Travelogue 1228 – 30 December

A Ciascun’Alma 

Dante is quirky. The use to which he puts poetry is something unique. I was young when I read the “Vita Nuova”, and that is appropriate. The book is a collection of poems by a young man, a self-conscious genius, dangerous to himself, and perhaps to others. He desired to braid a story thread, upon which to string a set of poems, the works that had made his reputation. It was a story to make sense of a decade of his life, the shape of which might have left him uneasy, a period of his life he felt should be interpreted for the public. And he sculpted a story of unrequited love and the death of his beloved, of great chivalry and mystery and romance. He gave it coherence and appeal. He gave himself a mission.

Florentine society was a public one. There was essentially no private life. Someone like Dante would have accrued a set of unedited public stories that dogged him from youth, like fragmented scenes that everyone had seen, that no director had moulded into a play. At best, they contributed to various unflattering portraits that gossips traded in the marketplace. Dante wanted to be the director of an epic film, rather than stock character in a commonplace farce.

The first poem in the book is a sonnet. He wrote it when he was about 18. It was a poem he circulated among his peers, among other poets, inviting their responses. 

A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core
Nel cui cospetto ven lo dir presente,
In ciò che mi rescrivan suo parvente
Salute in lor segnor, cioè Amore.

Greetings in the name of Love, he says, to any who may see these words. He tells the story of a dream. It is three in the morning, and he sees Love walking with his, the poet’s, heart in one hand and Beatrice attending him on the other. He cheerfully bade her eat Dante’s heart. She did, and Amore left, weeping.

Dream literature is not too unusual in medieval culture, but now, recorded in a sonnet, an ornate form still new, evolved from the troubadours’ songs of devotion, and sent around for comment among the young poets of Florence, this was provocative and odd.

“To this sonnet I received many answers, conveying many different opinions; of the which one was sent by him whom I now call the first among my friends [Guido Cavalcanti], and it began thus, ‘Unto my thinking thou beheld'st all worth.’ And indeed, it was when he learned that I was he who had sent those rhymes to him, that our friendship commenced.” This is from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation in the nineteenth century.

A friendly rival, Dante da Maiano, ridiculed him, writing back in his own sonnet response that it sounded as though Dante ought to consult a doctor and have his testicles washed. This anecdote did not make it into the “Vita Nuova”.

But this is how he started. Dante’s work was always personal. He made the general particular. The god Amore took a vivid interest in him. And any description of Hell ought to be eyewitness.

Travelogue 1227 – 27 December
Cold Holiday

It’s been a cold Christmas. There is a thin layer of ice on the canal behind our building, though there is none on the rivers. The waters still dance on the River Schie, under the busy bridges, and the gulls and ducks bathe there, as though it were summer.

The skies are clear, a bright and untroubled blue, like desert skies, like polar skies, perfect as stone, though scarred by the trails of planes. The air they provide us is sharp to the taste, crisp. I cross the bridge with a gaze held up in wonder.

The streets of the city are holiday calm, a relief. I cycle through the cold, grateful for the subdued traffic. There are others. They are bundled up against the chill. They lumber along like bears on their delicate bikes, in heavy coats and hats. They hold the handlebars with gloves. And they pedal less as though they have somewhere to go and more as though they are curious or lost. They might never arrive, though they have left early.

Passing over the river again, I travel down the road made of bricks. The trees have done their work, spreading roots underneath the layer of human work, and rippling the surface, making the bricks buckle and testing the tires of the bicycles that pass there. The bike rattles. I navigate the wrinkled map of the road, as I have done a hundred times before. There is no hurry.

Travelogue 1226 – 25 December

Next Came Padre Mio

And then came Guido Guinizelli, Bolognese poet of the mid-thirteenth century, probably born about a decade before the death of Giacomo da Lentini, and a decade after the birth of Dante. Guinizelli never met the great Florentine, Dante Alighieri, in life, but they met in Purgatory. 

Dante was passing through the seventh terrace of Purgatory, where lust is punished, Someone volunteered to explain to him what he was seeing, and when Dante discovered the name of that soul was Guido Guinizelli,

 

quand’io odo nomar sé stesso il padre
mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai
rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre;

 

he is humbled and grateful. He called him his father, and father to all those who wrote in the dolce stil novo.

 

But what was the substance of this “sweet, new style” that Dante celebrated? It was beautiful language, of course, but it was more. Consider Giacomo’s lovely sonnet, “Molti amadori la lor malatia,” and the case he built for the patient’s diagnosis. This penchant for constructing logical argument continues in Italian poetry. It appeals to examples from nature, to primitive scientific observation, and to philosophy.

 

Consider the beginning of this canzone by Guinizelli, one of the most famous poems of the era,

 

Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore,
com’ a la selva augello in la verdura,
nè fe’ amore avanti gentil core,
nè gentil core avanti amor natura;
ch’ adesso che fue il sole
sì tosto lo splendore fue lucente,
nè fue avanti il sole;

In two lines, he compares love retreating into the heart to a bird retreating into the woods. And then he spends five lines exploring a rather fine distinction. Neither does love come before the heart, he says, nor the heart before love; just as light does not precede the sun, nor the sun precede light.

