207 11. Petrarch and the invention of synchrony AMEDEO QUONDAM ‘quella gratia, & veneration, che Tantiquita presta non solamente alle parole, ma a gli edificii, alle statue, alle pitture, & ad ogni cosa"! Baldassare Castiglione, Libro del cortegiano, Lv.17 = Lxxx.1528 Ancient, modern, Ancients, Moderns, antiquity, modernity: it is worth- while making use of the neutral sign of the comma rather than those partisan conjunctions (or disjunctions) ‘andlor’ (the binary force of ‘versus’ would be even less helpful), in an attempt to free these pairings of adjectives and nouns (set out in a rigorously and similarly neutral alphabetical order) from the weighty semantic burden which results from their particular millennia-long and metamorphosing histories (which cannot merely be reduced to the usual well-worn querelles, and which have firmly located them at the heart of Western culture, begin- ning from its Mediterranean roots). This act of liberation aims at returning these terms to their original, basic meaning, as simply chronotopes denoting the point in time occupied by whoever is speaking (someone who is alive, here and now) as regards above all the past (and This opening statement, which I will now undertake to support through a range of examples of the uses of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ in the classical languages and in old Italian, is meant to signal that we must bear in mind the decidedly anthropological pertinence of this fundamental semantic field. Because - as I will lay out more clearly below - we are not only dealing more generally with the ways in which Time and History are represented and narrated (and the relationship of This article has been translated from the Italian by David Bowe. 1. ‘that grace and veneration, which antiquity lent not only to its words, but to its buildings, its stautes, its paintings, to each and every thing’.208 Amedeo Quondam man with nature), but also, in particular, with the primary forms of societies which are both structurally and functionally traditional, starting at the level of the family and thus at the level of relationships between young and old. In this familial context, the relationship with ancestors is not only one of identity and genealogy, but also involves the ‘political’ and ‘economical’ aspects of those societies, as well as their respective religious practices. This stems, in short, from the relationships between past and present, between Ancients and Moderns, between old and young, between ‘them’ and ‘us’, which form a constituent part of a cultural typology with a lengthy history, and which, for centuries, functioned (or intended to function) as a regulatory manifestation of a universal, coherent ‘design for living’, comprising good self-governance. Even when, in the cultural context of the classicism of the European courts, there is debate over how (or even whether) the relationship between Ancients and Moderns should function, and even when the querelles only take account of literary options, these underlying roots remain fully active. At least, this is the case until the very structure of this relationship is brought into question, freeing the Moderns from that bond with the Ancients which, for centuries, had seemed to be an almost biological necessity rather than a cultural choice. This moment is also marked by the liquidation of the classical tradition of History and Nature, with its canons, which may be variable and prone to metamor- phosis (hence the querelles), but which are rooted in a few simple and potent macrostructural constants (to begin from the axiomatic principle of imitation). At once and always, the querelles, in the Italian experience, immediately reactivate the synchrony between Ancients and Moderns, because they are a constitutive part of those same operative dynamics. This is evident among the early humanists, beginning with the polemics in which Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio engage in defence of the new poetry and new culture, and then in relation to the vernacular, on Ariosto and Tasso, on chivalric romance of the epic, on Marino, up until the general evaluations of his relationship as proposed by Alessandro Tassoni and Secondo Lancellotti and the Trajano Boccalini’s Ragguagli. In the face of these well-known situations and works, I would like to point out the primary importanc of t hich is a sort of continuous querelle. This is RP aca the right of the Moderns to use a new language instead of Latin, but also because of the dynamic between innovation and tradition which results from it, dealing with a living language and in particular in the system of literary genres of vernacular classicism. These lines from Agnolo Firenzuola’s Ragionamenti (1552) will suffice as illustration: ‘Dunque non é egli lecito agli moderni trovar nuovi modi di canzoni come fu agli antichi? Dunque non ci sara mai permesso di poter migliorare questa lingua e arricchirla11. Petrarch and the invention of synchrony 209 di nuove cose, anzi sara mestieri lasciarla in quegli puri termini che ella si ritrovava quando ella nacque, o almeno in quelli stessi che ella si ritrova al presente?’ (So is it not allowed to the Moderns to find [trovar] new modes of poetry as it was to the Ancients? So will we never be permitted to improve this language and enrich it with new things, rather it will be our calling to leave it in those pure terms which she [the language] found herself with when she was born, or at least in those with which she finds herself now?).2 The semantic richness of this field is already evident in Greek: ’apyéuos (ancient’, both distinct from and correlative with ‘apyéuos, ‘archaic’) refers to whom and what was there in the beginning, or at the ‘origin’ Capyn), and therefore ancient, old, primitive or original, and hence authoritative and venerable (and invested with ‘power’ - also ’apyn — whence ’apyéiov, ‘goverment building’, but also ‘archive’). of ’apyaior are ‘the ancients’, 40 ‘apxiuov is the ‘legacy of the forefathers’, and ’apyalorns is ‘antiquity’. One can also intentionally archaise (‘apydiLw), that is to say imitate the Ancients, or represent oneself as ancient (‘apydiws - ‘in the style of the ancients’). All this comes with important semantic nuances for this particular perspective, within the lengthy duration of these great Western categories, because it brings to light their structural ambiguity. For example, ‘apxaios (‘ancient’) can, with a positive spin, indicate something both authoritative and at the same time simple and straightforward. Italso can carry the negative connotations of aged, antiquated, decrepit or stale. This semantic field, which is already dense, is further articulated in the term zaAaios, which relates precisely to the passage of time. The adverb staat indicates a relation to something that came before, whether recently or in the distant past, thence coming to mean aged or old. of ada (aparos) are then the people of the past, the ancients, while the verb radatow refers to biological time in nature, the aging of bodies, but also the passage into disuse. Even Yepww (‘old’) contributes to the articulation of the semantic field of passing time with its natural rhythms. This term tends to refer to people more than things (aged, elderly, and thus ancient), but again with an inherent ambiguity, indicating authority, but also senility. As far as the semantic field of the modern, modernity and the Moderns is concerned, ancient Greek offers very few terms, only onjepwos (‘current’) and dnjepov (‘this day''today’, from ‘yéepa meaning ‘day’). There is a perfect analogue in Latin, down even to the anthropological implications, with the range of meanings carried by antiquus (though sharing a root in ante, this term is already distinguishable from anticus, 2 Translator’s note: the verb trovar carries the double sense of ‘finding’ and ‘writing’ poetry; trovatori are troubadours.