Amicus eius : Dante and the Semantics of Friendship - Johns ...

Amicus eius : Dante and the Semantics of Friendship
   Teodolinda Barolini

   Dante Studies, Volume 133, 2015, pp. 46-69 (Article)

   Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/das.2015.0006

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/605110

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

Amicus eius: Dante and the
            Semantics of Friendship
                        Teodolinda Barolini

D           ante’s writing bears witness to the importance of friendship in
            his poetry and in his life and testifies to a semantics of friend-
            ship that he developed over many years. This essay moves from
Dante’s earliest lyric poetry to the Commedia, tracking the word amico
and using its itinerary through Dante’s works to reconstruct the poet’s
thoughts and feelings on amicitia. In my commentary on Dante’s youthful
lyrics I approached friendship through two lenses: that of the sociology
of the brigata, through which Dante’s poems can give us limited but still
precious access to distant interactions between long-ago friends, and that
of the semantics of friendship.1 In this essay I elaborate the latter into a
coherent category of analysis for Dante’s thinking on friendship (and with
possible implications for other poets whose work is discussed here: Guit-
tone d’Arezzo, Dante da Maiano, Guido Cavalcanti). The starting-point
for this study was the realization that it is difficult to gloss with accuracy
Dante’s use of the word amico, a word that is apparently straightforward but
that is in fact deeply inflected by the conventions of Duecento Florentine
society and by Dante’s own idiosyncratic practice.2 By no means a survey
of all Dante’s references to friendship or an attempt to write the Dante
chapter in a history of friendship, this essay identifies rhetorical tropes
that became staples of the poet’s evocation of friendship through time,
and endeavors through analysis of these perduring tropes to illuminate
Dantean amicitia.3
   The word amico itself—the ways in which Dante employs it over time,
either featuring it or staying away from it—is key to telling this story. If
we consult the Tesoro della lingua italiana delle origini (TLIO) we see that the

              Vol. 133:46–69 © 2015 Dante Society of America

Amicus eius Barolini

primary form of amico is that of a noun, meaning “a man who is bound
to one or more persons by affection, solidarity, and esteem” (“chi è legato
a una o più persone da un rapporto di affetto, solidarietà e stima”), and
that the word is somewhat semantically unstable, requiring qualification
to achieve its significance. Hence the entry amico in the online vocabolario
offers the following subcategories: 1.1 Amico antico, 1.2 Amico carnale,
1.3 Amico falso, 1.4 Amico intimo, 1.5 Amico perfetto, 1.6 Amico singolare,
1.7 Amico speciale, 1.8 Amico stretto, 1.9 Amico di ventura, 1.10 Amico vero/
verace, and 1.11 (“in formule allocutive”) Bell’amico, bel dolce amico.4 In
such a loose semantic context, one of Dante’s achievements is to have
created, in the Commedia, a linguistic and semantic environment in which
the word amico can be employed to his satisfaction without being paired
with an adjective.Thus, in Purgatorio 22, in the verse “e come amico omai
meco ragiona” (21), to which we will return at the end of this essay, we
find amico able to signify fully and unequivocally without the support of
an adjectival qualifier.
   The rich prose of the Vita Nuova and the Convivio is invoked in TLIO
to illustrate various nuances of the noun amico. Similarly, Emilio Pasqui-
ni’s essay “Amico” in the Enciclopedia Dantesca is particularly valuable on
the Convivio, a treatise in which the critic finds “i minuti supporti di un
trattatello ‘de amicitia.’ ”5 Less attention is paid to Dante’s verse, in the
case of Dante’s early lyrics most likely because usage is less a lexical than
a contextual variable: meaning is highly dependent on context. The only
Dantean verses cited to illustrate amico in the online dictionary are two
from the Commedia (“l’amico mio, e non de la ventura” [Inf. 2.61] and
“fuor de la braccia del suo dolce amico” [Purg. 9.3]), and one from an
early sonnet: the adjectival use of “amica” in “emagina l’amica openïone”
comes from Savete giudicar vostra ragione, a sonnet that Dante Alighieri
wrote to the poet Dante da Maiano, whose opinion is here defined as
that of a “friend.”
   Savete giudicar is Dante Alighieri’s reply to Dante da Maiano’s rid-
dle-sonnet Provedi, saggio, ad esta visïone. It was written in the early 1280s,
when both Dantes were very young and very much under the sway of
the poetic conventions associated with Guittone d’Arezzo. In his invi-
tation to fellow poets to decipher his dream vision, Dante da Maiano
uses both saggio and amico as forms of address. He brandishes saggio in the
incipit, and turns to amico to mark the shift from octave to sestet: “Allor
di tanto, amico, mi francai / che dolcemente presila abbracciare” (“And

