Dante da Maiano

Dante da Maiano is the author of 47 lyrical poems written in a Provençal style, with notable Guittonian influences. Very little is known about his life: a 1301 document shows him to be the son of ser Ugo da Maiano, a Florentine, and he may have been a little older than Dante Alighieri, with whom he exchanged three series of poems. The best known is the so-called Tenzone del duol d’amore, with five sonnets, of which Alighieri wrote the second (Qual che voi siate, amico, vostro manto) and the fourth (Non canoscendo, amico, vostro nomo), while the other sonnets were written by da Maiano. This tenzone, in which unrequited love is acknowledged as the greatest sorrow, is one of Dante Alighieri’s earliest poetic experiences, marked by Guittonian experimentation, as shown in his use of identity rhyme and split rhyme as well as his frequent recourse to the replicatio. In the two other series, again it was da Maiano who started the sequence: in the first, also centred on the invincible force of Love, Dante Alighieri replied to the sonnet Amor mi fa sí fedelmente amare with Savere e cortesia, ingegno ed arte; in the second series, Alighieri wrote Savete giudicar vostra ragione to accept the invitation, also addressed to other lyric poets, to interpret a dream, namely, his friend’s “vision” (Provedi, saggio, ad esta visïone). Dante da Maiano also wrote one of the three responses (the others belong to Cavalcanti and Terino da Castelfiorentino) to the sonnet, A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core, the first in the Vita Nuova, in which Dante Alighieri asks the lyric poets of the time about one of his own dreams. In his sonnet (Di ciò che stato sei dimandatore), da Maiano advise Alighieri to cure his love disease and mitigate his emotions by washing his testicles (v. 7: che lavi la tua collia largamente), the heat of which, according to the medical science of the time, lay at the root of damage caused by erotic feelings.