SOURCE: Edwards, Robert. An Introduction to The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli, edited and translated by Robert Edwards, pp. xi-lxxx. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987.

[In the following excerpt, Edwards points out some difficulties in sorting out Guinizelli's biography, examines his accomplishments as poet and innovator, and considers his sources and influence.]

LIFE OF THE AUTHOR

In the later thirteenth century, a “sweet new style” (Dolce Stil Nuovo) emerged in Italian lyric poetry. The figure first associated with this change in literary language, rhetoric, and sensibility is the Bolognese poet and judge Guido Guinizelli. His contemporaries discuss the innovations of Guinizelli's poetry as part of a polemic between the new style and the earlier Sicilian and Tuscan schools. Dante portrays Guinizelli as the actual founder of the Dolce Stil Nuovo and acknowledges him in Purgatorio 26 as his poetic father. As a figure in literary history, Guinizelli is clearly sketched, but as a historical personality he is much harder to identify. Two men named Guido Guinizelli are in fact mentioned in thirteenth-century documents from Bologna, and scholars have found it difficult to build an absolutely conclusive case for identifying either as the poet.

In his commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy (all names and page references are keyed to the Select Bibliography), the fourteenth-century scholar Benvenuto da Imola identifies the poet as Guido Guinizello de' Principi. Benvenuto writes, “Iste quidem fuit miles bononiensis de clarissima familia Principum vocatus Guido Guinicellus. Guinicelli enim fuerunt unum membrum de Principibus pulsis de Bononia seditione civili, quia imperiales erant” (This man was a Bolognese nobleman called Guido Guinizelli, from the most famous de' Principi family. The Guinizelli were one branch of the de' Principi who were driven out of Bologna because of sedition, since they were of the imperial party). Benvenuto's remark greatly influenced later scholars, and his identification is repeated with confident authority well into this century. Subsequently scholars have shown that Guido Guinizello de' Principi was podestà at Castelfranco in 1270 and was buried at Verona in 1283. But the claim that the Guinizelli were a branch of the de' Principi has proved troubling for historians. In the late eighteenth century, for instance, Gaetano Monti examined Benvenuto's remarks in a section of Giovanni Fantuzzi's Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi (1784), but he could not substantiate the family connection.

Benvenuto's identification of the poet is open to several objections. Dante, writing within a generation of Guinizelli, calls the poet Guido Guinizelli. Benvenuto knows him by the same name, and the copyists who transcribed Guinizelli's poems in the earliest manuscripts refer to him as Messer Guido Guinizelli di Bologna. The surname Guinizelli seems not to have been applied in contemporary records to the de' Principi, who bore their illustrious name unaltered throughout the thirteenth century. But the name Guinizelli does change in the course of several generations in the family that descends from an artisan named Magnano. Ludovico Frati, Emilio Orioli, and Guido Zaccagnini have built the case based on onomastic evidence and archival records that the poet was indeed Guido Guinizelli di Magnano, from a family that remained distinct from the de' Principi, though the families were contemporaries and both were driven into exile. Gianfranco Folena has rightly cautioned that either identification can be only conjectural, but the consensus is that the poet praised by Dante belonged to the Magnani family and not to the de' Principi.

The Magnani are designated as marble masons in transactions from the twelfth century, but the milieu perhaps closest to Guido Guinizelli is commercial and judicial. From the acts and documents recorded in various Memoriali of the thirteenth century, it is clear that the family took an active role in civic life and in business. The poet's grandfather, Magnano, served as a prosecutor for the Commune of Bologna in 1229, while his father, Guinizello di Magnano, was appointed at the same time to the Consiglio del Popolo (Council of the People). Guinizello is named as a witness in the sale of a legal book (“digestum novum”) in 1226 and acts as one of three examiners of notaries in 1247. He is the judge in civil and criminal actions taking place in 1235 and 1251. In 1265 the notary Martino Rosello promised to accompany Guinizello di Magnano, who would assume the title of podestà at Narni for the following year. Among the witnesses to this agreement executed at Guinizello's house was the poet, “dominus Guido filius domini Guinizelli.”

Guinizello di Magnano married Guglielmina di Ugolino Ghisilieri, who came from the same family as the Bolognese poet Guido Ghisilieri. They had six children—Guido, Giacomo (or Jacopo), Vermiglia, Bartolomea, Uberto, and Tommaso. From the order in which the first three brothers are named in later contracts, it appears that Guido was the eldest child. Giacomo, named in 1264 to act as counsel for the Commune of Bologna in an inventory of the holdings of the Ponte di Reno, was probably born before 1234. Tommaso, who is recorded at one point as giving testimony “more minorum” (as a minor), seems to have been considerably younger than his brothers. Zaccagnini argues that he could not have been born before 1269.

In 1268 Guido Guinizelli's father evidently became insane. He no longer transacted his own business, yet his sons were identified in their own dealings without the distinguishing phrase quondam domini Guinizelli Magnani (sons of the late Guinizello di Magnano), which would establish the father's death. Four separate contracts for loans of 100 Bolognese lire were executed by “Guido domini Guinizelli” on January 11, 1269, in Guinizello's house on the Piazza Maggiore (“in domo dicti domini Guidonis in platea maiori”). On August 12, 1269, license was granted to Guido, Giacomo, and Uberto to make contracts and enter into agreements as heads of the household (“contrahere et pacisci tanquam patres familias”). Jacopo Buvalelli, acting as a trustee for the poet's father, made an inventory of Guinizello's property on November 11, 1274.

Guinizello di Magnano's domestic problems did not end, however, with his illness. On December 15, 1272, his sons agreed to give their mother 40 Bolognese lire per year as long as she chose to reside outside her house. The cause of the separation is unknown, but it may have been exacerbated by the fact that her own family were Guelfs (the papal party), while her husband's family sided with the Ghibellines (the imperial party). Guinizello probably died around 1275. The list of men banished in 1274, revised in the following year, contains the names of Guido and Giacomo twice with the designation “fratres et filii d. Guinizelli Magnani” (brothers and sons of Guinizello di Magnano). But Giacomo and Uberto appear elsewhere in the same lists as the sons of “quondam D. Guinizelli Magnani” (the late Guinizello di Magnano). Guinizello and Guglielmina were buried in the church of San Colombano, where their daughter Vermiglia also chose to have her tomb built.

The key dates of Guido Guinizelli's life, like the identity of his family, have to be inferred from scattered notices. Orioli places his birth before 1240. The date is a terminus ante quem because in the mid-1260s Guinizelli was acting as a jurisconsult (a consulting lawyer), a position that normally required him to be thirty-five years old. The year of his birth is usually thought to be 1230, though this date would make him a contemporary and not a junior of the poet Guittone d'Arezzo, whom he addresses as his dear father, “O caro padre meo” (Poem 20a). In 1270 Guinizelli bought and took possession of a house in the parish of San Benedetto di Portanuova from Ubaldo Frenarii for 400 lire. He married Beatrice della Fratta in 1272 and had a son, Guiduccio, the following year. A transaction recorded in 1287 notes that Guiduccio was then fourteen years old. The decisive event of Guinizelli's life occurred in 1274, when he was banished with his brothers Giacomo and Uberto and with the Frenarii family as part of the defeated Lambertazzi party. He died sometime in 1276. On November 14, 1276, Beatrice “uxor quondam domini Guidonis domini Guinizeli Magnani” (the wife of the deceased Guido Guinizelli di Magnano) became the guardian of Guiduccio, and an inventory of Guinizelli's property was made. Two weeks later, identified as Guinizelli's widow and the guardian of his son, Beatrice paid 150 lire to her mother-in-law and 50 lire on behalf of Uberto, the latter sum representing the dowry that the elder Guinizello had received for Guglielmina. On January 3, 1277, acting again as a widow and a guardian, she sold a small plot of land in Casalecchio di Reno to Guido Zalla.

Between the conjectural birthdate and the time of his exile, the civic records of Bologna sketch a portrait of Guido Guinizelli as a man with family business interests and a successful legal career. Early in 1266 his name appears as a witness on a contract for a loan of 100 lire. On February 12, 1267, he is a witness in his brother Giacomo's marriage contract to Giuliana, daughter of Guido di Guezzo della Bilina; later in the year he receives 200 lire in payment of her dowry. Guinizelli's name appears on a contract dated November 13, 1268, in which 43 cords of wood from property in Ceretolo were sold for 23 lire and 13 shillings. In August of the next year, he joined his brothers in selling two plots of land at Casalecchio to Salvetto Foscardi, whose loan he had witnessed in 1266. The three brothers agreed on May 14, 1270, to dismiss an action against Giovanni di Villanova for usury. Zaccagnini hypothesizes that there was a disagreement among the brothers in 1270 because of divergent interests, since four arbiters are named in that year. In February 1271, Guinizelli is mentioned again as a witness, and with the two brothers he agreed on January 27, 1272, to provide a dowry to Fulco Gattari on behalf of his sister Vermiglia. The dowry consisted of 100 lire in furnishings and 200 lire in cash. Two codicils to the agreement stipulate that Guido Guinizelli and the notary Palmirolo di Manegoldo will pay 66 lire, 13 shillings, and 4 pence per year to complete the dowry and that Guinizelli will indemnify Manegoldo for the obligation. In February of the same year, Guinizelli is recorded as receiving a sum of money. On November 14, 1273, he sold a Digest (“digestum vetus de littera nova”) with critical apparatus to Arardo Petrizoli for 65 lire. Throughout this period Guinizelli continued to own land in Ceretolo under his own name. On August 19, 1273, Giacomo sold a parcel which is described in the contract as lying next to his brother's property (“iuxta dominum Guidonem fratrem dicti venditoris”). Tax rolls from the early months of 1274 show that Guido and Uberto Guinizelli were assessed the value of one horse and Giacomo half a horse.

Guido Guinizelli's legal career extended from the mid-1260s to the time of his exile in 1274. In 1268 he rendered two decisions as a jurisconsult. In the first case, the warders who had been chosen to guard the Commune's prison apparently allowed four prisoners to escape custody. The warders themselves fled the city and were sentenced to banishment and a fine of 1,000 lire for their complicity in the escape. Two of the warders, Giacomino Dosi and Giovannino di Alessio, petitioned for a cancellation of the decree of exile. Guinizelli decided in favor of the petitioners when they were able to reach an accord with the men who had stood surety for them.

In the second case, a jeweler named Benvenuto Flamenghi, also called Manzolo, was accused of sexually assaulting Giacomina di Bartolomeo Bonfioli in his shop in November of the preceding year. The complaint alleges, “Manzolus duxit illam Jacobinam per vim intra stazonem suam ubi laborat et ipsam ibi tenuit per vim unam diem et per duas noctes et eam cognovit carnaliter pluries et pluries” (Manzolo led Giacomina by force into the place where he worked and held her there by force for a day and two nights and had intercourse with her repeatedly). Manzolo evidently fled when authorites came to take him into custody. He was fined 2,000 lire and banished from the city on November 23. On March 27, 1268, the banishment was cancelled on the petition of Manzolo's attorney and the advice of Guido Guinizelli, who noted that a reconciliation had been recorded between Manzolo, Giacomina, and her father Bartolo. The terms of reconciliation in such cases usually involved reparations to the family and marriage to the victim. The account of Guinizelli's decision names him as a judge (“dominus Guido domini Guinicelli iudex”). The title is repeated in an act of February 21, 1270, designating Amadeo Canevisio the guardian of Francesca Ventura with “d. Guido domini Guinilcelli iudex” standing as surety.

The fact of Guinizelli's exile is well documented, but the immediate circumstances remain somewhat obscure. In the list of exiles compiled by the municipal Office of Rebels and Exiles and in a list (probably from 1275) recopied into a Register for 1277, Uberto's name precedes Guido's and Giacomo's. Because of this sequence, scholars at one time speculated that Uberto was the prime reason for the brothers' banishment. These lists repeat some items, however, sometimes naming the same person twice in different capacities, and it seems likely that their apparently haphazard construction reflects an effort to make them comprehensive and not to distinguish degrees of punishment. Guido, Uberto, and Giacomo are on the municipal list for 1274 that begins, “In hoc libro continetur tuta progenies. / De capella Sancti Benedicti de Porta nova. / Sub titulo banitorum et rebellium pro parte Lambertaciorum” (In this book is contained the entire group from the parish of San Benedetto di Portanuova under the category of exiles and rebels of the Lambertazzi party). The poet's infant son, identified formally as “D. Guidutius filius Guidonis Guinizeli,” is also included among the exiles. Guiduccio is mentioned again in an addition made to the 1277 Register: “Guiducius filius domini Guidonis domini Guinicelli Magnani.” The practice of banishment included both minor children and children who might be born while the father was in exile. The victorious Geremei party seems, in general, to have been unusually fierce in pursuing its advantage over the defeated Lambertazzi. A popular account like the Serventese dei Lambertazzi e dei Geremei, which names “i Magnani” among the civil combatants, offers a compelling, if hyperbolic, image of the aftermath: “in Bologna lassòn niente / roba né avere, dinari né parenti” (They left nothing in Bologna, not a garment, possession, coin, or relative, 165-66).

The Guinizelli and Frenarii chose Monselice near Padua as their place of exile. Nothing is known of Guido Guinizelli's activities between his banishment and death two years later. Lists of exiles compiled in 1277 and 1281 give the names of his brothers Giacomo and Uberto, but Guido is not mentioned. His name does appear with Ubaldo Frenarii's on a list made in 1287 of the nobles and freemen who died while confined outside the territory of Bologna: “mortuus Guido d. Guiniçelli Magnani de milicia.” During Guinizelli's exile, his property was either not seized or was kept relatively intact and later returned to the family, since Beatrice could assume the duties of guardian for Guiduccio and a donation of Guido Guinizelli's books could be made to the Sisters of St. Agnes early in 1290. In 1281, Uberto returned to Bologna and later joined the order of the Frati Gaudenti (Jolly Friars). The Frenarii returned sometime before 1285. The poet's sisters survived him by a long while. Vermiglia is mentioned as the daughter of the late Gunizello Magnani and wife of Fulco Gattari in a will dated January 24, 1292; Bartolomea drew up wills on May 10, 1317 and December 1, 1329.

Although the details of Guinizelli's private and public life offer a context for his writing within an environment of law and letters, they provide no direct testimony about his poetic career or the literary setting of his work. Some indication of an artistic context comes, however, from Dante's comments in the De vulgari eloquentia. Praising the Bolognese vernacular for its capacity to incorporate smooth and rough sounds from the dialects of surrounding cities, Dante contrasts other kinds of municipal speech that have not been adequate in encouraging poets. Bologna, he says, deserves to be placed first among the vernacular dialects; but its position is not absolute, he cautions, since poets like Guinizelli, Guido Ghisilieri, Fabruzzo di Tommasino dei Lambertazzi, and Onesto degli Onesti have had to diverge from its dialect in order to achieve illustrious speech. These “doctores illustres et vulgarium discretione repleti” (illustrious experts, filled with discretion regarding the vernacular languages) appear in Dante's account as a poetic school (poëtantes Bononie) composed of near contemporaries. Guinizelli was, of course, related on his mother's side to Ghisilieri, whose canzone “Donna, lo fermo core” is the only known work by him. Fabruzzo has a canzone beginning “Lo meo lontano gire” that is mentioned twice by Dante (De vulgari eloquentia 1.15.16 and 2.12.6), but none of his work survives. Onesto exchanged sonnets with Cino da Pistoia and at one point reproves Cino's impatience and inconsistency about love. He comments to Cino, “né ciò mai vi mostrò Guido nè Dante” (neither Guido nor Dante ever showed you this [lack of control]). Onesto's remark is usually taken to refer to Guido Cavalcanti, but Sandro Orlando and Folena have recently argued that the reference may be to Guinizelli.

The literary scene in Bologna also included poets like Paolo Zuppo, Gherarduccio Garisendi, Pilizaro, Semprebene, and Bernardo who figured in various ways in debates over poetic styles and influences. One interesting source for gauging the literary tastes of the age is provided by a group of poems inserted by notaries to fill the spaces between entries in the Memoriali which recorded private contracts. Bologna provided the example of transcribing these agreements in public collections, but the records of other communes do not preserve poetry in the same way. Between 1287 and 1320 nearly 60 poems were copied in the registers, the date of transcription identifiable from the date of the legal contract. The poems appear without attribution, but the authors range from the older generation of Sicilian poets to Dante and the same poem could appear a number of times. Orlando (“Un piccolo canzoniere”) observes in Memoriale 74 for 1288 that the texts comprise a discrete collection within the larger framework of the registers. This collection begins with Giacomo da Lentini, moves through poems by Pilizaro and Bonagiunta of Lucca, and ends with Guinizelli's poem (Sonnet 19b) rebuffing Bonagiunta's attack on the Dolce Stil Nuovo. It thus presents in miniature the polemic between the Siculo-Tuscan schools and Guinizelli's extension of the lyric into new ranges of expression.

Bolognese literary life in the thirteenth century drew together a variety of sources. Carlo Calcaterra notes that popular poets, minstrels, and troubadours circulated in the same public environment as did university students, merchants, and officials. The writing of official high culture divided among poetic composition in Latin, prose composition such as the ars dictaminis (the art of letter writing), and the continuing use of Provençal as a medium for cultivated lyric expression. Moreover, Tuscan poets had a large and visible role in Bologna. In 1248 they formed the Società dei Toschi, which numbered the rhetorical theorist Boncompagno da Signa among its members. Guittone d'Arezzo was a frequent visitor, and the Florentine poet Monte Andrea resided in the city in the period immediately preceding Guinizelli's exile.

From the twelfth century onwards, Bologna docta (learned Bologna) enjoyed its greatest fame as a university renowned for its professional subjects, rhetoric, and especially the study of law. Following work begun earlier, Irnerius revived Roman civil law and wrote extensive commentaries, now lost. The Four Doctors (Bulgarus, Martinus, Hugo, and Jacobus) who were his legendary disciples continued this tradition of commentary and study, which served as a foundation for medieval judicial and political theory. Gratian's Decretum (1140) exercised a similar influence in canon law. The judicial revival and its tradition of textual commentary created an atmosphere that supported a poetry of distinctions and subtle arguments, of quaestiones like those that probe the intricacies of legal reasoning. In Guinizelli's own age, the speculations of Scholastic philosophy gained prominence, and they found a complementary energy in the teachings of the Franciscans. Bartholomew of Bologna, a master of theology at Paris who succeeded Matthew of Acquasparta in the theology school at Bologna, produced a work that has been adduced as one of the sources for the imagery of light and the Neoplatonic-Augustinian elements in Guinizelli and the Dolce Stil Nuovo. In its literary and intellectual resources, Bologna offered the appropriate climate for a poet to engage tradition and reconceive some of its characteristic forms of thought and expression.

ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT

Guinizelli's achievement lies in at least two dimensions—the intrinsic artistry of his poems and the impact of his innovations within a highly structured literary context. Guinizelli is first and foremost a poetic craftsman. He writes with an appreciation of the musical qualities and rhythmic cadences of verse. His imagery is both sensuous and abstract, and his themes offer a vehicle for theorizing and analysis in the love lyric. The styles range from the Sicilian-Provençal and Tuscan schools to popular tradition and the didactic “middle style” discussed in medieval literary and rhetorical theory. With a small but distinctive group of lyrics, Guinizelli inaugurates the Dolce Stil Nuovo. Maurice Valency credits him with beginning “the vogue of metaphysical verse.” Frederick Goldin finds his contribution in “the institution of a new lyrical rhetoric” (p. 283). A broader view of his achievement, however, would see Guinizelli as a transitional figure, an experimenter with tradition, styles, and themes. He is a poet of considerable technical skill in whom the conventions of lyric take on new accents and promise redirections that later writers will chart fully.

It is convenient to divide Guinizelli's poems into Sicilian, Guittonian, and stilnovist works; but even with such divisions the poetry presents a body of verse with its own characteristic subject matter, themes, and tones. Guinizelli is preeminently a love poet, and the experience of love is his topic in all but two of the canzoni and in Sonnets 6-8, 10-13, and 17. His thematic focus continues, moreover, into works aligned with other literary genres and forms of poetic discourse. He writes poems of a moral and didactic nature in Sonnets 15, 16, and 19b, in the fragmentary Canzone 21, and in the disputed Canzone 23 (see Editorial Policy for a discussion of authentic and disputed works in Guinizelli's canon). Sonnets 9 and 14 are poems of complaint closely related to love; the first is directed against his lady's apparent indifference to the poet, the second against the loss of love or perhaps in response to the wrenching experience of his exile. Sonnet 18, which calls down calamity on an old woman, is a spirited invective, unique among Guinizelli's extant poems for its seemingly free play. Sonnet 20a, the poem written to praise Guittone, shows Guinizelli's familiarity with the traditions of epideictic oratory, whose purposes are panegryic and eulogy. It purports to accompany a canzone sent as an offering and sign of respect to Guittone for his judgment and correction; that canzone is unidentified, but some critics speculate that it might have been Canzone 5, which adapts some of Guittone's mannerisms.

Guinizelli's signature piece is the canzone “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (No. 4), which Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde have read as “the great programmatic canzone” and “eloquent manifesto.” In it Guinizelli lends the Dolce Stil Nuovo two essential themes—the designation of the lady as an angel and the equation between love and the noble heart. The first theme transforms the identification that earlier poets had made by approximation and simile. The rhetorical exaggerations of their flattering compliments become an ethical and metaphysical fact. Unlike the midons of Provençal lyric and the donna of earlier Italian poetry whose existence is preeminently social, Guinizelli's angelic lady mediates between human experience and a higher, abstract truth. She is not a mere symbol but the embodiment of spiritual values that rise from the poet's own subjective response to approach the absolute objectivity of divine creation.