                                      47

Dante Studies 133, 2015

then, my friend, I got my courage up / and threw my arms around her
tenderly” [9–10]).6 In his reply, Dante Alighieri uses grammatically chi-
astic equivalents of amico and saggio (adjective for noun and vice versa).
He replaces Dante da Maiano’s noun amico with the adjectival “amica
openïone” cited by TLIO, and he replaces Dante da Maiano’s adjective
saggio with a periphrasis that includes the noun saver, “o om che pregio di
saver portate” (“O man of learning held in high esteem” [2]).7 In other
sonnets exchanged with Dante da Maiano, Dante Alighieri will use amico
as a vocative form of direct address on four occasions: once in Qual che
voi siate, amico, vostro manto, twice in Non canoscendo, amico, vostro nomo, and
once in Savere e cortesia, ingegno ed arte.
    Judging from this spate of amico in Dante’s very early sonnets, we might
well expect it to be a word with a certain currency in his lyric poetry.
Such is not the case. Amico is in fact quite a rare term in Dante’s lyrics,
appearing in the sonnets exchanged with Dante da Maiano, in the incipit
Se Lippo amico, and only in generic or metaphoric constructions thereafter,
as in the poet’s desire to be “di veritate amico” in the second verse of the
mature canzone Doglia mi reca.8 In all, Dante employs amico as a form of
direct address in his poetry on only five occasions, and four of those five
vocatives are addressed to Dante da Maiano.
    In Dante da Maiano’s Provedi, saggio, ad esta visïone, the terms saggio and
amico are effectively pluralized.This poem is an opening gambit, a declar-
atory effort sent out by the poet from Maiano to the world at large, and
amico here is a ritual honorific signaling the commencement of a contest,
a kind of poetic tourney. The respondents are Dante Alighieri, Guido
Orlandi, Salvino Doni, Ricco da Varlungo, ser Cione Baglione, and Chiaro
Davanzati. Besides Dante Aligheri’s sonnets, two of the replies testify to
the formulaic use of amico in this kind of poetic correspondence: Chia-
ro’s reply begins Amico, proveduto ha mia intenzione while Salvino Doni’s
incipit is Amico, io intendo, a la antica stagione.9 This usage has a Guittonian
pedigree, as was noted à propos Dante Alighieri’s poems by Barbi, who
cites the following incipits of the Aretine poet: Messer Bottaccio amico,
ogn’animale; Messer Giovanni amico, ’n vostro amore; Finfo amico, dire io, voi
presente; and Mastro Bandino amico, el meo preghero.10
    Guittone, however, as we can see from the above citations, pairs amico
with a proper name in his incipits. The results, I would suggest, are a
more authentic and less formulaic address. Guittone’s amico-incipits are
the gateway to an interaction that is less ritualized and less alien to amicitia

