Memoria e mnemotecnica nei Triumphi di Francesco Petrarca

The studies of Yates and Carruthers have highlighted the importance of medieval mnemotecniques for meditation, as well as for rhetoric and poetry. The medieval mnemotecnique – that was elaborated on the model of the classic one in monastic context – put the working mechanism of memory at the centre of literary and artistic creation, generating a systematic transcodification and establishing a collective imagination. The latter on one hand is used by church authorities in their communication strategy, on the other it allows the individual to reclaim a symbolic apparatus. Indeed, opposing the crystallization of the medieval allegory, the arbitrariness of memory’s association allows the use of the same images to convey new meanings. In this context Petrarch – as Torre has highlighted – pays particular attention to the characteristics and the poetic functions of memory. The author of the Fragmenta, inheriting the Augustinian radical scepticism towards the phantasma, seems to restore a moral value of images, using them as means of meditation. This meditation, from a poetic point of view, consists in a search of balance between the arbitrariness of memory’s association and the images’ connection to a cultural heritage that the poet wants to renovate. In this sense Petrarch wants to create his own symbolic universe and to share it with an ahistorical élite of intellectuals. An example of this reflection of Petrarch can be traced in Triumphi. Despite the poem is unfinished, it seems in an editorial status which allows the reader to recognize the project of the poet, as it is possible to recognize through two comparisons. Through the comparison with the canzoni organized as a “polyptych” of the Fragmenta, it is possible to analyse the lyric characteristics of the narration through juxtaposed images used by Petrarch in the poem. At the same time the comparison with the Commedia shows how the poet uses the topos of the vision only as a literary genre: indeed he systematically reveals the fictionality of the visio, foregrounding the processes of the biographical, poetic and erudite memory. Therefore in the poem Petrarch tells of a journey of memorial rethinking of phantasmata relating to his individual memory. At the same time he tries to reform the medieval collective imagination, creating a universe made for himself and his public in which it is possible to find an eternal icon that proves the survival of something human in the eternity.