Writing in the name of love

Petrarch's complex encounter with Ovid's Metamorphoses, as critics of Renaissance literature know well, left an indelible mark on the history of European representations of the poet – particularly as that poet represented himself, or herself, as the subject of language and of desire. In rereading and rewriting Ovidian stories, Petrarch necessarily worked through a relationship fundamental to the Metamorphoses' poetic project: the mutually constituting, and mutually interfering, relationship between rhetoric and sexuality. Any attempt to account for Ovid's place in the Rime Sparse, therefore, will implicitly be commenting on rhetorical and erotic problems that ramify, extending throughout the mythographic lexicon of Renaissance poetic self-representation. In order to examine how the rhetoric of Ovidian eroticism affects Petrarch's portrait of himself in love, I consider several Ovidian characters crucial to Petrarch's representation of himself as a “martyr” to an idol “sculpted in living laurel” (12.10; 30.27): Apollo, Pygmalion, Narcissus, Actaeon, Diana and, finally, Medusa. In this chapter, I ask several related questions: precisely how – and with what formal and libidinal effects – does Petrarch read Ovid? What does that reading suggest about the relationship between language and sexuality in the Rime Sparse? And what does Ovid's presence in the Rime Sparse mean for the Petrarchan subject, particularly when the poet who would rival Pygmalion is tormented by language as well as desire? For Petrarch, like Apollo, gets his laurel leaf – a signifier in return for his impossible demand – but as soon as he reaches the tree, he finds only “such bitter fruit” that his “wounds” are more aggravated than comforted (6.13–14).