                                      48

Amicus eius Barolini

than the others we have seen, for Guittone—although he did not pen a
great poem of friendship—was a committed interlocutor in both his verse
and his letters. Messer Bottaccio amico (Egidi, 154) issues a reprimand to
Bottaccio for not following the right path, and Messer Giovanni amico, ’n
vostro amore (Egidi, 156) links the word amico to the word amore, indicating
Guittone’s firsthand knowledge of the Ciceronian model.11
    In the context of young males seeking to take their places in the poetic
agora (the work that from an anthropological and sociological perspective
underlies Dante’s early poetic exchanges), amico as a direct address, untem-
pered by the presence of a proper name, is a word that signals posturing
and rivalry masking as friendship. It has nothing to do with amicitia in the
Ciceronian sense of the word. So it is in Dante da Maiano’s Provedi, saggio,
ad esta visïone, and Dante da Maiano employs amico in this way again, now
as a singular that is specifically addressed to Dante Alighieri but is equally
lacking in intimacy, in a set of sonnets known as la tenzone del duol d’amore.
(Dante da Maiano’s only other use of amico includes his interlocutor’s
proper name, in the Guittonian manner: “Ver’ te mi doglio, perch’ài lo
savere / amico Brunellin, di mia pesanza” [“I turn to you in my suffering,
friend Brunellin, because of your wisdom”]). Dante Alighieri features
the term amico in the incipits of his replies in the tenzone del duol d’amore:
Qual che voi siate, amico, vostro manto and Non canoscendo, amico, vostro nomo.
    While it is not possible to time-stamp these poems with absolute accu-
racy, Dante Alighieri wrote them when very young, in his late teens.12 To
find a related poem that carries a date we must turn to Dante Alighieri’s
sonnet A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core, a riddle poem like Dante da Maia-
no’s Provedi saggio. Dante Alighieri eventually placed A ciascun’alma in the
prose frame of a narrative that he would entitle Vita Nuova, where he
provides an autobiographical account that dates the sonnet to 1283. Out-
side the Vita Nuova, one of the respondents to A ciascun’alma was none
other than Dante da Maiano, in his sonnet Di ciò che stato sè dimandatore,
and in this poem the gloves have come off. In his mocking response to A
ciascun’alma presa, Dante da Maiano addresses Dante Alighieri slightingly
as “amico meo di poco canoscente” (“my friend who understands but
little” [3]). He further disparages Dante Alighieri as delirious: “sol c’hai
farneticato, sappie, intendo” (“I only mean, please know, you were delir-
ious” [Di ciò che stato sè dimandatore, 11]). In conclusion Dante da Maiano
rudely announces that his rival’s hysteria is caused by illness, requiring his
urine to be examined by a medical doctor:“né cangio mai d’esta sentenza

                                      49

Dante Studies 133, 2015

mea / finché tua acqua al medico no stendo” (“nor shall I change my
view / till I submit your urine to the doctor” [13–14]).13
   If, as seems likely, the overt aggression of Dante da Maiano’s Di ciò che
stato sè dimandatore, where the poet wields the word amico as an insult,
marks the end of all correspondence between the two Dantes, then we
can suppose that the three other exchanges between them occurred prior
to Dante da Maiano’s response to Dante Alighieri’s A ciascun’alma.14 Thus
we can plausibly place the tenzone del duol d’amore not later than 1283.This
correspondence is only superficially devoted to the question posed in the
tenzone del duol d’amore: what is the greatest suffering caused by love? In
reality, it is a contest between two ambitious young men who use flattery
to manage the aggression animating their wary exchange.
   In the preliminary sonnet, Per pruova di saper com vale o quanto, Dante
da Maiano’s octave is devoted to the true matter of this tenzone, that of
proving one’s worth in the poetic agora. As gold is tested by a goldsmith
to discover its true value, so this poem will be submitted to the test of an
interlocutor. And not just any interlocutor will do: “l’adduco a voi, cui
paragone voco / di ciascun c’have in canoscenza loco, / o che di pregio
porti loda o vanto” (“I’m sending it to you, my touchstone for / whoev-
er claims to rank among the wise, / or who is praised and held in high
regard” [6–8]). In the sestet Dante da Maiano asks his interlocutor, “che
mi deggiate il dol maggio d’Amore / qual è, per vostra scienza, nominare”
(“What kind of suffering brought on by Love, / in your experience, is
worst of all?” [10–11])—but the real materia remains the issue of a man’s
valore, his comparative worth, expressed in the oft-repeated verb valere
(“to be worth,” “to possess value”). Dante da Maiano is motivated by the
desire to ascertain his value, present (“vaglio”) and future (“varraggio”):

e ciò non movo per quistioneggiare
(che già inver’ voi so non avria valore),
ma per saver ciò ch’eo vaglio e varraggio.15
(Per pruova di saper com vale o quanto, 12–14)

(and this I ask, though not to stir debate, / [for, with respect to you, I’d be out-
classed], / but just to know my worth and future promise.)

