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Dante da Maiano was a late thirteenth-century poet who composed mainly
sonnets in
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional It ...
and
Occitan. He was an older contemporary of
Dante Alighieri and active in
Florence.
He may have been a
Provençal- or
Auvergnat
or (endonym: ) is a northern dialect of Occitan spoken in central and southern France, in particular in the former administrative region of Auvergne.
Currently, research shows that there is not really a true Auvergnat dialect but rather a va ...
-speaker from
Maillane (the birthplace of
Frédéric Mistral
Joseph Étienne Frédéric Mistral (; oc, Josèp Estève Frederic Mistral, 8 September 1830 – 25 March 1914) was a French writer of Occitan literature and lexicographer of the Provençal form of the language. He received the 1904 Nobel P ...
), but more probably he was from the
Tuscan village of
Maiano
Maiano is small hilltop locality, now part of Fiesole, in Tuscany.
The Chiesa di San Martino was founded there in the eleventh century and subsequently restored in the fifteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. A '' palagio'' existed at Ma ...
near
Fiesole. In 1882 Adolfo Borgognoni argued that he was an invention of
Renaissance philology, but met with the opposition of F. Novati in 1883 and Giovanni Bertacchi in 1896. Bertacchi argued that Dante da Maiano was the same person as the Dante Magalante, son of ser Ugo da Maiano, who appears in a public record of 1301. At the time this Dante was living in
the monastery of San Benedetto in Alpe and was requested ''in mundualdum'' by a relative of his, Lapa, widow of Vanni di Chello Davizzi, to be her tutor. That a Dante da Maiano existed during the lifetime of Dante Alighieri and that he was capable of "tutoring" was thus established, but the identification with the poet could not be made certain. Santorre Debenedetti finally disproved Borgognoni's thesis in 1907.
[Michael Papio (2004), "Dante da Maiano", ''Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia'', Christopher Kleinhenz and John W. Barker, edd. (London: Routledge), p. 290.] He discovered two
Occitan sonnets ascribed to Dante da Maiano in a fifteenth-century Italian manuscript conserved in the
Biblioteca Laurentiana
The Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana or BML) is a historic library in Florence, Italy, containing more than 11,000 manuscripts and 4,500 early printed books. Built in a cloister of the Medicean Basilica di San Lorenzo di Firenze ...
, Florence.
Almost all Dante's extant work is preserved in the ''
Giuntina'' (or "Junte"), a Florentine
chansonnier
A chansonnier ( ca, cançoner, oc, cançonièr, Galician and pt, cancioneiro, it, canzoniere or ''canzoniéro'', es, cancionero) is a manuscript or printed book which contains a collection of chansons, or polyphonic and monophonic settings ...
compiled in 1527 under the title ''Sonetti e canzoni di diversi avtori toscani in dieci libri raccolte'' by
Filippo Giunti
The Giunti were a Florentine family of printers. The first Giunti press was established in Venice by Lucantonio Giunti, who began printing under his own name in 1489. The press of his brother Filippo Giunti (1450–1517) in Florence, active fr ...
. His total work is some forty-eight
sonnets, five ''
ballate
The ''ballata'' (plural: ''ballate'') is an Italian poetic and musical form in use from the late 13th to the 15th century. It has the musicapenim
AbbaA, with the first and last stanzas having the same texts. It is thus most similar to the Fren ...
'', two ''
canzoni
Literally "song" in Italian, a ''canzone'' (, plural: ''canzoni''; cognate with English ''to chant'') is an Italian or Provençal song or ballad. It is also used to describe a type of lyric which resembles a madrigal. Sometimes a composition w ...
'', and a series of ''
tenzoni'' with Dante Alighieri.
[ He was influenced by the troubadours (notably ]Bernart de Ventadorn
Bernart de Ventadorn (also Bernard de Ventadour or Bernat del Ventadorn; – ) was a French poet-composer troubadour of the classical age of troubadour poetry. Generally regarded as the most important troubadour in both poetry and music, his 1 ...
), the Sicilian School
The Sicilian School was a small community of Sicilian and mainland Italian poets gathered around Frederick II, most of them belonging to his imperial court. Headed by Giacomo da Lentini, they produced more than 300 poems of courtly love betwee ...
and in particular Giacomo da Lentini
Giacomo da Lentini, also known as Jacopo da Lentini or with the appellative Il Notaro, was an Italian poet of the 13th century. He was a senior poet of the Sicilian School and was a notary at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Gia ...
, the Tuscan School of Guittone d'Arezzo
Guittone d'Arezzo (Arezzo, 1235 – 1294) was a Tuscan poet and the founder of the Tuscan School. He was an acclaimed secular love poet before his conversion in the 1260s, when he became a religious poet joining the Order of the Blessed Virgi ...
, and the later ''dolce stil novo
''Dolce Stil Novo'' (), Italian for "sweet new style," is the name given to a literary movement in 13th and 14th century Italy. Influenced by the Sicilian School and Tuscan poetry, its main theme is Divine Love. The name ''Dolce Stil Novo'' wa ...
'', though he belongs to none of these. Rosanna Betarrini calls his work a " pastiche" and Antonio Enzo Quaglio a ''silloge archeologica della produzione anteriore e contemporanea'' ("an archaeological collection of past and contemporary production").
