Visual Discourse in Petrarch's Sestinas

Abstract

Visual Discourse in Petrarch's Sestinas Francesco Marco Aresu Introduction MS Riccardiano 1088 is a paper codex of seventy folios, dated between the end of the fourteenth century and beginning of the fifteenth, and conserved in Florence in the Biblioteca Riccardiana.1 It is a miscellaneous manuscript that preserves a redaction of Francesco Petrarca's canzoniere (in the Malatesta form).2 The copyist starts transcribing Petrarch's poems in two columns, the odd lines on the left and the even lines on the right, with the significant exception of the sestinas, which are copied in a single column on folios 17r, 20r-v, and 25v. After folio 26v, a sudden change of pen, ink, and layout occurs. Halfway through his transcription of the canzoniere, the copyist leaves a dramatic testimony of his scribal resolutions. From now on, as he tells the readers on folio 27r, he will discontinue the practice of following different layouts for different metrical genres, distancing himself from Petrarch's conventions as we know them from his partially autograph manuscript of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (henceforth RVF): MS Vat. Lat. 3195.3 Instead, the copyist will uniformly transcribe poems of any type in the same format, one verse per line, proceeding vertically: "Non mi piace di piu seguire discriuere nel modo cheo tenuto da quinci adietro cioe di passare daluno colonello alaltro, ançi intendo di seguire giu p(er) lo cholonello tanto che si co(m)pia la chançone o sonetto chesia [I don't wish to continue writing the same way I have done so far, that is, switching from one column to the other. Instead, I plan on writing down one column until either the canzone or sonnet is complete]."4 An urge for standardization and simplicity here replaces a more philological approach to the mise-en-page of the exemplar and Petrarch's authorial (and authoritative) editorial decisions.5 In this essay, I explore Petrarch's material treatment of the poetic genre of the sestina (with the exclusion of the sestina doppia, RVF 332)6 in the autograph of the RVF: the aforementioned MS Vat. Lat. 3195.7 I outline how [End Page 185] Petrarch's material choices isolate the sestinas from both the poetic experiments of his precursors in developing the form (Raimbaut d'Aurenga, Arnaut Daniel, Dante Alighieri) and the other metrical genres in the autograph of the RVF (sonnets, canzoni, ballate, madrigali). Then, I study how the mise-en-page of the sestinas interacts with their metrical form and subject matter. Finally, I focus on this interaction and how it relates to the other lyrical forms and their layouts in the autograph in terms of their semantic contribution to the structure of the canzoniere as an organic book of poems. I intend to show how the sestinas work as material and poetic loci for the progressive synthesis and assessment of the narrative of the songbook, or as niches for metaliterary considerations. Toward a History of the Sestina Often referred to as the lyrical sestina (in order to distinguish it from the narrative sestina or sesta rima), the sestina is a form that, in Aurelio Roncaglia's words: consta di sei strofe esastiche, più una tornada di tre versi. Le parole che terminano i versi non soggiacciono, entro la singola strofa, a vincolo di rima, ma si ripetono identiche in ogni strofa, combinando all'insistenza lessicale il dispositivo dei rims dissolutz…. Da una strofa all'altra varia soltanto l'ordine di successione, che risulta a ciascuna ripresa diverso, governato però da una legge di permutazione rigorosa.8 [consists of six stanzas of six lines each and a tornada of three lines. Within each strophe, words at the end of the lines are not subject to any rhyme scheme, but are repeated identically in all strophes, combining lexical insistence with the device of rims dissolutz…. From strophe to strophe, only the order of presentation varies: it is different at every round, though it still complies with a rigorous law of permutation.] Roncaglia's succinct definition requires some expansion. The notion of rims dissolutz (or rimas dissolutas; also rims estramps or rimas estrampas, literally "rhymes with a limp") refers to a rhyme...