Petrarch Sentence Examples

These compositions belonged to a species which, since Petrarch set the fashion, were very popular among Italian scholars.

At Avignon, where he appeared in August 1352, Rienzi was tried by three cardinals, and was sentenced to death, but this judgment was not carried out, and he remained in prison in spite of appeals from Petrarch for his release.

He continued to reside at Avignon despite the arguments of envoys and the verses of Petrarch, but threw a sop to the Romans by reducing the Jubilee term from one hundred years to fifty.

The assaults, of the Dalmatian pirates, attracted by the growing wealth of the city, necessitated the building of strong castellated houses, of which no example has come down to our day, but we may gather what they were like from Petrarch's description of his house on the Riva degli Schiavoni, with its two flanking towers, probably retaining the primitive form, and also from the representations of protecting towers which occur in Carpaccio's pictures.

The Byzantine palace seems to have had twin angle-towers - geminas angulares turres - such as those of the Ca' Molin on the Riva degli Schiavoni, where Petrarch lived.

In 1635 Fra Fortunato Olmo found in a room over the great door of St Mark's a number of books which he supposed to be Petrarch's gift.

It is very doubtful whether these books really belonged to Petrarch.

For him, as for Petrarch, St Augustine was the model of a Christian student.

The students numbered between three and five thousand in the 12th to the 15th century, and in 1262, it is said, nearly ten thousand (among them were both Dante and Petrarch).

Petrarch had urgently pressed Urban V., Gregory's immediate predecessor, to accomplish the desired change; and Dante had at an earlier date laboured to bring about the same object.

Their historical importance, their spiritual fragrance and their literary value combine to put their author almost on a level with Petrarch as a 14th century letter-writer.

Among the natives of Arezzo the most famous are the Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo, the inventor of the modern system of musical notation (died c. 1050), the poet Petrarch, Pietro Aretino, the satirist (1492-1556), and Vasari, famous for his lives of Italian painters.

Petrarch (1304-1374) has been well described as Italy.

Petrarch had discovered Cicero's Speech pro Archia at Liege (1333) and the Letters to Atticus and Quintus at Verona (1345).

In the case of poetry, this imitative spirit is apparent in Petrarch's Africa, and in the Latin poems of Politian, Pontano, Sannazaro, Vida and many others.

Petrarch was not only the imitator of Virgil, who had been the leading name in Latin letters throughout the middle ages; it was the influence of Petrarch that gave a new prominence to Cicero.

Olive, a collection of love-sonnets written in close imitation of Petrarch, first appeared in 1549.

It was the opinion of Petrarch that, had Urban remained in Rome, he would have been entitled to rank with the most distinguished men of his era; and, if we discount this single act of weakness, he must be classed as one of the noblest and best of popes.

The edition of Petrarch's Italian Poems, published by Aldus in 1501, and the Terzerime, which issued from the same press in 1502, were edited by Bembo, who was on intimate terms with the great typographer.

Casa is chiefly remarkable as the leader of a reaction in lyric poetry against the universal imitation of Petrarch, and as the originator of a style, which, if less soft and elegant, was more nervous and majestic than that which it replaced.

It is said to have been copied from Petrarch's handwriting, and was cast under the direction of Francesco da Bologna, who has been identified by Panizzi with.

Once, while searching for some apples, he found a huge folio volume of Petrarch's works.

The poet Petrarch, who was the doge's intimate friend, was sent to Venice on a peace mission by Giovanni Visconti, lord of Milan.

The great Latin poets were imitators indeed, but mere imitators they were no more than Petrarch or Milton.

To Malocello's enterprise, moreover, it is probable that Petrarch (born 1304) alludes when he tells how, within the memory of his parents, an armed fleet of Genoese penetrated to the "Fortunatae"; this passage some would refer, without sufficient authority, to the expedition of 1291.

Petrarch says that among his countrymen Cicero was a great name, but was studied by few.

Petrarch himself sought for MSS.

Petrarch was under the impression in his old age that he had once possessed Cicero's lost work de Gloria, but it is probable that he was misled by one of the numerous passages in the extant writings dealing with this subject.'

It was according to tradition in a tower which, previous to 1584, stood near the church of the Annunziata that Boethius wrote his De consolatione philosophiae; the legal school of Pavia was rendered celebrated in the 11th century by Lanfranc (afterwards archbishop of Canterbury); Petrarch was frequently here as the guest of Galeazzo II., and his grandson died and was buried here.

