Petrarch at the Spring of Vaucluse

Böcklin painted this in 1867 and set his subject at a spring rather than in any scene of action. The figure is Petrarch, the 14th-century Italian poet, standing at the Fontaine de Vaucluse in southern France, the deep pool where a river rises fully formed out of the rock. Petrarch had lived near this place, and it was here, in his own telling, that much of his verse to Laura, the woman he loved and mostly wrote to from afar, took shape. Böcklin gives the setting a lush, half-dreamed quality, more inner world than travel record. He was living back in Basel while he worked, painting Italian scenes from memory. The poet stands at the literal source of the water, and, the picture suggests, of the poems.