  In his reply, Qual che voi siate, amico, vostro manto, Dante Alighieri
addresses Dante da Maiano in a stylized fashion that suggests contained
aggression, with repeated genuflections to the wisdom of his interlocutor

                                           50

Amicus eius Barolini

and self-deprecating references to his own comparative lack of knowl-
edge: “che di saver ver’ voi ho men d’un moco (“compared to yours
my learning is but scant” [6]). The most intriguing feature of Dante
Alighieri’s replies to Dante da Maiano, deployed in a way that show-
cases his precocious talent, is his ostentatious insistence that he doesn’t
know his interlocutor’s name. Although ignorance of one’s interlocutor
is accepted as part of the culture of tenzone-writing, in this case there is a
time lapse between Dante Alighieri’s first reply to Dante da Maiano and
his second, in which he might plausibly have ascertained the name of his
correspondent.16 Moreover, anonymity need not be underscored to the
degree shown by Dante Alighieri in his sonnets to Dante da Maiano. For
instance, Dante Alighieri’s sonnet Io Dante a·tte che·mm’hai così chiamato,
if addressed to an unknown as Barbi and Contini maintain, does so in an
unemphatic way.17
    In contrast to Io Dante a·tte che·mm’hai così chiamato, both Dante
Alighieri’s replies to Dante da Maiano begin by ostentatiously calling
“amico” a man whom he simultaneously claims not to know. In the first
reply, the thematic emphasis may appear to fall on the learning of the
unknown interlocutor—“Qual che voi siate, amico, vostro manto / di
scienza parmi tal, che non è gioco” (“Whoever you may be, my friend, I
find the learning you display to be no joke”)—but to get to this remark-
able erudition we must first encounter “Qual che voi siate, amico,” with
its amusing and illuminating juxtaposition of “Whoever you may be” and
“friend.”18
    This amico is quite the opposite of an intimate, a familiaris, as Petrarch
calls his friends in his letter collection Familiares or Familiarium rerum
libri.19 In his second reply to Dante da Maiano, Non canoscendo, amico,
vostro nomo, Dante Alighieri makes clear that his interlocutor is an
anti-familiaris, devoting the entire octave to his ignorance of the name
of the man to whom he is writing, and provocatively embedding the
word amico between “Non canoscendo” and “vostro nomo”: “Non
canoscendo, amico, vostro nomo, / donde che mova chi con meco par-
la” (“Although, my friend, I do not know your name, whoever it may
be that speaks to me” [1–2]). After a full octave dedicated to establishing
his ignorance of his correspondent’s name, Dante Alighieri finally gets
to the question of the greatest suffering in love in the sestet, where he
hits the reset button, starting the sestet with a by now familiar move:
the vocative “Amico” (9).

                                     51

Dante Studies 133, 2015

    As noted previously, Dante da Maiano penned an aggressively dismis-
sive reply to Dante Alighieri’s A ciascun’alma, a reply that I have read as
framing Dante’s sonnet in contemptuously gendered terms, using the verb
farneticare to classify Dante Alighieri’s sonnet as feminized hysteria: “sol
c’hai farneticato, sappie, intendo” (“I only mean, please know, you were
delirious” [Di ciò che stato sè dimandatore, 11]).20 Dante da Maiano refuses
to engage in any interpretation of a sonnet whose vision of Love, a Love
that holds the poet’s sleeping beloved and then awakens her to feed her the
poet’s heart, is apparently too extreme for his tastes. Cavalcanti, by contrast,
had no problem with A ciascun’alma, which he interprets as a description
of existential and epistemological fullness: “Vedeste, al mio parere, onne
valore / e tutto gioco e quanto bene om sente (“You saw, in my opinion,
all worth and all happiness and as much good as man feels” [Vedeste, al mio
parere, 1–2]). In these exchanges we can see ideological positions carved
out as these rival poets debate the degree of metaphysical access permit-
ted to love poetry: what Cavalcanti views as an experience of mystical
completion (Dante Alighieri will later confirm this interpretation, using
“farneticare” to describe himself experiencing mystical visions in the Vita
Nuova), Dante da Maiano dismisses as feminine hysterics.
    Dante da Maiano’s reply to A ciascun’alma may well mark the first time
that Dante Alighieri is mocked for his spirtualizing tendency—as Guiniz-
zelli was mocked by Bonagiunta, and as Cino da Pistoia will be mocked
by Onesto degli Onesti, for this is an ongoing debate in the Italian lyric
tradition—but it is not the last. In the sonnet Dante Alleghier, Cecco, tu’
servo amico, Cecco Angiolieri critiques Dante Alighieri in a sonnet whose
incipit features the word “amico.”21 Here the formula of scrupulous cour-
tesy “servo amico” (“servant and friend”)22 positions Cecco to take Dante
Alighieri to task for self-contradiction in the sonnet Oltra la spera che più
larga gira. Engaging in a lawyerly parsing of Dante Alighieri’s visionary
sonnet, as though he had taken a tip about the value of “quistioneggiare”
from Dante da Maiano’s Per pruova di saper (where we find “e ciò non
movo per quistioneggiare” [12]), Cecco objects that in the first tercet of
Oltra la spera Dante claims not to understand the words of the thought
that followed Beatrice to heaven (“io no·llo ’ntendo” [10]), while in the
concluding verse he claims to understand them well (“sì che lo ’ntendo
ben”):

