Guido Cavalcanti (between 1250 and 1259 – August 1300Sources are divided between 27, 28 and 29 August.) was an Italian poet. He was Dante Alighieri's 'best friend', as well as one of his most notable intellectual influences.
Historical background
Cavalcanti was born in Florence at a time when the comune was beginning its economic, political, intellectual and artistic ascendancy into one of the most influential cities of the Renaissance. The disunited Italian peninsula was dominated by a political particularism that pitted city-states against one another, with this factionalism often contributing to the fractious and sometimes violent political environments of each comune. The domination of medieval religious interpretations of reality, morality and society was challenged by the rise of a new urban culture across Europe that gradually supplanted rural, local, ecclesiastical and feudal ways of thinking. There was an accompanying return to study, and to interpretation and emulation of the classics, known as a revival of antiquity. New secular and humanistic views laid the foundations for modern life in Western Civilization. As Jacob Burckhardt, Swiss historian and author of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy wrote, "It was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people which achieved the conquest of the western world." Cavalcanti lived during and helped shape this time of great innovation that was spurred on by a desire to explore, create and experiment with new things.
The politics of Florence
Cavalcanti was the son of Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, a Guelph whom Dante condemns to the sixth circle of his Inferno, where the heretics are punished. It is possible that, unlike Dante, Guido Cavalcanti was an atheist, sharing in his father's Epicurean philosophy. Giovanni Boccaccio (Decameron, VI, 9) wrote, over half a century after Cavalcanti's death, "Si diceva tralla gente volgare che queste sue speculazioni erano solo in cercare se trovar si potesse che Iddio non-fosse" (People commonly said these speculations of hia only regarded whether one could discover that God does not exist).
During his lifetime, Florence was politically torn by the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, factions supporting, respectively, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor in central and northern Italy during the 12th and 13th centuries. Although the struggle for power between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire had originally arisen with the Investiture Conflict of the 11th century, it was subsequently fed by a desire of either the Papacy or Holy Roman Emperor either to share in or to control the economic boom that was taking place in the leading cities of northern Italy during this time.
The division between Guelphs and Ghibellines was especially important in Florence, although the two sides frequently rebelled against each other and took power in many of the other northern Italian cities as well. Essentially, the two sides were now fighting either against German influence (in the case of the Guelphs), or against the temporal power of the Pope (in the case of the Ghibellines). In Florence and elsewhere the Guelphs usually included merchants and burghers, while the Ghibellines tended to be noblemen.
Towards the end of the 13th century, the Guelphs had secured their control of Florence through their multiple victories over the Ghibellines, including the battle at Benevento in 1266, and at Campaldino and Caprona in 1289. In 1267, as part of a political reconciliation, Guido married Beatrice, the daughter of Ghibelline party leader Farinata degli Uberti. Their marriage union proved unsuccessful, as the feuds between Guelph and Ghibelline families persisted.
By 1293, a rebellion of middle-class Florentine merchants toppled both sides of noble families. Nobles were then forbidden to claim public office, until 1295, when they were offered eligibility to join Florence's guilds. As a member of the Cavalcanti family, Guido had claimed ancestry dating back to the German barons of Charlemagne's court. He refused to occupy a position as a merchant, as he felt it offensive to his station and his heritage.
By 1300, infighting amongst the Guelphs had caused them to divide into two factions, the Black Guelphs and the White Guelphs. The Blacks continued to support the Papacy, while the Whites were opposed to Papal influence. Guido Cavalcanti allied himself with the White Guelphs, led by the Cerchi family, and developed a rivalry with Corso Donati of the Black Guelph faction.
By June 1300 the Florentines had become tired of the endless brawling between the White and Black Guelphs. The priors of Florence, Dante Alighieri serving amongst them, voted to exile the leaders of both factions and their accomplices, including Guido Cavalcanti. He was sent to Sarzana, a marshy place infested with malaria-bearing mosquitoes, where, after only a few months he decided to try to return to Florence. Guido Cavalcanti died of fever (probably malaria) in August of the same year on his journey home.
Guido's marriage to Beatrice degli Uberti should not be seen in the context of modern relationships where people marry each other for love, but rather in the context of his own age, when marriage was often motivated by business and/or political interests. As such, Guido's poetry, which dwells on love, should be seen as a philosophical exploration of love and not as that of a husband bound into and seeking satisfaction outside a marriage made for political purposes.
Dolce stil novo Cavalcanti was a part of the Tuscan poetic movement known as the dolce stil novo (Sweet New Style), whose members are referred to by their Tuscan name, the stilnovisti. The formative influences on the stilnovisti came from two main sources.
First, there was the poetry of the troubadour and trobairitz, who began the tradition of courtly love, known by its then contemporary term, as fin'amor in the ducal and princely courts of Aquitaine, Provence, Champagne and ducal Burgundy, at the end of the eleventh century. Based on the Occitan language of south France, this courtly poetry, which was a part of Occitan literature, spread throughout all European cultivated circles in the 12th and 13th centuries.
