Dante da Maiano
Encyclopedia
Dante da Maiano was a late thirteenth-century poet who composed mainly sonnet
s in Italian
and Occitan. He was an older contemporary of Dante Alighieri
and active in Florence
.
He may have been a Provençal- or Auvergnat-speaker from Maillane
(the birthplace of Frédéric Mistral
), but more probably he was from the Tuscan
village of Maiano
near Fiesole
. In 1882 Adolfo Borgognoni argued that he was an invention of Renaissance
philology
, but met with the opposition of F. Novati in 1883 and Giovanni Bertacchi in 1896. Bertacchi argued that Dante da Maiano was the same person as the Dante Magalante, son of ser Ugo da Maiano, who appears in a public record of 1301. At the time this Dante was living in San Benedetto
and was requested in mundualdum by a relative of his, Lapa, widow of Vanni di Chello Davizzi, to be her tutor. That a Dante da Maiano existed during the lifetime of Dante Alighieri and that he was capable of "tutoring" was thus established, but the identification with the poet could not be made certain. Santorre Debenedetti finally disproved Borgognoni's thesis in 1907. He discovered two Occitan sonnets ascribed to Dante da Maiano in a fifteenth-century Italian manuscript conserved in the Biblioteca Laurentiana, Florence.
Almost all Dante's extant work is preserved in the Giuntina (or "Junte"), a Florentine chansonnier
compiled in 1527 under the title Sonetti e canzoni di diversi avtori toscani in dieci libri raccolte by Filippo Giunti
. His total work is some forty-eight sonnet
s, five ballate
, two canzoni
, and a series of tenzoni
with Dante Alighieri. He was influenced by the troubadours (notably Bernart de Ventadorn
), the Sicilian School
and in particular Giacomo da Lentini
, the Tuscan School of Guittone d'Arezzo
, and the later dolce stil novo
, though he belongs to none of these. Rosanna Betarrini calls his work a "pastiche
" and Antonio Enzo Quaglio a silloge archeologica della produzione anteriore e contemporanea ("an archaeological collection of past and contemporary production").
Dante da Maiano wrote a sonnet in response to A ciascun' alma presa e gentil core, the first sonnet in Dante Alighieri's Vita nuova
. There was also a five-part exchange (probably preceding the Vita nuova) called the duol d'amore ("dolour of love"), in which Dante da Maiano wrote three pieces and Dante Alighieri responded to the first two. In a final two-part communication, Dante Alighieri wrote Savere e cortesia, ingegno ed arte to Dante da Maiano's Amor mi fa sì fedelmente amare. In all their correspondence, the elder Dante assumes an air of superiority towards his up and coming interlocutor, the future author of the Divine Comedy. Before Dante Alighieri's career had taken off, the elder Dante was for a time quite famous in Florence for his sonnet Provedi, saggio, ad esta visïone, in which he recounts a dream he had and asks his fellow citizens for an interpretation. Chiaro Davanzati
, Guido Orlandi, Salvino Doni, Ricco da Varlungo, Cino da Pistoja and Dante Alighieri, in what was to be his earliest still-extant poem, all responded. Dante da Maiano, along with Cino da Pistoja, also wrote a response to a sonnet (Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io) that Alighieri sent to his friend Guido Cavalcanti
.
According to later stories now generally accepted as only legend, Dante also kept up a correspondence with Nina of Sicily, the first Italian poetess, and with whom he fell in love. Their relationship became well-known and she grew in fame because of his writings so that she was called la Nina di Dante. She took up poetry, apparently, as a result of his influence.
Víctor Balaguer
published the Occitan sonnet Las! so qe m'es el cor plus fis e qars in 1879, where he also hypothesised for Dante a birthplace in Provence
. Despite these Occitan sonnets and Dante's more probable birthplace in Tuscany, Giulio Bertoni disqualifed Dante from being an "Italian troubadour" in his 1915 study. By one reckoning, Dante's Occitan sonnets are the earliest examples of what is undisputedly an Italian form, but the invention of which is usually assigned to Giacomo da Lentini.
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
s in Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
and Occitan. He was an older contemporary of Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
and active in Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
.
He may have been a Provençal- or Auvergnat-speaker from Maillane
Maillane
Maillane is a commune in the Bouches-du-Rhône department in southern France in the former province of Provence.-Geography:...
(the birthplace of Frédéric Mistral
Frédéric Mistral
Frédéric Mistral was a French writer and lexicographer of the Occitan language. Mistral won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1904 and was a founding member of Félibrige and a member of l'Académie de Marseille...