The first theme is intimately related to the second: to love the angelic lady means to have a noble heart. As Guinizelli explains in a passage echoed throughout the Dolce Stil Nuovo and beyond, Love and gentilezza come into being in the same instant. As a theory of value, which synthesizes ethics and metaphysics, this definition of nobility does not derive from lineage or social position but from the soul's innate resources and from its capacity to absorb the powers that the lady confers by analogy to stellar influences, spiritual grace, and finally divine will. Love offers the possibility of an attainment and completion that transcends personality and subjectivity by reaching a state of moral perfection. And to the extent that man is moved by love, he approaches a full realization of himself.

Implied in these two central themes and demonstrated overtly by Guinizelli in his sonnets and above all by Dante in the Vita Nuova is the project of praise. The poet's role is to extoll the lady's beauty and moral elevation both as celebration and as an act of understanding. One means for doing so is an elaborate structure of analogies that describe her attributes according to rhetorical principles of comparison and metalepsis, the transfer of qualities from one object to a second. Another technique is to develop a philosophical and analytical language within lyric poetry that combines several medieval styles of thought. The general basis is Aristotelian and Thomistic: love is a movement of the soul whose process and realization can be described by the notions of potency and act. In the supposed Averroism ascribed to Guido Cavalcanti, this process is susceptible to a minute, scientific description of its constituent parts and operation. Yet there are as well a Neoplatonic-Augustinian strain in Guinizelli and the Dolce Stil Nuovo and a tonal quality that suggests the perspectives of Franciscan spirituality. The lady who acts as a catalyst for love can be imaged in the aesthetics of light and illumination and seen as one of the angelic Intelligences who move the heavens in virtual obedience to the divine will. Yet as a creature of that will, she manifests a beauty whose enjoyment and celebration evoke at the same time praise of the Creator.

As a complement to these central themes, Guinizelli and the poets of the Dolce Stil Nuovo establish the primacy of a psychology of love. The perception of the lady as an angelic figure depends both on the objective fact of her status within a providential scheme and on the poet's sensory experience. Love begins as a desire emanating from sight and the inner contemplation of images; the senses and appetites impinge on the faculties of imagination, intellect, and memory. Thus the eyes, spirits, and heart enact a drama of apprehension that joins the sensitive soul to reason. But the subjective experience of love often takes an antithetical form. Though the soul aims to ascend, the immediate sensations can be turmoil and psychic disorder, expressed in military metaphors of battle and in the metaphor of death. Yet through this dialectic, as Favati argues, the Dolce Stil Nuovo succeeds by maintaining two focal points—one on the lady as the object of desire and reservoir of its powers, the other on the poet whose responses give a human resonance to abstraction.

The ideological framework of the Dolce Stil Nuovo reflects a cultural and historical context. Though the movement does not present a consistent philosophy so much as a framework for speculation, the borrowings from philosophical language and from analytical structures show its beginnings in the university environment of Bologna, where the study of rhetoric, law, and Thomistic theology enjoyed renown. The poems articulate the municipal values of the commune's life, and they record the pressures of a revived and fermenting spirituality. The soul elevated by love in them is individual, situated in history but liberated from historical determinism. Erich Auerbach emphasizes that Guinizelli and the other poets change the social basis of poetry from a feudal court with fixed, inherited values to an imaginary country; the community that joins them is a community of the noble heart and an aristocracy of the spirit. Along the same lines, Carlo Salinari observes that the Dolce Stil Nuovo substitutes for the Provençal court an ideal court, “a cenacle of noble hearts, the limited and refined circle of the initiates to the secrets of love” (La poesia lirica del Duecento, p. 29).

Guinizelli stands at the head of a school of poets who redefine the rhetoric and thematic emphases in the medieval Italian lyric, at the same time that they affirm traditional aesthetic features such as the musicality of their verse. The polemics indicate that the poets are highly self-conscious in their divergence from earlier Italian writers, but their claims for novelty are scarcely new in themselves or in the context of medieval vernacular poetry. Near the middle of the thirteenth century, for instance, long after the classic age of the Provençal lyric, Guilhem de Montanhagol claims to institute a “noel dig de nova maestria” (new speech for a new art). The materials of the Dolce Stil Nuovo likewise do not present a radical originality so much as a translation—that is, an aesthetic re-creation and extension of other works. Many of the sources already lie within established traditions. The novelty and aesthetic achievement have to do with giving received materials a new shape and discovering possibilities of expression that had heretofore remained latent. What emerges is a new poetic construction in which a conventional language and a known repertoire of themes and motifs operate in a different perspective. Commenting on Guinizelli's achievement within the context of the Dolce Stil Nuovo, Italo Bertelli (La poesia di Guido Guinizzelli e la poetica del “Dolce Stil Nuovo”) asserts that the seemingly conventional terms used to express the theory of gentilezza, for example, operate within a linguistic system whose semantic structure lends new meaning to the terms, often a spiritual meaning. It might be excessive, then, to describe this structure as a formal program or ideology, but it would be as much a distortion to reduce the poems to their linguistic sources or thematic precedents.

It is interesting to note that the contemporary polemic that helps to define Guinizelli's historical position also incorporates the earliest aesthetic judgments of his work. Contemporaries like Guittone and Bonagiunta read his poems for sharp differences from earlier writing in Italian, yet their comments point indirectly to some of the intrinsic qualities that make up Guinizelli's verse—its strategies of metaphor and metalepsis, its concern with praise, and the calculated estrangement of the style. In the sonnet that answers Guinizelli's praise of him (20b), Guittone is vague and noncommital about Guinizelli's poetic technique. He speaks more directly to Guinizelli's practice in another sonnet whose theme again is correction and whose stylistic references may be to Guinizelli's Sonnets 7 and 10:

S'eo tale fosse ch'io potesse stare,
senza riprender me, riprenditore,
credo farebbi alcun om amendare
certo, al mio parer, d'un laido errore:
che, quando vuol la sua donna laudare,
le dice ched è bella come fiore,
e ch'è gemma over di stella pare,
e che 'n viso di grana ave colore.
Or tal è pregio per donna avanzare
ched a ragione maggio è d'ogni cosa
che l'omo pote vedere o toccare?
Ché Natura né far pote né osa
fattura alcuna né maggior né pare,
for che d'alquanto l'om maggior si cosa.
If I were the kind of man who could reproach
Others without reproaching myself,
I surely think I'd make a man correct
What seems to me a grievous error:
When he wants to praise his lady,
He says she is beautiful like a flower
And is the equal of a gem or star
And has the shade of crimson in her face.
Now is the value of praising a lady
Made so much greater by reasoning
Than anything a man could see or touch?
For Nature neither could nor would dare make
Any creature greater or equal
Unless a man might call it a slight bit greater.

Guittone's sonnet provides an analysis of Guinizelli's poetics in the very process of correcting its supposed abuse of metaphor and comparison. Conceding (albeit with rhetorical modesty) that his view may be only personal (“al mio parer”), Guittone recognizes the importance of praise within Guinizelli's intentions, and he identifies the central aesthetic problem in Guinizelli of defining a proper framework for the expression of praise. He properly intuits that praise and comparison lead inexorably back to the poet, to his interiority and the role of perception in the psychological drama of love poetry. It is the poet's role and his sources of expression that Bonagiunta, too, will focus on in his sonnet to Guinizelli (Sonnet 19a), though with somewhat different emphases and a more strident tone. Bonagiunta charges that Guinizelli wants to surpass other poets, particularly Guittone, and that he tries to force song out of writing. Whatever their polemical purposes, though, these writers show a practical appreciation for the importance of the poet's defining consciousness and for the technical ambition of the verse. While rejecting Guinizelli's innovations in personality and style, Guittone and Bonagiunta remain surprisingly canny readers of the texts.

Among the disputants over the Dolce Stil Nuovo, Dante offers an even more specific analysis of Guinizelli's achievements in technique. He praises Canzone 1 as an example of what he calls the “gradum constructionis excellentissimum” (De vulgari eloquentia 2.6.6)—the highest level of linguistic construction, which embodies artificial order in grammar, the use of rhetorical figures, and an elevation of theme and moral sentence. His comments on the meters of Canzoni 4 and 26 (De vulgari eloquentia 2.5.4 and 2.12.4, respectively) record an appreciation for Guinizelli's skill in versification. Dante observes that in the first case Guinizelli adopts the “most splendid” (superbius) eleven-syllable line which affords the poem adequate duration and the necessary scope for richness in meaning, construction, and vocabulary. He notes, in the second case, that Guinizelli is among the relatively few poets who can begin a poem in the gravity of the tragic (high) style with a seven-syllable line.

Guinizelli's masterwork is, of course, the canzone “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (No. 4) and although it stands above Guinizelli's other verse in reputation and sustained achievement, it can serve as a mark against which to measure the other poems. As a stylist, Guinizelli exhibits a remarkable mastery of aural effects, construction, and language in the poem. His control over poetic effects appears in carefully modulated rhythms and the musicality of lines like those which God directs to the poet: “Lo ciel passasti e 'nfin a Me venisti / e desti in vano amor Me per semblanti” (4.53-54). The argument of his canzone proceeds as an extended series of comparisons, each working toward defining the nature of love and the relation of love to true nobility. Within the logic of analogy, the poet constructs lines of argument in which linguistic and rhetorical order duplicate the conceptual order of his theme. His contention from the outset is that love and the gentle heart are coextensive. Neither precedes the other; rather, both exist simultaneously as attributes of a natural and providential scheme. To express these propositions in a linguistic construction, Guinizelli turns to the devices of syntactical parallelism, antithesis, and hyperbaton. He denies the possibility that love or the gentle heart might precede the other, and he does so by using the figure of hyperbaton to defer the grammatical subject (natura) that governs the two parallel but contrasting clauses: “né fe' amor anti che gentil core, / né gentil core anti ch'amor, natura” (Nature did not make love before the noble heart, / Nor the noble heart before love). By not re-creating at a syntactic or linguistic level the problem of sequence that he wants to reject conceptually, Guinizelli demonstrates his subtle understanding of the theme. His deferral of the grammatical subject reinforces his argument that neither love nor the gentle heart has priority over the other, and he leaves the two parts of the equation balanced and counterposed in the rhetorical figure of chiasmus (love-heart-heart-love).

Guinizelli's artistry in this canzone depends on his skill in integrating different registers of language by synthesizing forms of speech that might seem widely disparate. From Scholastic philosophy, he borrows the terms used to describe the relation of potency to act. Love's manifestation in the gentle heart can be understood, for example, by analogy to the power (vertute) thought to be latent in a precious stone: the stone is purified by the sun and made ready to receive the power (valor) that emanates from the proper star which governs it. The emphasis later in the poem on the lover's realizing (compimento) the potential of his love by obeying his lady carries out a similar equation again in the terms of the schoolmen. From medieval science, Guinizelli derives the attributes of elements like fire and water and of natural objects like the stone and diamond. From the language of Christianized Neoplatonism, he takes the idea of angelic Intelligences contemplating divine perfection and the characteristic imagery of light that communicates divine will and the creature's obedience. From liturgy, he borrows the metaphors of a heavenly queen and kingdom and the belief that spiritual love is expressed as praise (laude). Further, he creates a structure wherein these borrowings echo against one another: concrete particulars like heart, stone, and fire correspond to such universals as power, force, and nature.

