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1901–1950. Rome: Edizioni Cateriniane, 1971.
Suzanne Noffke, O.P.
CAVALCANTI, GUIDO (c. 1255–1300)
The signifi cant events in the life of the poet Guido
Cavalcanti were inextricably bound up with the political
tumult in Florence. Cavalcanti was born into a Guelf
family that had established itself as one of the wealthi-
est and most powerful clans in Florence. In 1267 he
married a daughter of Farinata degli Uberti, head of the
Florentine Ghibellines, a political arrangement intended
to promote peace between Guelf and Ghibelline factions.
A force in Florentine politics, Guido Cavalcanti served
as a public guarantor for the Guelf party in a peace ac-
cord brokered in 1280, and as a member of the consiglio
generate of Florence in 1284 and 1290. His political role
in Florence ended abruptly in 1295, when the ordina-
mento di giustizia, an ordinance against magnates, was
adopted. However, he remained engaged in the power
struggle between factions of the Guelf party, and he was
held responsible for the assassination attempt of a rival,
Corso Donati. In June 1300, Guido Cavalcanti was ex-
iled from Florence for the sake of public tranquillity, but
he was recalled shortly thereafter because of ill health,
and he died in August of the same year.
During his lifetime, Cavalcanti was reputed to be a
parsimonious, impetuous, and irascible; in the decades
following his death, he became an icon of the aloof, in-
tellectual urban aristocrat. Boccaccio, in the Decameron
(6.9), describes Cavalcanti as one of the best logicians
in the world and an outstanding natural philosopher,
adding that Cavalcanti was a perfect nobleman: wealthy,
eloquent, and accomplished. The Decameron introduced
the notion that Cavalcanti was widely held to be an Epi-
curean who denied the immortality of the soul, although
there is no historical evidence for this. Cavalcanti’s inter-
est in philosophy is borne out, however, in a philosophi-
cal tract dedicated to him in 1280 by Iacopo da Pistoia,
a professor at the University of Bologna.
Cavalcanti was a pivotal fi gure in the development
of thirteenth-century lyric poetry, and he is regarded by
many modern readers as the fi nest lyric poet of the Ital-
ian Duecento. He fi rmly rejected, in terms more disdain-
ful than Dante’s, the heavily ornamented, conceptually
curtailed poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo (c. 1235–1294).
Cavalcanti’s language combines intensity of expression
with intellectual clarity, defi ning what Dante dubbed the
dolce stil nuovo; his corpus of fi fty-two poems is char-
acterized by a highly subjective and intimate exploration
of the experience of love. Cavalcanti’s probing poetic
voice became the inspiration for Dante’s own youthful
writing of love poetry in Vita Nuova, and in fact Dante
dedicated this book to Cavalcanti. Later, though, there
is ample evidence of rancor and ideological discord
between the two poets.
The Bolognese Guido Guinizzelli (fl. mid-thirteenth
century) infl uenced Cavalcanti’s early sonnets writ-
ten in praise of his lady. In the marvelous sonnet Chi
è questa che vèn ch ’ogn’ om la mira (“Who is this
who comes, upon whom every man gazes?”), Caval-
canti repeats the two rhyme words and four rhymes of
Guiniz-zelli’s Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare
(“I truly wish to praise my lady”). Yet even this early
sonnet reveals signifi cant deviations from its model. In
the quatrains, Guinizzelli’s poem describes a lady by
using hyperbolic comparisons to natural beauty; in the
tercets, her spiritually salutary effects on those in her
presence are recounted. Cavalcanti’s poem turns on its
own inadequacy: the impossibility of giving voice to the
commotion he feels in the lady’s presence, the ineffable
quality of her beauty, and the incapacity of the mind to
ascend to and comprehend the lady’s splendor. The son-
net also differs from its model in the poet’s detachment
as he contemplates his lady, and in the universality of
the effects ascribed to her beatitude. Chi è questa che
vèn is characterized by many of the features that defi ned
Cavalcanti’s poetry throughout his career: a marriage
of form and content; phonic lightness; rhythmic grace;
supple syntax; subtle allusions to the Old and New Testa-
ments (the opening line echoes the Song of Songs) and
to other vernacular poets; and references to logic and
science (the visible trembling of the air that creates a
halo of light around the lady in line 2 is a phenomenon
appropriated from the physics of sound). Personifi ca-
tion, the most prominent characteristic of Cavalcanti’s
poetry, is present in the fi gure of Love, (Amor), who is
charged with telling of the lady’s gaze when the poet
cannot. In other works, personifi cation is accompanied
by frequent apostrophes, as the poet appeals to his
denatured heart or soul or spirits and begs that they, in
turn, appeal to his lady.
Other poems develop the implications of Cavalcanti’s
paradoxical understanding of love poetry: since he is
unable to sing of his lady, whom his mind cannot con-
ceive or his words convey, his poems explore the fear,
despair, anguish, and disorientation that result from the
experience of love. Guittone d’Arezzo had equated love
with a loss of reason and virtue, and even with death;
Cavalcanti dramatizes the psychological disintegration
and internal commotion caused by love, in sonnets like
Deh, spiriti miei, quando mi vedete (“My spirits, when
you see me”), L’anima mia vilment’ è sbigotita (“My
soul is so cruelly aggrieved”), and Voi che per li occhi
mi passsste ’l core (“You who pass through my eyes
to my heart”). In these poems the poet’s heart, mind,
eyes, sighs, soul, and spirits—vital vapors, according
to the physiology of the time—are engaged in his plea
for survival: some are sent to the lady to beg for mercy;CAVALCANTI, GUIDO