LIKENESS, BEWILDERMENT, AND SWEETNESS: THE ITALIAN PATHWAY TO LYRICAL SCIENCE

Abstract

Scholars have defined Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Michelangelo Buonarroti philosopher-poets, and yet, they have overlooked the implications of such articulation. In my dissertation, I clarify how these authors articulate philosophy and poetry into a single one discipline – a lyric science – devise its thinking tools, and urge us to consider love as the defining experience of human life, and the gateway to knowledge. The results of this experiment can be summarized in four key-terms which name the different chapters of my dissertation: likeness, bewilderment, sweetness, and excess. Chapter 1. “Irresistible likeness: Al cor gentil rimpaira sempre amor” is dedicated to Guinizzelli’s poetical manifesto, in which he challenges the primacy of logical argumentation by devising a mode of thinking based on resemblance, likeness. Chapter 2. “Bewildering love: Donna me prega” deals with Cavalcanti’s response to Guinizzelli’s manifesto, in which he devises a theory of bewilderment, an experience of love as destructive, disconnecting, and eventually mortal. However, Cavalcantian love also works positively, since it manifests the basic structures of human’s intellect. Chapter 3 “Unfinished praise: Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” analyzes how Dante lays out the ground work to connect Cavalcanti and Gunizzelli’s approaches into a comprehensive doctrine of love. Lightness and sweetness are Dante’s provisional solutions to transforms the deadly experience of love into a positive and salvific one, eventually lay the ground for his opus magnum, the Comedia. In chapter 4, I investigate the use of the term superchio (“excess”) in Michelangelo’s poetry in relationship to grace, love, and art. Over the course of the analysis two important traits of Michelangelo’s poetry emerge: the use of analogy to structure his verses, and the use of highly antithetical – if not contradictory – logic to express his key concepts concerning art, grace, and love.