PETRARCH AND PETRARCHISMS: DEFINITIONS AND PROBLEMATICS

1. Petrarchism as disease from Arturo Graf (1926) to Hugo Friedrich (1964)

"Il Petrarchismo è una malattia cronica della letteratura italiana. A cominciare dai tempi stessi del poeta che gli diede il nome, e a venire giù sino a quelli dei nonni o dei bisnonni nostri,  ogni secolo della nostra storia letteraria se ne mostra, non voglio dire infetto, che potrebbe parere troppo irreverente verso la causa prima e non volontaria del male, ma soprappreso, colpito in vari modi e con diversità di grado e di effetti. E' una specie di febbre ricorrente, da cui non so se possiamo dirci ancora in tutto  e per sempre guariti, ma che già più d'una volta c'ebbe a tornare perniciosa…"

Ebbe petrarchisti il Trecento; ébbene il Quattrocento, e non pochi, ma il secolo in cui il petrarchismo galla, lussureggia, trionfa e strabocca è il Cinquecento: così che quando si parla di petrarchismo, subito la mente corre a quel secolo, come se a quello esso appartenesse strettamente ed in proprio."

Arturo Graf, “Petrarchismo e antipetrarchismo.” In Id. Attraverso il Cinquecento, Torino, 1926: 1-70.

The “disease metaphor” lasts until Hugo Friedrich (1964) who opposes Petrarch to the petrarchists holding that Petrarch’s writing tends to the truth of the soul while petrarchists care only for imitation. The strongest declaration in this area comes from Ernst Curtius who in his major work European literature and the Latin Middle Ages writes that Petrarchism is a kind of plague developes in Italy and France: "Der Petrarkismus der sich wie eine Pest über Italien und Frankreich verbreitete" (1948: 232).

Hugo Friedrich, Epochen der italienischen Lyrik, Frankfurt/M, 1964.

Ernst Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. Bern: A. Francke, 1948)

2. Petrarchism as lack of sincerity

Berdan (1909) utilizes this metaphor to identiphy “petrarchismo” as opposed to “Petrarchism” as unconscious imitation and not servile fashion.

Berdan, J.M., "A definition of Petrarchismo," in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 24 (1909): 699-710.

With this trait of the literature must be considered a characteristic of the Italian life, its cynical immorality. To one who has read the novelle, the Priapea of Franco, the Ragionamenti of Aretino, the satires of Pietro Nelli, or the Capitoli of Berni, no further comment is necessary. To one familiar with the histories of the Italian families, the lives and crimes of the Borgia, Baglioni, d'Este, no more need be said. Yet, however unpleasant it is to discuss, it must never be forgotten that while the superstructure was platonic idealism, the foundation was cynical immorality.

Society in such a condition took upon itself to imitate the Petrarch of the Canzoniere. Actually the real and the ideal were poles apart. Whereas on the one side all conception of love had degenerated into gross sensuality, on the other was upheld a love almost entirely of the spirit. For twenty years during the life of Laura and for ten years after her death, according to the story of the Rime, Petrarch humbly besought the favor of a lady, modest, chaste, and beautiful. This situation is set forth with minute analysis, in three hundred and seventeen sonnets, twenty-nine canzoni, nine sestine, seven ballate, and four madrigali. The series is divided into two parts.

Whereas in the first part there are slight indications that the love is fleshly, in the second the love is entirely that of the spirit.

