[In the following essay, Radcliff-Umstead examines Guinizelli's contribution to the development of the style Dante called “Dolce Stil Nuovo” (“Sweet New Style”) and explains how Guinizelli broke with poetic tradition when he spoke of a lady in divine terms in his work.]

Among the enduring ‘innovations’ of the Middle Ages, the cult of romantic love is perhaps the most controversial of all. Scholars have engaged for years in a continuing polemic about the arising of domnei (man's vassalage to a superior lady) in Provence toward the close of the eleventh century. None of the theories which so far have been advanced—the influence of amorous Arabic poetry, the poetic adoration of the Virgin, a misinterpretation of Ovid's Art of Love seen as a serious work and not as a satire, or the presence of heretical Catharist sects—sufficiently account for the origin of a strikingly different love tradition.¹ In classical antiquity love was viewed as an illness, a deviation from the norm—as with Sappho's suicidal passion for Phaon, Dido's raving for ‘pius Aeneas’, or Catullus' bitter recriminations against the fickle Lesbia. Women in classical literature were portrayed either as victims or seductresses. But in Provençal poetry the lady becomes the source of all ennobling virtues. The poet-knight willingly takes the role of the lady's abject servant, and the reward (guerdon) that he hopes to receive for his years of devoted service often amounts to little more than a token of recognition like a smile. In less than a century this troubadour poetry of Provence, which proclaimed man's submission to the beloved lady, was enthusiastically sung by the trouvères of Northern France and the Minnesingers of Germany. In the early thirteenth century the poets of the Sicilian School at the court of Emperor Frederick II in Palermo slavishly adapted the language and ideas of the Provençal tradition for their own needs and thereby brought Italy out of its literary isolation from the rest of Western Europe.

From the time of its inception troubadour love existed in a basic conflict with caritas, love for God who in the Augustinian scheme accepted by the Middle Ages had to be the end of all human desires. But for the troubadour his adored lady was the only domina (lord) that he acknowledged. No matter how uplifting his worship for the lady might appear, she could only represent a dangerous aberration from that true love which belonged to God. Eventually many of the troubadours ended by recanting their love for the lady and spent their final days in monasteries. Folquet of Marseilles, for example, renounced his impassioned verses, joined the Cistercians, rose to become Bishop of Toulouse in 1205 and then worked with St. Dominic in the pitiless suppression of the Albigensian heresy. For the troubadours and their imitators there could be no reconciliation between Christian love and adoration of the lady.²

By the last quarter of the thirteenth century several Italian poets, not working as a school but each following his own conception of love, sought out the way to resolve the conflict between the two love traditions. These Italian poets are generally referred to as the writers of the “Sweet New Style” (“Dolce Stil Nuovo”). This label is to be found in the twenty-fourth canto of Dante's Purgatorio, where the Florentine poet is traveling in the company of Vergil and Statius along the terrace of the Gluttons. One of the repentant souls approaches Dante, makes an obscure prophetic statement about a future visit to Lucca and then asks this question:

“But tell me if I see in you the one
                    who drew forth the new rimes beginning,
                    ‘Ladies who have intelligence of love …’”

(vv. 49-51)

And Dante replies:

“… I am one who,
                    when Love inspires me, takes note,
                    and as he dictates within, I write.”

(vv. 52-54)

Dante's answer so impresses the Purgatorial soul that he makes this comment:

“O brother, now I see,”…, “the knot
                    that held back the Notary, Guittone and me
                    from the sweet new style that I hear.
I see clearly how your pens move
                    following closely the one who dictates,
                    which certainly was not the case with ours.”

(vv. 55-60)³

The repentant glutton who interviews Dante is the Lucchese poet Bonagiunta Orbicciani, a member of the group of North Italian versifiers who servilely copied the work of the Sicilian School. Dante rejected the formalistic and conventional verse of poets like Giacomo da Lentini (the “Notary” of the Sicilian School), Guittone d'Arezzo (the leader of the Northern group) and Bonagiunta. For Dante poetry had to be inspired by the heart rather than become a rhetorical exercise. His “sweet new style” subordinated diction, metre and music to the faithful expression of deep-felt emotions. What the Florentine poet wished to express with the new style was his understanding of love as the way to eternal salvation, as he had first stated it in the canzone Ladies who have intelligence of love—the poem to which he has Bonagiunta refer with admiration. Dante recognized that his new understanding of love was indebted to other poets who had served as his spiritual teachers.

