Dante da Maiano was a late thirteenth-century poet who composed mainlysonnets inItalian andOccitan. He was an older contemporary ofDante Alighieri and active inFlorence.
He may have been aProvençal- orAuvergnat-speaker fromMaillane (the birthplace ofFrédéric Mistral), but more probably he was from theTuscan village ofMaiano nearFiesole. In 1882 Adolfo Borgognoni argued that he was an invention ofRenaissancephilology, 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 inthe monastery of San Benedetto in Alpe and was requestedin 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.[1] He discovered twoOccitan sonnets ascribed to Dante da Maiano in a fifteenth-century Italian manuscript conserved in theBiblioteca Laurentiana, Florence.[2]
Almost all Dante's extant work is preserved in theGiuntina (or "Junte"), a Florentinechansonnier compiled in 1527 under the titleSonetti e canzoni di diversi avtori toscani in dieci libri raccolte byFilippo Giunti.[3] His total work is some forty-eightsonnets, fiveballate, twocanzoni, and a series oftenzoni with Dante Alighieri.[1] He was influenced by thetroubadours (notablyBernart de Ventadorn), theSicilian School and in particularGiacomo da Lentini, theTuscan School ofGuittone d'Arezzo, and the laterdolce stil novo, though he belongs to none of these. Rosanna Betarrini calls his work a "pastiche" and Antonio Enzo Quaglio asilloge archeologica della produzione anteriore e contemporanea ("an archaeological collection of past and contemporary production").[4]
Dante da Maiano wrote a sonnet in response toA ciascun' alma presa e gentil core, the first sonnet in Dante Alighieri'sVita nuova.[5] There was also a five-part exchange (probably preceding theVita nuova) called theduol d'amore ("dolour of love"), in which Dante da Maiano wrote three pieces and Dante Alighieri responded to the first two.[6] In a final two-part communication, Dante Alighieri wroteSavere e cortesia, ingegno ed arte to Dante da Maiano'sAmor 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 theDivine Comedy.[7] Before Dante Alighieri's career had taken off, the elder Dante was for a time quite famous in Florence for his sonnetProvedi, 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.[1] 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 friendGuido Cavalcanti.
According to later stories now generally considered only legend, Dante also kept up a correspondence withNina of Sicily,[8] the first Italian woman poet, and with whom he fell in love. Their relationship became well-known and she grew in fame because of his writings so she was calledla Nina di Dante. She took up poetry, apparently, as a result of his influence.
Víctor Balaguer published the Occitan sonnetLas! so qe m'es el cor plus fis e qars in 1879, where he also hypothesised for Dante a birthplace inProvence. Despite these Occitan sonnets and Dante's more probable birthplace in Tuscany, Giulio Bertoni disqualified Dante from being an "Italian troubadour" in his 1915 study.[9] 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.[10]
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