These appropriations point up in turn what may be Guinizelli's greatest strengths as a poet—his abilities with abstraction and imagery and his skill in bringing the two into a creative tension. Guinizelli incorporates the language of act and potency or celestial Intelligences not as a rhetorical ornament but as an essential part of the work. A phrase like prava natura (a base nature) becomes something other than a bloodless generalization; it is the contrary of the noble heart where love resides. The talento (desire) which leads the lover to wish to obey his lady in imitation of the angelic Intelligences who intuit the will of their Creator is an inclination that joins man's appetitive and rational souls. Guinizelli's abstractions reach their culmination in a phrase like calore in clarità di foco, where the properties of fire are so palpable that they seem to be physical elements rather than qualities. More frequently, however, Guinizelli balances abstractions with concrete images. Water, sky, and stones are the particulars that allow him to define the motion of love. Love inhabits the gentle heart like a bird in the woodland (1) and remains there like fire on the tip of a torch (22).

The aesthetic qualities that Guinizelli demonstrates in his so-called doctrinal canzone are apparent elsewhere in his poetry, and they give evidence for the highly structured organization of his work. The musicality can be seen in stilnovist poems like Sonnets 6 and 7 and in less stylistically identifiable poems like the love complaint: “Dolente, lasso, già non m'asecuro, / ché tu m'assali, Amore, e mi combatti” (8.1-2). The fragmentary Canzone 21 seems to refer directly to the effects of such verbal artistry in speaking of “the sweet song that pierces to the heart.” Guinizelli's control over a complex poetic structure shows in other works that have been taken to represent the influence of earlier poetic styles. Canzone 1, which bears resemblances with the didactic style of the Guittonian school, begins with a general sententia about moral conduct and moves quickly to a comparison between the surrender of human will and the feeble resistance of the poet's eyes and then to similes of lordship, political domination, and power which explain the lady's control over his other faculties.

          Tegno di folle 'mpres', a lo ver dire,
chi s'abandona inver' troppo possente,
          sì como gli occhi miei che fér' esmire
incontr' a quelli de la più avenente,
          che sol per lor èn vinti
senza ch'altre bellezze li dian forza. …
I think a man foolish, to tell the truth,
Who yields himself to some great force,
Just like my eyes, which were reflected
In those of a most charming lady
And are conquered by hers alone
Without her other charms lending them strength.

The poem operates from within this expanding framework of analogies, delaying praise of the lady by concentrating on her effects before describing her directly in later stanzas. The deferral allows Guinizelli to build a dramatic sense within the lyric so that the poem becomes a representation not only of the beloved but also of the poet's struggle to understand the interconnecting orders (moral, political, natural, and social) that exemplify her power (valore) to transform what surrounds her. Indeed, in the psychological nuancing that follows from these discriminations, Mario Marti finds the very roots of Guinizelli's experimentalism, which aims to bring a fresh sensibility to traditional materials.

In Canzone 2, Guinizelli displays a similar mastery in composition by elaborating some of the characteristic themes of the Sicilian school in a single, sustained utterance that comprises the entire first stanza of the poem. His technical virtuosity consists in balancing enjambment and end-stop lines and in modifying the usual break between the frons and sirma of the canzone stanza:

          che d'ogni parte m'aduce conforto,
quando mi membra di voi la 'ntendanza
a farmi di valore
          a ciò che la natura mia me mina—
Since it brings me comfort from every place
When I think about my desire for you,
To make myself worthy of being
What my own nature draws me toward. …

The linkage between the compositional units here contrasts with later stanzas of the poem that maintain the divisions between the two parts. Guinizelli has written something of a seamless overture whose themes later stanzas will develop with analytical precision. Antonio Quaglio observes a comparable pattern in Canzone 5, where there is a remarkable density of explanatory, causal, consecutive, and declarative links. In Sonnet 12, the same ability to sustain elaborate development appears on a smaller scale, as the poet opens by addressing his lady “Gentil donzella” and amplifying the terms of her praise: “di pregio nomata, / degna di laude e di tutto onore” (renowned for your worth, / Worthy of praises and every honor); he continues in this vein and completes his thought only at the beginning of the second quatrain, where the sentence actually begins: “pare che 'n voi dimori onne fiata / la deïtà de l'alto deo d'amore” (The divinity of the high god of love / Seems to reside in you ceaselessly). Thus the two quatrains of the sonnet's octave are joined in a rich and complex construction whose devices of amplification create an effect of stylistic elevation. In Sonnet 13, Guinizelli uses the devices to a different effect, multiplying examples of a world upside down (the rhetorical figure is adynaton) to suggest the impossible changes that would have to happen before Love would allow him to lose his feelings for his lady.

Guinizelli is notably sensitive to the particular registers of speech that make up human discourse, and this sensitivity informs his selection of certain vocabularies. The reward a lover expects from service to his lady can be seen alternatively as a gift (guigliardone and guiderdone, 3.39, 11.12, 16.14) or the economic return on an investment, hence financial gain or interest (acquistato 2.90, 3.60). Political and military metaphors express the power that the lady enjoys over the poet in Poems 1, 6, and 8; and the heart's battle becomes an internal struggle of sighs in Sonnet 9. Guinizelli invokes the rich associations of theology to address the lady as “incarnato amore” (Love made flesh, 3.6), and ask for the pity that should be shown to martyrs (7.14). Describing her as eletta (1.30-31), he draws together the various senses of the term to suggest that the woman is remarkable, socially unique, and specially favored by divine grace. Guinizelli also echoes the diction of the Provençal poets in protesting that he resists the sottil voglia (2.25) that might lead him to complain that bitter Love has taken him over. With a linguistic virtuosity that reveals his ties to the earlier poets, he argues instead that his words show a “dismisura / d'ogni forfalsitade” (2.74-75)—the “overflow / Of every true feeling.” This he can articulate only by contrast, in the precious conceit of his words being signs of absence: the excess of being without falsity (for- meaning “the absence of”). In other instances, he plays on the multiple meanings of words—sole as noun (sun) and verb (is accustomed, 5.41-42) and gioia as both “joy” and “jewel.”

Guinizelli's capacity to absorb language goes beyond the incorporation of vocabulary to encompass larger adaptations of style. With the synthesis of philosophical and scientific language in Canzone 4, one might compare the use of a Scholastic, argumentative style in Canzone 23, a work whose attribution to Guinizelli has been challenged, but which echoes terms that he uses in authentic works. Just as Guinizelli expresses the simultaneous existence of love and the gentle heart in Canzone 4 by antithesis and hyperbaton, so in the other poem he adapts the syllogistic construction of a Scholastic quaestio to debate whether true nobility derives from nature or nurture:

          In quanto la natura
e 'l fino insegnamento
han movimento—de lo senno intero,
          und'ha più dirittura
lo gran cognoscimento,
da nodrimento—o da natura, quero.
Given that nature
And refined learning
Are the source of inner knowledge,
I ask where knowledge itself
Has its origin—
From nurture or from nature?

In Canzone 24, Guinizelli returns to this closely reasoned and speculative style, pondering the nature, source, and action of Love: “Amor che cosa sia, / e d'onde e come prende movimento” (What kind of thing Love might be / And how it originates and takes motion). His conclusion—that love reaches fulfillment in the internal senses (“che per tre cose sente compimento”)—follows so closely from the style of the questioning that he does not need to bother identifying the senses as the conventional triad of imagination, intellect, and memory.

The skill with abstraction that raises Canzone 4 to an anthem for the Dolce Stil Nuovo can be seen as well in other poems. Love is by turns a physical force, psychological condition, and an allegorical figure. Sonnet 11 uses Hope as a personification to assure the poet that his service to the lady will be rewarded. The continual insistence in the canzoni and sonnets on the lady's power and worth (forza, valore, vertute) carries the poems past specific experiences and personal history to a realm of psychological and moral paradigms. As in Canzone 4, though, Guinizelli's most effective technique of abstraction involves comparison. In both the social and natural worlds, his lady shines like the sun (“come lo sol di giorno dà splendore,” 1.37), and when she appears at night, her splendor makes the day envious by giving darkness equal radiance.

When Guinizelli announces in Canzone 2 that he derives his own valore and vertute from the lady, his theme steadily gains precision as he first draws an analogy to the inclination of creatures to return to their origins and then goes on to make a comparison to the power of magnetism and the movement of a compass needle. Love's power to bring on death—which James E. Shaw defines in Cavalcanti's verse not as physical extinction but as a helpless state of body and mind, “a total disorganization of the normal life, a living death”—is made concrete for Guinizelli in Canzone 3 by the example of lightning born from clashing winds and igniting whatever it hits. In Sonnets 10 and 19b, Guinizelli reveals alternate ways of connecting abstract values to their symbolic counterparts. In the first poem, the lady's capacity to vanquish pride and inspire moral reform comes as the culmination of his likening her to flowers, stars, and precious jewels, and her “maggior vertute” (greater power) is that no man could think evil after seeing her. In the second poem, where Guinizelli responds to Bonagiunta's reproach by adopting the diction and elevated tone of Guittonian verse, his admonition that a wise man keeps quiet until he is sure of the truth finds confirmation in birds flying through the air “né tutti d'un volar né d'un ardire” (Not all of one flight nor all of a single intent).

Guinizelli's imagery frequently achieves the vivid effects of a highly self-conscious art, and critics since Vittorio Rossi have accurately characterized Guinizelli as a “visual” poet. Like other medieval love poets, he describes love and his beloved within an aesthetics of light. Love's embodiment is like the splendore (4.6) of sunlight shining forth, and the lady correspondingly makes her appearance as a bright morning star (7.1) and as light whose rays (splendore 8.9) pierce the eyes and wound the heart. Love's violent power is imaged in a thunderbolt striking through a tower window and shattering everything within (6.9-11) or hitting against a wall as wind batters the trees (8.5). The poet's heart is like a bird struck by an arrow (8.14), and the subjugation of his will compares with the futile struggle of a bird caught in a snare (16.7-8). His thwarted desire is likened to fire extinguishing itself in tears and sorrow (3.36), and his emotions shift from ice to fire: “di ghiaccio in foco e d'ardente geloso” (From ice to fire and from burning to envy, 9.6).

Guinizelli draws on other natural images to describe the reality of subjective experience. Overcome by the sight of Lucia, his heart falls lower than the head struck off a snake (17.7). Facing separation, whether from his beloved or his homeland, he sees himself as a torn leaf, dry bark, or a root pulled from the earth (14.5-9). The attributes of his lady can be defined from the powers of the salamander and panther in Canzone 5. What may be his most compelling and best managed image occurs at the end of Sonnet 6, which describes Love's assault on his senses through the lady's gentle greeting and tender look. Love splits his heart and penetrates to its center, destroying its contents and leaving the poet a lifeless, still outline of himself: “Remagno come statüa d'ottono / ove vita né spirto non ricorre, / se non che la figura d'omo rende” (I stand quietly like a brass statue / With no life or spirit flowing / Filling out the bare shape of a man). The hollow statue is the final product of the destruction that originates with seeming irony in the subdued and refined actions of the lady, and Guinizelli builds the images toward this culmination with an uncharacteristic consistency. More often he uses images not according to a sense of organic unity but for their power to express moments of perception within a shifting field of experience. He moves discretely from one to the next with an intuitive grasp of symbolic forms, but he cares little to assure that the images of a poem are all of a single piece. The energy of his poetry lies in these contrasts and juxtapositions and in the acts of perception they dramatize.

