‘Volto di Medusa’: Monumentalizing the self in Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta

Scholarship on Petrarch has generally intepreted the figure of Laura-as-Medusa as a projection of the poet's internal conflict between sacred and profane love. Such a reading takes Medusa as a threat to Petrarch's agency. Yet Petrarch's Laura-Medusa is suggestively figured as only her...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inForum italicum Vol. 47; no. 3; pp. 497 - 521
Main Author Feng, Aileen A
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.11.2013
Sage Publications Ltd. (UK)
Subjects
Analysis
Patron and client
Petrarch, Francesco
Portrayals
Self
Italy
Petrarch
Medusa
patronage
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Summary:Scholarship on Petrarch has generally intepreted the figure of Laura-as-Medusa as a projection of the poet's internal conflict between sacred and profane love. Such a reading takes Medusa as a threat to Petrarch's agency. Yet Petrarch's Laura-Medusa is suggestively figured as only her disembodied head, a weapon ultimately manipulated by Perseus. This reversal of agency has an impact on Petrarch's complicated theory of poetic inspiration, and reaches beyond the relationship between poet and beloved to encompass another fraught paradigm of power: the relationship between poet and patron. By recalling the disembodied head of Medusa in the figure of Laura, and recovering the political symbolism of the appropriation of her petrifying gaze, Petrarch creates a model of poetic agency that he uses to stage his relationship to patronage in the Latin Africa and a poem addressed to his Colonna patrons.
ISSN:0014-5858
2168-989X
DOI:10.1177/0014585813497334