The first of Dante's mentors was Guido Guinizelli, whom he hailed in the twenty-sixth canto of Purgatorio as his poetic father.⁴ Guinizelli, who died in 1276 as a political exile because of his imperial Ghibelline sympathies while serving as a jurist in Bologna, had originally begun his career as a poet by imitating the amorous verses of Guittone d'Arezzo. Then he radically departed from the Guittonian model with his canzone “To the gentle heart Love betakes itself” (“Al cor gentil ripara semper amore”), where in the first stanza he equated enjoyment of true love with possession of a noble heart:

To the gentle heart Love betakes itself
As to the wood the bird amidst the foliage:
Before the gentle heart, in Nature's scheme,
Love was not, nor the gentle heart before Love.
For with the sun, at once,
So sprang the light immediately;
Nor was its birth before the sun's.
And Love takes its abode in the gentle heart
As appropriately
As brightness in fire's clear light.

By the adjective “gentle” the poet means “noble”.⁵

Guinizelli considered as love's cause and prerequisite what earlier poets took as its effect: for the Bolognese poet love was not the force which ennobled hearts since only the noble heart could feel love. Because of his training in the great university city of Bologna, the poet selects similes drawn from the natural sciences like astrology and physics. In the second stanza Guinizelli compares the influence of a lady possessing nobility of heart to a star which fires men with love. Then in the following stanza he draws the simile of love's dwelling in the noble heart to a flame's shining at the top of a candle or the presence of magnetic metal in iron ore. The fourth stanza declares boldly that nobility does not depend on rank upon birth but on the virtue of soul. Here Guinizelli breaks from the Provençal tradition, where the lady was always the social superior of the poet. The Bolognese author reflects the democratic, bourgeois spirit of the North Italian communes which had never truly passed through a feudal phase. In the fifth stanza the poet likens God's radiant emanation of His powers to the angelic intelligence with the beloved lady's ability to bestow nobility to her worshipful admirer through the shining of her eyes. After making this audacious comparison between the might of God and his lady, Guinizelli seems to draw back and in the final stanza he tries to justify his attitude as he stands before the throne of Heaven:

Lady, God will say to me: “What did you dare?”…
“You have passed beyond the heavens and come even up to me,
In a simile of vain love.
But to me belongs all praise
And to the Queen of the worthy realm,
Who kills all frauds and wrongs.”
I shall say to Him: “She had the semblance of an Angel
Who came from your kingdom:
Be not sin imputed to me if I loved her.”

The poet has thus exalted feminine beauty as a manifestation of divine love. His lady becomes the donna angelicata. Although many poets before Guinizelli had compared their ladies to an angel, it is for the first time in his canzone that the beloved actually acquires the attributes of a celestial being who has come down to earth on a special mission. The final stanza reveals a certain hesitation on the author's part as if he feared the angelic comparison might appear blasphemous. Guinizelli recognized the religious problem, stated it clearly and attempted to transcend it by demonstrating that the lady's angelic beauty is the splendor of her noble heart and the direct creation of God. Love for her would then cease to be a deviation and instead become the means of moral elevation to Heaven.⁶

In his sonnets Guinizelli treated two motives which came to characterize the poetry of the Sweet New Style. The one motive focuses on the aura of mystery and miracle which envelops his lady whenever she appears before him. Brilliant luminosity and intense coloration give proof of the lady's resplendent nature:

I wish to praise my lady
                    and compare her to the rose and the lily:
                    she appears, outshining the morning star,
                    and I liken her to what is lovely on high.
I compare green banks and the air to her,
                    all colors of flowers, yellow and crimson,
                    gold and blue and rich jewels to be offered,
                    Love himself is made purer through her.
She goes by, comely and so gentle;
                    that she humbles the pride of whom she greets
                    and makes him of our faith if he does not believe in it;
And no man who is base can approach;
                    and more, I tell you she has greater power:
                    no man can think evil from the time he sees her.(7)

The radiance of the lady's soul converts infidels to Christianity and effects a moral transformation in all who gaze upon her. Guinizelli is among the first of Italy's painterly poets whose palette is made of highly coloristic and visual terms, employed here to portray the effulgence of a noble heart.⁸