SOURCES AND INFLUENCES

From the standpoint of craft, Guinizelli owes a large and enduring debt to earlier lyric poets. His canzoni and sonnets conform to the traditional metrical and rhyme schemes of the Sicilian-Provençal tradition. The lines are regularly seven or eleven syllables, and the rhyme schemes reflect a conservative approach to verse techniques, with comparatively little enjambment or disruption of lines and stanzas. Even the most technically complex and manneristic poem, Canzone 5, finds authority in the practice of trobar clus and precedent for its scheme of internal rhymes in poets like Giacomo da Lentini, Guido delle Colonne, and Rinaldo d'Aquino. The sonnets are similarly conservative in regularly preserving a scheme of alternate rhymes abab, abab) in the octave, whereas the poems of other stilnovists generally show a preference for interlaced rhymes (abab, abab). In the canzoni and sonnets, Guinizelli makes use of coblas capfinidas, the linking of stanzas by the repetition and iteration of key words. He draws freely on the rhetorical strategies and devices taught in the school trivium to organize, adorn, and amplify poetic discourse. On a larger aesthetic plane, he employs a technique of semantic linkage by which the terms associated with a central theme recur throughout stanzas, the parts serving to recall the whole. His particular debt to an earlier generation of Italian writers can be seen in the relatively free use of Sicilian rhyme, which permits the substitution of i/e and o/u—for example, servire-vedere (1.41, 43), m'ancide-merzede (6.2, 4), and tuzzo-mozzo (17.5, 7).

The language of his poems connects Guinizelli to the conventions of Romance lyric. At issue, however, is not the poet's dialect but the relation of his poetic language to other writing. Dante remarks (De vulgari eloquentia 1.15.6) on the “admirable sweetness” and primacy of the Bolognese dialect in comparison to the other municipal vernaculars, but he specifically refrains from calling it “curial” or “illustrious,” since it cannot sustain poets like Guinizelli, who must depart from their own vernaculars. As preserved in the textual tradition, Guinizelli's poems incorporate few specifically Bolognese traits: ausello (4.2) and ausel' (19b.9) and the rhyme of meglio with giglio, somiglio, and vermiglio in Sonnet 10. The manuscripts more frequently record settentrional traits: nascute (2.42), vène (2.43), volgiando (4.44), the truncated form vogl' (3.44 and 10.1; cf. Lombard foc', 5.38), sïando (4.52), parlente (13.5), cò (17.2), and perzò (19b.14). There is a small group of meridional forms such as vo (2.1), saccio (2.67), sacciate (3.7), and saccenza (5.57). Sicilianisms appear throughout the canzoni as a reflection of both poetic dependence and scribal tradition. Several of the abstract nouns that describe the poet's exalted lady in the middle stanza of Canzone 1 (adornezze, gentilezze, bellezze) end in a form (-ezze) that can be read as either a plural or a Sicilian singular. Canzoni 2 and 3 incorporate a number of other Sicilianisms: mina (2.7), miso (2.20, 3.24, 5.15), priso (2.26, 16.5), plui (2.43; possibly a Latinism), entisa (2.64), ca (3.10 for consecutive che), immantenenti (3.30), and loco (3.31 as adverb of place).

By far the greatest sources for Guinizelli's lexical borrowings are the languages that already enjoyed literary prestige. At various points, Guinizelli turns to Latin as either a direct or etymological source: plagato (1.14), plu (1.22), laudare (2.28, 9.1), propinque (2.40), audivi (3.25), fraude (4.57), s'ole (5.46), angostioso (14.1), grada (19b.2), laude (20a.1), aude (20a.3), claude (20a.5), gaude (20a.7), and quero (23.6). His awareness of such borrowing plays an important role in the sonnet addressed to Guittone (20a), where the Latinisms complement the aureate style and the effort to achieve a tone of elevation appropriate to the task of praise. The borrowings from French and Provençal, by contrast, are more widespread, and it is not always easy to distinguish one source from another. Certain phrases (di folle 'mpresa, 1.1; amore amaro, 2.26; fu ancora nata, 12.3) are characteristic of both literatures by Guinizelli's age, and a French from like visaggio (17.10) already had currency in Sicilian and Tuscan lyrics. Nonetheless, the reliance on words and phrases from these other parts of the “illustrious vernacular” continues across the full scope of Guinizelli's canon. The Gallicisms divide evenly between the canzoni and sonnets: fér' esmire (1.3), anzi (2.12), rempaira (4.1), asletto (4.19), tutto 'l giorno (4.33), coraggio (4.36), lungia stagione (5.26), biltate (7.8), giano (10.6), Franza (11.13), lumera (12.9), riviera (13.4), pecora (15.14), sturbignon (18.2), ci ha (25.26). The borrowings from Provençal, though still more extensive, tend to concentrate somewhat in poems that adopt the style of the Sicilian and Tuscan Schools: rivera (1.33, 10.5), sclarisce (1.37), clarore (1.39), fino amor (2.1), blasmo (2.30), ni (2.61), aigua (4.26), semblo (4.33), al primero (4.45), regn(a) (5.31), consideranza (5.56), contrarioso (11.2), bellore (12.8), disconfortanza (14.10), allegranza (14.11), disperanza (14.13), coralmente (17.4), sovralarchi (20a.8), fino insegnamento (23.2), al meo parvente (24.36), servire a grato (24.41), assembra (25.33).

The importance of Guinizelli's linguistic debt and its characteristic patterns is two-fold. The borrowings enrich his language, and at the same time they signal the relation of his work to a lyric tradition that he both participates in and helps to redefine. Terms like gioiosa (1.49) and adastare (9.3) echo the vocabulary of the Sicilian and Tuscan schools, while gradire (3.43) bridges the distance between the Sicilians and the Dolce Stil Nuovo. Beyond the lexical choices, in his construction of terms and phrases, Guinizelli again devotes attention to Guittone as the paternal figure who must be acknowledged and superseded if his own style and cultural project are to be realized. These reminiscences, which are tributes of both language and technique, appear in the Guittonian prefix of forfalsitate (2.75) and in the etymological figures used so often by Guittone such as fior fiorisce (12.13) and the play on Gaudenti, gaude, and gaudii in Sonnet 20a.

The themes and motifs that lend a conceptual unity to Guinizelli's poems have their sources most often in the vernacular tradition. Like Dante in the De vulgari eloquentia, Guinizelli is drawn to the later Provençal poets and to figures in the Sicilian school, particularly Giacomo da Lentini and Guido delle Colonne. The project of offering praise for the lady, which Guinizelli announces in Sonnet 10 and carries out in so many other poems, is the thematic center of the troubadour canso, and a poet like Peire Vidal speaks for the entire tradition when he says (37.31-32), “Qu'ieu farai sai mos vers e mas chansos / Per la gensor qu'anc fos d'amor enquisa” (I will make my verses and my songs here for the most noble woman who was ever asked to love).

The superiority of the lady, stated absolutely by Peire in this passage, finds a narrower and more focused expression in Guinizelli's poems in the lady's dominance of the poet and her surpassing other women in beauty and worth. Canzone 1, for instance, phrases her dominance in political metaphors, and Canzone 5 portrays her pride and disdain in the poet's suffering and pain. Her preeminence over other women, which Guinizelli also elaborates in Canzone 1, is an argument already developed by Bernart de Ventadorn, who claims (14.34-35), “midons, que totas las vens, / es la melher qued el mon sei!” (my lady, who surpasses them all, is the best that is in the world!) and again by Peire (8.31-33): “Que bel' es sobre las gensors / Plus que roza sobr' autras flors” (in beauty she stands above the most noble women, like the rose over other flowers). In the Sicilian School, the theme appears repeatedly in Giacomo da Lentini, Rinaldo d'Aquino, and Giacomino Pugliese.

The pain and anxiety that the poet experiences in his love are commonplaces of the Provençal and Sicilian traditions. Guinizelli's formulation of that pain in complaining that love assaults him (6.3) echoes earlier treatments by Bernart and Giacomo da Lentini, and his description of a living death (nascosa morte) shares affinities with Guilhem de Montanhagol and Sordello. In less extreme terms, Guinizelli describes the frustration of love by the motif of painting. His likening his service to sketching a lady in colors that suit her badly (5.18-21) recalls two poems by Giacomo. The impossible and insubstantial task of painting the air (3.48-49) connects Guinizelli to Bonagiunta (6.29-31) and Chiaro Davanzati (Canzone 24.1-6).

A network of images supports the treatment of the principal themes in Guinizelli's poems. Some of the more prominent images suggest a conscious borrowing from predecessors. Describing the intense feelings of a compulsive love that strengthens itself daily, Guinizelli uses the image of a ship tossed by storms at sea in Canzone 3. These separate elements—ship, storm, and sea—lead back to Bernart and other writers. Guinizelli's resolve to love his lady parallels Bernart's “bon' esperansa” (4.37), and his inner turmoil re-creates Bernart's acute sense of peril: “Mas petit m'aonda, / c'atressidm ten en balansa / com la naus en l'onda” (But that is of little help to me, for she thus holds me in the balance like a ship on a wave). Guilhem Ademar (10.27-28) describes himself in terms strikingly like Guinizelli's: “que cum la naus que mena lo tempiers, / Que sobredl mar sofre pen'e tormen” (I am like a ship following a storm, that suffers pain and torment on the sea). Giacomo da Lentini treats the elements of the image in an extended simile (1.49-54):

Lo vostro amor, che m'ave
in mare tempestoso,
è sì como la nave
c'a la fortuna getta ogni pesanti
e campane per getto
di loco perigloso.
Your love, which casts me
Into a stormy sea,
Is just like a ship which throws
All its heavy weights to fortune
And saves itself from a dangerous place
By jettisoning its ballast.

Along the same lines, Guido delle Colonne speaks of desire's throwing him into a storm (3.45), and Ruggerone da Palermo commends to lovers the figure of a sailor who suffers bad weather without abandoning himself and finally reaches port. The image thus serves the dual function of representing psychological experience and locating the poem within a lyric tradition.

Many of Guinizelli's images evoke natural elements—sun, water, fire, flowers, and the countryside. But the phrasing given the images often reveals as well a reminiscence of their literary sources. When Guinizelli asserts the superiority of his lady to all others and claims, “ed infra l'altre par lucente sole / e falle disparer a tutte prove” (And among others she seems a burning sun that makes all of them vanish with every test, 1.23-24), he harkens back to similar lines in Giacomo da Lentini (30.5-8):

Più luce sua beltate e dà sprendore
che non fa 'l sole, nè null'autra cosa;
de tutte l'autre ell'è sovran'e frore,
che nulla aparegiare a lei non osa.
Her beauty gives more light and brightness
Than the sun or any other thing;
She is sovereign, the flower over all others,
And none dares compete with her.