The humanists which it produced, interested only in its splendid revelations, forgot or ignored the achievements of the period which intervened between Cicero and Petrarch.

Petrarch not only set his countrymen upon the right method of studying the Latin classics, but he also divined the importance of recovering a knowledge of Greek literature.

The Divine Comedy, the Canzoniere and the Decameron were works of monumental art, deriving neither form nor inspiration immediately from the classic's, but applying the originality of Italian genius Petrarch to matter drawn from previous medieval sources.

Petrarch's lyrics continue the Provencal tradition as it had been reformed in Tuscany, with a subtler and more modern analysis of emotion, a purer and more chastened style, than his masters could boast.

So much had to be premised in order to make it clear in what relation humanism stood to the Renaissance, since the Italian work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio is sufficient to indicate the re-birth of the spirit after ages of apparent deadness.

Petrarch and Boccaccio were, as we have seen, the pioneers of the new learning.

The fascination of pure study was so powerful, the Italians at that epoch were so eager to recover the past, that during the 15th century we have before our eyes the spectacle of this great nation deviating from the course of development begun in poetry by Dante and Petrarch, in prose by Boccaccio ism to and Villani, into the channels of scholarship and anti- - quarian research.

The humanistic movement led these learned writers to engraft the graces of the antique upon their native literature, and to refine it by emulating the lucidity of Petrarch.

From Petrarch to the Epistolae obscurorum virorum there is a whole epistolary literature.

Petrarch's real name according to Tuscan usage was Francesco di Petracco.

Like Ovid and many other poets, Petrarch felt no inclination for his father's profession.

Notwithstanding Petrarch's firm determination to make himself a scholar and a man of letters rather than a lawyer, he so far submitted to his father's wishes as to remove about the year 1323 to Bologna, which was then the headquarters of juristic learning.

The most precious remnant of Petrarch's inheritance was a MS. of Cicero.

A great Roman noble and ecclesiastic, Giacomo Colonna, afterwards bishop of Lombez, now befriended him, and Petrarch lived for some years in partial dependence on this patron.

On the 6th of April 1327 happened the most famous event of Petrarch's history.

Petrarch's inner life after this date is mainly occupied with the passion which he celebrated in his Italian poems, and with the friendships which his Latin epistles dimly reveal to us.

Not very long after these events Petrarch made his first journey to Rome, a journey memorable from the account which he has left us of the impression he received from its ruins.

Meanwhile his fame as a poet in the Latin and the vulgar tongues steadily increased, until, when the first draughts of the Africa began to circulate about the year 1339, it became manifest that no one had a better right to the laurel crown than Petrarch.

There, in the month of April, Petrarch assumed the poet's crown upon the Capitol from the hand of the Roman senator amid the plaudits of the people and the patricians.

The ancient and the modern eras met together on the Capitol at Petrarch's coronation, and a new stadium for the human spirit, that which we are wont to style Renaissance, was opened.

With the coronation in Rome a fresh chapter in the biography of Petrarch may be said to have begun.

He invited Petrarch to attend him when he made his triumphal entry at the end of May; and from this time forward for a considerable period Parma and Vaucluse were the two headquarters of the poet.

Petrarch remained true to the instinct of his own vocation, and had no intention of sacrificing his studies and his glory to ecclesiastical ambition.

In January 1343 his old friend and patron Robert, king of Naples, died, and Petrarch was sent on an embassy from the papal court to his successor Joan.

It is much to be regretted that Petrarch found the precious MS. so late in life, when the style of his own epistles had been already modelled upon that of Seneca and St Augustine.

Petrarch, who in politics was no less visionary than Rienzi, hailed the advent of a founder and deliverer in the self-styled tribune.

Petrarch built himself a house at Parma in the autumn of 1347.

We may say with certainty that Laura's death, accompanied by that of so many distinguished associates, was the turning-point in Petrarch's inner life.

Though nothing came of this scheme, a marked change was henceforth perceptible in Petrarch's literary compositions.

Petrarch remained an incurable rhetori cian; and, while he stigmatized the despots in his ode to Italy and in his epistles to the emperor he accepted their hospitality.

When the jubilee of 1350 was proclaimed, Petrarch made a pilgrimage to Rome, passing and returning through Florence, where he established a firm friendship with Boccaccio.

Boccaccio carried his admiration for Petrarch to the point of worship, Petrarch repaid him with sympathy, counsel in literary studies, and moral support which helped to elevate and purify the younger poet's oversensuous nature.

