The Window and the Diamond. Reading, memorizing and visualizing Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta

Compared to prose ones, the images of lyric poetry are more penalized by the inevitable reduction to literalness implied by illustration, and this is one of the reasons why we have few examples of canzonieri with a structured set of visualizations of the single poems. Despite that, the imagery and the conceits of Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta are the basis of love emblems which exploited them pictorially in different forms (illuminated manuscripts and books, numismatic collections, cycles of frescoes etc…) and which, at the same time, have been textually codified in iconological treatises and dictionaries of epithets. Through the analysis of some examples of emblematic visualizations of Petrarch’s fragmenta [i.e., the editio princeps of the Rime (Venice, 1470) illustrated by Antonio Grifo; a manuscript of emblems owned by the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; the manuscript Cento Imprese fatte da Fra Francesco Cuomo nella caduta del Cipresso (1615) held at the Rare Book Room of the University of Illinois Library; etc.], this paper will explore the visual dimension of Petrarchan poems and will suggest an innovative reading of Petrarchism, where emblems and imprese become almost an hermeneutical gloss of the text.