UC Berkeley

“The Italian Poetic Triumvirate Realized: Visualizing the ‘Trionfi’ of the ‘tre corone’,” is the first study to analyze the mostly unexplored fifteenth-century visualizations of Francesco Petrarca’s unfinished poem, I Trionfi (1351-1374), through an intermedial lens. While the intertextual references to two prior works, namely Dante Alighieri’s Commedia (1321) and Giovanni Boccaccio’s l’Amorosa visione (c.1342), have been studied in some detail, my project is the first to locate the intermedial ties between Boccaccio and Petrarch. Additionally, I am the first to explore the imagery for the Trionfi and its tie to both literary and visual elements in the Commedia. I develop a new reading of these canonical works by tracing various macchine, or ‘machines,’ such as God’s chariot located in the Book of Ezekiel, medieval French literary automata, and civic-sacred public pageantry, that intertextually appear in Dante’s and Boccaccio’s poems. I further examine how contemporary visual examples, such as Buonamico Buffalmacco’s Triumph of Death in the Pisa Camposanto (c.1336-1340) and Giotto di Bondone’s Triumph of Vainglory, originally depicted in Azzo Visconti’s palace in Milan (c.1336), similarly portray these macchine and serve as artistic interlocutors for Boccaccio’s “triumphs.” It is only through Petrarch’s mediation of these mechanisms from Dante, Boccaccio, and contemporary visual artists that his readers, and those who later attempt to depict his poem visually, acquire an image of the Trionfi.

It is apparent that this intermedial triumphal discourse does not cease with fifteenth-century Italian visualizations of Petrarch’s text. As a further point of comparison, I conclude by demonstrating how the “triumph of the tre corone” extends and is re-integrated into other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poems, artworks, and public festivals on a broader European scale. My methodology brings the textual and visual Trionfi in conversation with works that implicitly adhere to the same composite triumphal dialogue, allowing us to reconsider and enhance our reading of later texts. Though I offer the case study of the visual reworking of “Petrarch’s” Triumph of Chastity in Queen Elizabeth I’s Sieve Portrait (c.1583) by Quentin Metsys the Younger, my dissertation invites audiences to regard other examples, including Angelo Poliziano’s re-writing of the hybrid “Trionfi” in Part II of his Stanze per la giostra (1478), Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (1477-1482) and triumphal entrees at least as far away in time and space as those of Henri II into Rouen (1550), along similar lines.

The broader implication of this project is that it explores what happens when there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between textual model and visual representation or between visual model and successor text. My project underscores the intermedial value of equal parts text and image from another source. Through distinct, yet complimentary approaches, each chapter questions the dominant discourses of transmission and reception as direct models for representation to uncover the multi-layered dimensions embedded within a singular textual or discursive example. This critical analysis complicates conventional methodologies for literary and visual analysis which may take for granted the inherent meaning of a particular text or material object. By proposing new angles through which to consider the relationship between literary and visual histories, this research accentuates their interconnectedness as part of a broader, sociopolitical and cultural history. Such mutual dialogues of exchange bolster opportunities for analytical evaluations of the role of intermediality across numerous disciplines, in both early modern and contemporary contexts.