Wheras the preceding sonnet emphasizes the lady's appearance, Guinizelli also desired to examine the lover's state of ecstatic admiration and bewilderment. The following sonnet studies the poet's thunder-struck astonishment:

Your fine greeting and the gentle glance
          that you give me when I meet you kills me;
          Love assails me and is quite unconcerned
          whether he gives offense or favor,
          because he casts a dart through my heart
          which cleaves it through and divides it into parts;
          I cannot speak for I burn in great pain
          as one who sees his death.
It passes through the eyes as does the bolt
          which strikes through the window of the tower
          and what it finds inside it breaks and splits.
          I remain as a statue of brass,
          in which neither life nor spirit dwells,
          except that it gives the appearance of a man.(9)

The sight of the lady works such an over-powering effect on the beholder that he comes close to dying. This is poetry of the deepest possible introspection which probes love's psychic and physiological sway over the enamored writer. Guinizelli brought to the study of love an erudition which far surpassed that of any preceding troubadour. For him the problem of love had to be understood intellectually. Amore and scienzia became nearly synonymous terms in as much as poetry served as an instrument of philosophical meditation and reasoned analysis of the religious virtue of the beloved lady.¹⁰

The pain of love and philosophical inquiry are fundamental aspects of the lyrical poems of Dante's ‘first friend’ Guido Cavalcanti (ca. 1250-1300). An aristocrat in the most mercantile of Italian cities, Cavalcanti haughtily refused to join one of Florence's guilds and was consequently banned from participating in the commune's government. Chroniclers of Florentine history generally speak of his bold and courteous manner but also of his extreme sensitivity and quick anger. Cavalcanti's contemporaries regarded him as tainted with heresy because of his interest in Averroistic philosophy with its denial of individual immortality. Dante in fact placed Guido's father, Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, in the circle of Inferno reserved for heretics. Despite his exclusion from political office Guido Cavalcanti played an active role in the White faction of the Guelf party and in the Spring of 1300 he fought violently in street brawls with the Black partisans. In the hope of restoring public order the priors of the city, including Dante, banished Cavalcanti along with the other trouble-makers from the city. That summer Cavalcanti contracted malaria in the marshy region of Sarzana and although the government relented and revoked the order of exile, he died shortly after his return to Florence.¹¹

Cavalcanti's poems faithfully reflect his inclination to extremes as they either depict a mood of radiant joyousness or the most unrelieved despair. Among the lyrics of serenity there is a ballad modeled on the French pastorelle, where Cavalcanti relates how one Spring morning he encountered a lovely blonde shepherdess in a thicket where birds were singing and since the girl's passionate mood coincided with his, the two of them shared all the pleasure and sweetness of reciprocated love. The restrained and refined eroticism of an idyllic encounter also characterizes another ballad where the poet begs consolation from two country girls for the agonizing wound in his heart which a Tolosan lady inflicted upon him. Even in the sorrow of exile and knowing that death was near, Cavalcanti was capable of overcoming his melancholy by writing a third ballad in which he commends his soul and voice to the Florentine lady for whom he had long performed the service of love.

Usually Cavalcanti stressed the torment of passion, and he equated Amore with Morte. What for Guinizelli was a moment of splendid astonishment which he resolved into praise for his lady became for Cavalcanti the premise for an irreconciliable antithesis between reality and an ideal of perfection. The difference in stress between Guinizelli and Cavalcanti is evident in the following sonnet, where the Florentine lyricist attempts to represent the marvelous apparition of his lady:

Who is this who comes along that everyone gazes upon her,
and makes the air tremble with brightness,
and brings the God of Love with her
so that no man can speak, but each one sighs?
O, how she looks when she turns her eyes,
Let Love describe it because I am incapable of relating it:
she seems to me to be so great a mistress of humility
that compared to her every other woman is a creature of wrath.
Her pleasantness could not be described
since every noble virtue bows down before her,
and beauty displays her as its goddess.
Our minds have never been so exalted,
nor do we possess so much divine grace
that we could ever have understanding of her.(12)

Despite the obvious similarities with Guinizelli's verses—the emotion-charged picture of the lady's passing along the way—a certain feeling of frustration pervades the entire sonnet since the poet confesses his inability to describe the wondrousness of his lady, and thus the initial question is never adequately answered. Cavalcanti wished to capture in words the idealization of his love, and language failed him. Also the final two lines of the second quatrain establish a crucial dichotomy between wrath (ira) and humility (umiltà). Wrath darkened Cavalcanti's life and made him believe that he could never realize his illusion of loving perfection. The quality which he most desired in his lady was the meekness which might redeem him from the state of wrath. The moment of grace could only prove transitory for the poet as when beholding the approach of his beloved.