Second, there was the poetry of the Sicilian School, which was a small community of Sicilian, and to a lesser extent, mainland Italian poets gathered around Frederick II, most of them belonging to his court, the Magna Curia. Headed by Giacomo da Lentini, they produced more than 300 poems of courtly love between 1230 and 1266, the experiment being continued after Frederick's death by his son, Manfredi. This school included Enzio, king of Sardinia, Pier delle Vigne, Inghilfredi, Stefano Protonotaro, Guido and Odo delle Colonne, Rinaldo d'Aquino, Giacomino Pugliese, Arrigo Testa, Mazzeo Ricco, Perceval Doria, and Frederick II himself.
The poets of Stilnovismo included the early forerunner Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti and Dante, plus Cino da Pistoia, Lapo Gianni, Gianni Alfani, and Dino Frescobaldi. Far from being a derivative school of poetry that mimicked its French and Sicilian poetic ancestors, Stilnovismo brought an originality to and completely transformed the poetry of courtly love in that: 1) it was an urban poetry of the Tuscan commune, not of an aristocratic court; 2) it explored the philosophical, spiritual, psychological and social effects of love; 3) it championed the Tuscan vernacular; 4) it did all this while expressing the heart and mind of the poet in original verse that utilized the sonnet, ballata and canzone forms of poetry. Cavalcanti was a central part of this accomplishment.
Early poetry
In one of his earlier poems, Guido transforms the imagery of fin'amor, with its beautiful ladies and armed knights, into an idea that love has a philosophical component related to human intelligence and moral purity by equating it with a wise heart. He then proceeds to create a series of images of nature's serene beauty, which he then explains are all transcended by his lady's beauty, grace and noble heart; i.e., her emotions that are pure, based on wisdom, something he is incapable of.
This sonnet is an example of the Dolce Stil Novo movement and Cavalcanti's characteristic poetic idiom and structure.
The crowning achievement of Cavalcanti's poetic youth is his canzone Io non pensava che lo cor giammai in which he embodies his philosophical thoughts in a vernacular masterpiece. An analysis of two passages from this fifty-six-line poem reveals his core ideas on love.
Influenced by Averroës, the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher who commented on Aristotle, Cavalcanti saw humans with three basic capacities: the vegetative, which humans held in common with plants; the sensitive, which man shared with animals; and, the intellectual, which distinguished humans from the two lower forms. Averroës maintained that the proper goal of humanity was the cultivation of the intellect according to reason. Further, Averroës maintained that the intellect was part of a universal consciousness that came into the body at birth and returned to the universal consciousness after death. As such, it meant there was no afterlife, and, as well, the thing that gives an individual his or her identity was not the intellect, but the sensitive faculty, the appetites and desires of the body. Hence, the goal for Averroës and Cavalcanti was the perfection of the sensitive capacity through reason in order to achieve a balance between the body's physical desires and the intellect. This balance was considered the buon perfetto, the "good perfection." Guido thought this balance could not be achieved, which is why he speaks of “tormented laments” that makes his soul cry, that make his eyes dead, so he can feel “neither peace nor even rest in the place where I found love and my Lady.”
This passage explains the conflict between the sensitive and intellectual, as Guido's heart shivers as his "our lowly minds couldn't sustain what our intellects saw." All this is driven by the lofty beauty of his lady.
Poetic maturity
Cavalcanti is best remembered for belonging to that small but influential group of Tuscan poets that started what is now known as Dolce Stil Novo, to which he contributed the following (note: translations provided in parentheses do not match the titles by which are widely known in English manuals but are meant to be a more literal rendering of the Italian originals): "Rosa fresca novella" (New, Fresh Rose), "Avete in vo' li fior e la verdura" (You Are Flowers in the Meadow), "Biltà di donna" (A Woman's Beauty), Chi è questa che vèn (Who's This Lady That Comes My Way), "Li mie' foll'occhi" (My Crazy Eyes), "L'anima Mia" (My Soul), "Guido Orlandi", "Da più a uno" (From Many to One), "In un boschetto" (In A Grove), "Per ch'io no spero" (Because I Do Not Hope), "Voi che per gli occhi mi passaste il core" (see below), and "Donna me prega" (A Lady Asks Me), a masterpiece of lyric verse and a small treatise on his philosophy of love. Starting from the model provided by the French troubadours, they took Italian poetry a step further and inaugurated the volgare illustre, that higher standard of Italian language that survives almost unchanged to the present day. The founder of this school, Guido Guinizzelli, a law professor at Bologna's University wrote the first poem of this kind, a poem whose importance does not so much lie in its literary merits but in outlining what would be the fundamentals of the Stil Novo program, which was further perfected by a second generation of poets, including Dante, Cino da Pistoia, Lapo Gianni, and Guido himself. As Dante wrote in his De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, XIII, 4: