Guittone d’Arezzo

Guittone d’Arezzo (circa 1235-1294) played a fundamental role in the Italian literary tradition of the thirteenth century. He was the author of a corpus of letters and a canzoniere with more than 300 compositions, mainly canzoni and sonnets, but also sacred ballads, or laude, a genre which he probably invented himself. His stature as leader of a poetic school was acknowledged in his lifetime, and confirmed by important role played by his works in the early manuscript tradition of Italian lyric poetry in the thirteenth century: the Codex Laurenziano Rediano 9 of the late thirteenth century contains a collection of his work, conceived so as to provide readers with a canonical text. Throughout his poetry, divided into before and after his religious conversion in 1265, he uses a highly elaborate metrical and rhetorical apparatus and a discursive strategy which is insistently, albeit only superficially, argumentative, and enriches the erotic content of his poetry with themes relating to civics, morality and politics. Like Cavalcanti, Dante judged Guittone extremely harshly, from Chapter XXV of the Vita Nuova up to De Vulgari Eloquentia (I 13 1 and II 6 8) and the Commedia (Purg., XXIV 56 and XXVI 124-126), criticizing his ideological poverty and linguistic municipalism. Dante’s systematic and obstinate rejection of Guittone, lucidly interpreted by Contini as indicating a desire to eliminate his most dangerous rival and an attempt to hide an embarrassing debt, is nonetheless accompanied by his youthful acknowledgement of Guittone’s lesson (at least in the tenzone with Dante da Maiano), and his frequent recourse to clearly Guittonian themes, verbal calques and stylistic patterns in his moral canzoni and in the Commedia.