Francesco Petrarca (July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374), known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest Renaissance humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism". Based on Petrarch's works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio and above all Dante Alighieri, Pietro Bembo in the 16th century created the model for the modern Italian language, later endorsed by the Accademia della Crusca. His sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry. Petrarch was also known for being one of the first people to refer to the Dark Ages.
MONT VENTOUX
Petrarch recounts that on April 26, 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux (either 1,912 meters (6,273 ft) or 6,263 feet (1,909 m)), a feat which he undertook for recreation rather than necessity. The exploit is described in a celebrated letter addressed to his friend and confessor, the monk, Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, composed some time after the fact. In it Petrarch claimed to be the first person to have scaled a mountain for pleasure since Philip V of Macedon and that an aged peasant had warned him against it. However, the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt noted that Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before, and other ascents are recorded from the Middle Ages, including Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne.
Scholars note that Petrarch's letter to Dionigi displays a strikingly "modern" attitude of aesthetic gratification in the grandeur of the scenery and is still often cited in books and journals devoted to the sport of mountaineering. But in Petrarch this "modern" attitude is never reconciled with his ongoing "medieval" aspiration for an otherworldly life of Christian virtue, and on reaching the summit, he took from his pocket a volume by his beloved mentor, Saint Augustine, that he always carried with him.
For pleasure alone he climbed Mount Ventoux which rises to more than six thousand feet, beyond Vaucluse. It was no great feat, of course; but he was the first recorded Alpinist of modern times, the first to climb a mountain merely for the delight of looking from its top. (Or almost the first; for in a high pasture he met an old shepherd, who said that fifty years before he had attained the summit, and had got nothing from it save toil and repentance and torn clothing.) Petrarch was dazed and stirred by the view of the Alps, the mountains around Lyons, the Rhone, the Bay of Marseilles. He took St. Augustine's Confessions from his pocket and reflected that his climb was merely an allegory of aspiration towards a better life".
in Petrarch's poem "The Triumphs". First, Love triumphs; then Love is overcome by Chastity, Chastity by Death, Death by Fame, Fame by Time and Time by Eternity.
As the book fell open, Petrarch's eyes were immediately drawn to the following words:
And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.
Petrarch's response was to turn from the outer world of nature to the inner world of "soul":
I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again. We look about us for what is to be found only within. How many times, think you, did I turn back that day, to glance at the summit of the mountain which seemed scarcely a cubit high compared with the range of human contemplation.
James Hillman argues that this rediscovery of the inner world is the real significance of the Ventoux event. The Renaissance begins not with the ascent of Mont Ventoux but with the subsequent descent—the "return to the valley of soul", as Hillman puts it. Whether Petrarch's focus on 'soul' is 'modern' depends on what is meant by 'modern', since much of 'modernity' would deny the very existence of subjectivity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarch.
