erred is to be found in the
Capitoline contests of musicians, poets, and other artists, founded by
Domitian in imitation of the Greeks and celebrated every five years,
which may possibly have survived for a time the fall of the Roman
Empire; but as few other men would venture to crown themselves, as Dante
desired to do, the question arises, To whom did this office belong?
Albertino Mussato was crowned at Padua in 1310 by the Bishop and the
rector of the university.

The University of Paris, the rector of which was then a Florentine,
1341, and the municipal authorities of Rome competed for the honor of
crowning Petrarch. His self-elected examiner, King Robert of Anjou,
would gladly have performed the ceremony at Naples, but Petrarch
preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the senator of Rome. This
honor was long the highest object of ambition, and so it seemed to
Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian magistrate. Then came the
Italian journey of Charles IV, whom it amused to flatter the vanity of
ambitious men, and impress the ignorant multitude by means of gorgeous
ceremonies. Starting from the fiction that the coronation of poets was a
prerogative of the old Roman emperors, and consequently was no less his
own, he crowned, May 15, 1355, the Florentine scholar Zanobi della
Strada at Pisa, to the annoyance of Petrarch, who complained that the
barbarian laurel had dared adorn the man loved by the Ausonian muses,
and to the great disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to recognize this
_laurea Pisana_ as legitimate. Indeed, it might be fairly asked with
what right this stranger, half Slavonic by birth, came to sit in
judgment on the merits of Italian poets. But from henceforth the
emperors crowned poets whenever they went on their travels; and in the
fifteenth century the popes and other princes assumed the same right,
till at last no regard whatever was paid to place or circumstances.

Outside the sphere of scientific investigation, there is another way to
draw near to nature. The Italians are the first among modern peoples by
whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful. The
power to do so is always the result of a long and complicated
development, and its origin is not easily detected, since a dim feeling
of this kind may exist long before it shows itself in poetry and
painting, and thereby becomes conscious of itself. Among the ancients,
for example, art and poetry had gone through the whole circle