If there is a tutelary figure for the Renaissance, or even for all of modernity, it is that of Petrarch, curators Jean-Marc Chatelain and Gennaro Toscano postulate.
For their exhibition at the BnF Richelieu on the role of the book in this era of flourishing arts and sciences, these two scholars, respectively director of the rare books reserve and scientific advisor for the institution's museum, have immediately summoned the figure of the one they also consider as their great ancestor.
This son of a pontifical notary who took refuge at the court of Avignon, born in 1304 in Tuscany and found dead almost seventy years later in his formidable library, his head in a Virgil.
“Even before being the great poet that we know, the friend of Boccaccio, the platonic lover of the mythical Laura, this layman, the first among them to have an office set up near his bedroom, was one of the greatest text hunters of his time"
, they recall
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