Obviously, imitations of Petrarch may follow along several general lines. The form of the two parts may be copied, or only the use of sonnets, varied by other lyrical verse-forms; or the substance may be copied without a strict adherence to the forms. For our purpose, however, the imitations may be grouped into two main classes: First, Petrarchism, where the author, carried away by his admiration, unconsciously and not servilely copies his master, or honestly translates him. In English, Wyatt is an example. Secondly, Petrarchismo, a foreign manner for which I retain the foreign name, an insincere literary fashion, where Petrarch figures only as the first of the type. Examples of this are any of the Elizabethan sonneteers. Only this last need concern us now—Petrarchismo. It is Graf, I think, who defines iti as " art for art's sake." M. Pieri explains it thus: "Petrarchismo is the art of treating cleverly and wittily matters of the heart, of composing love-poems without the emotion in the soul, of feigning passion for an imaginary mistress, and of singing a fiction of amorous intrigue, whose phases and whose stages are fixed, and, as it were, established by an immovable tradition. To succeed in this type our sixteenth-century poets needed only a little learning and imagination, a great deal of memory, and a certain ability in the art of composition." As Cardinal Bembo was the great exemplar, the fashion is sometimes called Bembismo. But to make the matter still more complex, Angelo di Costanzo reacted, harked back to the Quattrocentisti, and developed the epigrammatic sonnet. Thus, from one original Petrarch, there sprang, in the Cinquecento, a number of varying forms, all of them equally insincere.

 But this insincerity can be pushed back, even to Petrarch himself. At Arqua, as an old man, he rewrote his poems, altering lines; so that the Canzoniere is rather a work of art than a record of objective fact. Finzi thus summarizes the condition: " Commenced, one may say, with the ardor of a lover, continued with minute care through more than ten lusters, elaborated, corrected, arranged with the feeling of an artist, the Canzoniere is not a collection of historic and psychologic documents on the love of Petrarch for Laura. It is an elaboration, artistic, slow, and manifold, of the motive which dominated poetry for more than a century in Provence and Italy. On this general motive of art, the poet has grafted the personal motive of his love for Laura, melting the two elements into a work which, on account of its perfection, remains one and indivisible, and which cannot be discomposed so that they appear sharply distinct." 

In the Cinquecento the natural effect of this conception was to divorce literature from life. Subject-matter, treatment, and vocabulary, all become purely conventional. The point is so important that I shall cite instances. Bembo himself writes a series of aspiring, idealizing sonnets to Morosina, who was known to be his mistress and the mother of his children.

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Tullia d'Aragona is both the author of and interlocutor in the Dialogo della Infinità di Amore  wherein is upheld the principle that " honest love, which is peculiar to noble men, those who have gentle and virtuous souls, whether they be rich or poor, is not born in desire as is the other, but in the reason, and has for its principal end to transform itself into the beloved object, with the hope that she be likewise transformed into him, so that from two they become one, or four; of this transformation have sung so many times and so pleasantly, thus Messer Francesco Petrarcha, thus the Right Reverend Cardinal Bembo; as one cannot experience it except spiritually, hence is it that in such loves no sentiments have place except the spiritual, that is, seeing, hearing, and still more, as being more spiritual, the imagination." And yet historically it is a fact that Tullia d'Aragona was a common prostitute, listed in the Tariff of Venice! Literary convention versus the actual fact!

So much for external evidence. Internal evidence tells the same tale. Necessarily one becomes suspicious when poet after poet bewails the same experience, in almost identical terms, concerning ladies who differ only in their names. Consequently there are great types of sonnets, the " galley " sonnet, the cumulative sonnet, the negative sonnet, the sonnet comparing the lady to gems, to flowers, —all using the same conceits, the same metaphors, the same allegories. Obviously it is a literary manner, without objectivity.

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There are then five possibilities:

First. The sonnet may be original. Sidney's " Whether the Turkish moon new minded be " and Spenser's " Most happy letters! framed by skillful trade " are localized by their allusions.

Second. It may be a direct translation of Petrarch. Lodge's twenty-fifth sonnet has thus been identified by Mr. Lee.

Third. It may be a mosaic of Petrarchan phrases. Professor lI:oeppel' has shown this to be the case with Sidney. Drayton's sixteenth sonnet is thus reminiscent of two of Petrarch's.

Fourth. It may be a direct translation or modification of an Italian imitator of Petrarch. Lodge's " Not causeless were you christened, gentle flowers " is so direct a translation from Ariosto that it has nothing original except the concluding couplet. Comically enough, as Lodge could not work in the name of the first fiower, it is incomprehensible without a knowledge of the Italian. Spenser's " My love is like to ice, and I to fire " follows in the octave Cazza's " Se la mia donna e tutta neve, e ghiaccio." Fletcher's " A painter drew the image of a boy " simply takes the conceit of the sonnet attributed variously to Orcagna and to Burchiello.

