Term commonly applied both to the love poetry addressed to Laura by Petrarch (1304-74) and to the conventions which developed from the Canzoniere's widespread influence on generations of 15th- and 16th-c. European lyric poets. Petrarch had assimilated elements from Christian Platonism and from classical and medieval amatory traditions (especially the ethos of chivalry and fin'amor), and had expressed, with psychological realism and emotional conviction, the tensions between his spiritual idealism and the anguish of love. Numerous Italian imitators, and notably the ‘precious’ poets of the late 15th c. (the Quattrocentists Chariteo, Tebaldeo, Serafino), transmitted to future European love poets a common language and a mode of stylization, well suited to an aristocratic court audience, in which an over-refined, ‘witty’ manner and the mechanical reproduction of a cluster of thematic and formal features (especially antithesis) all too often replaced the psychological complexities of the love-experience.
Within the Petrarchist conventions the woman was idealized as a goddess and an icon of physical and spiritual perfection. Her beauty was described in stylized comparisons (flowers, precious jewels, and metals) and her virtues and accomplishments rendered by hyperbole. The overwhelming effect of this paragon on the lover is crystallized in the account of the first meeting (the innamoramento) with its associated religious and seasonal symbolism and its common core of conceits and images (Cupid's arrows, love as a paralysing poison, the poet as wounded or trapped animal). Based on service and fidelity, the poet's love is immutable. Because of the woman's coldness, however, it is also characterized by physical and mental suffering and by conflicting emotional states (hope/despair, love/hate, pleasure/pain); these often find expression in patterns of antithesis and oxymoron, in military metaphors, and in concetti (like that of the poet in a frail boat prey to storm and shipwreck). Although death is welcomed as a release from torment, the lover enjoys his anguish which, like a religious passion, purifies and perfects. The obsessive intensity of his love recalls his absent lady either in natural settings or in nocturnal visions, or it expresses itself in the wish to be transformed into an object in her presence. Nature reflects the lover's emotional state in a process of ‘pathetic fallacy’: it either comforts him in his solitude or isolates him even further by contrasting the extremity of his grief with the universal harmony of nature.
Mythological reference supports the themes of metamorphosis (Jupiter), suffering and bondage (Prometheus, Sisyphus), hubris and self-destruction (Acteon, Icarus). In addition to antithesis, oxymoron, metaphor, and hyperbole, the Petrarchist's preferred rhetorical figures include apostro̧phe, exclamation, periphrasis, adynaton, and anaphora, whilst concluding force is often provided by an epigrammatic or pithy final line. Within such a codified system the poetry should not be read as a reflection of lived experience or sincere feeling: in many cases the woman is a pretext, and ultimately what is of prime importance is a devotion to the beauty of poetry itself.
The history and nature of French Renaissance Petrarchism are complex and are intertwined with developments in Italy in the 15th and 16th c. The first French imitators of the 1530s and early 1540s (Marot, Saint-Gelais, Scève) were restrained in their Italian borrowings, and in the case of Marot in particular remained rooted in the native love tradition. Influenced less by Petrarch himself than by the Quattrocentist poets, on the whole these French poets preferred, as did their Italian models, the epigram (strambotto) to the sonnet—Scève's Délie (1544), for example, is a sequence of dizains which combines Petrarchist and Neoplatonic features.
It was with the advent of the Pléiade that Petrarch himself, Petrarchist conventions, and the sonnet form and cycle were fully and creatively acclimatized in France. Tyard, Du Bellay, Baïf, and Ronsard all published cycles of love poetry between 1549 and 1555 (exclusively or predominantly in sonnet form), in which the Petrarchist canon occupied a prominent place—sometimes fused with the mystical idealism of Neoplatonism—and in which the preferred models were Petrarch himself and the more ‘classical’ and restrained poets, Ariosto, Bembo, and Bembist disciples. Ronsard in particular demonstrates independence of his models, transcending and naturalizing inherited conventions by superlative craftsmanship and by the personal voice he gives to inner tensions between idealism and sensuality.
The final phase of French Renaissance Petrarchism again reflects developments in Italy, where, from about 1555, there had occurred a reaction against the restraint of Bembo and a return to the ‘precious’ manner of the Quattrocentists, especially as manifested in the recent poetry of the Neopolitans Costanzo, Tansillo, and Rota. Their influence was discernible in varying degrees in France in Les Soupirs of
In Renaissance France, as elsewhere in Europe, this widespread fashion for Petrarchism coexisted with an anti-Petrarchist tradition, which originated in Italy and which generally expressed itself in parodies of the artifices of the convention or in a rejection of some of its principal features. This counter-current, which never seriously called into question the legitimacy of the convention or diminished its validity as a means of serious poetic utterance, is found in France in Du Bellay's A une dame (1553; reproduced in variant form in 1558 as Contre les pétrarquistes) and in Ronsard's ‘A son livre’ (Nouvelle continuation des Amours, 1556).
If certain social factors help to explain the popularity of Petrarchism in Renaissance France—the increasing influence of Italians in French society and at the court of Catherine de Médicis in particular, the improvement in the status of women at court and their role in the literary salons of the day—it was similarly the external pressures of civil war and the developing religious imperatives of the century which ultimately caused poets to turn in their sonnet cycles to devotional expression of a more overtly Christian nature.
[Malcolm Quainton]
Bibliography
- J. Vianey, Le Pétrarquisme en France au XVIe siècle (1909)
- H. Weber, La Création poétique au seizième siècle en France, 2 vols. (1956)
- L. Forster, The Icy Fire (1969)
