Visual Discourse in Petrarch's Sestinas

Abstract

MS Riccardiano 1088 is a paper codex of seventy folios, dated between the end of the fourteenth century and beginning of the fifteenth, and conserved in Florence in the Biblioteca Riccardiana. It is a miscellaneous manuscript that preserves a redaction of Francesco Petrarca’s canzoniere (in the Malatesta form). The copyist starts transcribing Petrarch’s poems in two columns, the odd lines on the left and the even lines on the right, with the significant exception of the sestinas, which are copied in a single column on folios 17r, 20r-v, and 25v. After folio 26v, a sudden change of pen, ink, and layout occurs. Halfway through his transcription of the canzoniere, the copyist leaves a dramatic testimony of his scribal resolutions. From now on, as he tells the readers on folio 27r, he will discontinue the practice of following different layouts for different metrical genres, distancing himself from Petrarch’s conventions as we know them from his partially autograph manuscript of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (henceforth RVF): MS Vat. Lat. 3195. Instead, the copyist will uniformly transcribe poems of any type in the same format, one verse per line, proceeding vertically: “Non mi piace di piu seguire discriuere nel modo cheo tenuto da quinci adietro cioe di passare daluno colonello alaltro, ançi intendo di seguire giu p(er) lo cholonello tanto che si co(m)pia la chançone o sonetto chesia [I don’t wish to continue writing the same way I have done so far, that is, switching from one column to the other. Instead, I plan on writing down one column until either the canzone or sonnet is complete].” An urge for standardization and simplicity here replaces a more philological approach to the mise-en-page of the exemplar and Petrarch’s authorial (and authoritative) editorial decisions. In this essay, I explore Petrarch’s material treatment of the poetic genre of the sestina (with the exclusion of the sestina doppia, RVF 332) in the autograph of the RVF: the aforementioned MS Vat. Lat. 3195. I outline how