FRANCESCO PETRARCA, 1304-1374
Nota de Laura
On paper
Florence, 1468
General Manuscripts 109, Box 285, Folder 5127a (Spinelli Archive)
Bifolium, f. 1 recto

When Petrarch was a young boy, his father commissioned the famous manuscript of Virgil that became one of the future scholar's most beloved books. Petrarch even had the artist Simone Martini paint an illumination on the front page. It is within that volume, and facing the painting by Simone Martini, that Petrarch chose to insert the bitter sweet note about an event in 1348, when the Black Death raged through Western Europe:

“Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth,
in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the
same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was with-
drawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate. The sad tidings reached me
in Parma ... ”

The note about Laura was later copied by many readers of Petrarch, as this example from the Spinelli Archive.