The protagonists of the story told in the miniatures and the landscape

The miniatures and the glosses emphasize the narrative and autobiographical dimension of the Rvf developing an original interpretation in the context of the Quattrocento’s readings more inclined to privilege the poetic anthology over the narrative. Grifo creates an effect of continuity by inventing a thematic and iconographic network that, besides the fashionable Laura, is based on figures of the poet (Zaganelli, “La storia del Petrarca e la favola del Grifo,” 89-91).

First of all, the poet-book depicted in various meaningful postures, quite often pierced by an arrow as metaphor of heartbreak and grief (1v). The poem itself is quite often depicted as a bird holding the letter-poem in its beak. Secondly, the serpent that has a broad metaphoric value alluding quite often to vital erotic spirits and is not simply reducible to lust and desire, as memory of the biblical snake. The serpent accompanies the book performing many different expressive position and attitudes starting from the miniatures included in 3v. Grifo’s serpent may be interpreted as the genius loci as conceived in ancient Roman religion (the Greek agathodaemon, ἀγαθὸς δαίμων, whose roots are lost in prehistory), the individual instance of a general divine nature that is present in every place, thing or individual person (Donati 249).

It is reasonable to think that the magical-religious aspects of the serpent manifested themselves in cult form in primitive societies. These cult forms continued until the Middle Ages when they began to take on Christian forms around the cult of saints. As Alfonso di Nola has shown, these magical-religious aspects still survive today in the cult of snakes and in its relations with that of San Domenico in Cocullo. This cult manifests itself among other things in the cocullese exhibition of snakes which continued up to the present time (Alfonso Di Nola 68, 129). A rare photographic document by F.P. Michetti prior to 1886 recalls in some respects the snakes that appear in groups in some miniatures by Grifo. The book of Grifo, performs a function analogous to that of the hero or the saint in providing a protection against the indomitable and irreducible aspects of nature of which one perceives the disturbing but at the same time fecund presence.

The poet-book and the serpent are always inserted in the ever-present garden-valley with river and flowers, trompe d’oeuil of Valcluse, and metaphor of the intense poetic dialogue with the natural environment so penetrating and significant in Petrarch’s Rvf. The garden-valley, includes quite often the laurel and groups of bonsai trees; it has a regular and geometric arrangement inspired by the contemporary Italian Renaissance gardens. The nature that is represented in Grifo’s miniatures is not wild for sure but it still present as both challenge and inspiration for human creativity (1v; 3r).  

The miniaturist believes in the interdependent vitality of nature, in the force of the anima mundi, where natural elements, from the flowers to the rivers, still play an active role in directing the vital spirit that traverses the poet-book toward the sky. The open-air scenery some time includes castle and walled Renaissance towns that add to the adventurous spirit of the story and its illustrations. All these features confirm the origin of this incunabulum in the Po Valley courts at the end of Fifteenth Century. Mariani Canova sees some similarities with the atmosphere of a court romance such as Boiardo’s Orlando inamorato that was in part already circulating at the Estensi’s court in Ferrara at that time  (15v; 28v; 115r). For certain aspects, the incunabulum is witness to a gallant, at moments humorous, reading of the Rvf that disappeared after the individual, interiorized and intimate reading solicited by Pietro Bembo and his Aldine print version (184).  

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