My MESA
Creative Commons License
This exhibit has not been peer reviewed.  [Return to Group]  [Printer-friendly Page] 

Valentine's Day.

Seth Mulliken

Picture
Miniature, border, and opening of Trionfi with a blinded Cupid shooting anarrow from atop the cart drawn by white horses.
Petrarca, Francesco (1304-1374)
Picture
The allegory of Chastity rides atop a cart, with the still blindfolded Cupidnow vanquished; the cart is drawn by unicorns.
Petrarca, Francesco (1304-1374)
Detail of miniature of Petrarch and Laura, with Love aiming his arrow at Laura.
Detail of miniature of Petrarch and Laura, with Love aiming his arrow at Laura.
Chaucer, his contemporaries, and the authors of the Roman de la Rose were not the only individuals to write about love in the middle ages. Petrarch—whose sonnets regarding his muse, “Laura,” would come to represent the medieval ideal of beauty—also wrote a series of Triumphs in five parts. First, Love triumphs over Man, then Chastity triumphs over Love. Death triumphs over Chastity, and Fame over Death. Time triumphs over Fame, and finally Eternity over Time. The first two images here depict the first two triumphs, with carts drawing allegorical representations of both Love and Chastity. The third image, from Harley 3567 (f. 9r), of Petrarch and Laura, with Love – represented as we would expect today and as he’s depicted in the first Triumph – aiming his arrow at her. Note Laura’s fair skin and blond hair, which would come to be part of what is known as the Petrarchan ideal.

While it is not known if Chaucer ever met Petrarch, he was influenced in his later works by Italian humanism. He was part of a diplomatic envoy to Italy in 1372, and the framing device of his most famous work, the Canterbury Tales, is taken in part from Boccaccio’s Decameron. Likewise his Troilus and Criseyde is a translation and adaptation of Boccaccio’s version in his Il Filostrato. It is one of the pieces of evidence given to require him to write the Legend of Good Women, and it is likely that Chaucer read Petrarch’s set of Triumphs even if the two never met.

Petrarch himself is mentioned in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, where the Clerk-as-narrator states that the tale he is about to tell was learned by him from Petrarch at Padua (l. 26-31). The Clerk’s tale, that of patient Griselda, is taken from Petrarch’s translation of Boccacio’s Griselda and, much like the tales from the Legend of Good Women, serves to show faithful love as a counterpoint to the misogynistic undertones of the Roman de la Rose or the faithlessness of Troilus and Criseyde.