                                      52

Amicus eius Barolini

Ch’al mio parer ne l’una muta dice
che non intendi su’ sottil parlare,
di quel che vide la tua Beatrice;
e poi hai detto a le tue donne care
che ben lo intendi: e dunque contradice
a sé medesmo questo tu’ trovare.
(Dante Alleghier, Cecco, tu’ servo amico, 9–14)

(For in my view in one tercet it says that / you don’t understand the subtle speech /
of him who saw your Beatrice; / and then you said to your dear ladies that / you
understood it fine; and so it contradicts / itself, this poem of yours.)

This “friend” is sadly out of tune with the novel mixture of love, Aristo-
telian physics, and Pauline commitment that we find in the deceptively
simple sonnet Oltra la spera.23

                                           ***

So much for the presence of amico in Dante’s pugnacious early verse.These
men who call each other amico in their poetry are not thinking in terms
of Cicero’s definition of the friend as an “alternate self ” (“alter idem” in
De Amicitia 21.80). To find the Ciceronian idea of amicitia in vernacular
verse we must turn to another sonnet of Dante Alighieri’s, also youthful
although less so than the early exchanges with Dante da Maiano. In his
great poem of perfect friendship, Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io, Dan-
te bypasses altogether the word amico and instead marshals his friends’
names as talismans of intimacy—and not only his friends’ names, but also,
in a move that will be a cornerstone of his semantics of friendship, the
pronouns that are surrogates for the names. Guido, i’ vorrei is a dream of
ahistorical and dechronologized friendship, friendship outside of time and
under the aegis of an undifferentiated “sempre,” friendship untarnished
by the events in historical time to which we respond with different egos
and different expectations and divergent interests and in ways that are
destined to separate us.
   Guido, i’ vorrei is a vernacular lyric incarnation of the Aristotelian and
Ciceronian ideal of the friend as an other self, in which Dante imagines a
condition in which individual wills are so transparent and congruent that
there is never any conflict, in which individuals can remain ontologically

                                             53

Dante Studies 133, 2015

and grammatically differentiated—continue to be Dante, Guido, and
Lapo, continue to be tu ed io—and yet suspend all individual desires and
thus experience no “impediments” to their love:

Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io,
fossimo presi per incantamento
e messi in un vasel ch’ad ogni vento
per mare andasse al voler vostro e mio;
sì che fortuna od altro tempo rio
non ci potesse dare impedimento,
anzi, vivendo sempre in un talento,
di star insieme crescesse il disio.
E monna Vanna e monna Lagia poi
con quella ch’è sul numer de le trenta
con noi ponesse il buono incantatore:
e quivi ragionar sempre d’amore,
e ciascuna di lor fosse contenta
sì come credo che sarémo noi.

(Guido, I wish that Lapo, you, and I
were carried off by some enchanter’s spell
and set upon a ship to sail the sea
where every wind would favour our command,
so neither thunderstorms nor cloudy skies
might ever have the power to hold us back,
but rather, cleaving to this single wish,
that our desire to live as one would grow.
And Lady Vanna were with Lady Lagia
borne to us with her who’s number thirty
by our good enchanter’s wizardry:
to talk of love would be our sole pursuit,
and each of them would find herself content,
just as I think that we should likewise be.) (Lansing trans.)

