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Tag yourself

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Ruprecht von Kaufmann.

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io e te, card. pietro bembo

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Thinking about the werewolf from the hate mail Lemgo council pharmacist David Welman (1595 - 1669) got after being accused of being a werewolf

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In 1363, a 29-verses-long excerpt from the 6th book of Francesco Petrarca's poem, Africa, started circulating, attracting some literary critiques. As we can see, Petrarca took it very normally.

From Res Seniles, II, 1.

English translation by me under the cut:

"To Giovanni from Certaldo [Boccaccio], in defense of some accusations moved to his [own] writing style.

I should have kept quiet or live hidden or perhaps never being born to escape to these Scyllas' barking. Going out in public is no joke. Tough dogs maul the weak ones with their teeth and their voice: danger comes from the former, annoyance from the latter. I would have liked to avoid both by shutting up and staying far away, but waves pushed me where I never intented to. I'm already under the people's gaze and pointed out at from those for whom being unknown is the first and foremost part of their glory."

"I felt sympathy for something new that hurt no one; it's hard to kill someone you love. I felt like I was committing violence on my own offspring with my own hands."

"For you people the wrath of the erupting Etna or [the one] of Charybdis, the rumble of the sea during a storm or a thunder are not as horrible-sounding as the name of a fellow citizen of yours."

"Oh Envy, worst one among the soul's diseases! They say you've brought death to the human genre and that's not enough yet! What are you still looking for?"

"Now, since all meadows are damaged by this kind of herds and envy's wounds are eagerly inflicted on the noblest plants, how should the scars left by these teeth be judged if not like marks of glory? What can I do to my critics, to these feverish, stinking, aggressive little goats of mine? If I stay silent, they insult [me], if I talk back, they get mad, [they're] enemies of thruth, wreckers of patience."

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egon schiele, self portrait as st. sebastian, 1914, pencil on paper

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I've been tagged by dearest @petrarchesco (thx ♡♡) to share my top 10 songs from my on repeat playlist:

bob - the dodos

close to me - the cure

melo - marco castello

per un'ora d'amore - mattia bazar

redwood (anxious god) - haley heynderickx

conchiglie - andrea lazlo de simone

the chain - fleetwood mac

andromeda - weyes blood

taro - alt-j

capirò - mina

tagging @tractim @girldante @karaviav (if u wanna) and anyone who would like to join

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woland ha letteralmente detto ape in centro (appartamento di stepan bogdanovic) con le ame (le mie incarnazioni)

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i've discovered the noble art of scanning sketches

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mi sento così

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i am doing a little research on the minotaur for uni; i made some sketches during a study break

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to celebrate Petrarca's birthday here's some pictures from ms. parigino latino 1989, a codex with St. Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos gifted to the poet by Giovanni Boccaccio.

The manuscript was described by Petrarca in a letter to Boccaccio in these terms:

translation under the cut

You blessed me with your great and splendid gift; now I will safely sail through the davidic sea: I will avoid the reefs and I will not dread the waves of words nor the wreck of shredded sentences. I used to venture into high seas with my only strength, waving my arms or clinging to chance wrecks, and I kept my exhausted mind afloat through the contrary waves, so that often when I would sink with Peter I started crying: "O Lord save me!" And often like him, with the help of Christ's hand, which He extends to supplicants, I would rise. Amidst such dangers you have sent me a good ship and an industrious helmsman: Augustine, whose immense work - which is usually divided by the multitude in three parts a stored in large volumes - I receive from you complete in a single volume.

I welcomed it with pleased surprise and I said to myself: "Now it's not the time of sloth; if I did have any time remaining, this will destroy it, for my illustrious guest must be attended to with great sumptuousness. He will not allow sleeping throughout entire nights; in vain, eyes of mine, you turn pale or blink, you must stay awake, you must work through the night, in vain you will think of rest; you must begin toiling."

I shall tell the truth: none of my friends viewed that book without admiration, and with one voice they all bore witness that they had never seen such an enormous book, something I myself, scarcely an amateur at such things, admit; nor is there a greater work of such tremendous literary merit or wealth of content. It is impossible to imagine the greatness of his intellect and his learning, whence came that holy man's fervor, his passion for writing, his knowledge of divine things, in one who had been long involved with earthly pleasures, finally that dedication to toil in old age, that productive idleness in a bishop, that skill in the Roman tongue in an African, although as he clearly implies in one of his works, some Africans knew Latin in his day. You may well say about him what he borrowed from Terence to say about Marcus Varro: "From any perspective a most learned man is Varro, who read so much that we marvel he had the time to write, and wrote so many works that we believe scarcely anyone can read them all." But bypassing other works of his genius, whether they be the many I  already possess or still lack, or those he himself mentions in his Retractationes, already possess or still lack, or those he himself mentions in his Retractationes, or those that were perchance forgotten or omitted or overlooked in that work, or had not yet been written and would require at least a lifetime to read, who would still not be astonished that he could write this one work, though he had done nothing else? I know of no work of comparable magnitude by a single Latin writer, except perhaps his other book on the Epistles of Paul, that seems to approach the same magnitude, unless my opinion is flawed and my memory failing. Or perhaps one could recall the huge work on Roman history by Titus Livy, which was divided into sections called decades not by him, but as a result of readers laziness.

The value of such a gift from your friendship is increased not only by the size of the work of which I am speaking but by the book's elegance, the majesty of its calligraphy, and its truly modest ornamentation; consequently, since I first set eyes upon it, I am unable to look away, like a thirsty leech, until they have had their fill. Thus are my days slipping away without eating and the nights without sleeping. How much this generosity of yours has added to my pleasure, which now resides almost exclusively in reading literature, can never be easily imagined by the multitude who enjoy only bodily pleas-ures. But you will readily understand and will not be astonished that I have been awaiting with eager anticipation this book's arrival. You know that a brief wait is a long time when something is desired, while any kind of haste is slow; but if a mad lover in Naso's work can say, "The seventh night has passed, a period longer for me than a year," how do you think I feel when during my waiting, as the same writer has another character say, "the moon has four times hidden itself and four times reappeared throughout the world"? The flame of desiring noble things is usually more serene but not more sluggish. I am, however, of the opinion that it deliberately happened this way, not through any fault of yours since you were so solicitous in sending the book, but rather through fortune's whim, which made the delay serve as a spur to my desire and increase my gratitude. And so that you may not perchance believe that this letter's contents or any one day is indicative of the extent of my gratitude for your gift, know that it will have no boundary other than the day I put an end to my reading and living. Farewell, and remember me.

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happy birthday mf

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           “for Vera”

Vladimir Nabokov used to draw butterflies for his wife and love of a lifetime, Véra Slonim.