As I said, I don't disagree. I argued the same thing at the beginning of the "Petrarch and Giotto" thread, viewtopic.php?f=12&t=848#p12119.I continue to see a seven virtues template with 7 exemplars to which another 7 get added in the PMB.
But it is harder to argue that the seven were in early Florentine decks than that they were in the CY, because the Theologicals aren't extant in any of the surviving Florence-based ones. Also, in Florence there is the additional complication of accounting for the three luminaries (assuming that the d'Este and BAR cards are Florentine-based), which aren't in Giotto or Petrarch. They are in the Book of Revelation, to be sure, but as they appear in the early cards, they don't look much like their depiction there. There should be some means of accounting for them, in terms of writings or art of that time and place. Huck, for example, says that the Florentines wanted to celebrate their science and industry, although I can't see that he gives any evidence for that rationale, other than the existence of the science and industry in question.
Phaeded wrote,
Petrarch supplies 6 cards and the theme of the whole, a progression through virtue to immortality. I don't deny that the titles of the 6 Petrarchan Triumphs were known in pre-1440 Florence. But I can't find the poem itself. I've looked in the inventories of Cosimo de' Medici, and it isn't there (A. C. de la Mare, "Cosimo and His books" , in Cosimo 'Il Vecchio' de' Medici 1389-1464, pp. 115-156; it also isn't mentioned in James Hankins, "Cosimo de' Medici as a Patron of Humanistic Literature", pp. 69-94 of the same volume). This includes the books that Cosimo acquired for various church institutions either. It isn't in the inventory of Salutati's library either (B. L. Ullman, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati), and Salutati was an early admirer of Petrarch. Carrara had a copy of De Viris Illustribus made for him at his request, for example.Why place such an emphasis on Petrarch? I hardly think he was ignored in his home town (considered one of the "three crowns" after all) but his Trionfi could have influenced the iconography of only up to six of the cards, so at all events not model for the trump series.
I also looked in the discussions of Petrarch by the humanists of the early Quatrocento. Again I could find no reference to the Trionfi. So I looked for statements that might have prompted by the Trionfi. Here I did find one thing (although it is not mentioned by commentators). Leonardo Bruni, in his Dialogues of 1403, puts into the mouth of Salutati the following (The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 1987, p. 77):
Compare this last sentence to what Petrarch says in "The Triumph of Fame":...But to speak for myself, I could never be led to believe that Caesar was the parricide of his fatherland. It seems to me that I discussed this matter carefully enough in the book I wrote On the Tyrant, where I concludes with good reasons that Caesar did not rule wickedly. And so I shall never think Caesar was a parricide, nor shall I stop exalting him to the skies for the greatness of his deeds. Nevertheless if I had to exhort my sons to virtue, or ask God for it, I should certainly wish them to resemble Marcellus or Camillus rather than Caesar; for they were not inferior in war, and in addition to this military virtue they had moral purity.
Caesar is the one who "served them both", virtue and love, and as a result was of impure virtue. But since Salutati did not own a copy of the Triumphs, perhaps someone quoted this passage to him--or he read it from another's copy. My best guess for the source would be Vergerio, who edited the Africa "in collaboration with" Salutati (per http://renaissance.academic.ru/566/Vergerio,_Pier_Paolo) and carried on an extensive correspondence with him (Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 1966, pp. 101ff); but Vergerio, when he was in service to the Cararra in Padua (1399-1405), defended one-man rule (Baron,Crisis, p. 108). On the other hand, Petrarch may have expressed the same view in other works.Those who attended her [Fame] bore on their brows
The signs of worthiness: among them were
Some I had seen aforetime bound by Love.
At her right hand, where first I bent mine eyes,
Were Scipio and Caesar; but which one
Was closer to her I could not discern.
One of the twain served virtue and not love,
The other served them both.
In any case, Petrarch was not wholly admired in pre-1440 Florence, due to his politics. First let me give some background. Baron observes (p. 29 of From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 1968)
And even in the Africa, there are criticisms of the Roman Republic. Baron paraphrases Petrarch (pp. 34f)It has long been common knowledge, of course, that Petrarch started out by celebrating, in the Africa, the elder Scipio as the embodiment of Roman greatness, whereas Caesar, the destroyer of the republic, was at that time the object of his bitter criticism, and at the same Caesar, in all the relevant works of Petrarch's old age--in the De Gestis Caesaris, as well as in the Invectiva Contra Eum Qui Maledixit Italiat and in the Mirror for Princes addressed to Francesco da Carrara of Padua---appeared as the supreme model and the very apex of Roman history. But Martelloti added the striking observation that in the draft of the Trionfo della Fama written shortly after 1350 Caesar obscures Scipio's figure, because he stands resplendent at Fama's right, whereas Scipio, flanked by the younger Scipio, is merely one in a crowd led by Augustus and Drusus.
The same was true of other heroes of the Roman Republic. Baron (p. 35) quotes Petrarch:Had Scipio the Elder not been hampered by the termination of offices given him only for a limited period, and had he not been obliged to share his power with other citizens, he would have gained so overwhelming a victory that no Scipio the Younger and no destruction of rival Carthage would have been needed after him (Foornote: Africa, VIIII 569-611.)
Baron further observes (pp. 35f):"What--may we believe--would have those men have achieved, had they been permitted to wage their wars in the way of kings, without fear of successors or colleagues?"
When he returned to Italy from France, he declined the earnest invitations of friends to settle in Florence; he "even refused Boccaccio's invitation to teach at its university," Gordon Griffiths tell us in Humanism of Leonardo Bruni p. 16). Instead, Petrarch went to work for Florence's enemy. After Milan, he was in the pay of another of the same ilk, Carrara in Padua. People who valued the republican form of government as a brake on despotism--most of the Florentine humanists--would not have been pleased with his views or his practice. They might have suspected that the emphasis on "men of virtue" was a form of what we today would call the "cult of personality," in which a ruler surrounds himself with noble-sounding rhetoric and secretly does horrible things. Filippo Visconti, the "count of virtue," would be a case in point. To be sure, once the Medici established a de facto despotism of their own and made the alliance with Sforza, it no longer mattered.Already in a letter of 1352 we find Petrarch wondering whether one should not talk fo "Caesar's monarchy" rather than of his "tyranny." It is also unmistakable that these changes were related to the changing conditions of Petrarch's life. The year 1352 immediately preceded the period in which he chose the milieu of the north-Italian tyrant courts for his home for the rest of his life, disdaining a return to his ancestral city on the Arno, so importunately urged upon him by his Florentine friends. From 1353 to his death he lived, with few exceptions, as a counselor and associate of north-Italian princes.
in his early years, Salutati seems to have supported Petrarch's early views. At the end of his life, in De Tyranno he supports the later Petrarch. This change is not supported by the younger generation of scholars. Baron writes:
What holds for Dante holds for Petrarch as well.In De Tyranno, the heart of the argument--the exoneration of Dante's judgment on Caesar and his assassins--was obsolete the moment it appeared. In the name of the younger generation Bruni, in his Dialogi gave the answer at once: Dante's monarchism was to be modified in the light of the convictions held in the Florentine Republic, instead of being used as aweapon against them and as a means to depreciate the ideals of civic freedom represented by Cicero. The end of the Renaissance, Bruni's reinterpretaiotion, as we have seen, remained the common Florentine reaction to Dante's verdict on Caesar.
Actually, it is not clear how firmly late Salutati supported late Petrarch. Thompson, in his preface to Bruni's Dialogues (p. 56 of The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni), 1987, says,
Was it only his Latin that was disappointing, or also the content? For the early Salutati, before "De Tyranno", probably it was both. If so, which part of the content, that for the Republic or against it? It is not clear.Petrarch's magnum opus, the Africa, had been an enormous disappointment when it finally became available to his humanist admirers such as Salutati; and Petrarch's Latin style was soon found lacking by classical standards.'
Another recent author (McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance, p. 75) paraphrases Salutati in 1406:
Again it is not clear whether style or content is meant; but probably, from the lack of further qualification, he means both.His [Salutati's] final verdict is that the supreme writer in Latin prose is Cicero, in poetry Virgil, in a lengthy vernacular poem Dante, in sonnets Petrarch (9IV. 140).
But it is fairly clear that Bruni, from the Dialogues to Pier Paolo Vergerio (c. 1403-1405) onward, dissociates himself from Petrarch's politics. In the Dialogues he puts very harsh words into the mouth of Niccolo Niccoli, probably reflecting what Niccoli actually thought about the Africa. When Salutati, in the dialogue Petrarch's supporter, asks for another opinion, he turns to Roberto Rossi rather than Bruni, because Bruni's "every opinion so accords with Niccolo's that I think he would rather be wrong with him than right with me" (quoted by Thompson, p. 57).
In later works Bruni continues as in the Dialogues. He is careful not to criticize Petrarch too much, since after all he is one of the "three crowns" that is spreading admiration of Florence across Italy. (Probably for the same reason, everyone at the end of the Dialogues is conciliatory toward Petrarch, even though the only answer to the criticisms of Africa is that he may be excused because it was left unfinished. I agree with Baron and the editors of The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni that some have made too much of this conciliatory attitude.) In his history of Florence, Bruni revises its founding myth by claiming, based on new evidence, that Florence was founded not by Julius Caesar but by Sulla in the days of the Roman Republic. And in his 1436 Lives of Dante and Petrarch he emphasizes Petrarch's service to Visconti and other northern princes (this during the war against Filippo), which allowed him leisure to write, while praising Dante's civic engagement in in the Florentine republic, which caused him no end of trouble. In this essay Bruni also praises the Roman Republic against the kingship it had had previously and the Empire that Caesar introduced, which discouraged men from civic engagement (see http://books.google.com/books?id=c97DF2 ... ch&f=false, p. 133).
In this whole essay, Bruni fails to quote Petrarch once. He seems more of a cultural phenomenon than someone to be read.
Poggio is also critical of Petrarch. Thompson writes:
Whereas Salutati had refused to believe that Caesar was 'the parricide of his fatherland," Poggio calls him "no less a parricide of the Latin language and the liberal arts than of his fatherland (Thompson p. 61, citing Baron, Crisis, p. 466 n. 42).
This is in 1435, when Poggio engages in a dispute with Guarino on this question.
Others take similar positions on the republican form of government, for example Francesco Macchiavelli (and Niccolo later), one of whose kinsmen, Giralomo, "under Cosimo de' Medici became a martyr for his republican convictions" (Baron, Crisis p. 339; for more on Giralomo, see http://books.google.com/books?id=uKl8iH ... li&f=false). Francesco writes
You might want to argue that the attitude toward Petrarch'in Florence was changing (in the sense of criticism becoming muted), once Cosimo returned from his Paduan exile in 1434 and before the Councils of Ferrara and Florence. If so, there should be supporting evidence in document- and artifact-rich Florence of the time.The enjoyment of freedom makes cities and citizens great; this is well known. But places under tyranny become deserted by their citizens. For tyrants fear the virtus of good citizens and engage in their extermination.