 

It is in precise constructions like this that the roots of our sonnet spread. Poets compare and contrast; they offer definitions and delicate analyses. And these, in turn, define the poet. This makes the sonnet the poetic form of the Renaissance and Age of Science. Michelangelo wrote sonnets, as did Galileo.

Travelogue 1225 – 20 December 

The First Ever?

There might be a contender for first sonnet ever written, or at least, earliest surviving sonnet. It’s written by Giacomo da Lentini somewhere near eight hundred years ago. What survives of Giacomo the Notary’s sonnets escape from their own time only thanks to Tuscan collectors, and they survive only in Tuscan translation. None have arrived in the original Sicilian dialect.

No one from our time would dare speculate about which of Giacomo’s sonnets came first. It takes the optimism of an American writing in the 1920s, indulging in some Victorian romanticism, to think this way. Good for him. It’s fun.

To be fair, Mr Wilkins of Southern Methodist University admits in his short article that it can be little more than guesswork. He applies himself transparently. There were only 25 surviving sonnets. Some are parts of sonnet cycles, so we can eliminate many based on sequence. Some apply rhyme schemes that can be deduced to be later experiments. Some show other characteristics that seem experimental, like equivocal and internal rhymes (though I wonder how he applies this analysis when all poems have been translated into Tuscan). He thinks it unlikely that the first sonnet would be anything too sophisticated or philosophical. It has to be a love poem, since the roots of the form are the songs of troubadours. Of the two sonnets that have not been eliminated, one is already complaining about his lady’s response to him. The final one must be the best candidate.

“Molti amadori la lor malatia,” Giacomo writes, “portano in core….” Many lovers carry their sickness in their hearts, he says. The sickness, or “distress” according to the translation Mr Wilkins has quoted, is, of course, love or the effect of love. The sonnet must be a story of love: this is thirteenth-century Sicilian poetry, written for the court, based on Occitan tradition. So, yes, the topic is amore. And who becomes impatient with that? Who questions the Renaissance painters this way? “Oh, Leonardo, not another ‘Last Supper’?”

The little story inside the sonnet is that the narrator is helpless to hide his love. Amore has made him powerless. He is paralysed. That is the effect of the malatia, the distress of being in love. He can:

nè di meve non ò neiente a fare,

Se non quanto madonna mia voria,

ch’ella mi pote morte e vita dare.

 

He can neither move nor do anything, unless his beloved wills it, she who holds the power of life or death.

 

As we know, the argumentation must change in the final sestet. The octave describes the symptoms of his malatia, and now we must review the result. In the volta, he tells us, “Su’ è lo core, e suo sono tutto quanto.” His heart is hers; everything of him is hers. He continues:

 

e chi non à comsiglio da suo core,

non vive imfra la gente como deve.

 

And he who has lost the counsel of his won heart cannot live in society as he should. It’s like a doctor’s summation of a patient’s case.

 

Lovely stuff. And it is precisely that clinical, analytical nature of the narrative that becomes a part of the code of the sonnet, and ties this form so closely to the development of the Renaissance.

Travelogue 1224 – 13 December
The Notary

We can actually trace the birth of the sonnet back to one person in one time in one familiar place, in Sicily. In those days, Sicily was not yet a subject of Spanish royalty. Spain was not even Spanish yet. It was the thirteenth century, and Spain was a collection of smaller kingdoms, one being Muslim. Sicily had passed from Norman rule to German. It was the fiefdom of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who had been born in Italy and raised in Palermo. The Normans before him had unified Sicily and made the kingdom one of Europe’s wealthiest. Frederick was a product of Norman marriages into great European families, and he himself was one of those rulers who popped up in European history, a nexus of all the intermarrying, suddenly in possession of vast swaths of Europe.

There was a notary in the court in Palermo named Giacomo da Lentini, the guiding spirit among a group of active poets, favourites of the emperor, a royal who himself dabbled in poetry. Giacomo wrote many “songs” of the traditional variety, including the eight-line strambotto, a sweet series of rhyming couplets that was usually accompanied by the lute. It was best suited to witty messages of love or satire.

Giacomo the notary also experimented with other forms. He tried adding a turn of six more lines onto the strambotto, with a different rhyme scheme and a different the pace. The resulting “turn” between the two sections, the volta, suggested all sorts of possibilities. The second section could be a new perspective, a change of topic, or even an answer to the question posed in the first lines. This little song, the “sonnet”, became the form most suited to the age, a form that poets turned to for centuries as the most refined vehicle for their most delicate feelings. Some say the sonnet was the very voice of the Renaissance. Some have suggested that the form was indeed a kind of catalyst for the Renaissance.