Fifth. It may be taken from the French Petrarchists.

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But although thus deprived of their biographical role, these sonnets mark an important stage in our literature.

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Thus whereas the 'prentice pieces of the modern poet never appear, those of the sixteenth century are not only preserved, but a fictitious biographical value is placed upon them. But they were not written to deceive. Watson labels his sources quite carefully. In general, it was assumed that every cultivated reader would recognize the translation from Desportes, Ronsard, or Ariosto. It is the misfortune of that age, and the double misfortune of our present-day studies, that we have forgotten the once admired originals. Consequently we treat these trifles too seriously, deduce from them facts that are untrue, use heavy words, such as plagiarism and theft, when the sixteenth-century poet was only doing his best to improve both himself and his mother tongue. Petrarchismo was but a literary fashion, and the Elizabethan sonnet-cycle but a necesary stage in the progress to the greatness of the Elizabethan age.

3. Wilkins (1950, p.327) a broad non-normative definition of Petrarchism:

"The word 'petrarchism' may properly be used, if the widest possible application is desired, to mean «productive activity in literature, art or music under the direct or indirect influence of the writings of Petrarch, the expression of admiration for him, and the study of his works and their influence."

"Renaissance Petrarchism" for him is "the writing of lyric verse under the direct or indirect influence of Petrarch in a period beginning in his lifetime and ending about 1600" (p.328)

“The main manifestations of renaissance Petrarchism are the use of Petrarchan words, phrases, lines, metaphors, conceits, and ideas, and the adoption, for poetic purposes, of  the typical petrarchan experiences and attitudes. In countries other than Italy, petrarchism manifest itself also in translations and paraphrases. Among the poets who where in some sense Petrarchist there is a wide variation with respect to the intensity of their Petrarchism. Some are subservient are purely imitative; some, though they make use of Petrarchan material, have something of their own to say; and there are some in whose verse the Petrarchistic elements are merely secondary and incidental.” (329)

4. An even broader definition of petrarchism would include epic poetry and theater. See Orlando furioso (v.Bigi, 1953)  and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (v.Leimberg, 1968).

Bigi, E. “Petrarchismo ariostesco,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 130 (1953), re-printed in Id. Dal Petrarca al Leopardi. Studi di stilistica storica, Milano/Napoli, 1954:47-76.

Leimberg, I. Shakespeare ‘Romeo und Julia’ –Von der Sonett-Dichtung zur Liebestragödie, München, 1968.

5. The idea of a “Petrarchan system”

Criticism has developed also the idea of a “Petrarchan system.” Pyritz (1962: 60) speaks of this as the second international system of conventional love between the chilvaric love of the middle ages  and the romantic love of ninetineth century.

Pyritz, H., “Petrarca and die deutsche Liebeslyrik des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Id. Scriften zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, Köln, 1962: 54-62.

This idea is further developed by Forster (1969). He writes that Petrarch takes up and assimilates both the tradition of troubadour poetry and that of the dolce stil novo. The first one “does not exclude the treatment of final satisfation in love”, the second assimilates the lady to the divine of which she becomes a sort of symbol. (2) Forster goes on saying that Petrarch’s original intention “was to express genuine frustration in love through the inherited conventions of the dolce stil novo. He oscillates between restrained wooing and distant adoration. But the beloved Laura remains for him a real women, whose beauty intoxicates him and whose physical presence excites him. Hence he can hymn her various physical attributes –eyes, hair, skin etc.- and do  so with a better conscience in that she represents physical and spiritual perfection. Nonetheless, love is not a virtue in itself, for he realizes that his love is a passion and that passion is sinful. But he wants both passion and purification, and cannot always balance the two. He longs to be free of his hopeless devotion and knows that he cannot escape. The fundamental note of his poetry is therefore melancholy and resignation, in which for more that thirty years he may fairly be said to wallow. He designates this state of affairs by a characteristic antithetical paradox: he speaks of “dolendi voluptas.” (3).

