, the enemy of Venice, in 1368.  The library was seized by the lords of Padua, and his books and manuscripts are now widely divided over Europe.<ref>Bishop, pp. 360, 366. Francesca and the quotes from there; Bishop adds that the dressing-gown was a piece of tact: "fifty florins would have bought twenty dressing-gowns".</ref> Nevertheless, the Biblioteca Marciana traditionally claimed this bequest as its founding; although it was in fact founded by Cardinal Bessarion in 1468.  <ref>Encyclopedia  Britannica, 11th edition,  [http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/index.php?title=Libraries&oldid=26002 Libraries]" §Italy.</ref>

==Works==
thumb|right|200px|Petrarch revived the work and letters of the ancient [[Roman Senate|Roman Senator Marcus Tullius Cicero.]]
left|thumb|200px|''Petrarch's [[Virgil (title page)'' (c. 1336) <br>Illuminated manuscript by Simone Martini, 29 x 20 cm Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.]]

Petrarch is best known for his Italian poetry: notably the ''Trionfi'' ("Triumphs").  However, Petrarch was an enthusiastic Latin scholar and did most of his writing in this language.  His Latin writings are quite varied and include scholarly works, introspective essays, letters, and more poetry.  Among them are ''Secretum'' ("My Secret Book"), an intensely personal guilt-ridden imaginary dialogue with De Viris Illustribus'' ("On Famous Men"), a series of moral biographies;  ''the French; the ''Africa''. Petrarch also published many volumes of his letters, including a few written to his long-dead friends from history like Seneca were his literary models. Unfortunately most of his Latin writings are difficult to find today. However, several of his works are scheduled to appear in the Harvard University Press series I Tatti, [http://www.hup.harvard.edu/itatti/forthcoming.html].  It is difficult to assign any precise dates to his writings because he tended to revise them throughout his life.

In addition Petrarch collected his letters into two major sets of books called ''Saint Vitalis. 

His "Letter to Posterity" (the last letter in ''Seniles'')<ref>[http://history.hanover.edu/texts/petrarch/pet01.html Petrarch's Letter to Posterity] (1909 English translation, with notes, by James Harvey Robinson)</ref> gives an [http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_letters.html?s=pet01.html autobiography] and a synopsis of his philosophy in life. It was written originally in Latin and was completed in 1371 or 1372.<ref>Ernest H. Wilkins, "On the Evolution of Petrarch's Letter to Posterity," ''Speculum'' 39, pp. 304-308.</ref>

While Petrarch's poetry was set to music frequently after his death, especially by Italian madrigal composers of the Renaissance in the 16th century, only one musical setting composed during Petrarch's lifetime survives. This is ''Non al suo amante'' by Jacopo da Bologna, written ca. 1350.

=== Laura and poetry ===
On April 6, 1327, Good Friday, after giving up his vocation as a priest, the sight of a woman called "Laura" in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion, celebrated in the ''Rime sparse'' ("Scattered rhymes").  Later, Renaissance poets who copied Petrarch's style named this collection of 366 poems ''Il Canzoniere'' ("Song Book"). Laura may have been Laura de Noves, the wife of Count Hugues de Sade (ancestor of the Marquis de Sade). There is little definite information in Petrarch's work concerning Laura, except that she is lovely to look at, fair-haired, with a modest, dignified bearing. Laura and Petrarch had little or no personal contact. According to his "Secretum", she refused him for the very proper reason that she was already married to another man. He channeled his feelings into love poems that were exclamatory rather than persuasive, and wrote prose that showed his contempt for men who pursue women.  Upon her death in 1348, the poet finds that his grief is as difficult to live with as was his former despair.  Later in his "Letter to Posterity", Petrarch wrote: "In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair - my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames. I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did."

While it is possible she was an idealized or pseudonymous character - particularly since the name "Laura" has a linguistic connection to the poetic "laurels" Petrarch coveted - Petrarch himself always denied it. His frequent use of ''l'aura'', as in "Erano i capei d'oro a ''l'aura'' sparsi" is also remarkable: for example, the line may both mean "her hair was all over Laura's body", and "the wind ("l'aura") blew through her hair". There is psychological realism in the description of Laura and Petrarch's love is nothing conventional - unlike some cliché women of mystic Christian, making it impossible to reconcile the two, his quest for love a hopeless, endless agony. 

Laura is unreachable - the few physical descriptions are vague, almost unpalpable as the love pines for, and such is perhaps the power of his verse, which lives off the melodies it evokes against the fading, diaphane image that is no more consistent than a ghost. Francesco De Sanctis remarks much the same thing in his ''Storia della letteratura italiana'', and contemporary critics agree on the powerful music of his verse: Gianfranco Contini, in a famous essay on Petrarch's language ("Preliminari sulla lingua del Petrarca". Petrarca, Canzoniere. Turin, Einaudi, 1964) has spoken of linguistic indetermination - Petrarch never rises above the "bel pié" (her lovely foot): Laura is too holy to be painted, it is an awe-inspiring goddess. Sensuality and passion are rather suggested by the rhythm and music that shape the vague contours of the lady.