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Petrarch, an Italian scholar who lived from 1304 to 1374, described the time when he lived as an era of “darkness and dense gloom.”

But the first, Liszt’s arrangement for piano of “Pace non trovo,” one of his songs to Petrarch texts, was more than that: wistful yet fresh, altogether elegant.

When May asked it to write a specific kind of sonnet—he requested a form used by Italian poet Petrarch—the model, unfamiliar with that poetic setup, defaulted to the sonnet form preferred by Shakespeare.

But the diamond-shaped panel does illustrate a line from the poet Petrarch about chasing desire.

The poet Petrarch recorded how trolling for seashells could help people feel “unconscious of depressing cares.”