The icy Fire - Five Studies in European Petrarchism, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969.

Keller  sees the main character of Poetrarchist poetry in acedia. He writes that the medieval concept of acedia is theological. Acedia is considered a mortal sin developed above all within religious orders and it meant, apathy, lack of interest and energy in faith and spiritual life. This is not the case in Petrarch's poems where it is not possible to understand the origin of acedia. The Renaissance will separate acedia from theology and focus on medical ans psychological factors. In Petrarch there is neither integration nor speration, there the conflict between two opposite poles: the religious drive (Augustin) and the mundane drive (Francis). See Canzoniere 35, Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi where is difficult to understand if acedia derives from Saturn or from Eros, form melancholy or love. Acedia is one of the major theme of the Canzoniere and it is linked to many of the poetic metaphors that we find in Petrarch's collection. Keller holds that the Petrarchists will lose the ambiguityn and richness of this Petrarchan topos. They will reduce its semantic richness (6). Keller provides a few examplas, including Ronsard and Du Bellay. Petrarchists did not repete the model, they interpreted it. For this reason it is very important for the history of French literature and of Comparative literature in general. (13) "Car une poésie qui se veut par définition reproduction, traduction ou imitation d'une modèle, une telle poésie se meut continuellement aux limites de sa propre existance et nous force ainsi à poser continuellement la question de savoir ce que c'est que la poésie ou ce que c'est une poème." Petrarchism acquires a real existence when it departs from the model and becomes something different from it.

Keller, L. “«Solo e pensoso,» «solitaire et pensif»,  mélancolie pétrarquienne et mélancolie pétrarquiste,” in Studi francesi XVII (1973):3-14.

L'idea di sistema si trova occasionalemente in Badacci (1974, p.7), mentre in Quondam (1974, p.212) ci si  riferisce unicamente ad un sistema linguistico normativo e selettivo.

On the other hand Hoffmeister (1973, p.3) stresses a broader variety of themes and feature in Petrarchism.

Hoffmeister, G., Petrarkistiche Lyrik, Stuttgart, 1973.

One has to keep in mind that Petrarch is not the only model of poetry and that Petrarch’s idea of love is not the only one in the Renaissance.

We have to avoid crystallizing Petrarch and Petrarchism in a formula. We need not only to appreciate the variety of Petrarchisms but also to become able to recognize a variety of contradictory elements in Petrarch works and personality. We have to take into account the tensions between the individual poems and the larger structure of the Canzoniere, the "plot" that has been conceived after the majority of the single poems was already written. The frame and the structute convey a specific discourse on love that quite often is contradicted in the single poem.

Forster stresses the function of Petrarchism in Renaissance Europe. In this regard he introduces the notion of poetic "game." This "game" was "serious" in Petrarch's poems and became "pure game" in Petrarchism. Graf speaks of a corrispondence between the artificial and sofisticated life's in Renaissance courts and Petrarchism. Hempfer suggests that we should relate the Petrarchist's game to the idea of game that we find the Castiglione's Courtier. Besides this sociologialc approach we should address the variety of national receptions of Petrarch's poetry and philosophy.

 William Kennedy argues that Petrarchan sonnet is the msots widespread vernacular literary mode in elite of sixteenth-century Europe and that it provides a site for early modern expressions of national sentiment. The critical commentaries that were published on Petrarch's Rime sparse and Trionfi canonized these works as supreme models of Italian literary style and of Italian patriotic emotion. These works became models not only in the Italian peninsula but also in other Europeans vernaculars. The conferral of the Italian identity was the work of "Pietro Bembo and his circle as propagandists for the restored Medici family. As even Machiavelli had come to regard political hegemony under the Medici as one way to confederate Italy, so Bembo proposed a cultural hegemony under Petrarch and Boccaccio in the Tuscan vernacular as models for Italian lietarry discourse. Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua (1525) canonized Petrarch and Boccaccio as supreme exemplars of poetic and prose styles, respectively, and their dominance as models for literary Italian remained unrivaled for three centuries." (2-3)

