Altissima verba: the Laureate Poet and the King of Naples

Francesco Petrarca, famously urging the renewal of both classical letters and classical virtues, proclaimed his sense of alienation from his own age and his preference for the company of the illustrious men of antiquity to whom he paid tribute. The notable exception was his relationship with the king of Naples, Robert of Anjou, whom he chose as sponsor of his poetic coronation in 1341. That choice and its little-explored background are rich in implications for Petrarch's vastly ambitious conception of his own role, and its importance did not diminish with the king's death in the following year. In the coordination of depictions of the king dispersed throughout his corpus of literary, epistolary, and historical works in Latin, Petrarch constructs and then elaborates Robert's association with the coronation event into that of a coprotagonist in the renewal of an ideal of enlightened kingship and patronage.