{"id":59,"date":"2014-01-17T11:36:33","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T11:36:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=59"},"modified":"2014-01-17T11:36:33","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T11:36:33","slug":"petrarchs-cat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=59","title":{"rendered":"Petrarch’s Cat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Post 4 Petrarch\u2019s Cat<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>To a place sacred to another pair of lovers — Arqu\u00e0 Petrarca \u2013 a village set in the hills above Padua. Here Petrarch — whose sonnets celebrating his love for Laura are the source of the love-language that characterises Romeo and Juliet<\/em> — spent the last years of his life. This place has been invented and reinvented from the fourteenth century onwards as a site of literary pilgrimage. So, fortifying ourselves with a Petrarch and Laura pizza, we set off to find the house \u2013 discreet to the point of concealment in strong contrast to the hoo-ha of signs and souvenir shops around the Casa di Giulietta.<\/p>\n

Petrarch\u2019s house is possibly the oldest writer\u2019s house museum in the world — it has attracted enthusiasts ever since the poet\u2019s death. Cut into one of the mantelpieces is the date, 13th October 1564, and all the names of a group of Austrian students who\u2019d travelled all the way across the Alps to see the room in which Petrarch died. In 1816, Byron came here too, on his way from Verona to Venice.<\/p>\n

\u00a0As Petrarch\u2019s letters make clear, he consciously dramatised his poetic life of retreat here. He altered the house to be more poetic, adding a handsome portico. Here are all sorts of things that endeavour to realise and amplify the Petrarchanism of the place \u2013 his actual bookcase in the room in which he died, a series of lavish sixteenth-century frescoes describing his life and works, a box of earth brought over in the 1960s from his birthplace, Arezzo, and much more.<\/p>\n

But what I am chiefly eager to see is Petrarch\u2019s cat. Here it is — a real, embalmed cat \u2013 poor thing. It must, however, be one of the most famous writer\u2019s pets in the world. It seems to have originally been displayed on a plinth, and is now set in a baroque wall tablet.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The verse below reads \u2018etruscus gemino vates exarsit amore – maximis ignis ego, laura secundus erat, quid rides. divinae illam si gratia formae, me dignam eximio fecit amante fides; si numero geniumque sacris dedit illa libellis, causa ego ne saevis muribus esca forent. arcebam sacro vivens a limine mures, ne domini exitio scripta diserta daree incutio trepidis eadem defuncta pavorem, et viget exanimi in corpore priscem fides.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0 This translates (rather roughly) as \u2018The Etruscan Bard burned with twin loves – I was the greatest of his flames, Laura was the second. Why do you laugh? If it’s a matter of beauty and faith, I should have made \u200b\u200ba superb lover. The Muse of Poetry gave no reason why I should not eat wild mice. I guarded the sacred threshold from mice to prevent anxiety that might have meant the fearful destruction of eloquent inspired writings. I died, full of life, my lifeless body faithful to the end.\u2019<\/p>\n

This cat is clearly a joke \u2013 and it was devised in 1635 by the then owner of the house in reference to a famous picture of Petrarch with his cat in his study. What interests me about this cat is what sort<\/em> of joke it is. It\u2019s a joke on the cultural investment in the rather notional love of Petrarch for the ever unattainable and unattained Laura (at best a sort of stalking, one could argue). But it\u2019s also a joke at the expense of the cultural desire to possess the material traces of the (relatively speaking) immaterial — myth and story, words and sentiment. It is, above all, a meditation on the desire to re-embody the disembodied \u2013 to re-body Petrarch himself. It serves as a commentary on the long history of the fetishization of Petrarch\u2019s remains — the way his bones have been subjected to a long series of disinterments, dismemberments, and evacuations. Nowadays, for example, the house holds a miniature copy of the tomb down in the church, which holds one of Petrarch\u2019s ribs. Grotesque and magical, over-embodied, under-motivated, Petrarch\u2019s cat perfectly describes the comic problem of displaying the writer\u2019s house as the material conditions of the writing.<\/p>\n

This was a problem in 1635 — it may be a problem for the future of writer\u2019s houses, too. The poor cat has recently been demoted from \u2018Venus\u2019 room\u2019 to the servants\u2019 quarters. It suggests the possibility that other objects historically taken very seriously as material pointers to the embodiment of genius may also lose their power. For those in charge of conserving writer\u2019s houses, the challenge is to find new ways of finding a \u2018local habitat and a home\u2019 for the \u2018airy nothings\u2019 of literature. But meanwhile I have unpacked my Casa Petrarca tea-towel, and my plaster figurine of Romeo and Juliet clinging together on their famous balcony is sitting next to my keyboard as inspiration, of sorts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Post 4 Petrarch\u2019s Cat To a place sacred to another pair of lovers — Arqu\u00e0 Petrarca \u2013 a village set in the hills above Padua. Here Petrarch — whose sonnets celebrating his love for Laura are the source of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions\/62"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}