Dante da Maiano wrote a sonnet in response to ''A ciascun' alma presa e gentil core'', the first sonnet in Dante Alighieri's ''Vita nuova
''La Vita Nuova'' (; Italian for "The New Life") or ''Vita Nova'' (Latin title) is a text by Dante Alighieri published in 1294. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and v ...
''. There was also a five-part exchange (probably preceding the ''Vita nuova'') called the ''duol d'amore'' ("dolour of love"), in which Dante da Maiano wrote three pieces and Dante Alighieri responded to the first two. In a final two-part communication, Dante Alighieri wrote ''Savere e cortesia, ingegno ed arte'' to Dante da Maiano's ''Amor mi fa sì fedelmente amare''. In all their correspondence, the elder Dante assumes an air of superiority towards his up-and-coming interlocutor, the future author of the ''Divine Comedy
The ''Divine Comedy'' ( it, Divina Commedia ) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun 1308 and completed in around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature a ...
''.[Stoppelli, 657.] Before Dante Alighieri's career had taken off, the elder Dante was for a time quite famous in Florence for his sonnet ''Provedi, saggio, ad esta visïone'', in which he recounts a dream he had and asks his fellow citizens for an interpretation. Chiaro Davanzati, Guido Orlandi, Salvino Doni, Ricco da Varlungo, Cino da Pistoja and Dante Alighieri, in what was to be his earliest still-extant poem, all responded.[ Dante da Maiano, along with Cino da Pistoja, also wrote a response to a sonnet (''Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io'') that Alighieri sent to his friend ]Guido Cavalcanti
Guido Cavalcanti (between 1250 and 1259 – August 1300) was an Italian poet. He was also a friend and intellectual influence on Dante Alighieri.
Historical background
Cavalcanti was born in Florence at a time when the comune was beginning it ...
.
According to later stories now generally considered only legend, Dante also kept up a correspondence with Nina of Sicily, the first Italian woman poet, and with whom he fell in love. Their relationship became well-known and she grew in fame because of his writings so she was called ''la Nina di Dante''. She took up poetry, apparently, as a result of his influence.
Víctor Balaguer Víctor is a Spanish masculine given name, equivalent to Victor in English and Vítor in Portuguese. Notable people with the given name include:
*Víctor Cabrera (Argentine footballer)
* Víctor Cabrera (Chilean footballer)
* Víctor Hugo Cabrer ...
published the Occitan sonnet ''Las! so qe m'es el cor plus fis e qars'' in 1879, where he also hypothesised for Dante a birthplace in Provence. Despite these Occitan sonnets and Dante's more probable birthplace in Tuscany, Giulio Bertoni disqualified Dante from being an "Italian troubadour" in his 1915 study. By one reckoning, Dante's Occitan sonnets are the earliest examples of what is undisputedly an Italian form, but the invention of which is usually assigned to Giacomo da Lentini.[Henry John Chaytor (1912)]
''The Troubadours''
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 106.
Complete list of works
Notes
Further reading
*Pierre Bec Pierre Bec (; oc, Pèire Bèc; 11 December 1921 – 30 June 2014) was a French Occitan-language poet and linguist. Born in Paris, he spent his childhood in Comminges, where he learnt Occitan. He was deported to Germany between 1943 and 1945. A ...
"Les deux sonnets occitans de Dante Da Maiano (XIIIe siècle)"
''Perspectives médiévales'', Congrès Languedoc et langue d'oc. Colloque, Toulouse, 22 (1996), pp. 47–57.
*Santorre Debenedetti, "Nuovi studí sulla Giuntina di rime antiche", ''Giornale storico della letteratura italiana'', 50 (1907).
*F. Montanari, "L'esperienza poetica di Dante fino alla Vita Nuova", ''Lettere italiane'', 7:3 (1955:July/Sept.).
*Robin Kirkpatrick, "Dante's Beatrice and the Politics of Singularity", ''Texas Studies in Literature and Language'', 32:1 (1990:Spring).
*Piero Cudini, "La tenzone tra Dante e Forese e la ''Commedia'' (Inf. XXX; Purg. XXIII–XXIV)", ''Giornale storico della letteratura italiana'', 159:505 (1982).
External links
*Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (), was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhoo ...
, ed.
''Dante and His Circle: With the Italian Poets Preceding Him, (1100–1200–1300): A Collection of Lyrics''
(Roberts Brothers, 1887).
::Presents colourful English translations of Dante de Maiano's exchanges with Dante Alighieri (pp. 127–9).
*Víctor Balaguer Víctor is a Spanish masculine given name, equivalent to Victor in English and Vítor in Portuguese. Notable people with the given name include:
*Víctor Cabrera (Argentine footballer)
* Víctor Cabrera (Chilean footballer)
* Víctor Hugo Cabrer ...
''Historia política y literaria de los trovadores''
(Impr. de Fortanet, 1879).
::Spanish commentary and text of ''Las! so qe m'es el cor plus fis e qars'' (pp. 117–8).
*Dante da Maiano's correspondence with Dante Alighieri, with English translations:
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dante Da Maiano
Italian poets
French male poets
Sonneteers
Year of death unknown
Year of birth unknown
Italian male poets
Male composers