It was Boccaccio who in the spring of 1351 brought to Petrarch, then resident with the Carrara family at Padua, an invitation from the seigniory of Florence to accept the rectorship of their recently founded university.

But, flattering as was the offer, Petrarch declined it.

He induced Petrarch, who had long been a friend of the Visconti family, to establish himself at his court, where he found employment for him as ambassador and orator.

Petrarch was entrusted with the office; and on the 8th of November he delivered a studied oration before the doge Andrea Dandolo and the great council.

There Petrarch made his acquaintance, and, finding him a man unfit for any noble enterprise, declined attending him to Rome.

When Charles returned to Germany, after assuming the crowns in Rome and Milan, Petrarch addressed a letter of vehement invective and reproach to the emperor who was so negligent of the duties imposed on him by his high office.

Petrarch was now commissioned to congratulate King John upon his liberation from captivity to England.

The remaining years of Petrarch's life, important as they were for the furtherance of humanistic studies, may be briefly condensed.

Petrarch, who possessed a MS. of Homer and a portion of Plato, never acquired the Greek language, although he attempted to gain some little knowledge of it in his later years.

This youth has been identified, but on insufficient grounds, with that Giovanni Malpaghini of Ravenna who was destined to form a most important link between Petrarch and the humanists of the next age of culture.

One of Petrarch's last compositions was a Latin version of Boccaccio's story of Griselda.

When we attempt to estimate Petrarch's position in the history of modern culture, the first thing which strikes us is that he was even less eminent as an Italian poet than as the founder of Humanism, the inaugurator of the Renaissance in Italy.

Petrarch's ideal of humanism was essentially a noble one.

With this double ideal in view, Petrarch poured scorn upon the French physicians and the Italian Averroists for their illiberal philistinism, no less than for their materialistic impiety.

In this effort to realize his truest self Petrarch was eminently successful.

The defects of Petrarch's character were no less striking than its qualities, and were indeed their complement and counterpart.

Petrarch was made up of contradictions.

The point to notice in this complex personality is that Petrarch's ideal remained always literary.

Viewed in this light Petrarch anticipated the Italian Renaissance in its weakness - that philosophical superficiality, that tendency to ornate rhetoric, that preoccupation with stylistic trifles, that want of profound conviction and stern sincerity, which stamp its minor literary products with the note of mediocrity.

Had Petrarch been possessed with a passion for some commanding principle in politics, morality or science, instead of with the thirst for selfglorification and the ideal of artistic culture, it is not wholly impossible that Italian humanism might have assumed a manlier and more conscientious tone.

But this is not a question which admits of discussion; for the conditions which made Petrarch what he was were already potent in Italian society.

As an author Petrarch must be considered from two points of view - first as a writer of Latin verse and prose, secondly as an Italian lyrist.

With regard to his Italian poetry Petrarch occupies a very different position.

It is true that even in the Canzoniere, as Italians prefer to call that collection of lyrics, Petrarch is not devoid of faults belonging to his age, and affectations which have imposed themselves with disastrous effect through his authority upon the literature of Europe.

Much might be written about the peculiar position held by Petrarch between the metaphysical lyrists of Tuscany and the more realistic amorists of succeeding generations.

The same criticism might be passed on Petrarch's.

This disengagement from local circumstance without the sacrifice of emotional sincerity is a merit in Petrarch, but it became a fault in his imitators.

Petrarch did not distinguish himself by love-poetry alone in the Italian language.

They exhibit the oratorical fervour, the pleader's eloquence in its most perfect lustre, which Petrarch possessed in no less measure than subjective passion.

To the high conception of Italian nationality, to the belief in that spiritual unity which underlay her many discords and divisions, Petrarch attained partly through his disengagement from civic and local partisanship, partly through his large and liberal ideal of culture.

The materials for a life of Petrarch are afforded in abundance by his letters, collected and prepared for publication under his own eyes.

Without attempting a complete list of Petrarch's works, it may be well to illustrate the extent of his erudition and his activity as a writer by a brief enumeration of the most important.

Five public orations have been preserved, the most weighty of which, in explanation of Petrarch's conception of literature, is the speech delivered on the Capitol upon the occasion of his coronation.

The complete bibliography of Petrarch forms a considerable volume.

Georg Voigt's Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums (Berlin, 1859) contains a well-digested estimate of Petrarch's relation to the revival of learning.