"In the history of Petrarchism these effects reinforce one another. Petrarchism echoed laterally through the courts of Europe as a nearly universal literary phenomenon, but it also gave shape and definition to highly particularized literary vernaculars. Bembo's standardizing of an Italian literary language based on Petrarch's style inspired analogous efforts across Europe. In his 0bras of I543 Juan Boscan showcased his own and Garcilaso de la Vega's display of Petrarchan conventions in an elegant Castilian style as a model for the Spanish vernacular and, within a generation, academics at the universities of Salamanca and Alcala augmented his efforts with treatises on the refined use of the vernacular. Joachim Du Bellay's Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (I549) and its accompanying Olive (I549-50) urged an imitation of Petrarchan style as a way to enrich the French vernacular and advance a national literary discourse. Philip Sidney's A Defence of Poetry (ca. I580) and Astrophil and Stella (ca. Is8I-8z), his sister Mary Sidney's translation of Petrarch's Triumph of Death (I590), and their niece Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (I62I) showed how a Petrarchan style could empower English literary expression. Elsewhere across Europe Petrarchism served to jump-start other literary vernaculars." (4)

Kennedy underlines the importance of commentaries appended to early printed editions of the Rime sparse in this process.

"Despite their great variety and sometimes discrepant claims, all the commentaries focus on his status as an exile. An inhabitant of multiple sites but the possessor of none, Petrarch grounds a factitious sense of his identity in a recollection of classical culture, ancient Roman civilization, Christian teaching, and late medieval remnants of Siculo-Tuscan and Florentine literary texts that lay at hand. As I shall argue in part I, this composite of ancestral sources, begetters of Petrarch's imagined cultural patrimony rather than of any existing political patria, assumes a totemic function in his cognitive system.Totemic here refers, in the sense that Freud gave it in Totem and Taboo, to an organizing principle that confers a bond of group identity upon ambivalent subjects as a substitute for some figure of authority which once inflicted pain on them. In this case the offending figure is the Florentine republic that has rejected Petrarch and his father, while the substitute is an ancient classical civilization associated with Rome and the greater part of the Italian peninsula. Working hard to recover and assimilate what has been lost or denied in the past, Petrarch invests this totemic substitute with supreme value. In so doing, he edits out of his personal history the painful, disagreeable elements of political exile and replaces them with a new narrative of cultural patrimony. In this narrative Petrarch is no longer the despised offspring of a fractious Florentine city-state but the inheritor of a grander, nobler, more virtuous, and more enabling civilization. His true parentage is neither Guelph nor Ghibelline but a Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, sometime republican, sometime imperial culture. The process corresponds to what Freud represents in his essay on "Family Romances" as the replacing of a real begetter by a superior one." (4-5)

"The dissemination of Petrarchism beyond Italy mirrors this pattern." (6)

   On Italian and European National Sentiment in Early Modernity.

"As a geographical entity, Italy no longer dominated the Holy Roman Empire. Nor was it a coherent nation, for which concept a substantive noun did not even exist. For both Dante and Petrarch the cognate adjective natio designates "native, indigenous." In Inferno 10 Farinata degli Uberti displays exorbitant pride in being a natio Florentine: "La tua loquela ti fa manifesto / di quella nobil patria natio" 'Your speech clearly shows you a native of that noble fatherland' (25-26). In sonnet I94 Petrarch returns from his "natio dolce aere tosco" 'sweet native Tuscan air' to Vaucluse, where Laura resides, "per ritrovar ove 'I cor lasso appoggi" 'to find again a place where my weary heart can lean.' The Tuscan noun that best approximates a concept of nation is gente, a collectivity of people, especially foreign peoples, as opposed to those in the more personalized ancestral space of a patria. Thus in Dante's Inferno 7 Fortune apportions wealth among various genti by alternating richness with poverty "di gente in gente e d'uno in altro sangue" 'from people to people, and from one to another blood' (79-80).

