The Window and the Diamond: Reading, Memorizing, and Visualizing Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta

Compared to images in prose, the images of lyric poetry are more penalized by the inevitable reduction to literalness implied by illustration, and this is one of the reasons why we have few examples of canzonieri with a structured set of visualizations of the single poems. Despite that, the imagery and the conceits of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta are the basis of love emblems which exploited them pictorially in different forms. Through the analysis of some examples of emblematic visualizations of Petrarch’s Fragmenta, this essay explores the visual dimension of Petrarchan poems. All these documents testify to a Renaissance way of reading Petrarch’s work, a ‘reminiscing cogitation’ in which the images, as expressions of the amplificatio, deal with the dimension of enargeia, that is, of the text’s connection to the ‘perception-imaginatio-memory-invention’ chain.