Ascent of Mont Ventoux
The Italian poet Petrarch wrote about his ascent of Mont Ventoux (in Provence; elevation 1912 meters) on 26 April 1336 in a well-known letter published as one of his Epistolae familiares (IV, 1). In this letter, written around 1350, Petrarch claimed to be the first person since antiquity to have climbed a mountain for the view. Although the historical accuracy of his account has been questioned by modern scholars, it is often cited in discussions of the new spirit of the Renaissance.
Contents
Petrarch's letter is addressed to his former confessor,
Historic doubts
It is often claimed that Petrarch was the first to climb Mont Ventoux, although he did not suggest so himself. The mountain was likely already climbed in prehistoric times. There is even a slightly older written account of an ascent by Jean Buridan, who, on his way to the papal court in Avignon before the year 1334, climbed Mt. Ventoux "to make some meteorological observations."[4][5] It seems implausible that Petrarch sat down and wrote the six thousand words we have, in elegant Latin with correct quotations from the classical poets, before dinner after an eighteen-hour hike up and down a mountain.[6] In fact, whether Petrarch himself climbed the mountain has been doubted by modern scholars; according to Pierre Courcelle and Giuseppe Billanovich, the letter is essentially a fiction written almost fifteen years after its supposed date, and almost a decade after the death of its addressee, Francesco Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro.[7] Lyell Asher argued, indeed, that the ascent of the mountain was a figurative account of writing the letter itself.[8]
Modern reception
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg describes Petrarch's ascent of Ventoux as "one of the great moments that oscillate indecisively between the epochs," namely between the medieval period and modernity. He also uses it to illustrate his theory of intellectual history: "The description of the ascent of Mont Ventoux exemplifies graphically what is meant by the 'reality' of history as the reoccupation of formal systems of positions."[15]
James Hillman, in Re-Visioning Psychology, uses the story of Petrarch's ascent to illustrate his argument that
the outer world of nature is mirrored by an equally vast inner world of images. Both worlds exist apart from the human being. The outer world may have motivated Petrarch to climb Mont Ventoux, but the inner world is what he discovered when he reached the top and read the passage from Augustine's
The findings support this argument, that aesthetic experiences of nature and landscape can also be found in medieval accounts, such as the ascent of the volcanic mountain Vulcano by the Dominican friar Burchard of Mount Sion.[17] Therefore, what is new for Petrarch compared to medieval reports is the artistic representation of his mountain ascent as a subjective experience of autonomy.
Notes and references
- ^ Petrarch himself applies this to his spiritual failures; this passage is one of the reasons the whole letter is regarded as allegory.
- ^ Confessions X.8.15
- ^ Bishop, pp.102-112; quotes and translation from Bishop, as is the choice of points to summarize and the comment on the Pyrenees.
- ^ Ernest A. Moody Jean Buridan Archived 2021-02-13 at the Wayback Machine in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography
- ^ Michael Kimmelman, "NOT Because it's There", The New York Times, June 6, 1999. See also Lynn Thorndike, pp. 69-74.
- ^ So Bishop, p. 112
- ^ O'Connell, Michael, "Authority and the Truth of Experience in Petrarch's 'Ascent of Mount Ventoux,'" Philological Quarterly, 62 (1983), p.507, citing Billanovich, Giuseppe. "Petrarca e il Ventuso," Italia medioevale e umanisrica 9 (1966), pp. 389-401, and Courcelle, Pierre, "Petrarque entre Saint Augustin et les Augustins du XIVe siecle," Studipetrarcheschi 7 (1961), pp. 51-71.
- ^ Asher, Lyell, Petrarch at the Peak of Fame; PMLA, Vol. 108, No. 5. (Oct., 1993), pp. 1050-1063.
- ^ Burckhardt, Civilization, Part IV §3, beginning. convenience link Archived February 3, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ , E.g. Bishop, p.104:"the first recorded Alpinist, the first to climb a mountain because it is there."
- ^ , E.g. Kimmelman, who sees Petrarch's letter as early environmental writing.
- ^ E.g. Ernst Cassirer: The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, tr. Hans Nachod, p.28:"The colorful description of this enterprise has startled many readers who have been amazed to see a man of his epoch venturing to climb a mountain for a view like a modern alpinist"
- ^ Bishop, p.102,104
- ^ Thorndike, pp. 69-74
- ^ Blumenberg, pp. 341, 342
- ISBN 0-06-090563-8.
- ^ Mehr, Christian: Vor Petrarca. Die Bergbesteigung eines Mönchs auf Vulcano. Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 101, 2 (2019), p. 317-346.
See also
Bibliography
- Bishop, Morris Petrarch and His World. ; Bloomington, Indiana. Indiana University Press 1963
- Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (tr. Robert M. Wallace). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1983.
- Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, (1868) tr. Middlemore; New York, Macmillan 1890.
- Michael Kimmelman, "NOT Because it's There", The New York Times, June 6, 1999.
- O'Connell, Michael, "Authority and the Truth of Experience in Petrarch's 'Ascent of Mount Ventoux,'" Philological Quarterly, 62 (1983),
- JSTOR 2707236.