The Presence of the Past and the Shadows of Futurity: Petrarch, Vernacular Art Criticism, and the Anticipation of the Connoisseur

Abstract

“On Monday, July 20, at the break of dawn, I was born in the city of Arezzo,” Petrarch recounts in a letter to Boccaccio, “a red-letter day for our people,” as it was that very morning that the White Guelphs stormed Florence’s gates in a failed uprising. Due to this factional strife, Petrarch had been born in exile, although in February the following year he and his mother were permitted to move to the family holding of Incisa, just inside Florentine territory, where he spent his early childhood. Before leaving for that country estate, Petrarch would have been baptized in Arezzo’s Santa Maria della Pieve, just a five-minute walk from his birthplace on Viccolo dell’Orto (Fig. 1). The thirteenth-century façade has stolid Romanesque arches that in turn support three registers of rapidly rhythmic loggias; these arcades confound the eye with their vertiginous sense of upward climb and sequential dance. Adding to this dizzying profusion is the exuberant menagerie of whimsical interlacing and zoomorphic forms. In contrast, the columns of the ground register are more stately, crowned in antique Corinthian capitals, perhaps recycled from the town’s ancient Roman buildings. The portal through which Petrarch most likely entered is still watched over by a carved lunette of the Madonna in orans pose, identified by a nearby inscription as the work of Marchionne, dated 1216 (Fig. 2). Also in the barrel of this entrance are polychromed statues of the labors of the months, cheerfully smiling their welcome to the initiates below. Precocious as he was, even Petrarch as an infant would have been unable to appreciate the elaborate decoration of Santa Maria. But the pieve highlights a key aspect of Duecento and Trecento experience, namely the saturation of one’s environs with