CAVALCANTI, GUIDO. - Poet, true founder of the dolce stil novo, b. in Florence ca. 1255, son of Cavalcante de' C., noble and Guelph; he married Beatrice, daughter of Farinata degli Uberti, noble and Ghibelline. But the political marriage did not inspire in him any desire for political peace. In 1280 he was a guarantor for the Guelphs for the peace stipulated by Card. Latino; in 1284 and 1290 he sat on the Council of the commune; and in 1292, having barely escaped an ambush set for him by Corso Donati, he went on pilgrimage to St. James of Compostela; but he did not go beyond Nîmes, and at Toulouse, in the church of the Daurade, a woman, Mandetta, stirred his heart. Returned to Florence, although excluded from the popular government by the ordinances of justice of July 1295, he took his stand, noble though he was, on the side that came closest to the people, that of the Cerchi, and from 1296 to 1300 he was a fiery opponent of the Donati faction, until, together with the leaders of the two factions, he was sent into confinement at Sarzana (June 24, 1300). There he contracted malaria; recalled to his homeland, he died there on Aug. 29 of the same year 1300. His Rime comprise ca. 50 compositions, among canzoni, ballate and sonnets.
« He was, as a philosopher, a man virtuous in many things, except that he was too tender and irascible » says Villani; and of lofty genius and graceful manners, but disdainful and solitary, the contemporaries unanimously depict him; Boccaccio adds that he went speculating in the manner of the Epicureans; and it is to be believed, with Nardi, that his theory of love is tinged with Averroism, which, in practice, could lead to Epicureanism. For C., love is, in fact, a passion that comes from the sensitive soul subject to the irresistible influence of Mars and not from the intellect, a separate substance, which "enjoys solely a life of reason, which consists in the contemplation of the true"; and when the passion of love becomes violent and consuming to the point of clouding the intellect, it generates in man death, the moral death, which consists in the loss of the use and dominion of reason (Nardi). But more than for the subtle verses in which C. investigates and analyzes his states of love, he is to be exalted 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 feeling of love, full of sighs, tremors and fears almost of death.
Bibliography8 works
Alberto Chiari