You have to imagine the poet Petrarch (1304-1374) wandering in the medieval night for hundreds of kilometers, from one monastery to another. We are in 1333. After having studied in Carpentras (Vaucluse), in Montpellier then in Bologna (Italy), this son of an Italian pontifical notary, taking refuge at the court of Avignon, has already fallen in love with Laure, with whom he will sing about love all his life. He read Cicero, Virgil, and undertook to bring together the scattered fragments of theRoman history by Livy. It was then that he left Avignon, “the hell of the living, the sewer of the earth, the stinkiest of cities”to go to Paris then to Liège (Belgium), and to Aachen (Germany), via the Ardennes.
There, in the secrecy of the monastic libraries, he discovered the manuscripts of Latin authors forgotten by all. Propertius, Quintilian. He copies them, exeges them. Through its survey of ancient letters, it constitutes the first of the humanist libraries.
In his house in Arqua, near Padua (Italy), he shaped what Cicero called the “culture of the soul”and opens the way to other manuscript hunters, who will in turn contribute to rehabilitating the “taste of the antique”, like Poggio Bracciolini, who finds texts by Tacitus or Vitruvius. As such, he became one of the founding heroes of a new cultural era: the Renaissance.
On its Richelieu site, the National Library of France (BNF) retraces his epic journey, and that of some of his peers, in a marvelous exhibition: “The Invention of the Renaissance”.
Pedagogy and poetry
It’s difficult to tell a turning point in history, to evoke through images the birth of a thought. The BNF takes up the challenge with pedagogy and poetry, punctuating the demonstration with a few paintings, such as‘Apollo and Daphnis of Perugino, and especially some of the most precious manuscripts, like the “Great Ptolemy of Henry II”. From illuminations to writings, they tell how this ideal and international community of scholars gathered in “Republic of Letters”.
Freed from all supervision, whether university or ecclesiastical, those who belong to it allow, well before the invention of printing, this dissemination of ancient knowledge which will found the Renaissance: they copy by hand the treasures they unearth , and translate the original Greek or Latin into the languages then called “vulgar”. The creation of luxury copies, fabulously illuminated, soon brought this knowledge into the princely libraries.
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