Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 11.djvu/32

* ITALIAN LITEBATURE. 20 ITALIAN LITERATURE. Among the renderings from Latin iigurcd the aioric (Je Troia c de IComa, made, seemingly, soon after 1250, the moral distielis of Cato, the J'amijliiltis dc Amorc, the Tratlati morali of Al- bertano da lirescia (two Tuscan versions, 12US find 1275), and the various treatises attributed to the diligent translator Bono Giamboni. These all may belong to the time before 1300. The -Esopic fables were also soon translated and became very popular. Original works in prose began to ap- jiear later. All may belong to this time. Note- vorthy among them were the letters of (iuittone d'Arezzo (1220-!)4), which display an unmistak- able attempt to create a sort of poetical prose in Italian; the didactic works of Guidotto da Bolo- gna (before 12G0), of Tommaso Gozzadini (sec- ond half of the thirteenth century), of Ristoro d'Arezzo (1282), and cspeciallj- the Introduzione alia virtu of Bono Giamboni (second half of the thirteenth century) ; certain chronicles and his- torical accounts; and, most interesting of all, tcrtain collections of tales. Already in the thir- teenth century professional tellers of tales ( faro- latori, novcllatori) wandered about Northern and Central Italy relating stories derived from all possible sources. Written collections of their tales, or of similar ones, were the Conti di anticlii cavallicri (second half of the thirteenth century), consisting at least in part of rather free versions of matter originally French and Latin, and the yovclliiio, worked o^er in many versions even be- fore the cud of the thirteenth century, and dis- ])laying no little skill in the art of story-telling, which Bfx'caccio was to develop to the fullest be- fore another century had ])assed. Having considered Italian literature in its lisp- ing, almost wholly imitative childhood, we now approach the period of Italian letters, when the great Tuscans, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, made their native dialect the predominant one of the Peninsula. The earliest of the three. Dante, stood at the height of a poetic movement which he himself styled the dolce stil nuovo, and which develo])ed the principles already enunciated and illustrated by Guido Guinizelli and the Tuscan and Bolognese poets of the transition period. The idealizing of woman, brought about partly by the rise of the worship of the Virgin in the twelfth century and i)artly a natural conse- quence of the development of a philosophy of love and its origin, formed the subject matter of the verse of the dolcc alii viioro poets. Among these ■were Dante, his friend Guido Cavalcanti ((•.1250- 1.300), Lapo Gianni (died after 132S). Dino Fres- cobaldi (died 1313), Gianni Alfani (still alive in 1310), Cino Sigisbuldi of Pistoia (died c.1.337). and a ntimber of younger men whose verse forms a link between the lyric methods of Dante and those of Petrarch. During the activity of Dante and the dolce stil nuovo poets there were some poets of a humorous and sarcastic turn of mind, like Cerco. irioIieri (still living in 1310) and Folgore di San Gimignano( flourished c. 1315) , and others of didactic and allegorizing tendencies, like the unknown authors of the Fiore — an imi- tation of the Roman de In Rose and possibly the work of Ser Durante (c.l300)^and of the Intelliqcnza (a work descriptive of Intelligence as a personifieation of universal knowledse, which was erroneoiisly attributed to the Florentine chronicler Dino Compacrni), and like Francesco da Barberino (1264-1348), who composed the Documcnti d'amore and a treatise on etiquette entitled Dtl ni/yiiiuiilo e dci cosluiiii di donna. The allegorical nielliods of the Fiure and the lnluUiiji)i:a, and of Francesco da Barberino's poems, are present likewi.se in the Diiiiia Com- media of Dante, who most brilliantly elaborates them. Dante Alighieri (q.v. ), who was born in 1265 and died in 1321. probably produced most of his work in the fourteenth century; the ]'ita Suova alone seems to belong to the thirteenth century. This latter is a poetical account of the rise and growth of his love for Beatrice, set in an explanatory framework of prose. His abiding fame and t.eellence must be liased on his Diiiiia Vommediu, a magnificent vision in which the poet pictures himself as guided first by iiis master Vergil through Hell, the realm of the damned, and Purgatory, the mount of temporary suffering where sin is purged from the soul, and as led afterwards by his idealized love Beatrice through the spheres of Paradise, where dwell the eternally blessed. The Divina Commedia is the most glorious production of the Middle Ages, of which it is the fullest artistic expression. The vision, a fomi often xised before Dante's time, l)ut with nothing like his skill ; the allegory, a vivid por- trayal of luuidreds of men and women, and an endeavor to epitomize all human knowledge as scholastic philosophy comijrehended it : frequent lyric outbursts; and, most striking of all, an auto- biograjihy, ever'vhero present and always grand- ly — these are the chief inner characteristics of the poem, which in its outer form displays an admirable metrical structure, depciuling jnin- cipally upon the use of the ter:a rima and the hendecasyllaliic verse. Another work of Dante's in the vulgar speech, which he now for all time made the norm of Italian, and one espe- cially interesting for his conception of philosophy, is the Conviiio (or Convito). a fragment in which the prose commentary and the verse text are intended to present to men a feast of reason. Some more or less doubtful short poems in Ital- ian and certain works in Latin constitute the rest of his literary endeavors. A rival of Dante, Francesco Stabili, known as Cecco d'Ascoli (1257- 1327), who was finally burned as a heretic, wrote the Acerba, a didactic poem in which he sought to sum up all matters of scientific interest, and to heap ridicule upon Dante's splendid creations of fancy. Still another noteworthy represen- tative of the allegorical poetic movement, now declining, was Jacopo Alighieri (died probably during the plague of 1348), Dante's son. and the author of the Dottrinale. A number of political ballads, and of laxtdi that show a continued de- velopment of the dramatic form, are to be counted as part of the verse output of the fourteenth cen- tury. In so far as prose is concerned, transla- tions from Latin and French still constituted the more important part of that produced during this first period of Tuscan supremacy, as it had done in the earlier periods of the literature. Bar- tolomeo da San C'oncordio (1202-1347) and Filip- po f'effi were prominent among the translators of Latin works. Many of the translations re- main anonymous — as. for example, the various versions of the .^sopic fables, and of many leg- onds of the saints, and the translation from the French known as the hihro di Fioravante. Di- dactic compilations and treatises are frequent enough at this time, many of them being due