During the Middle Ages and down to the fifteenth century Cavalcanti's most quoted and discussed poem was the canzone My Lady entreats me (Donna me prega), in which he employed all of his doctrinal learning to explore the nature of love. In that most obscure of poems Cavalcanti identified passionate love as the state of wrath. Whereas Dante saw love as an emanation of Venus (the star of the third heaven), Cavalcanti declared the source of passion was in the dark rays of the fifth heaven of Mars. With its power of darkness wrath strikes at life itself. The poet wrote this canzone to answer the questions of his contemporary Guido Orlandi, who wished to know if “Love was life or death.” With his pessimistic outlook Cavalcanti stated that love often brought about death. Using the language of medieval philosophy the Florentine writer analyzed love as an ‘accident’, the creation of man's sensitive soul which is stimulated by viewing a particular lady to formulate an ideal image. Love's torment arises from the inseparable distance between the ideal illusion and the reality of the lady. The poet's intellectual faculties continue to add to the image, rather like Stendhal's process of crystallization in the treatise De l'amour, until the truth of reality shatters his illusions and brings him to death. In his longing to attain the ideal through an actual lady, the lover falls prey to the pitiless despot Love who never ceases to torture him. This discrepancy between an eternal ideal and the individual beloved could only end in anguish. For fleeting moments Love calls a truce when the lady through her kindly meekness grants the sufferer grace for his meritous service.¹³

As a natural consequence of the internal dissension within the poet there results a fragmentation of his being. Cavalcanti dramatizes this psychic and physiological conflict by personifying his various faculties as spiriti and spiritelli. These spiriti people his verses and struggle with each other for supremacy over the poet. The lover's whole being is torn to shreds by the battle between Heart, Mind and Soul. He can never be at rest because of the inner agitation which moves him from hope to despair, from delight to anguish. Sonnets like My soul is basely dismayed (L'anima mia vilmente è sbigottita) mirror the inner tension between the ever-moving spiriti which control the lover's slightest gesture like a glance, smile and especially his sighs. From the shattering collision between real and ideal the poet's spiritual unity disintegrates.

At times there can occur a moment of superior perception when the poet's rational faculties succeed in distinguishing the image from the particular. Through the image he is able to behold the lady's angelic nature. His ballad In my lady's eyes I see (Veggio negli occhi de la donna mia) relates the separation of the image from the physical being of the lady:

In my lady's eyes I see
          a light full of spirits of love
          which brings wonderful delight into my heart,
          so that it is filled with joyous life.
Such a thing befalls me when I am in her presence
          that I cannot describe it to the intellect:
          I seem to see issue from her lips
          a lady of such beauty that the mind
          cannot grasp it, and at once
          from this another is born of wondrous beauty
          out of which it seems a star moves
          and says: “Behold, your salvation is before you.”
Where this beautiful lady appears,
          a voice goes forth before her
          and sings the praises of her meekness
          so sweetly that if I try to repeat it,
          I feel that her greatness makes me tremble,
          and in my soul stir sighs
          which say: “Lo, if you gaze at this lady,
          you will see her virtue ascended into heaven.”(14)

Here Cavalcanti perceives that the lady's beauty is the splendor of her angelic virtues. While his sensitive soul has merely gazed upon the outward physical appearance, his intellective faculty understands that the lady is an angelic intelligence who has descended from heaven. At her return to the celestial spheres the poet seems prepared to follow his lady. He compares her to a star since her shining spirit radiates a power which elevates men to God. She becomes one of the forces which set the cosmos into motion. Cavalcanti does not here use the language of gallant compliments, for the ideal lady whom he first beheld in the particular woman's eyes (the windows of her soul) and who issued forth from the woman's lips upon the breath of the soul actually is a star which points the way to salvation.

