JACOPONE da TODI. - Franciscan mystic and poet, born in Todi c. 1230, died at Collazzone on 25 Dec. 1306. He studied law at Bologna, practiced as a procurator in his native city, and towards the end of a dissolute youth married Vanna, daughter of the Counts of Coldimezzo, who, it is said, died during a feast after a floor collapsed. Stricken to the heart, Jacopone abandoned the world and from 1268 to 1278 lived as a wandering penitent in extreme, feral austerity. It is perhaps to this decade that belong the laude marked by the highest asceticism, by a self-hatred carried to the point of invoking every kind of contempt and suffering, including madness. In 1278 he entered the Franciscan Order as a lay brother, meditated the mysticism of St. Bonaventure, and sang of enamored poverty and the ascending degrees of holy nothingness (1278–88). But, of an extremist temperament intolerant of any mitigation of the rule, he fell in with the most ardent dissidents, the followers of Angelo Clareno, who were protected by Celestine V. In 1294 at Palestrina he joined the Colonna faction against Boniface VIII; in 1297 he signed with the rebels the refusal to appear before the Pope and was excommunicated with them. During this period (1288–97) he hurled violent satires against the relaxed Franciscans, worldly prelates, and Boniface VIII, satires that betray an undisciplined heretical spirit even if they are not doctrinally heretical.
Imprisoned with the others after the fall of Palestrina, Jacopone, who joyfully accepted prison as the supreme poverty, sent rhymes of repentance to Boniface VIII begging him to lift the excommunication, but this was only achieved by the latter’s successor, Benedict XI, at the end of 1303. Perhaps in his last three years, the tempestuous mystic, subdued by suffering, sang more loftily of the rapture of divine love. Jacopone is sometimes given the title of “blessed,” but his cult has not been officially recognized by the Church.
He composed about 110 laude (Chantilly codex) and the Stabat Mater in Latin. Two lines stand out in his mysticism and poetry: holy nothingness and mad love; the one arises from self-knowledge, the other from the study of Christ; from the first come doctrinal laude, from the second mystical ones, not without mutual influence, especially where the “glorious nothingness” reaches union with God. Jacopone excels in poems to the Madonna. The Stabat Mater liturgically interprets the Virgin’s martyrdom on Calvary; the magnificent lauda Donna del Paradiso breaks off abruptly in a popular and dramatic manner, presenting in outline the entire Crucifixion. With an originality surpassing that of his contemporaries, he dramatizes in other laude the contrast between soul and body, between the living and the dead, between fleeting pleasure and eternal damnation; he evokes the horror of burial and the terror of Judgment. Ardently realistic in his pessimism about mankind, he lashes out with ridicule at feminine vanity, the hypocrisies and ambitions of bigots, and savagely satirizes Boniface VIII. And it is the same poet who ineffably sings of the Nativity. An exceptional penitent, tempered by culture into a great lyric poet, he wrote only for the glory of God and the salvation of his neighbor, avoiding, out of humility, the pursuit of artistic effect, and giving himself over to a vein that is now crystalline, now turbid and torrential, using the popular form of the ballad with varied and always musical rhythms. Inasmuch as he expresses (even if paradoxically) the soul’s journey to God, Jacopone is not only a representative of the Middle Ages but the poet of asceticism and Christian mysticism of all time, the poet who has brought into focus the folly of divine love and the incredulity of a woman.
**JACOPONE da TODI** – Idealized portrait of Jacopone da T. (1596), painted on his tomb – Todi, church of S. Fortunato.