GUITTONE D’AREZZO
(c. 1235–21 August 1294)
Guittone d’Arezzo was the master of thirteenth-century
literary culture in Tuscany and Emilia. Guido Guiniz-
zelli deferred to his command of style; and Dante, like
other poets, experimented with Guittone’s formal tech-
niques and elevated tone, striving to surpass his poetic
fame and expressivity. In spite of the anti-Guittonean
polemic set in motion by the stilnovists, Guittone’s
corpus of fi fty Italian epistles, fi fty canzoni, and some
250 sonnets—evincing a vast range of formal experi-
mentation, political-moral discourse, and public cor-
respondence—profoundly infl uenced and altered the
course of vernacular literature in Italy.
Guittone probably joined the order of the Knights
of Saint Mary (the so-called Frati Gaudenti, “jovial
friars”) in 1265. This was a turning point in his life and
writing; and it is impossible to ignore the other, albeit
sparse, biographical data available to us, for in few poets
of Guittone’s era was the connection between life and
literature more keenly developed. Before his took up
his literary career in the 1250s, Guittone had an inside
view of municipal politics—perhaps beginning in 1249,
when he helped his father in the Aretine treasury. By
the late 1250s, Guittone’s conservative Guelf values
and his dissatisfaction with Arezzo’s Ghibelline gov-
ernment led him to seek voluntary exile in places such
as Pisa, Bologna, and Florence. Pisa is the provenance
of the most authoritative manuscripts of his works:
Rediano 9 (Laurentian Library, Florence) and its lateral
Riccardiano 2533 (Riccardian Library, Florence). The
wide circulation of Guittone’s literary work during his
lifetime probably contributed to his stature as the head
of an entire poetic movement.
There is no doubt that Guittone was a powerful liter-
ary model for thirteenth-century Tuscan poets. He suc-
ceeded in converting the detached courtly traditions of
the Sicilians and Occitans into a poetry that refl ected the
political and ethical concerns of the municipal citizen,
the pivot of a new Tuscan power structure founded on the
sometimes contradictory worlds of Christian morality
and the new commercial order. In his writing, Guittone
established a delicate balance between wisdom and
wealth by emphasizing the ethics of their acquisition
and use: Saver.... vale in ben condurlo.... [N]on pec-
cato in ricchezze e, ma in male aquistarle e male usarle
(“Wisdom is good in that it leads one to happiness....
There is no sin in riches, but in acquiring and using them
evilly,” Letter 25). The two polysemous foundations of
these ethics, often repeated in Guittone’s poetry and
letters as onor e pro (“honor and profi t”), are in fact
the classical concepts of honor and utilitas overlaid
with the Christian ideals of goodness and service and
adapted to contemporary mercantile notions of family
honor and useful effi ciency. To this groundwork of a
poetics of moral virtue Guittone added a dimension of
political philosophy, moving from a defense of collec-
tive culture in his early invectives against the Aretines
(Gente noiosa e villana—”Bothersome and uncourtly
people”) and the Ghibelline Florentines after the rout
of the Guelfs at Montaperti (Ahi lasso, or è stagion de
doler tanto—”Alas, now is the time of great sorrow”)
to his later concentration on individual peace as an
integral part of the Christian collective (Magni baroni
certo e rep quasi— “Great barons certainly and kings
almost”). Guittone’s fusion of rhetorical skill and civil
morality solidifi ed, in Italian letters, the perspective of
the involved civic poet writing in the vernacular.
Guittone’s poetics was equally infl uential among his
contemporaries. It was based on the highly elaborated
rhetorical devices of ars dictandi and the complicated
formalism of the Occitan trobar clus (hermetic style).
In his poetry and letters, which had a common language
and syntax, Guittone’s style refl ects more than studied
and refurbished borrowings of these two earlier tradi-
tions. In both cases, Guittone not only reexamines these
two sources of knowledge and self-refl ection but also
tailors them to the cultural needs of the vernacular of
his day. Guittone’s vernacular exploitation of conven-
tionally Latin-bound rhetoric and his revision of scuro
parlare (obscure speech) or trobar clus, taken in part
form his extensive knowledge of Occitan poets (includ-
ing Raimbaut d’Aurenga and Arnaut Daniel), represents
a commitment to link the honored traditions of the past
with the language and values of the new power base
of the commune. Guittone’s discursive investment in
literary Tuscan inspired two generations of Tuscan and
Emilian literary circles bent on imitating this new, even
overextended, attention to the development of a highly
articulated poetic language.
Guittone also led the way in challenging other aspects
of literary convention. He helped transform the vernacu-
lar poem from something composed for performance
by singers to a text of writers and correspondents. His
refi nement of the songbook, or song cycle (conjectured
to have been fi ve separate collections), and even its il-
lustration (in Trattato d’amore, “Treatise on Love”), and
his experimentation with expanded verse forms reveal
his involvement in literature not simply as a vehicle for
his formal talents but as a committed redefi nition of the
relationship of literature to its public. This new sense of
a public, and of a public sphere, runs throughout Gui-
ttone’s works, reshaping the narcissistic “I” of courdy
lyrics into a self-refl ective individual linked to his fel-
low citizens not through a political faction but through
thepolis or city itself (see Letter 14). In his canzone Ora
parrà s’eo saverò cantare (“Now it will be evident if
I know how to write poetry,” written after his conver-
sion), Guittone spells out the four essential elements of
human existence: Natura, Dio, ragion scritta, e comuneGUITTONE D’AREZZO