Guittone d'Arezzo (
Arezzo
Arezzo ( , ; ) is a city and ''comune'' in Italy and the capital of the Province of Arezzo, province of the same name located in Tuscany. Arezzo is about southeast of Florence at an elevation of Above mean sea level, above sea level. As of 2 ...
, 123521 August 1294) was a
Tuscan poet
A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...
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 Virgin Mary
The Order of the Blessed Virgin MarySometimes the "Blessed" is omitted; "Order of the Glorious Saint Mary" is a variant. (; ), also called the Order of Saint Mary of the Tower or the Order of the Knights of the Mother of God, commonly the Knights ...
. In 1256, he was exiled from Arezzo due to his
Guelf sympathies.
Biography
Son of Viva di Michele and
chamberlain of his area, he travelled often for business. A passionate supporter of the Guelfs, he lamented in a celebrated ''
canzone
Literally 'song' in Italian, a canzone (; : ''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 which ...
'' the Ghibelline victory of
Montaperti (1260). Guittone had a wife and three children who he would later abandon in 1256 after a spiritual crisis.
He joined the Order of the Knights of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a relatively exclusive group permitting members on the basis of financial background, showing Guittone's aristocratic familial origin and wealth.
[ Pertile & Brand 1999, p. 15.] The group's primary goal was to favor and promote the peace between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions. Guittone died in Florence on 21 August 1294. He willed his estate to build the
Camaldolese monastery
A monastery is a building or complex of buildings comprising the domestic quarters and workplaces of Monasticism, monastics, monks or nuns, whether living in Cenobitic monasticism, communities or alone (hermits). A monastery generally includes a ...
of
Santa Maria degli Angeli, near Florence.
Works
His surviving work comprises forty letters and some 300 poems, these dividing evenly between about 140 courtly poems (–), and the moral writing, in verse and prose, that accompanied and followed his conversion (). The entire corpus is unified by his inherent sobriety, didactic sententiousness, and stylistic virtuosity. A conflict between the inherited Romance tradition and his learned civic formation and logical, moral temper is already apparent in the 120 courtly sonnets, most of which he links, for the first time in the history of the sonnet, into cycles (five in all, three of them narrative), to probe the moral inconsistencies of the conventional love ethos. The 20 courtly ''canzoni'' display a pioneering grasp of the difficult style of the
Provençal troubadours
A troubadour (, ; ) was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word ''troubadour'' is etymologically masculine, a female equivalent is usually called a ''trobairitz''.
The tro ...
(''trobar clus'').
Following his religious awakening, the tone and subject of Guittone's poems shifted. He started to sign his works as Fra Guittone, and in the
canzone
Literally 'song' in Italian, a canzone (; : ''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 which ...
"Ora parrà s'eo saverò cantare" he refers to his previous love poems as foolish.
A series of palinodes announce a muscular new assertion of the moral will, abandoning Love and embracing Christian ethics. They introduce a body of mature work, much of it in correspondence form, in which he preached an austere code of practical civic conduct to all ranks of contemporary central Italian society. This blunt and sober writing of his maturity is marked by formal inventiveness. His epistles in the vernacular display high mastery of ''
ars dictaminis'', coupled with stylistic experimentation. The letters, without precedent in Italian, furnish an anthology of models for sermons and political speeches. He invented the double sonnet and perfected the ''
lauda''-''
ballata
The ''ballata'' (plural: ''ballate'') is an Italian poetic form, poetic and musical form in use from the late 13th to the 15th century. It has the musical form AbbaA, with the first and last stanzas having the same texts. It is thus most similar ...
''; he addressed the
communes of Arezzo,
Pisa
Pisa ( ; ) is a city and ''comune'' (municipality) in Tuscany, Central Italy, straddling the Arno just before it empties into the Ligurian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa. Although Pisa is known worldwide for the Leaning Tow ...
, and Florence, and leading political figures like
Nino Visconti and
Corso Donati; and his exchanges with poets like
Chiaro Davanzati,
Guido Guinizzelli, and
Guido Cavalcanti
Guido Cavalcanti (between 1250 and 1259 – August 1300) was an Italians, Italian poet. He was also a friend of and intellectual influence on Dante Alighieri.
Historical background
Cavalcanti was born in Florence at a time when the comune was b ...
point to a looming crisis of allegiances and styles in which Guittone's prosaic moralizing and dense style were to be the anti-model of the Tuscan lyric ''
avant-garde
In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
''.
Legacy
Guittone was the most considerable figure among the transitional Tuscan poets who followed the
Sicilians and preceded the ''
stil novo''. He was the first poetic voice of the communes and the first Italian poet to write on moral and political themes in the high lyric style. All his work has the stamp of an original and powerful mind. His important ''Canzoniere'' contains earlier poems on the conventional love themes of Sicily and Provence, and later ones on ascetic religious subjects. The manner of his ''canzoni'' and sonnets remains constant, however, in its cultivation of all the artifice and deliberate obscurity of expression inherent in the Provençal tradition of the ''
trobar clus''. It was against Guittone that the polemic of
Dante
Dante Alighieri (; most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri; – September 14, 1321), widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer, and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called ...
and the Stilnovists was largely directed on the grounds of his harshness, obscurity and extravagant artificiality. But though often graceless, his verse does achieve more solid meaning and a firmer contact with life than the rather fragile poetic tradition of his Sicilian predecessors. In spite of recent reappraisals his work is still struggling to recover from Dante's brief but deadly dismissals (''
De vulgari eloquentia'' 1, xiii, 1 and II, vi, 8; ''
Purg.'' XXIV, 56 and XXVI, 124-6).
[ Pertile & Brand 1999, p. 17.]
Lettere di Fra Guittone d'Arezzo.tif, ''Lettere di Fra Guittone d'Arezzo'', 1745 edition
Guittone - Rime, 1940 - 1851078 0001.jpg, ''Rime'', 1940 edition
References
Bibliography
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External links
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1230s births
1294 deaths
People from Arezzo
Sonneteers
Italian male poets
Year of birth uncertain
13th-century Italian poets
{{Italy-poet-stub