All his life Guido Cavalcanti sought his ideal. Many of his verses are addressed to Giovanna of Florence, whom he called Spring (Primavera) and his “fresh new rose” because of the joyous renewal of spirit that she brought him. In 1292 he set off for a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but he ended his journey at Toulouse, where his political rivals tried to assassinate him. In the Gilded Church of the French city Cavalcanti saw the girl Mandetta, who captured his love because of her resemblance to Giovanna. Both the Florentine lady and the French girl served as models of that ideal which he always cherished. His failure to embrace the desired image compelled Cavalcanti to beg for the release of death.

Of the many Italian lyricists writing at the close of the thirteenth century and the start of the fourteenth only Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) truly transcended the emotional distress of love for his lady and reconciled it with adoration of God. Unlike Cavalcanti, he was eventually capable of discovering the earthly embodiment of all redeeming love in Beatrice. Although scholars will continue to debate whether lady Beatrice ever existed, rejecting or accepting Florentine documents about a certain Bice Portinari who died in 1290; what matters is that Dante believed in the reality of a woman who brought mankind the promise of eternal beatitude. Acting as the scribe of Love, he recorded the history of his affection for Beatrice in the Vita Nova, the book of the marvelous new life which she made possible. The eventful experiences which Dante relates in the Vita Nova go from the ninth to twenty-sixth year of his life. Of the sonnets, ballads and canzoni included in the work; the first sonnet belongs to 1283 and the last to 1292. Following the model of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dante arranged prose commentaries about the various poems. The prose must have been written around 1293. Thus the work reflects ten years in the author's life. Since many of the poems were originally composed without the author's intending to place them in a larger context, the prose commentaries impose on them a meaning which often clashes with the actual significance of the verses. Dante of course felt that he had come to understand the deeper meaning of the poems after the death of Beatrice, which is the central event of the book.¹⁵

At the very beginning of the Vita Nova Dante states (Ch. II) that he is not telling a fable of passionate love, for his Beatrice “seemed not the daughter of mortal man but of God.” Structurally the book falls into a threefold division. The number three is not without intention as Dante related it to the mystery of the Christian trinity. Throughout the work Beatrice will be associated with the number nine, the square of three because of her special mystic role. In the first section of the book Dante tells how he met Beatrice when she was eight and he nine. Their second meeting occurred nine years later, when the girl greeted the poet. The verses which follow deal with the miraculous power of Beatrice's salutation (with a play on the meaning of the Italian word salute—greeting, health, salvation) and the psychic and physiological effects of love on Dante. Here Cavalcanti's influence is rather strongly manifested in the verses of his young friend. Dante discovered his beatitude in the greeting which his beloved would make him. But on account of scandalous gossip which was caused by the poet's writing verses to two different screen ladies (donne di schermo) in order to conceal his love for Beatrice, that gentle lady denied Dante her salutation.

Up to this point the poems of the Vita Nova are unoriginal and conventional. In the seventeenth chapter, however, Dante declares that the subject of his verse will be genuinely noble, and he explains in the following chapter to a group of gracious ladies that since he can no longer enjoy Beatrice's salutation, the new theme for his poetry will be the state of beatitude that he attains in writing words of praise for his lady. The first poem which expresses his new blessedness is that canzone Ladies who have intelligence of love which Dante cites in the twenty-fourth canto of Purgatorio as displaying his “sweet new style”, as can be shown by quoting the first two stanzas:

Ladies who have intelligence of love,
          I wish to speak with you of my lady,
          not because I think I can relate all of her praises,
          but because speaking sets my mind at ease.
          I say that when I think of her virtue,
          Love causes me to experience such sweetness
          that if I did not then lose my daring,
          just by speaking I would make other fall in love.
          And I do not wish to speak in so lofty a style
          that fear might make me fail basely in my task.
          But I shall speak of her gentle state
          with a style inadequate to describe her merits
          to you, loving ladies and maidens:
          for it would not be fit to speak of her to anyone
                    else.
An angel calls forth to the divine mind
          and says: “Lord, in the world there is seen
          a miracle in the act which issues forth
          from a soul whose splendor reaches even up here.
          Heaven, which lacks nothing else
          except to have her, begs for her of its Lord,
          and each saint cries out for this grace.”
          But Pity speaks up in our defense,
          for God replies, since he knows fully of the lady,
          “My beloved ones, now suffer in peace;
          although your hope pleases me,
          there is someone on earth who expects to lose her
          and who will say in Inferno: “O you evil-born,
          I saw the lady who is the hope of the blessed.”(16)