In fashioning his lady “la lucente stella diana / ch'apare anzi che 'l giorno rend' albore” (the bright morning star that appears before daylight, 7.1-2), Guinizelli combines the “stella splendida et matutina” of the Apocalypse (22:16) with the diction used by the Sicilian poets to image the lady as the dawn star. Giacomino Pugliese addresses his lady as “Isplendïente / stella d'albore” (7.1-2), while Pier della Vigne speaks of “la sublimata stella de l'albore” (2.16). Giacomo da Lentini and Rinaldo d'Aquino come even closer to the phrasing of Guinizelli's poem. Giacomo's “sweet beginning” to one poem is “O stella rilucente / che levi la maitina” (12.6), and in a close echoing, Rinaldo directs his poem to “stella che levi la dia” (7.2).

An important part of the lyrical rhetoric that Guinizelli institutes features images drawn from medieval science. Guinizelli's innovation lies in using the discourse of contemporary empiricism to objectify inner reality and bring a sense of intellectual force to conventional themes, but the sources of the images can be found, too, in earlier writers. Guinizelli's borrowings, which cover the full range of his corpus, rely particularly on the Sicilian poets and the Latin and vernacular writers of the encyclopedic tradition. Love's capacity to animate the poet's heart is presented in Canzone 5 by the image of the salamander's living in fire, an image growing out of the scientific lore gathered in Brunetto Latini's Tresor and employed poetically by Giacomo da Lentini and others. In the same poem, the fabled sweet breath of the leopard, which was treated in the bestiaries and taken over by Guido delle Colonne and Inghilfredi, provides an image for the lure of desire. In Canzone 2, Guinizelli develops an elaborate conceit in which the lady's power operates like the force exercised by magnetism over a compass needle. Guido delle Colonne had earlier used these images to present his lady as an intermediary between him and the power of Love. Guinizelli's treatment goes, however, to the scientific tradition summarized in Latini and portrays the lady as a figure who inhabits a physical universe whose laws of attraction and influence are also signs of a moral order that she embodies. His appropriation of scientific imagery can be seen distinctly in the contrasting uses of the image of thunder. In Sonnets 6 and 8, thunder describes the effects of Love's assaults on the poet; but in Canzone 3, it is handled more subtly by incorporating Brunetto's explanation of clashing winds to describe the contrary wills of the poet and lady.

In Canzone 4, the sources of the key images derive from a scientific tradition that had been adapted by Guinizelli's predecessors to the dual aims of praise and complaint. Guido delle Colonne (3.1-19) uses the images of water and fire to describe the shifting effects of love and to characterize the lady as an intermediary who holds their powers in balance. Guinizelli conceives the contrast in even starker terms: “prava natura / recontra amor come fa l'aigua il foco / caldo, per la freddura” (a baser nature opposes love, just as water quenches burning fire with its coldness). The light imagery that recurs at physical and metaphysical levels in the poem is connected to Bartholomew of Bologna's treatise De luce as well as to the lyrics of the Sicilian poets. The petra prezïosa that serves as the symbol for Guinizelli's analysis of love and nobility in terms of act and potency is taken from the Lapidarium of Marbod of Rheims but recalls, too, Giacomo da Lentini's motifs in two sonnets (29 and 30). The poem's final scene in which the poet faces his heavenly judge and explains his misperceiving his lady as an angel (“She had the likeness of an angel from your kingdom”) adapts a motif used earlier by the Monk of Montaudon and an image widely attested by the troubadours and earlier Italian poets.

Guinizelli's essential themes argue that love can be equated with the noble heart and that nobility derives from character rather than lineage. The sources for the themes are both classical and courtly. Juvenal begins his Satire 8 by asking, “Stemmata quid faciunt?” (What are your lineages worth?), and he goes on to argue at length that whatever the distinction of one's ancestors, “nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus” (virtue is the one and only nobility). In his Epistle to Lucillus, Seneca makes the same point, as Dante observes in Convivio 4.12.8, and Cicero likewise argues for the inherent nature of nobility. In his Consolation of Philosophy, which served as the great intermediary between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Boethius addresses the question of nobility in the context of man's effort to find true happiness (3.6). Lady Philosophy explains to Boethius that if nobility has anything at all to do with transient fame, it is really a kind of praise meant for one's ancestors and so to gain praise for oneself requires the nobility to carry on the virtues of the ancestors. In the verse accompanying the prose, she argues that all men are descended from one heavenly father and hence all are of noble origin. No one is base, she concludes, unless he denies his origins and becomes a slave to vice.

In Andreas Capellanus's treatise on love, which was translated into Italian in the fourteenth century, the essential themes are given a programmatic form. Andreas defines love as an inner passion proceeding from sight and the excessive contemplation of the outward form of the other sex: “Amor est passion quaedam innata procedens ex visione et immoderata cogitatione formae alterius sexus” (De amore 1.1). Although he delineates background and social status throughout his work, Andreas treats the inclination to love as a general human characteristic, absent only in the blind, elderly, and self-indulgent. His discussion of the ways of acquiring love lists beauty, behavior, speech, riches, and concession (1.6) as the principal devices of attraction. Andreas makes it clear that behavior is the most important of these considerations: “morum atque probitas sola est, quae vera facit hominem nobilitate beati et rutilanti forma pollere” (only goodness of character makes a man rejoice in true nobility and shine forth). It is this quality, in turn, which allows Andreas to propose a theory of nobility independent of lineage: “Nam quum omnes homines uno sumus ab initio stipite derivati unamque secundum naturam originem traximus omnes, non forma, non corporis cultus, non etiam opulentia rerum, sed sola fuit morum probitas, quae primitus nobilitate distinxi homines ac generis induxit differentiam” (For we are all men descended in the beginning from one root and have derived one origin according to nature; not outward shape, not the adornment of the body, not the richness of things, but only the uprightness of character originally distinguished men with respect to nobility and established a difference in kind). Completing the terms of an equation between love and the noble heart that Guinizelli will make explicit, Andreas concludes that uprightness alone is the worthy crown of love: “Sola ergo probitas amoris est digna corona.”

D'Arco Silvio Avalle (“Due tesi di Andrea Capellano”) finds in these terms a fully developed syllogism whose construction allows for alternate yet reciprocal views of love. The essential formulation reflects the view that love is an innate human capacity: character defines nobility; nobility manifests itself in love; therefore, character is associated with love. Avalle points out, however, that Andreas suggests elsewhere that character (probitas) is influenced by love. With the minor premise reversed, the syllogism works back to the contrary assumption—namely, that nobility defines character. Consequently, Avalle understands Andreas to propose two complementary propositions, one egalitarian and emphasizing merit, the other aristocratic and stressing the determinism of lineage. There is, of course, a question of primacy implied in these formulations; and Andreas, following the classical writers, gives the general impression that nobility defined by lineage is a consequence of merit. But whether nobility by descent proceeds from earlier merit or vice versa, the issues and terms of debate were well delineated by the end of the twelfth century.

The ethical dimension of love that Andreas presents in the De amore appears in the later Provençal poets, whom scholars have taken to represent a line of development into the Dolce Stil Nuovo. Aimeric de Peguilhan, Guilhem de Montanhagol, Rigaut de Barbezieux, Peire Cardenal, and Lanfranc Cigala speak of love's power to convert evil men to good and to inspire still better works in good men. Guittone d'Arezzo (Canzone 46.49-50) returns to the question of defining nobility by merit or lineage, siding with the argument for innate character: “Non ver lignaggio fa sangue, ma core / ni vero pregio poder, ma vertute” (the heart, not blood makes true lineage and virtue, not power true worth). Chiaro Davanzati (Canzone 36.33-35) closely paraphrases the opening line of Guinizelli's poem: “Audit'aggio nomare / che 'n gentil core amore / fa suo porto” (I've heard it said that love resides in the noble heart). Monte Andrea, another poet of the Tuscan school, equates nobility and courtliness in a similar paraphrase: “ché 'n core gientile e cortese fa locore / sempre l'Amore” (Love always takes its place in the noble and courtly heart). But as Aurelio Roncaglia (“Precedenti e significato dello ‘Stil Novo’ dantesco”) points out, these sources differ from Guinizelli's formulation of love by treating the nobility of the soul as a consequence rather than a condition of love. The theorists and poets of love who precede Guinizelli envision a sequence in which the soul is made noble by love; Guinizelli goes beyond his sources in insisting on the coexistence of love and nobility.

Like his sources, Guinizelli's influence must be assessed in a critical and interpretive context. Guinizelli presides over a redefinition of Italian lyric poetry and particularly of its themes and rhetoric, but his position as a figure of literary history continues to be controversial. The existence of the Dolce Stil Nuovo as an organized group distinct from its predecessors and contemporaries has been a matter of serious debate, and the nature of Guinizelli's relation to any such group has been open to question. Guinizelli's poems offer images and turns of phrase that echo in Dante, Cavalcanti, and Petrarch; yet the references to these poems do not imply an unquestioning acceptance of Guinizelli so much as a creative response to themes, images, and the poetic conventions they represent. For later periods Guinizelli stands with other poets as a figure from an age of poetic beginnings that is constructed through differing historiographies.

According to one critical view of literary history, the Dolce Stil Nuovo can be regarded as a historical fiction projected retrospectively from Dante's works, notably the De vulgari eloquentia and the Purgatorio. Dante's works, it is argued, have imposed a program and vocabulary that separate a group of poets, mostly Florentines, writing between 1280 and 1310 from a larger and more important continuity that links the earlier Sicilian and Tuscan schools with their poetic successors up through Petrarch and Boccaccio. Such a view discounts, however, the equally compelling historical fact that Dante was not alone in sensing a break from the poets of Frederick II's court circle in Sicily and from Guittone and his Tuscan followers. If his writings institute a program and terminology, other poets of the age bring the aesthetic and historical conflict into a continually sharper focus through a polemic that lasts as long as the movement. Bonagiunta and Guittone write sonnets that reprove Guinizelli's innovations with varying degrees of severity; Lapo degli Uberti attacks Cavalcanti's pasturella, while Cecco Angiolieri composes a parody of his style and “contradicts” Dante's final sonnet to Beatrice in the Vita Nuova. In Guinizelli's own city, his contemporary Onesto writes two Guittonian sonnets against the obscurity of Cino da Pistoia. Later, Cecco d'Ascoli rejects the concept of love articulated by Cavalcanti and Dante. To these attacks the stilnovists responded on their part with apologetics that range all the way from high-minded dismissal by Guinizelli and Cino to Cavalcanti's assertion (Sonnet 47) that Guittone's language is barbarous and his theory of love incapable of sustaining syllogism and rational argument.

Much as historians debate the existence of the Dolce Still Nuovo as a school, they differ, too, on whether Guinizelli is to be regarded as a founder or a precursor of the movement. One reason for their disagreement is the heterogeneity of Guinizelli's work, its inclusion of both conventional and distinctively innovative lyrics. Paradoxically, this uncertainty about Guinizelli's position as a mediator between the old and the new stems from the very point of its conferral in Purgatorio 26 where Dante encounters Guinizelli among the lustful, whose sexual appetites have carried them beyond natural constraints. In a scene with multiple levels of literary allusion and subtle yet revealing contradictions, Dante describes Guinizelli as “il padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai / rime d'amor usar dolce e leggiadre” (the father of me and of others my betters who ever used sweet and gracious rhymes of love, 26.97-99). Guinizelli asks why Dante holds him so dear, and Dante tells him that the reason is “Li dolce detti vostri, / che, quanto durerà l'uso moderno, / faranno cari ancora i loro incostri” (Your sweet verses, which so long as modern use shall last, will make dear their very ink, 112-14).

