One of the tre corone of Italian literature, and the most famous lyric poet of European history, Petrarch (the usual rendering in English) was the single-most used poetic source for the cinquecento madrigale. Thousands of settings exist, primarily starting in the 1540s and lasting well into the 17th century.

His primary work was the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta ("Fragments of Vernacular Matters"), also known as his Canzoniere, and sometimes as the Rime Sparse ("Scattered rhymes", taken from the first poem of the work). The 366 poems consist of 317 sonetti (sonnets), 19 canzoni, 9 sestine, 7 ballate, and 4 madrigali. It was begun in 1327, and continued through most of Petrarch’s life, ending around 1368. An autograph copy in the Vatican provides dating for most of the pieces. The central theme is the poet’s love for Laura, whom Petrarch met in April 1327. There are many puns on Laura’s name, mostly l’aura (breeze, sometimes aura) or lauro (laurel, the tree associated with Apollo, and poetry since classical times). The first 263 poems are traditional classified as "In vita", written during the life of Laura, and the remaining 103 "In morte", after her death.

In the late 1400s Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) gained a love of the Florentine dialect while his father served as an ambassador for Venice in Florence, and especially a love of the poetry of Petrarch. In the early 1500s, he wrote a work that came to be known as the Prose della volgar lingua (Prose of the Vernacular Tongue), which circulated widely in literary circles in manuscript form before being published in 1525. It extolled Petrarch as the best example of Italian poetry (and Boccaccio for prose). He also edited the first truly authentic edition of Petrarch’s poetry in the age of the printing press. More than any thing else, this established Petrarch as the model for poetry, and started a century-long trend of Petrarcan poetry widely imitated by poets throughout the peninsula.

The musical madrigal began its life in 1520s Florence, and was more associated with somewhat lighter forms of poetry, mostly (of course) the madrigal, with its unfixed rhyme scheme (which by this time allowed 7-syllable lines as well as 11-syllable: the four examples in the Canzoniere only consist of hendecasyllabic lines). Early settings of Petrarch exist, including Verdelot’s famous setting of Italia Mia (#128), but it was not until the 1540s as the madrigal became more widespread outside of Florence that Petrarch was widely used as a model. Cipriano de Rore and Adriano Willaert, especially, associated with Venice and Ferrara, set many sonnets of Petrarch, usually 6-part pieces. Willaert’s famous publication, the Musica Nova of 1559, consisted of 21 sonnets of Petrarch (most written years past and only circulated in manuscript). Toward the end of the century, the popularity of Petrarcan poetry began to wane, especially as pastoral poetry experienced a sudden vogue around 1570-1600, though it never disappeared entirely.

Madrigal prints of the seicento containing at least one text from the Canzoniere, with the number of such pieces:

Decade Collections Pieces Avg. per Col. Avg. per decade Avg. annual

Total

511

2466

4.8

6.4

30.8

1520-1529

2

10

5

0.2

1

1530-1539

11

30

2.7

1.1

3

1540-1549

61

367

6

6.1

36.7

1550-1559

61

368

6

6.1

36.8

1560-1569

122

746

6.1

12.2

74.6

1570-1579

91

379

4.1

9.1

37.6

1580-1589

111

438

3.9

11.1

43.8

1590-1599

52

128

2.4

5.2

12.8

Source for table: Cecchi, Paolo. "La Fortuna Musicale Della Canzone Alla Vergine." In Petrarca in musica, edited by Andrea Chegai and Cecilia Luzzi, pp. 247-291. Biblioteca Musicale LIM, 2006.