Guido Guinizzelli: lo padre mio e de li altri miei miglior

Guido Guinizzelli was born in Bologna around 1230 and was a judge before his Ghibelline politics forced him into exile in Monselice in 1274, where he died two years later. Considered the precursor of the stilnovo, his poetic output, consisting of 5 canzoni, 15 sonnets and a few short fragments, includes the canzone, Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore, which contains several ideas basic to the new poetics, including the correspondence between love and the gentle heart and praise of the woman-angel. Guinizzelli’s example was extremely important in Dante’s work, and was neither eclipsed nor revised throughout Dante’s entire output. Right from the Vita Nuova, Guinizzelli is synonymous with saggio, a learned man, and seen as auctor on a par with biblical or Scholastic auctores, as demonstrated by Dante’s citation in the incipit of the sonnet Amor e ’l cor gentil, somewhat rare for a vernacular poet of the time. He is nobile again in the Convivio (IV 20 3), maximus Guido in De vulgari (I 15 6), the one who holds the gloria de la lingua (“glory of our tongue”) in Purg., XI 97-99, and clearly acknowledged as padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai / rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre (“my father and father of my betters in using sweet and graceful rhymes of love”) in Purg., XXVI 97-99. These explicit judgements are confirmed by frequent allusions to Guinizzelli’s work in the Rime and the Commedia. Nonetheless, the almost literal echo of the incipit of Al cor gentil in the words of the lustful Francesca in Inf., V 100, Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende (“Love, which in the gentle heart is quickly kindled”), and his placing of Guinizzelli among the lustful in purgatory, emblematically point to Dante’s use of the model as indication that it has been surpassed. Comparing the woman to the angel in the last stanza of Al cor gentil may be hyperbolic but it is nonetheless a simile, to be surpassed by the angelic substantialization of Beatrice, to which Dante had already attained in Chapters XVIII-XIX of the Vita nuova.