Dante's association of Guinizelli's poetry with the modern usage refers both to writing in the vernacular and to conscious stylistic innovations; and it is reinforced by an earlier scene in which Bonagiunta identifies Dante as the author of “le nove rime” (Purgatorio 24.50) and admits to the impediment (“il nodo”) that kept Giacomo da Lentini, Guittone d'Arezzo, and himself short of the “dolce stil novo” (57). Yet Dante's scene with Guinizelli complicates the issue of paternity as much as it may identify a line of descent. Guinizelli implicitly rejects the name of father by addressing Dante as his brother (“frate”), and he points to Arnaut Daniel as the “miglior fabbro del parlar materno” (the better craftsman of the mother tongue). His term of address here directly echoes Bonagiunta's in the earlier scene, and he further insists on portraying himself as a contemporary of Dante by distinguishing their shared esteem for Arnaut from the reputation accorded Guittone by “molti antichi” (124), presumably some earlier generation of writers distinct from their own.

Dante's treatment of Guinizelli elsewhere does little to clarify his view of Guinizelli's position with regard to the Dolce Stil Nuovo. In Purgatorio 11, the theme of literary succession had already been touched on by Oderisi, the great miniature painter who remarks on the transience of human powers. Using the rhetorical topic of translatio, the transference of learning and preeminence from one school to another, Oderisi observes that the glory of the Italian language has passed from Guinizelli to Cavalcanti (“Così ha tolto l'uno a l'altro Guido / la gloria de la lingua”) and may proceed onward to someone else—possibly Dante—who might in turn displace them both. While it traces a continuity, Oderisi's remark does not indicate how far Guinizelli may stand from the new school of poets. He mentions only Guinizelli's eclipse by Cavalcanti. That Dante nevertheless perceives some distance between Guinizelli and the later poets is implied earlier in the De vulgari eloquentia. He speaks at several points in the treatise about the artistry of “maximus Guido Guinizelli” (1.15.6), but he places Guinizelli in the Bolognese school of poets whose language will be contrasted with the primacy of Florentine speech.

Whatever the uncertainties of Dante's precise view of Guinizelli, there can be no doubt of influence. For Dante, Guinizelli represents an ideal of artistic composition, order, and proportion, and his poems are an aesthetic and intellectual presence in Dante's early work. The sharp distinction between love and a base nature, which Guinizelli images in fire and water, recurs in the Canzone “Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore” (Vita Nuova 19) in an imagined scene where Love drives ice into ignoble hearts, freezing and demolishing their thoughts. The identity of love and the gentle heart is the principal theme in a sonnet meant to explain love in Vita Nuova 20 (“Amore e 'l cor gentil sono una cosa”) which alleges its authority from Guinizelli's canzone and evokes the terms of the debate between Guinizelli and Bonagiunta: “come il saggio in suo dittare pone” (As the wise man proposes in his love poem). The prose accompanying the sonnet makes apparent Dante's close reading of his source because the commentary divides the octave and sestet into sections dealing respectively with the categories of potency and act. In the sonnet of the ensuing chapter, Dante repeats these terms and adds reminiscences of Guinizelli's other poems—the lady's eyes; her power to transform all who see her, to conquer vice, pride, and anger.

Guinizelli's vision of a woman adorned with abstract qualities (1.25-27) reappears at the opening of Dante's canzone in Vita Nuova 23: “Donna pietosa e di novella etate, adorna assai di gentilezze umane” (A compassionate lady of young age, richly adorned with human graces). Guinizelli's ambivalent conceit of beautiful eyes full of love penetrating to the heart (8.9-12) takes a benign form in the sonnet “Tanto gentile” (Vita Nuova 26): “dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core” (through her eyes she gives a sweetness to the heart). At a structural level, Dante amplifies Guinizelli's motifs of the lady's greeting and the poet's praise of her so that they become major elements of the Vita Nuova, defining the scope of the poet's enterprise. In the Convivio (4.20.7-8), when Dante resolves to put aside the polished style (“lo mio soave stile”) of these early love lyrics for something more rugged and complex (“rima aspr' e sottile”) in order to explain man's nobility, Guinizelli is the only modern poet directly cited among the Biblical figures, classical authors, and philosophical authorities. Here again Dante invokes the doctrinal canzone and particularly Guinizelli's example of the precious stone (4.12) made ready and purified by the sun to accept the powers that descend from the star.

In the Divine Comedy, Guinizelli's thematic influence takes the form of a contrast, and one can trace Dante's evolving understanding of love by measuring the distance from its early formulations. If the identity of love and the gentle heart proves adequate in the Vita Nuova, it serves in the Inferno to show the deficiency of temporal love. It is Francesca who recalls Guinizelli's canzone by way of excusing her love affair with Paolo and its tragic end as if they were effects determined by an overwhelming power for which she can decline responsibility (5.100): “Amor, ch'al cor gentil ratto s'apprende” (Love, which is quickly kindled in a gentle heart). Later, in Middle Purgatory, Dante returns again to Guinizelli's poem but with appropriately diminished echoes. Vergil's second discourse on love, dealing with its origin and nature, obliquely cites the Guinizelli line recalled by Francesca, in order to convey the spiritual motion of the soul's falling into desire (Purgatorio 18.28): “come 'l foco movesi in altura” (even as fire moves upwards). The message of Vergil's teaching, an implicit reproof of Francesca's pleading, is that free will operates in these movements and must attach itself to substantial forms rather than the projected images of an interior drama.

Elsewhere in the Divine Comedy, Guinizelli's influence shows in the similarities of images and phrasing. Guinizelli's image of lightning born from opposing winds (3.25-31) and pounding the walls and trees with heavy strokes (8.5-6) is woven into the description of the sound made by the angel who appears in Inferno 9 to drive off the Furies menacing Dante and Vergil and open the gates of Dis. The main source is Vergil's Aeneid (2.416-19), but the meteorological elements added to it suggest Guinizelli's poems:

non altrimenti fatto che d'un vento
          impetüoso per li avversi ardori,
          che fier la selva e sanz' alcun rattento
li rami schianta, abbatte e porta fori. …

a sound as of a wind, violent from conflicting heats, which strikes the forest and with unchecked course shatters the branches, beats them down and sweeps them away. …

The citation gains in resonance, moreover, because Dante has taken an image used in Guinizelli to define a deterministic and finally blunted sense of love and has associated it in his own poem with the heavenly messenger's assertion of divine will (9.94-95): “quella voglia / a cui non puote il fin mai esser mozzo” (that Will which can never be thwarted of its end). Dante's other echoes of Guinizelli's imagery seem to concentrate on poems outside the stilnovist group, and the influence may reflect a general debt to literary convention rather than specific reworkings of lines. Guinizelli's sententious sonnet “Pur a pensar mi par gran meraviglia” (No. 15) lends characteristic phrasing such as gente smarrita and images of change, vain desire, and brutishness. The sonnet praising Lucia (No. 17), which modern critics value for its freshness and the concreteness of imagery and references, incorporates phrases that Dante refashions into new contexts. Guinizelli's wish to ravish the girl against her will (“prender lei a forza, ultra su' grato”) reappears in the blasphemous Capaneus' description of Jupiter's striking him down (Inferno 14.59): “e me saetti con tutta sua forza.” The gesture in Guinizelli's poem that may have led Dante to place him among the lustful—“bagiarli la bocca e 'l bel visaggio”—is reenacted in Paolo's impassioned and nervous kiss of Francesca: “la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante” (Inferno 5.136). Lucia's fiery eyes (“due fiamme de foco”) are transferred to Charon, the wrathful boatman of Inferno 3.

Guinizelli's influence on Dante's “first friend,” Guido Cavalcanti, and stilnovist poets like Cino da Pistoia can be seen generally in the theme of praise, in the imagery of light and the eyes, and in the poet's absorption in his pain and suffering. Guinizelli's “fierce battle of sighs” (7.10) and his presentation of himself (14.1-2) as “pien di doglia / e di molti sospiri e di rancura” (full of pain, of many sighs and sorrows) recur in both poets. Cavalcanti complains of his lady (8.1) that she fills his mind with sorrow (“Tu m'ài sì piena di dolor la mente”) and “la dolente angoscia” (16.2), while Cino speaks of “la battaglia de' sospiri ch'io porto” (the battle of sighs that I bear, 102.15). Cavalcanti may parody Guinizelli's poem to Lucia in the sonnet “Guata, Manetto, quella scrignutuzza” (No. 51), but he follows out the rich thematic suggestions of Guinizelli's “Lo vostro bel saluto e 'l gentil sguardo” (Sonnet 6), as does Cino, who affirms (37.1), “Amore è uno spirito ch'ancide” (Love is a spirit that kills). Guinizelli's sonnet furnishes the images and motifs that support Cavalcanti's baroque psychological drama. The lady's murderous glance, which splits the poet's heart, likewise penetrates Cavalcanti (13.11), who dies (9.6) from a blow struck by love (“d'un colpo che li diede Amore”). Taking up Guinizelli's images in other poems, Cavalcanti continues the line of development in the original sonnet by having death appear before him (21.12) and rise on his face (32.14). Guinizelli's final, compelling vision of himself as a brass statue, emptied of life and spirit by Love's assault, inspires Cavalcanti's description of himself (8.9-11): “Io vo come colui ch'è fuor di vita, / che pare, a chi lo sguarda, como sia / fatto di rame o di pietra o di legno” (I go like a man parted from life who seems to one who sees him made of copper or stone or wood). The wound that Cavalcanti bears in this poem as a direct sign (“aperto segno”) recalls, too, the death written on Guinizelli's face and apparent to anyone who can read it (9.14).

Gianfranco Contini notes that Cavalcanti's sonnet “Chi è questa che vèn, ch'ogn'om la mira” (No. 4) signals a debt by Guinizelli through its technical devices. The poem shares rhymes in the octave and sestet and four rhyme words with Guinizelli's “Io vogl' del ver la mia donna laudare” (Sonnet 10). Further, the repertoire of images in Guinizelli's poem—“verde river' … l'âre, / tutti color di fior’”—makes up the discrete, imaginative world (“questo mondo”) that Cavalcanti projects for his lady in another sonnet (2.1-4):

Avete 'n vo' li fior' e la verdura
e ciò che luce od è bello a vedere;
risplende più che sol vostra figura:
chi vo' non vede, ma' non pò valere.
You have in yourself flowers and green
And what is bright or beautiful to see;
Your face shines more than the sun:
Whoever does not see you can never be worthwhile.

Other details of comparison in Guinizelli's sonnet—“oro ed azzurro e ricche gioi per dare”—work their way into the list of sensual images that serves in another sonnet (3.1-8) as a contrast to the beauty and worth of Cavalcanti's lady.

