Guido Cavalcanti: primo de li miei amici
Guido Cavalcanti was born in Florence no later than 1259 and was a respected exponent of the Whites. He was banished to Sarzana in 1300, while Dante was prior, after being implicated in violent fighting. After falling ill with malaria, he returned to Florence and died there in August of that year. The author of an exceptional corpus of lyrical poems, including the powerful doctrinal canzone Donna me prega, he is a major figure in Italy’s poetry of the late thirteenth century, and played a significant role in Dante’s intellectual life. The start of Dante’s journey as a poet, at least until the Vita nuova, clearly owes much to Cavalcanti. The sodalitas between them started with Dante’s first sonnet, A ciascun alma presa e gentil core, to which Guido replied with Vedeste al mio parere onne valore: this was, as Dante indicated later in the Vita nuova, quasi lo principio de l’amistà tra lui e me (“almost the start of the friendship between him and me”). The relationship developed in the years between 1285 and 1295, with another sonnet by Dante, Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io, Cavalcanti’s response, S’io fosse quelli che d’amor fu degno, and two compositions from Guido to Dante: Se vedi Amore, assai ti priego, Dante and Dante, un sospiro messagger del core. Their friendship was apparently still solid right up to the Vita nuova, which Dante dedicated to Cavalcanti, describing him as primo de li miei amici (“first of my friends”) and invoking him in Chapter XXV as a friend in the polemic against Guittone.
As recent research has shown[1], Guido did not appreciate the dedication, and challenged the ideological system of Dante’s libello, first by parody with the sonnet Pegli occhi fere, then with a famous reproach, written in the person of Love-Passion in I’ vegno ’l giorno a te, and finally with Donna me prega, a powerful critique with a sound theoretical basis. The divergence between Dante and Cavalcanti was indeed profound: for the former, love, guided by reason, is the Thomistic tool of moral edification and sustenance for the journey towards God; for Cavalcanti love is Averroistic in concept, an overwhelming passion beyond the control of reason, with devastating effects for the person experiencing it. Guido’s disagreement was not left unanswered, for Dante responded via in the Commedia. Although the two explicit references to Cavalcanti, in Inf., X and Purg., XI, acknowledge the value of his old friend, they nonetheless point out his lack of self-critique. More importantly, perhaps, Dante’s response to Cavalcanti is indicated in a complex, allusive correction of conceptual errors in Donna me prega, which gives the central cantos of Purgatorio (XVII and XVIII) a new doctrine of love in keeping with Christian principles. As Contini suggests, Cavalcanti had indeed “salted Dante’s blood”[2].
[1] Vd. E. Malato, Dante e Guido Cavalcanti. Il dissidio per la ‘Vita Nuova’ e il “disdegno” di Guido, Roma, Salerno Editrice, 20042.
[2] G. Contini, Cavalcanti in Dante, in Id., Un’idea di Dante, Torino, Einaudi, 1976, p. 157.
