Tra storiografia e biografia: la doppia svolta del Petrarca e del Boccaccio

Petrarch and Boccaccio were responsible for introducing two decisive dynamics in the development of the genres of historiography, biography and eulogy – dynamics that were not in conflict with each other, but complementary: the former concentrating exclusively on the past, and the latter giving preferential attention to the contemporary. Both of these aspects were certainly not unknown in the works that catalogued and narrated the lives of the «viri illustres» and the «mulieres clarae», but it was precisely with these two major figures of fourteenth–century culture that these aspects took on the features that were to become a model and authority for the Tradition that followed.
On the one hand were Petrarch’s composite «De viris illustribus» (and the experiences that resemble it in the «Rerum memorandarum libri», the «De vita solitaria» and the «Triumphus Fame», as well as the innumerable exemplary passages with which his letters are dotted); and on the other, Boccaccio’s «De casibus virorum illustrium» and «De mulieribus claris» (not to mention the individual lives; the «excursus» in the «Amorosa visione», the chapter eight of the «Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta», and the «Consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi»; the learned catalogue arranged genealogically in the first thirteen books of the «Genealogie deorum gentilium»; and the information glossing the characters in the «Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante»). Together, they brought to biographical historiography a series of conceptual and literary–historical elements that redefined how it was organized, starting from the very reason for choosing this form of writing.
In the light of this development and these innovations, we cannot fail to see Petrarch and Boccaccio as the two main re–founders of the genres of historiography and biography and their potentially infinite ramifications, modulating into complex texts the information provided by a stratified Tradition. It was not just a matter of re–reading and re–using: it was a movement — the dual breakthrough of the title — that impressed a new course on the future outcomes of the questions connected with writing history and/or lives and, above all, with describing the figures who are honoured with the title of “illustrious”. Introducing in this field the method that would endear itself to humanistic philology marked a definite reawakening of the critical spirit, but also projected the historical perspective forward in time, deploying new problems and new interests, both of which were to receive extremely different responses from the later developments of the cultural problems expressed in the macrocosm of literary forms revolving around the triple pole of attraction of historiography, biography and «laudatio».