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This volume explores the complex phenomenon of exegetical work produced from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century on Petrarch's vernacular poetry, that is, both his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Canzoniere) and his Triumphi (Trionfi). This body of exegesis takes the form of commentaries, annotations, academic lectures, and other forms of para­textual and critical intervention, from biographies and glossaries to marginal notes and illustrative programmes.The volume gathers together ten contributions from Anglo-American, Italian and continental scholarship. It combines rigorous analyses of specific commentators and lecturers (the author of the 'Portilia' commentary, Silvano da Venafro, Giovan Battista Gelli) alongside contributions devoted to interpretative strategies in both commentaries and academic lectures. It also explores the reception in Italy, France and England of the major Petrarch commentary by Alessandro Vellutello, as well as forms of reception and interpretation in paratexts and images. The volume is divided into three sections: 'Philology, Materiality and Paratexts'; 'Exegetical Strategies in Commentaries and Lessons'; and 'Visual Exegesis and Reception in France and England'.

Imbued with a pulsating energy that emanates from the sun, Claude Lorrain's landscape draws on the interplay of light and darkness to effect a 'living whole' and evoke the symbolic. In a life-long conversation with Lorrain - recorded in texts as diverse as 'Amor as Landscape Painter', Faust, and the Doctrine of Colours - Goethe conducts an inquiry into the dialectics of nature and art, imitation and invention, subject and object. Goethe seeks to comprehend Lorrain by reenacting him in words, in ekphrastic mode, as an experience and an idea. The inquiry remains open-ended for landscape is a paradox: the real, the spiritual, and the affective meet without merging. This aesthetic discovery and visualization of nature as landscape is consonant with the attempt to grasp the world and our place in it. The three sister arts of poetry, painting, and horticulture serve as mirrors for Goethe's self-understanding as an artist, including his ambivalence vis-à-vis the English Garden as articulated, for instance, in the novel Elective Affinities.Franz R. Kempf is Professor of German Studies at Bard College.