Dante seems here to announce the theme of his infernal descent. According to the poet, Heaven is imperfect without the presence of Beatrice who is needed up there to satisfy the longings of angels and saints. The third stanza praises the purity of her soul, for not only does Beatrice ennoble men but she also leads them to salvation. In the fourth stanza the poet asserts that never was human beauty as perfect as in his lady. This canzone is a hymn to the intellectual love of spiritual beauty, for Beatrice's beauty can only be appreciated by those who are capable of understanding it, who have “intelligence of love.” Dante's praise for his lady is made without any hope for a guerdon; instead he models his love on the distinterested praise to God which every Christian should offer up to his Lord. Herein lies Dante's transcendence of religious conflicts.

Beatrice then becomes a God-like figure. The poet had earlier commented that “names are the essences of things.” Thus his lady performs on earth the role of a beatrix, the bearer of blessings. Since Christ is the supreme beatrix, his lady acts analogously to God's Son. Therefore in the third section of the Vita Nova, where the poet treats of Beatrice's death, her passing and ascension to Heaven are shown to resemble Christ's. Some commentators argue that Beatrice actually replaces God in the religious universe of the Vita Nova.¹⁷ Others hold that she occupies an intermediary position, in a chain of love which goes from God to man by means of Beatrice¹⁸ It is our feeling that Beatrice was always the way to Heaven for the poet. She could never be a terminus in and of herself.

Dante's history of his love for Beatrice did not end with the Vita Nova. After her death he involved himself very deeply in mundane affairs, like a political career and passionate loves as with his desire for a not too compliant lady of the Casentino whom he called “Stone” (Pietra) for her lack of reciprocation. By 1300, when the poet was thirty-five and in the midst of the road of his life, he felt he was close to perdition. In the Divina Commedia, which Dante wrote during the years of exile from Florence after 1302, he recounts in the second canto of Inferno how Beatrice descended from Heaven to Limbo in order to beg the poet Vergil to guide Dante through the evil of Hell and the redeeming disciplines of Purgatory's terraces. Finally in the thirtieth canto of Purgatorio, after Dante and his guide arrive in the terrestrial paradise of the Garden of Eden, Beatrice appears in the chariot of the Christian Church. Among the Latin invocations which the elders of the Church sing to Beatrice the second reads “Benedictus qui venis”, (“Blessed are you who come.”) The phrase is from Matthew XXI, 9, referring to Christ's entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, except that the verb is changed to second person. The poet deliberately retained the masculine form “benedictus” to emphasize Beatrice's Christ-like nature. Beatrice will exact from Dante contrition, confession and satisfaction before he can be cleansed in the river Lethe to forget his past sins. He confesses that he fell from grace once Beatrice's presence was no longer on earth. Dante's transgression was in part for the Noble Lady (Donna Gentile), who appears in the later chapters of the Vita Nova as consoling the poet for loss of his beloved. In his philosophical treatise the Convivio Dante attempted to prove that the Noble Lady was no more than the consolation of Lady Philosophy. His confession admits that his devotion was far from a guiltless intellectual pursuit of philosophy. Beatrice, in the symbolic role of Christian Revelation, goes on to guide the repentant sinner through the various heavens of Paradise. But after Dante comes into the very presence of God, Beatrice steps aside (Paradiso XXXI) and takes her customary place in the third row of the highest tier in the heavenly amphitheatre. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, representing Divine Intuition, comes forward to intercede with the Virgin Mary on Dante's behalf so that the poet may experience the beatific vision which will reveal to him the love (caritas) that holds together the universe. The fact that Dante is able to step aside from Beatrice and gaze back at her in the historical personality which she resumes after leaving him proves that his love for her never made of the lady a terminal figure.