English readers may be referred to a little book on Petrarch by Henry Reeve, and to vols.

His distant kinsman Marsiglietto da Carrara succeeded to him, but was immediately assassinated by Jacopo da Carrara, a prince famed as the friend of Petrarch.

For the connexion of Petrarch with the town see Petrarch.

When he appeared upon the scene of human life, Petrarch and the students of Florence had already brought the first act in the recovery of classic culture to conclusion.

The school grew in numbers, and Barnes occupied all his spare time in assiduous study, reading during these years authors so diverse in character as Herodotus, Sallust, Ovid, Petrarch, Buffon and Burns.

Petrarch refuses to believe that any good thing can come out of Arabia, and speaks of Averroes as a mad dog barking against the church.

The bas-reliefs of one of the chapels represent Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Diana, together with the signs of the zodiac. And these subjects are derived, it appears, from a poem in which Sigismondo had invoked the gods and the signs of the zodiac to soften Isotta's heart and win her to his arms. The pageants of Mars and Diana seem to have been suggested by the Trionfi of Petrarch.

Rienzi was the hero of one of the finest of Petrarch's odes, Spirit() gentil, and also of some beautiful verses by Lord Byron.

Largely through the influence of Petrarch, whom he called to Avignon, he released Cola di Rienzo, who had been sent a prisoner in August 1352 from Prague to Avignon, and used the latter to assist Cardinal Albornoz, vicargeneral of the States of the Church, in tranquillizing Italy and restoring the papal power at Rome.

Robert had been a capable ruler, a scholar and a friend of Petrarch, but he lost influence as a Guelph leader owing to the rise of other powerful princes and republics, while in Naples itself his authority was limited by the rights of a turbulent and rebellious baronage (see Robert, king of Naples).

Petrarch began by waging relentless war against the logicians and materialists of his own day.

Reuchlin was no less learned than Pico; Melanchthon no less humane than Ficino; Erasmus no less witty, and far more trenchant, than Petrarch; Ulrich von Hutten no less humorous than Folengo; Paracelsus no less fantastically learned than Cardano.

Here Petrarch spent seven years of boyhood, acquiring that pure Tuscan idiom which afterwards he used with such consummate mastery in ode and sonnet.

We may, however, reject the sceptical hypothesis that Laura was a mere figment of Petrarch's fancy; and, if we accept her personal reality, the poems of her lover demonstrate that she was a married woman with whom he enjoyed a respectful and not very intimate friendship.

The tendency to honour men of letters and to patronize the arts which distinguished Italian princes throughout the Renaissance period first manifested itself in the attitude assumed by Visconti and Carraresi to Petrarch.

Petrarch found him at Prague, and, after pleading the cause of his masters, was despatched with honour and the diploma of count palatine.

Had Petrarch been born at the close of the 15th instead of at the opening of the 14th century there is no doubt that his Latinity would have been as pure, as versatile, and as pointed as that of the witty stylist of Rotterdam.

Though these Triumphs, as a whole, are deficient in poetic inspiration, the second canto of the Trionfo della morte, in which Petrarch describes a vision of his dead love Laura, is justly famous for reserved passion and pathos tempered to a tranquil harmony.

The language of Tuscany is remarkable for its purity of idiom, and its adoption by Dante and Petrarch probably led to its becoming the literary language of Italy.

One of the most remarkable features of the Countess 's translation is that it matches Petrarch 's terza rima line-for-line.

She is the first English translator to use Petrarch 's terza rima form.

The older forms of N. poeticus are now far surpassed by Mr Englehearts new seedlings, such as Dante, Petrarch, and many others.

In great state the tribune moved through the streets of Rome, being received at St Peter's with the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, while in a letter the poet Petrarch urged him to continue his great and noble work, and congratulated him on his past achievements, calling him the new Camillus, Brutus and Romulus.

The library is said to owe its origin to Petrarch's donation of his books to the republic. Most of these have now disappeared.

It is chiefly famous as the place where Petrarch lived his last few years and died in 1374.

At the request of the Roman people, which was supported by St Bridget of Sweden and by Petrarch, Clement VI.

Petrarch first opened a new method in scholarship, and revealed what we denote as humanism.

Petrarch and Boccaccio, though they both held the medieval doctrine that literature should teach some abstruse truth beneath a veil of fiction, differed from Dante in this that their poetry and prose in the vernacular abandoned both allegory and symbol.