 Petrarch uses gente with scorn to suggest a vulgar crowd or mob: "Seguite i pochi et non la volgar gente" 'Follow the few and not the crowd' (sonnet 99; cf. sonnets 18, 3s, and 335). In his political canzoni gente designates foreign peoples to the north, where "nemica naturalmente di pace / nasce una gente" 'is born a people naturally the enemy of peace' (28.50-'I; cf. 28.101); the oppressed people of Rome, as in the exhortation to Cola di Rienzo to end civil strife "per cui la gente ben non s'assecura" 'because of which the people are not safe' (53.46-47; cf. 53.63, 80); and those who serve the warring lords of northern Italy as mercenaries, "e 'n disparte/cercar gente, et gradire" 'and in foreign parts seek and reward men' (128.61; cf. 128.26, 78, 115).

(10)

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The Latin nouns gens and natio carry different meanings from those of their fourteenth-century Italian cognates. In Cicero's usage, for example, gentes refers to foreign "peoples" whose inferior origins subordinate them to Roman citizens. In late medieval vulgar Latin, nationes refers to communities of immigrant scholars united by a common "native" language and place of origin at various universities in western Europe—forerunners of foreign students' unions that shared a set of allegiances within the transnational institutions they belong to. At the University of Paris they included the "nations" of Picardy, Normandy, England, and Germany. In the late thirteenth century the idea of nation as a community of opinion was applied to various representatives at church councils who served as spokesmen for diverse secular and religious causes. Because they possessed some cultural and political authority, these spokesmen came to be identified with a ruling elite, a social class that constituted a nation in a narrow sense. In the fourteenth century they generally included representatives from France, Germany, Aragon, and England. In sixteenth-century England the word nation acquired its modern sense as referring to the entire people of a country, the broad expanse of land and small communities facing (contra, whence "country") the ruling metropolis and dependent on it. This new usage embraces the lower classes as well as the upper so as to mitigate the formerly derogatory sense of "people" attaching to the lowest stratum of the populace. Both nation and people now project positive meanings as bearers of sovereignty and units of political solidarity. As the word nation came into English, it resonated with the biblical associations of the Latin gens, gentis in Jerome's Vulgate. The latter in turn translates the Septuagint Greek to ethnos, which denotes a group of foreigners from a single or shared place of origin, in dire circumstances referring to the Jewish people during their nomadic exiles. (11)

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In the early seventeenth century "European texts represented the nation as a function of political and ideological, not just geographical determination. This ideaa had a long gestation. Ancient geographers such as Strabo and Pliny the Elder commented upon the cultural unity of Italy despite the variety of its peoples and extreme differences in its topography. Flavio Biondo's Latin Italia illustrata (1453) describes these differences and provides an account of their historical associations. The advent of print subsequently enabled reproducible Portolani maps to present visual cosmographies along with narrative chorographies or discursive accounts of various lands. Sebastian Munster's Cosmographia (1544), Leandro Alberti's Descrittione di tutta l'ltalia (I550), Abraham Ortelius' Theatrum orbis mundi (1570), and Pietro Bertelli's Teatro della città d'ltalia (I616) all helped to fix the site of Italy within the world and give it a substantive identity. Despite the diversity of Italy's regional composition and its stubborn particularities, a sense of pan-Italian unity had come to prevail." (12)

 "Petrarchan style provides an apt medium for a national literary discourse because its scope accomodates the mother tongue of modern vernaculars tothe father tongue of ancient classics." (18).

William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism. Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.

Per aiutare l'individuazione del sistema si possono considerare le parodie del petrarchismo che consentono di individuare i caratteri distintivi del pertrachismo così come veniva percepito in una certa epoca. (v. Baldacci, 1974, p.49). Si consideri per esempio Il Petrarchista (1539) di , Non esiste alcun rapporto di necessità tra strutture e funzioni e le stesse strutture possono adempiere funzioni diverse. La variabilità storica della poesia petrarchista può essere avvicinata solo tenendo presente un concetto dinamico di sistema (47).

