Saggio di un commento a emblemi petrarcheschi

The images of lyric poetry suffer more from the inevitable reduction to literalness implied by illustration than those of narrative (even of such a dream-allegorical narrative as Dante’s Divina Commedia or as Petrarch’s Trionfi), and also for this reason 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 (illustrated manuscripts and books, numismatic collections, cycles of frescoes, etc.) and, in the same breath, have been textually codified in iconological treatises and dictionaries of epithets. Through the analysis of some cases of emblematic visualizations of Petrarch’s fragmenta, this essay will study both the visual dimension of Petrarchan poems and a interesting experience of Petrarchism, where emblems and imprese become almost an ermeneutical gloss of the text. This essay will specially focus on a manuscript of petrarchan emblem owned by the Walters Art Gallery at Baltimore (ms W476).