Guittone d’Arezzo was the leading figure in the
Tuscan school of poetry, the second important poetic movement in vernacular Italian in the Middle
Ages. A group of followers calling themselves guittoniani emulated his style and created a thriving
poetic tradition to replace the earlier Sicilian
school, whose source of inspiration had dissolved
as the imperial court at Naples declined. As the
most important poet of the immediately preceding
generation, Guittone came under harsh criticism
from DANTE, who at first followed but later abjured
Guittone’s style.
The facts we know of Guittone’s life are few. He
was born near Arezzo and his father was a public
official of some kind. Guittone himself was apparently involved in commercial ventures and did a
good deal of traveling. He is also known to have
been a member of the Guelf party (the party that
initially supported the pope in Italian politics)—
he wrote a poem lamenting the 1260 defeat of the
Guelfs of Florence at Montaperte. When the Ghibellines (the party that supported the emperor)
controlled Arezzo after 1256, Guittone was exiled.
His travels throughout Italy, to Bologna, Pisa, and
ultimately Florence, put him in touch with powerful people and with other writers.
In 1266, apparently after a sincere spiritual crisis, Guittone left his secular life, including his wife
and three children, to enter the religious order of
the Knights of the Blessed Virgin Mary, known as
the merry friars. From this point on, he forsook the
COURTLY LOVE poetry of his earlier life, and focused
on religious, moral, and political themes. He died
in Florence in 1294, in a monastery to which he
had donated a large sum of money the previous
year on the condition that they would care for him
until his death.
Dante faulted Guittone for what he called his
excessive rhetoric and common language, and
claimed that only the ignorant and vulgar were
impressed by his poetry. In fact Guittone’s language was filled with a greater number of terms
borrowed from Provençal and Latin than that of
his forerunners in the Sicilian school. He also used
more complex rhetorical figures and sentence
structures than his predecessors. Dante at first
emulated Guittone’s style, then rejected it in favor
of the simpler and clearer manner of the Sicilians.
In fact all subsequent Italian poets owed a debt to
Guittone: The sophisticated court of Frederick II
at Naples was a likely heir to the TROUBADOUR tradition, which flourished in the great courts of
southern France. But with a new audience of middle-class citizens of the great Italian cities, Guittone needed to fashion something new. He kept
the older forms of the troubadours, but needed to
turn away from the values of a landed aristocracy
to those of the municipal citizen. His poems extol
the virtues of personal energy, self-sufficiency,
ambition, merit and the earning of reward. His
lyric “Gioia ed allegranza,” for example, ends with
the lines
But to suffer, if he has to,
to gain by his own worth and manliness—
that is a man’s way.
And I have a right to say
that by great manliness
I have won something great which so
pleases me
that any other joy I have isn’t worth a fifth
of that which, for this reason, my heart
feels.
(Goldin 1973, 267, ll. 26–33)
In this love poem, the poet sees the achieving of
success in love, or any other matter, as dependent
on personal energy and hard work. It was this sort
of attitude that Dante saw as plebeian, and he
sought a new kind of exclusiveness in his own poetic movement, the DOLCE STIL NOVO, or “sweet
new style,” which ultimately replaced the Tuscan
school of poetry.
Guittone was a very prolific writer: 50 of his
canzoni are extant, along with some 251 sonnets
in addition to other poems. His reputation has
been dimmed by Dante’s judgment of him, but a
more objective view will admit his important contribution to poetry in the Italian vernacular.
Bibliography
Goldin, Frederick, trans. German and Italian Lyrics of
the Middle Ages: An Anthology and a History. New
York: Doubleday, 1973.
Moleta, Vincent. The Early Poetry of Guittone
d’Arezzo. London: Modern Humanities Research
Association, 1976.