For Petrarch, Guinizelli is an influence felt from a distance and mediated through the central poets of the Dolce Stil Nuovo. The borrowings are consequently hard to distinguish from the tradition in which they are embedded. Guinizelli's battle of sighs with its corollaries of pain and suffering seems to travel through Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia before emerging as “un vento angoscioso di sospiri” (an anguished wind of sighs) in the Canzoniere (17.2). The image of the magnet, treated at length by Guinizelli in Canzone 2, is given a similarly extended treatment by Petrarch (Canzoniere 135.16-30), who may have known of the supposed properties of the stone through Guinizelli's scientific sources. The references to the lady's look in “Lasso me” (Canzoniere 70.40) depends on Cino and only remotely on Guinizelli. Other references suggest, however, a direct citation. One of the sonnets excluded from the Canzoniere begins, “Amor, che 'n Cielo e 'n gentil core alberghi” (Love, you that dwell in Heaven and in noble hearts). Rime 72 also gathers the elements of Guinizelli's canzone, though with different emphases: “Gentil mia Donna, i' veggio / nel mover de' vostr'occhi un dolce lume / che mi mostra la via ch' al ciel conduce” (My noble lady, I see in the moving of your eyes a sweet light that shows me the way that leads to Heaven). Franco Suitner has demonstrated that Petrarch matches the language and syntax of Guinizelli's Sonnet 6 in the octave of Rime 183. The images associated with archery, which appear frequently in Guinizelli's sonnets, open Rime 87. Guinizelli's moralizing tone in Sonnet 15 with its rhetoric of contempt for the world is taken up in Rime 7. The sonnet addressed to the River Rhone (Canzoniere 208) defines a real location in space for the countryside that Guinizelli had evoked so forcefully for Cavalcanti and Cino, and Petrarch obliquely cites Guinizelli's phrasing by mentioning “l'erba più verde e l'aria più serena” (the grass is greener and the air more clear). Two motifs from Guinizelli's Sonnet 9, reversed in their sequence, close one of Petrarch's most obscure poems in the Canzoniere. As the speaker in Guinizelli's poem changes from ice to fire and seems alive but carries hidden death, so, too, Petrarch complains that Laura makes him “vivo e morte” (alive and dead), while she freezes and burns him (“m'agghiaccia e mi riscalda”). These borrowings reflect, as Suitner insists, a strategy of citation rather than imitation, and the difference between the two lies in the fact that Petrarch's citation does not imply the acceptance of a poetic model.

Gunizelli's influence in the Renaissance and later periods has to do with a history of reception rather than his directly inspiring later writers to imitate his works. Evidence of his influence is scattered in discussions of the origin and nature of early Italian lyric; and the theories that arise from them reflect, as Emilio Bigi has shown, the varying aesthetic and historiographical concerns of their own ages. Already in Petrarch's Trionfo d'amore, for example, Dante and Cino da Pistoia stand above their predecessors, displacing the earlier poetic schools and writers like “i duo Guidi, che già fûr in prezzo” (the two Guidos, who were already worthwhile). In La Giostra (2.45.3-4), Angelo Poliziano addresses love in Guinizelli's terms: “E tu pur suoli al cor gentile, Amore, / Riparar, come augello alla verdura” (And you always used to take shelter in the noble heart, Love, like a bird in the forest). His Rispetti continuati (8.121-22) repeats Guinizelli's theme of the identity of love and the noble heart: “Amor no vien se non da gentileza, / Nè gentileza regna sanza amore” (Love does not come unless from nobility, nor nobility reign without love).

In a letter to Federigo of Aragon, which Poliziano may have actually written, Lorenzo the Magnificent links Guittone with Guinizelli as the first poets to write in the “novello stile,” by which he evidently means poetic composition in the vernacular. He finds both poets given to philosophical ornaments and serious moralizing, and he sets out aesthetic claims for Guinizelli that will become part of the historical conception not only of the poet's work but also of the Dolce Stil Nuovo as a group. Amplifying Dante's contrast between the poets, Lorenzo finds Guinizelli “more lucid, polished, and ornamental” than Guittone, and he asserts that Guinizelli was the first to lend a sweet coloring to the language (“da cui la bella forma del nostro idioma fu dolcemente colorita”). Cristoforo Landino places Guinizelli with Dante and Cavalcanti as poets inspired by love to write. Pietro Bembo recalls Dante's praise of Guinizelli, as he traces the arc of linguistic development in a universal history from earlier cultures to the appearance of the Italian vernacular.

Other early commentators place their remarks on Guinizelli firmly within the discussion of the Italian language and vernacular poetic culture. Machiavelli argues in his Discorso o dialogo intorna alla nostra lingua that all the early poets wrote in a Florentine idiom; the only exceptions (named obliquely) are Guittone, Guinizelli, and Cino, who cannot claim, he says, to have written more than ten poems among them. Giangiorgio Trissino, the discoverer of the De vulgari eloquentia, takes a more appreciative view and suggests the particular qualities that confer stylistic distinction. Guinizelli is the first, he writes, to introduce “cose sottili, filosofiche e dotte nelle sue rime” (subtle, philosophical, and learned topics in his poems). Trissino's characterization of Guinizelli is repeated in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by authorities like G. M. Crescimbeni and L. A. Muratori, who make the description a commonplace of literary history. Crescimbeni adds to these qualities the observation that Guinizelli ennobles the love poetry by treating it within a Platonic framework. Other Enlightenment figures continue to debate the question of poetic language, arguing that Guinizelli represents an elevation of diction but finding no adequate realization of it before Dante.

Romantic criticism introduced new categories for discussing Guinizelli's work as part of a comprehensive view of early Italian lyric. Guinizelli is valued among Dante's predecessors for his noble thoughts, lively imagination, and the effects of his piling up figures and comparisons. Ugo Foscolo's youthful ode, “A Dante” (1796), praises Dante by adapting the lines from Purgatorio where Oderisi explains the poetic succession from Guinizelli to Cavalcanti and hints that still another writer will take on the mantle. In his Vestigi della storia del sonetto (1816) and notes made for Cavalcanti and Cino, Foscolo rejects the periodization of schools and influences before Dante, but by mid-century literary historians argue again for the contributions of the Bolognese and Tuscan poets to Dante's achievement. Guinizelli is seen as having created a stylistic revolution; and he is recognized as model and master, a writer who permits a new soaring of spirits. In Francesco De Sanctis' formulation, which consolidated the reappraisal of Dante's precursors and established the term Dolce Stil Nuovo as a category within literary history, Guinizelli exemplifies the competing tendencies of inspiration and philosophical speculation. De Sanctis describes him as more an artist than a poet, a man moved by thought rather than imagination, a writer for whom science engenders art. Within the Dolce Stil Nuovo, he postulates a triumvirate with Guinizelli as the precursor, Cino the artificer, and Cavalcanti the poet.

In England the heritage of commentary on the early Italian lyric settled on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose father, Gabriele, had written on the allegories and esoteric lore in Dante. The younger Rossetti introduced in The Early Italian Poets (1861) translations of Dante's early poems and those of the poets surrounding him. Rearranging the collection into two parts for reissue under the title Dante and His Circle (1874), Rossetti solidified the distinction between the circle of Dante and the other schools without presenting a clear historiography. He represents Guinizelli with half a dozen poems based on the texts of scholars like Francesco Trucchi, whose Poesie italiane di dugento autore (1846) separated the writers preceding and contemporary with Dante (called trovatori) from Dante's group (poeti). Rossetti's note on Guinizelli repeats the mistake of identifying him with the de' Principi family, while pointing out the connection between Canzone 4 and the canzone of Convivio 4. In Rossetti's hands, the stylistic precision and dramatic contrasts within Guinizelli's poems recede behind the diction and musical effects, but the full consequences of pre-Raphaelite aestheticizing for an appreciation of Guinizelli's work are not to be felt until half a century later. Ezra Pound, who quotes the Rossetti translations throughout his studies of medieval poetry, is able to define the problem in relation to his translation of Cavalcanti. Says Pound, “My perception was not obfuscated by Guido's Italian, difficult as it then was for me to read. I was obfuscated by the Victorian language.”

Guinizelli plays a strategic, if appropriately minor, role in Pound's conception of Romance lyric poetry. Pound discovers in medieval love poetry “a cult of emotions” that transcends the sensual in order to achieve an intellectual and spiritual ideal. For Pound, this kind of love has its origins in the troubadours but takes a definitive shape from the Italian poets. Stuart McDougal contends, “Although Pound's early work bore evidence of his tacit acceptance of this notion of love, it did not become the cornerstone of his love ethic until he had immersed himself in the poetry of Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and the medieval philosophers who influenced them (in Pound's view, Richard of St. Victor and Robert Grosseteste).” Coevally, a new language is needed, as Pound says, to “make new things possible.” Pound finds such a language adumbrated in Arnaut Daniel yet adds, “this scarcely happened till Guinicello, and Guido Cavalcanti and Dante.” His sense of Guinizelli's place in the essay on “Arnaut Daniel” (1920) confirms an earlier conclusion in The Spirit of Romance (1910): “The art of the troubadours meets with philosophy at Bologna and a new era of lyric poetry is begun.”

Pound's conception of love as a spiritual ideal leads him to rely on Guinizelli as an occasional source and, more important, to read a poet like Cavalcanti through the Neoplatonic tendencies in Guinizelli's work. Pound credits Guinizelli with introducing “that new style in which the eyes and the heart and the soul have separate voices of their own, and converse together.” He translated the stilnovist Sonnets 7 and 10 in The Spirit of Romance, remarking of the former, “Here the preciseness of the description denotes, I think, a clarity of imaginative vision.” He discovered in these poems a visionary quality and a treatment of light imagery which, like Cavalcanti's “Donna mi prega,” locates the source of love in the eyes. In Provença (1910), the imagery pervades a poem like “Canzon: The Spear,” which also incorporates other echoes of Guinizelli:

The light within her eyes, which slays
Base thoughts and stilleth troubled waters,
Is like the gold where sunlight plays
Upon the still o'ershadowed waters.

Pound's most striking use of Guinizelli is, however, unacknowledged. At the culmination of the Fifth Decad of the Cantos, he turns to the most difficult stanza of Guinizelli's doctrinal canzone (4.41-50), juxtaposing its Neoplatonic-Augustinian imagery with the counter image of baseness (fango, “mud,” 4.31, 34) that is given in the preceding stanza of Guinizelli's poem:

Shines
in the mind of heaven God
who made it
more than the sun
in our eye.
Fifth element; mud. …

(“Canto 51”)

Pound's quotation and restructuring of the images here imply a creative engagement with the poetry, but Guinizelli's appearance in the Cantos lacks the sharp characterization given figures like Arnaut Daniel and Sordello. In his critical writing, Pound regards Guinizelli as an orthodox influence in contradistinction to Cavalcanti the natural philosopher; in Canto 51, as James J. Wilhelm points out, “Guinizelli does not emerge as a person; he is merely blended in with the other Neoplatonics in the poem.”…