Although there were other poets like Cino da Pistoia and Lapo Gianni who are usually associated with the Sweet New Style, the major figures were undoubtedly Guinizelli, Cavalcanti and Dante. To call them a school would be inaccurate and misleading. Even the formula Donna—scala a Dio (Lady—a ladder to God) must be applied with caution when one considers the poems of Guido Cavalcanti. All of those writers sought to make of their poetry an instrument of the heart to express religious adoration for a beloved lady whose earthly existence might point out the path to celestial beatitude.

Notes

1. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. M. Belgion (New York, 1940), pp. 71-76, advances the theory that many of the troubadours were members of the Catharist sect and their amorous poetry is to be explained by the Catharist doctrine of pure love. His conclusions do not appear to be well founded.

2. Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on the ‘Vita Nova’ (Cambridge, Mass.; 1949), pp. 63-66, speaks of the troubadour's need to recant.

3. Translation by H. R. Huse (New York, 1968).

4. In the Vita Nova Dante calls Guinizelli a “sage” (saggio) and in the De Vulgari Eloquentia “maximus”. Dante places Guinizelli in the terrace of Purgatorio for lustful sinners, among the heterosexuals and not the Sodomites as Rougemont, p. 92, mistakenly read. John A. Scott, “Dante's ‘Sweet New Style’ and the Vita Nova,” Italica, XLII, No. 1 (March 1965), 98-107, refuses to see Guinizelli's connection with a new understanding of love because Dante relegated him to the terrace of the lustful. But for Dante lust was the least culpable of vices, and he recognized how much he himself sinned in that direction. Dante felt lust and love were closely bound together.

5. The translation comes from Masters of Italian Literature, ed. Aldo Scaglione (Berkeley, Calif.; 1963), pp. 12-13.

6. A. G. H. Spiers, “Dolce Stil Novo—The Case of the Opposition,” MLA, XVIII, No. 5 (1910), 657-675, holds that the newness of Guinizelli is his emphasis on the inherent nobility of heart as an intrinsic part of love. Singleton, p. 70, recognizes only the presentation of a problem without any solution in the canzone.

7. Translation slightly paraphrased from the Penguin Book of Italian Verse, ed. George Kay (Baltimore, Md.; 1965), p. 54.

8. Vittorio Rossi, “Il ‘Dolce stil novo’,” Scritti di Critica Letteraria, I (Florence, 1930), 25, discusses the visual imagery in Guinizelli's verses.

9. Translation by Singleton, p. 71, where he speaks about the two new themes in Guinizelli's sonnets and their proliferation in the poetry of the Dolce Stil Nuovo.

10. Karl Vossler, Mediaeval Culture, trans. W. C. Lawton (New York, 1929), II, 91; and Francesco De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature, trans. J. Redfern (New York, 1931), I, 30-33, consider the intellectual quality of the new style of poetry.

11. Giulio Nassi, Letteratura Italiana del Medioevo (Florence, 1955), pp. 73-74, provides biographical information on Cavalcanti.

12. Translation is our own. J. B. Fletcher, “The Philosophy of Love of Guido Cavalcanti,” Twenty-second Annual Report of the Dante Society (1903), 9-35, points out the antithesis between ira and umiltà, “wrath” and “humility” in the poem.

13. Liborio Azzolina, Il ‘Dolce Stil Nuovo’ (Palermo, 1903), pp. 23-31, discusses the relationship between Cavalcanti and Orlandi. Otto Bird, “The Canzone d'Amore of Cavalcanti According to the Commentary of Dino Del Garbo,” Mediaeval Studies, II (1940), 150-203 and III (1941), 117-160, examines the canzone as commented by the medieval physician Dino Del Garbo, who regarded love as the sickness heroes in the tradition of Arabic and Hebrew medical theories. J. E. Shaw, Guido Cavalcanti's Theory of Love (Toronto, 1949), makes a masterly study of the canzone and considers the various commentaries throughout the ages; on p. 137, Shaw finds a common feature of the sweet new style as being the “studious and cultivated treatment of love.” (Italics are Shaw's.)

14. Translation paraphrased from Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love (New York, 1958), p. 229.

15. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (New York, 1963), pp. 372-378, rejects the identification of the lady of Dante's major poems with the historical daughter of Folco Portinari. Vossler, II, 159-161, mentions the years of composition for the Vita Nova.

16. Translation is our own.

17. See Scott, pp. 102-103.

18. See Singleton, pp. 76-77.