Petrarca e il petrarchismo in Europa

Il seminario su Petrarca e il petrarchismo in Europa tenuto dal Prof. Raffaele Donnarumma all'interno del Convegno su "La letteratura italiana e il grande canone europeo", si proponeva due obiettivi:

da una parte sperimentare una strategia didattica che rendesse l'autore più vicino agli interessi degli allievi posto che, da un rapido sondaggio effettuato sul momento, si è evidenziata la mancanza di partecipazione emotiva che ne accompagna lo studi;/

dall'altra confrontare la lettura del Petrarca e soprattutto del Canzoniere con modelli letterari europei attraverso lo sviluppo del petrarchismo nei secoli.

Nella prima fase del seminario il Professore ha guidato i docenti verso una seconda rivisitazione di alcuni sonetti famosi secondo una chiave di attualizzazione e di storicizzazione, ritenendosi questo un percorso efficace verso aspetti e motivi inediti della problematica petrarchesca.

Per fare un esempio, fra i tanti proposti, si può citare il sonetto XLVI (L'oro et le perle e i fior vermigli e bianchi) laddove i "micidiali specchi" davanti ai quali si pone Laura riportano alla tematica del narcisismo che può trovare ampia attualizzazione e motivi di dibattito.

Nella seconda fase del seminario si è affrontato il problema del confronto tra testi petrarcheschi e testi di autori stranieri e italiani postisi sulla scia del petrarchismo nei secoli successivi.

Gli autori presi in esame sono stati: Pierre de Ronsard, Skakespeare, Luis de Gongora, Leopardi sino al contemporaneo Andrea Zanzotto.

Un'attenta analisi testuale ha messo così in evidenza le attinenze e le profonde

divergenze di contenuti e soluzioni formali adottate.

Quanto detto è strettamente correlato al periodo storico culturale di appartenenza,nonché alla nazionalità degli autori considerati ed alla conoscenza diretta o indiretta che ebbero dell'opera di Petrarca.

A questo proposito si possono citare due esempi: il confronto tra la Canzone L (Ne la stagion che il ciel rapido inclina) e Il sabato del villaggio per ciò che attiene l'accezione di natura e la descrizione del paesaggio, nonché il più arduo accostamento fra il sonetto CCLXXIll (Che fai? Che pensi? Che pur dietro guardi) e il Sonetto del che fare e che pensare di Andrea Zanzotto il cui petrarchismo paradossale si offre come provocazione linguistica.

La disamina sulla fortuna del Petrarca dal Rinascimento ad oggi, nonché il confronto a cui si è appena accennato tra motivi squisitamente petrarcheschi e successive evoluzioni di questi stessi ha fornito ampia materia di dibattito.

Si è riconosciuta infine la necessità professionale di ampliare le prospettive della didattica dell'italiano nel triennio della scuola superiore. Allargare gli orizzonti letterari in maniera sistematica ed aprirsi a testi stranieri anche in traduzione,attualizzare e storicizzare le problematiche offerte dagli autori scelti, significa offrire allo studente la possibilità di una interpretazione più dialettica, più critica, in una parola, più moderna.

Prof. Mauriza Spadafora

I. T .I. "E. Majorana" - Palermo

Da quest’anno ci incamminiamo verso il centenario petrarchesco del 2004, in vista del quale particolare attenzione è portata all’imitazione del poeta nel successivo decorso della letteratura europea. Malgrado certa perdurante sfortuna critica del petrarchismo come “malattia” e sterile “artificio”, analizzare l’imitazione petrarchesca è invece preziosa chiave di accesso non solo alle anche divaricatissime interpretazioni date nei secoli della lezione di Petrarca, ma anche sempre attiva cartina di tornasole per la comprensione delle diverse poetiche e “ideologie della poesia” che si sono alternate nei secoli.