GUIDO CAVALCANTI. — Poet, true founder of the *dolce stil novo*, born in Florence c. 1255, son of Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, a nobleman and Guelph; he married Beatrice, daughter of Farinata degli Uberti, a nobleman and Ghibelline. Yet this political marriage did not inspire in him any desire for political peace. In 1280 he stood surety for Guelphs in the peace negotiated by the cardinal. In 1284 and 1290 he served on the city council; and in 1292, having just escaped an ambush set by Corso Donati, he went on pilgrimage to St James of Compostela, but did not proceed beyond Nîmes, and at Toulouse, in the church of La Daurade, a woman named Mandetta stirred his heart. Returning to Florence, though excluded from the popular government by the Ordinances of Justice of July 1295, he—himself a nobleman—took the side closest to the people, that of the Cerchi, and from 1296 to 1300 was a fiery opponent of the Donati faction, until, together with the leaders of both sides, he was sent into exile at Sarzana (24 June 1300). There he contracted malaria; recalled to Florence, he died there on 29 August of the same year, 1300. His *Rime* comprise about fifty compositions, including canzoni, ballate, and sonnets.
“He was, as a philosopher, a virtuous man in many respects, except that he was too tender and irascible,” says Villani; and contemporaries concur in depicting him as a man of high intellect and refined manners, yet proud and solitary; Boccaccio adds that he pursued speculation in the manner of the Epicureans; and one may believe with Nardi that his theory of love is tinged with Averroism, which in practice could lead to Epicureanism. For Cavalcanti, love is indeed a passion arising from the sensitive soul subject to the irresistible influence of Mars, not from the intellect, a separate substance “which enjoys only a life of reason, consisting in the contemplation of truth”; and when the passion of love becomes violent and consuming, so as to cloud the intellect, it brings about in man a death—moral death, consisting in the loss of the use and mastery of reason (Nardi). Yet more than for the subtle verses in which Cavalcanti investigates and analyses his states of love, he is celebrated as a poet for the verses in which he pours forth images of beauty and grace and abandonment to a most tender, trembling, and dreamy sentiment of love, full of sighs, tremors, and alarms almost like death.