Maybe half a century after Giacomo had died, Dante spotted the poet Bonagiunta Orbicciani in Purgatory. Bonagiunta had also been a notary, and he had lived in Lucca. He had bridged the generations between Giacomo and Dante. He also bridged the cultures, Sicilian to Tuscan, writing poetry in Tuscan dialect, inspired by the Sicilian styles. Bonagiunta spoke to him:

 

“O frate issa vegg’io,” diss’elli, “il nodo

che ’l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne

di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’i’ odo!”

 

With regret, he sees how they had fallen short of the “Sweet New Style” that Dante propounded, that Dante’s generation, after Guido Guinizelli’s model, had perfected. Bonagiunta lists himself and the Notary and Guittone d’Arezzo as those who had failed to reach Dante’s heights. But, of course, that Bonagiunta has a cameo in the “Purgatorio” at all suggests that Dante knew what he owed to the Notary and his other thirteenth-century antecedents.

Travelogue 1223 – 8 December
Father Figures

So here we have the strange heritage of Vittoria, of savagery and refinement: Pompeo, her cousin, leading troops into the Vatican in thirsty vengeance, and then returning to a palace to eat figs and write delicate poetry; her husband, her “bel sole”, Fernando, a vicious man in combat, bloodthirsty and self-serving.

Her father, Fabrizio, was a famous condottiero in his own right, fighting against the French of his day for the Spanish and for the pope. The French king then was Louis XII, and the issue was, again and still, the French king’s right to the throne of Naples. Louis was a bit more successful than his successor. He did manage to obtain the crown, though he only held it for three years. He traded it away in 1504, when the pressure from the Spanish became too much.

Fabrizio was such a famed warrior in his day that he was appropriated by Machiavelli to be a character in his book, “The Art of War”. The book takes the form of a dialog, in good Renaissance form, and Fabrizio is more or less the tutorial spirit in that dialog, lecturing the others on ancient Roman discipline and strategy. In one sense, the dialog was an extension of the humanist hunger for all things ancient; in another, it was a concession to the modern spirit, in which large nations states would deploy large, standing armies and bring to heel the small feudal and mercantile states. Not for much longer would suffice the plucky bands of knights, citizens or mercenaries that skirmished through the Middle Ages.

In a similar way, cultural production was being regimented, lined up in neat rows of well-regulated formats, and the Italians were marking the boundaries. By the end of the fifteenth century, literary forms were firmly decided. By the end of the next century, musical ones would be. In Vittoria’s case, the forms for poetry were well-established; as evidenced by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s tract on the sonnet, her favoured format was already much the fashion by the time of her birth. The nobility were fluent in sonnet structure, as though in a courtly language, specifically in the Petrarchan sonnet structure. Petrarch was their guiding light.

Called the father of the Renaissance, Petrarch did not originate the sonnet, or even the structure that took his name. That was settled upon some time in the mid-thirteenth century. But Petrarch, writing in the fourteenth century, devoted such passion to the project that would become his Canzoniere, his “song book”, composed largely in sonnets, that it became the model of love poetry for hundreds of years. Certainly, in the early sixteenth century, the Petrarchan form was undisputed pinnacle.

Travelogue 1222 – 1 December
Condotta

Pompeo Colonna’s service as condottiero in the service of the Spanish Neapolitans and the Holy Roman Emperor was not done. He participated in the great sack of Rome in 1527, though his military role was a minor one, and though he seemed most concerned with harbouring cardinals and nuns who otherwise would have been in harm’s way. He assumed some degree of control over the Vatican and the Borgo during the darkest days of the occupation, but it seems hard to determine what, if any, control anyone really had in the anarchic conditions. Eventually, he left, as many others did, when plague threatened in June of 1528.

Of course, Pompeo was not a condottiero in the classic sense of the early Renaissance, when free-wheeling generals led their mercenary troops from conflict to conflict, with the only allegiance being to their condotte, their contracts. They played the delicate balance of power among small city-states with little regard for patriotism or loyalty.

But now the field was too crowded with grand armies of grand nation states for the old-fashioned adventurers to thrive. Italy had become a small pond, and the stakes were too high for the small fish. Pompeo never really wavered in his loyalty to the Spanish.

He was rewarded for his service. He became, by order of Charles V, the Lieutenant General of the Kingdom of Naples, and later the Viceroy. And he was ever attentive to the needs of the emperor. In 1532, Charles V was obliged to raise troops to defend Vienna from the Turks. Pompeo

And in Naples, he spent time with his cousin Vittoria. He was not all blood and glory. He was a courtier, and a sophisticate. He held his own in the company of his peers, attending parties and writing poetry. He dedicated one to his cousin, who was becoming famous around Italy for her poetry. It was called De Laudibus Mulierum, “In Praise of Women”. The topic was a minor fashion of the time, and perfectly suited to honour Vittoria. Unfortunately, the poem does not seem to have survived.