Italian literature: Encyclopedia II - Italian literature - The Spontaneous Development of Italian Literature

Italian literature - The Spontaneous Development of Italian Literature

In the year 1282, the year in which the new Florentine constitution of the Arti minori was completed, a period of literature New began that does not belong to the age of first Tuscan begin nings, but to that of development. With the school School of Lapo Gianni, of Guido Cavalcanti, of Cino da of lysic Pistoia and Dante Alighieri, lyric poetry became exclusively Tuscan. The whole novelty and poetic power of this school, which really was the beginning of Italian art, consist in what Dante expresses so happily Quando Amore spira, noto, ed a quel niodo Ch ei detta dentro, vo significando that is to say, in a power of expressing the feelings of the soul in the way in which love inspires them, in an appropriate and graceful manner, fitting form to matter, and by art fusing one with the other. The Tuscan lyric poetry, the first true Italian art, is pre-eminent in this artistic fusion, in the spontaneous and at the same time deliberate action of the mind. In Lapo Gianni the new style is not free from some admixture of the old associations of the Siculo-Provencal school. He wavered as it were between two manners. The empty and involved phraseology of the Sicilians is absent, but the poet does not always rid himself of their influence. Sometimes, however, he draws freely from his own heart, and then the subtleties and obscurities disappear, and his verse becomes clear, flowing and elegant.

Guido Cavalcanti was already a good deal out of sympathy with the medieval spirit; he reflected deeply on his own work, and from this reflection he derived his poetical conception. His poems may be divided into two classes: those which portray the philosopher, il sottilissimo dialettico, as Lorenzo the Magnificent called him, and those which are more directly the product of his poetic nature imbued with mysticism and metaphysics. To the first set belongs the famous poem Sulla natura d'amore, which in fact is a treatise on amorous metaphysics, and was annotated later in a learned way by the most renowned Platonic philosophers of the 15th century, such as Marsilius Ficinus and others. In other poems of Cavalcanti's there is a tendency to subtilize and stifle poetic imagery under a dead weight of philosophy. On the other hand, in his Ballate, he pours himself out ingenuously and without affectation, but with an invariable and profound consciousness of his art. The greatest of these considered to be the ballata composed by Cavalcanti when he was banished from Florence with the party of the Bianchi in 1300, and took refuge at Sarzana.

The third poet among the followers of the new school was Cino da Pistoia, of the family of the Sinibuldi. His love poems are sweet, mellow and musical, surpassed only by Dante.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Spontaneous Development of Italian Literature", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki