Serendipity plays a greater role in life than we sometimes admit. This can be true in our scholarly lives. How did I find my way to Augustine and Petrarch? And why do I believe that the legacy of the late antique Church Father and his famous medieval interlocutor remains urgent business today?
Twenty years ago, I published a book on Augustine’s reception in Renaissance Italy, a project that began serendipitously. As a graduate student in art history, I had tried to reconstruct the early building history of Rome’s church of Sant’Agostino. This foundation is often identified with its patron, Cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville (c. 1412-1483), whose artistic patronage was the subject of my dissertation. I began to wonder about the “Renaissance Augustine” along the lines of Eugene F. Rice’s Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (1985). With the boldness – some might say foolhardiness and naivete – of youth, I set out.
I read the Confessions, an often-printed text in the Renaissance, and I was disconcerted and moved. My work on Augustine (and Augustine’s voice) accompanied me as I made my way as a young professor. I had the good fortune to meet scholars from many disciplines and institutions, and I found myself asking new kinds of historical and philosophical questions. Needless to say, I also felt humbled by the commentators who had come before, yet I believed – as many of us do – that the past has lessons for us.
I was often the only art historian on a panel or at a conference on Augustine (and quite often one of few women). These experiences were intellectually exciting. They led me to reflect, as well, on why I occasionally felt that Augustine’s representation in visual and material cultures was deemed to be of a second order (a lesser kind of evidence) when compared to his reception in textual tradition. Was it because the arts are deemed more “subjective?” I like to say – as my students have heard many a time – that a work of art is a form of knowledge in its own right.
If you ask me about what might be “modern” about Augustine and Petrarch, I would say just about everything, beginning with that subjective “I” of Augustine’s Confessions. That’s probably not a useful reflection. Many of the details of my chapter, “Petrarch’s Pocket” (or, better, “Petrarch’s Purse,” given fourteenth-century fashion!), have given way in my mind to larger, more abiding questions. We don’t worry so much now, for example, about whether Petrarch was the “first humanist,” nor whether he literally climbed Mont Ventoux in 1336, the occasion of his famous letter to the Augustinian, Fra Dionigi, who had given him the tiny Confessions which he carried. Pausing during this climb, Petrarch opened his little book at random, mirroring the serendipity of Augustine’s divine revelation.
In his writings, you might say that Petrarch works out his triumphs and troubles in Augustine’s company. The saint is present, by name or implicitly, as an interlocutor not only in that letter, but also across a diversity of literary forms. These include the Secretum (“On the Secret Conflict of My Worries” or “My Secret Book”) (c. 1358), written as he was reading Augustine’s De vera religione; De remediis utriusque fortunae (“Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul”) (1354-1366); De otio religioso (“On Religious Leisure”) (1347-1357); De vita solitaria (“On the Solitary Life”) (c. 1356); and De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (“On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others”) (1370).
Petrarch’s preoccupations portray a mind in conversation with itself, suggesting perhaps a modern notion of selfhood. The intimate and personal contend with the exemplary. What is a good life, after all, and which historical figures should be our paradigms? Petrarch takes for granted the idea that writing is a path to self-knowledge, even if it does not always lead to wholeness or resolution. The climb of Mont Ventoux was inconclusive despite its serendipitous revelation. In some ways, Petrarch’s personal and poetic expression of negative outcomes in his emulation of Augustine – his Augustine – recommends him to modern sensibilities. He was also afflicted, he notes, by a paralyzing melancholy; yet he had the candor and energy to write about it. He worried, not in a formulaic way, about the active and the contemplative life, acknowledging that both were necessary to a religious calling. This, and his ardent dialogue with figures from the past, connected him to a distinctively Augustinian way of life.
Meredith Jane Gill is author of Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo, and co-editor, with Karla Pollmann, of Augustine Beyond the Book: Intermediality, Transmediality and Reception. She is also Professor Emerita in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
