5 74 margaret l. king
So Petrarch came to Venice again, more than a decade after his encoun-
ter with dandolo. his presence was a plum for the city; and learned patri-
cians, citizens, and foreigners were Petrarch’s frequent visitors, acquiring
from their conversations with the great man something of the luster of
his presence. Four such men crossed his threshold in 1366: four young
aristotelians, two of them Venetian nobles who had studied at the uni-
versity of Padua, who pronounced a dread sentence upon him: he was a
good man, they said, but not learned—for, of course, he utterly disdained
the intricacies of scholastic logic. in consequence, the bargain unraveled,
Petrarch left town in a huff, and his books, transferred to the protection of
the carrara lord of Padua, were dispersed. Petrarch himself tells this tale
and responds to the accusations in his On His Own Ignorance and That of
Many Others (1370),7 a skillful attack on the arrogance of the scholastic
posture as well as a tactful and humorous, yet determined, defense of his
own position. it was written as he journeyed down the Po to fall into the
waiting arms of Francesco da carrara, who provided Petrarch a mountain-
top villa at arquà to replace the one on Venice’s riva degli Schiavoni.
Petrarch’s four antagonists were learned indeed, but in the books of
aristotle, then the rage at the university of Padua where so many Vene-
tians studied. although aristotelian physics and metaphysics had been
established by the 13th century in the universities of northern europe—
Paris, oxford, cambridge—they came to italy only in the 14th. as Paul
oskar Kristeller has established, the university-based study of aristotle
was therefore just as new a pursuit in italy as the humanist study of clas-
sical texts, which began outside of university precincts.8 These two intel-
lectual approaches wrestled with each other in the arcades and studies of
the italian renaissance. and they collided decisively in Petrarch’s Vene-
tian aerie when the four aristotelians whom he had considered friends
proclaimed his ignorance to the listening world.
The incident described in On His Own Ignorance has long attracted
the interest of those seeking to learn the fate of Petrarch’s books and the
origins of Venice’s eventually magnificent Marciana library. But it is of
interest, as well, for the glimpse it gives of an emerging intellectual circle
7 Francis Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others,
ed. and trans. hans nachod; in ernst cassirer, Paul oskar Kristeller, and John herman
randall, eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Selections in Translation (chicago, 1948),
pp. 47–133.
8 Kristeller, “il Petrarca, l’umanesimo e la scolastica a Venezia”; Kristeller, Paul oskar,
“humanism and Scholasticism in the italian renaissance,” in Michael Mooney, ed.,
Renaissance Thought and its Sources (new York, 1979), pp. 85–105.