), but more probably he was from the Tuscan
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
village of Maiano
Maiano
Maiano is small hilltop locality, now part of Fiesole, in Tuscany.The Chiesa di San Martino was founded there in the eleventh century and subsequently restored in the fifteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. A palagio existed at Maiano in the Middle Ages, but in 1467 it was destroyed in a...
near Fiesole
Fiesole
Fiesole is a town and comune of the province of Florence in the Italian region of Tuscany, on a famously scenic height above Florence, 8 km NE of that city...
. In 1882 Adolfo Borgognoni argued that he was an invention of Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
, but met with the opposition of F. Novati in 1883 and Giovanni Bertacchi in 1896. Bertacchi argued that Dante da Maiano was the same person as the Dante Magalante, son of ser Ugo da Maiano, who appears in a public record of 1301. At the time this Dante was living in San Benedetto
San Benedetto
San Benedetto in Perillis is a town and comune in the province of L'Aquila, Abruzzo, central Italy. The town is situated 43 kilometers away from the regional capital, L'Aquila.-History:...
and was requested in mundualdum by a relative of his, Lapa, widow of Vanni di Chello Davizzi, to be her tutor. That a Dante da Maiano existed during the lifetime of Dante Alighieri and that he was capable of "tutoring" was thus established, but the identification with the poet could not be made certain. Santorre Debenedetti finally disproved Borgognoni's thesis in 1907. He discovered two Occitan sonnets ascribed to Dante da Maiano in a fifteenth-century Italian manuscript conserved in the Biblioteca Laurentiana, Florence.
Almost all Dante's extant work is preserved in the Giuntina (or "Junte"), a Florentine chansonnier
Chansonnier
A chansonnier is a manuscript or printed book which contains a collection of chansons, or polyphonic and monophonic settings of songs, hence literally "song-books," although some manuscripts are so called even though they preserve the text but not the music A chansonnier is a manuscript or...
compiled in 1527 under the title Sonetti e canzoni di diversi avtori toscani in dieci libri raccolte by Filippo Giunti
Filippo Giunti
The press of Filippo Giunti and Bernardo Giunti was a leading printing firm in Florence from the turn of the sixteenth century. The first of the Giunti presses was established in Venice by Luca Antonio Giunti the elder , a Florentine...
. His total work is some forty-eight sonnet
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
s, five ballate
Ballata
The ballata is an Italian poetic and musical form, which was in use from the late 13th to the 15th century. It has the musical structure AbbaA, with the first and last stanzas having the same texts. It is thus most similar to the French musical 'forme fixe' virelai...
, two canzoni
Canzone
Literally "song" in Italian, a canzone is an Italian or Provençal song or ballad. It is also used to describe a type of lyric which resembles a madrigal...
, and a series of tenzoni
Tenso
A tenso is a style of Occitan song favoured by the troubadours. It takes the form of a debate in which each voice defends a position on a topic relating to love or ethics. Closely related genres include the partimen and the cobla exchange...
with Dante Alighieri. He was influenced by the troubadours (notably Bernart de Ventadorn
Bernart de Ventadorn
Bernart de Ventadorn , also known as Bernard de Ventadour or Bernat del Ventadorn, was a prominent troubador of the classical age of troubadour poetry. Now thought of as "the Master Singer" he developed the cançons into a more formalized style which allowed for sudden turns...
), the Sicilian School
Sicilian School
The Sicilian School was a small community of Sicilian, and to a lesser extent, mainland Italian poets gathered around Frederick II, most of them belonging to his court, the Magna Curia. Headed by Giacomo da Lentini, they produced more than three-hundred poems of courtly love between 1230 and 1266,...
and in particular Giacomo da Lentini
Giacomo da Lentini
Giacomo da Lentini, also known as Giàcumu da Lintini and Jacopo Notaro, was an Italian poet of the 13th century. He was a senior poet of the Sicilian School and was a notary at the court of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II...
, the Tuscan School of Guittone d'Arezzo
Guittone d'Arezzo
Guittone d'Arezzo was a Tuscan poet and the founder of the Tuscan School. He was an acclaimed secular love poet before his conversion in the 1260s, when he became a religious poet. In 1256, he was exiled from Arezzo due to his Guelf sympathies....
, and the later dolce stil novo
Dolce Stil Novo
Dolce Stil Novo , or stilnovismo, is the name given to the most important literary movement of 13th century in Italy. Influenced by both Sicilian and Tuscan poetry, its main theme is Love . Gentilezza and Amore are indeed topoi in the major works of the period...
, though he belongs to none of these. Rosanna Betarrini calls his work a "pastiche
Pastiche
A pastiche is a literary or other artistic genre or technique that is a "hodge-podge" or imitation. The word is also a linguistic term used to describe an early stage in the development of a pidgin language.-Hodge-podge:...
" and Antonio Enzo Quaglio a silloge archeologica della produzione anteriore e contemporanea ("an archaeological collection of past and contemporary production").
Dante da Maiano wrote a sonnet in response to A ciascun' alma presa e gentil core, the first sonnet in Dante Alighieri's Vita nuova
Vita Nuova
Vita Nuova Holdings Ltd is a British company based in York that provides technology for embedded systems and distributed applications based upon the unique operating system Inferno. It also distributes the Plan 9 operating system....
. There was also a five-part exchange (probably preceding the Vita nuova) called the duol d'amore ("dolour of love"), in which Dante da Maiano wrote three pieces and Dante Alighieri responded to the first two. In a final two-part communication, Dante Alighieri wrote Savere e cortesia, ingegno ed arte to Dante da Maiano's Amor mi fa sì fedelmente amare. In all their correspondence, the elder Dante assumes an air of superiority towards his up and coming interlocutor, the future author of the Divine Comedy. Before Dante Alighieri's career had taken off, the elder Dante was for a time quite famous in Florence for his sonnet Provedi, saggio, ad esta visïone, in which he recounts a dream he had and asks his fellow citizens for an interpretation. Chiaro Davanzati
Chiaro Davanzati
Chiaro Davanzati was an Italian poet from Florence, one of the Siculo-Tuscan poets, who introduced the style of Sicilian School to the Tuscan School. He was one of the most prolific Italian authors before Dante: at least 122 sonnets and sixty-one canzoni by Chiaro are known, many of them in...
, Guido Orlandi, Salvino Doni, Ricco da Varlungo, Cino da Pistoja and Dante Alighieri, in what was to be his earliest still-extant poem, all responded. Dante da Maiano, along with Cino da Pistoja, also wrote a response to a sonnet (Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io) that Alighieri sent to his friend Guido Cavalcanti
Guido Cavalcanti
Guido Cavalcanti was a Florentine poet, as well as an intellectual influence on his best friend, Dante. His poems in their original Italian are available on Wikisource .-Historical background:...
.
According to later stories now generally accepted as only legend, Dante also kept up a correspondence with Nina of Sicily, the first Italian poetess, and with whom he fell in love. Their relationship became well-known and she grew in fame because of his writings so that she was called la Nina di Dante. She took up poetry, apparently, as a result of his influence.
Víctor Balaguer
Victor Balaguer
Víctor Balaguer , Catalan Spanish politician and author, was born at Barcelona on 11 December 1824, and was educated at the university of his native city....
published the Occitan sonnet Las! so qe m'es el cor plus fis e qars in 1879, where he also hypothesised for Dante a birthplace in Provence
Provence
Provence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...
. Despite these Occitan sonnets and Dante's more probable birthplace in Tuscany, Giulio Bertoni disqualifed Dante from being an "Italian troubadour" in his 1915 study. By one reckoning, Dante's Occitan sonnets are the earliest examples of what is undisputedly an Italian form, but the invention of which is usually assigned to Giacomo da Lentini.
Further reading
- Pierre BecPierre BecPierre Bec , is an Occitan poet and linguist. Born in Paris, 1921, he spent his childhood in Comminges, where he learnt Occitan. He was deported to Germany between 1943 and 1945. After returning, he studied in Paris, where he graduated in 1959...
, "Les deux sonnets occitans de Dante Da Maiano (XIIIe siècle)", Perspectives médiévales, Congrès Languedoc et langue d'oc. Colloque, Toulouse, 22 (1996), pp. 47–57. - Santorre Debenedetti, "Nuovi studí sulla Giuntina di rime antiche", Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 50 (1907).
- F. Montanari, "L'esperienza poetica di Dante fino alla Vita Nuova", Lettere italiane, 7:3 (1955:July/Sept.).
- Robin Kirkpatrick, "Dante's Beatrice and the Politics of Singularity", Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 32:1 (1990:Spring).
- Piero Cudini, "La tenzone tra Dante e Forese e la Commedia (Inf. XXX; Purg. XXIII–XXIV)", Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 159:505 (1982).
External links
- Dante Gabriel RossettiDante Gabriel RossettiDante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
, ed., Dante and His Circle: With the Italian Poets Preceding Him, (1100–1200–1300): A Collection of Lyrics (Roberts Brothers, 1887).
-
- Presents colourful English translations of Dante de Maiano's exchanges with Dante Alighieri (pp. 127–9).
- Víctor BalaguerVictor BalaguerVíctor Balaguer , Catalan Spanish politician and author, was born at Barcelona on 11 December 1824, and was educated at the university of his native city....
, Historia política y literaria de los trovadores (Impr. de Fortanet, 1879).
- Víctor Balaguer
- Spanish commentary and text of Las! so qe m'es el cor plus fis e qars (pp. 117–8).
- Dante da Maiano's correspondence with Dante Alighieri, with English translations:
- Presents colourful English translations of Dante de Maiano's exchanges with Dante Alighieri (pp. 127–9).