    Friendship, a subset of love in Aristotle’s Ethics, is imagined in Guido,
i’ vorrei as an enchanted state untrammeled by our existence as differen-
tiated ontological beings, where the elision of difference does not carry
the inevitable moral cost that it does in an embodied historical context.
From the recitation of the names and pronouns that designate the fully
individuated and hence plural state of the three friends—Guido, Lapo, and
Dante himself are three subjects who are ontologically and grammatically
separate and different—we move to the unitary state of the plural verb at

                                          54

Amicus eius Barolini

the beginning of the second line: “Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io /
fossimo presi . . . (“Guido, I wish that Lapo, you, and I / were carried
off . . .”). The three plural identities, which preserve their individuality
underscored by the pronouns “I” and “you,” will be, in this fantasy, part
of one magic circle. Here we see foreshadowed the attempts in Paradiso
to give poetic life to the idea that Three can become One while also
remaining Three. Or, switching cultural contexts, we think of Cicero’s
De Amicitia, where a friend is “another self ” (“alter idem” [21.80]), where
friendship results in a mixing of souls as to nearly “make one out of two”
(“ut efficiat paene unum ex duobus!” [21.81]), and where the power of
friendship can fuse a plurality of souls into one: “Nam cum amicitiae vis
sit in eo ut unus quasi animus fiat ex pluribus (“the effect of friendship
is to make, as it were, one soul out of many” [25.92]).24
    Dante proposes eliminating the divergent wishes of the three protag-
onists without thereby doing away with their irreducible and separate
individual selves, an ideal enacted in the brilliant series of names and
pronouns that opens the poem. In Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io, the
names and pronouns indicate separate identities that set up an aporia: how
can the one and the many coexist? This is the same aporia that Dante
will eventually treat in Paradiso in rigorous philosophical terms as well
as through poetic tropes, metaphor especially. Indeed, the “gran mar de
l’essere” (“great sea of being”) of Paradiso 1.113 has its distant precursor
in the unifiying mare of this early sonnet. From Guido, i’ vorrei comes
the idea of names and pronouns as placeholders for ontological selves
who joyfully mingle in the waters of similitude while yet preserving the
metaphysical difference of selfhood. Guido, i’ vorrei introduces a grammar
of ontology that becomes a hallmark of Dante’s ongoing poetics and
semantics of friendship.
    The fact that Dante writes one of the world’s great poems of friendship
without employing the word amico suggests that the word still reminded
him of rivalry and competition. At least in the lyric context, where the
history of amico was one of thrust and parry, the word betokened two
men writing in a spirit of rivalry, not of friendship. When Dante wrote
Guido, i’ vorrei, his Guittonian mannerisms and the exchange with Dante
da Maiano were not yet distant memories, and, although he had clearly
evolved an idea of friendship that is consonant with Cicero’s De Amicitia,
in poetic practice he was not yet prepared to use the word anew. The lone
exception in Dante’s lyric poetry is an early sonetto rinterzato (a genre that

                                     55

Dante Studies 133, 2015

further testifies to Guittone’s influence), Se Lippo amico sè tu che mi leggi,
where we find a benign use of amico, tempered, as in Guittone’s incipits,
by the pairing of the term with the proper name.25 In this poem Dante
asks for a professional favor: he solicits protective clothing (most likely a
reference to musical accompaniment) for the canzone-stanza that accom-
panies the sonnet.While not aggressive, neither is it a poem of familiaritas
and intimate friendship like Guido, i’ vorrei. Perhaps we could classify Se
Lippo amico as indicating a transitional moment in Dante’s perception and
use of the word.
   The reclassification of the word amico was simultaneously occurring in
Dante’s prose, where he investigated the concept of amicitia over the years.
Beginning in the prose of the Vita Nuova, Dante makes explicit what goes
unsaid in a sonnet like Guido, i’ vorrei, namely the link between making
poetry and making friends. This link is articulated in the Vita Nuova’s
labeling of the poet Guido Cavalcanti “primo de li miei amici” (“first
among my friends” (VN 3.14 [2.1]), whose reply to A ciascun’alma “was
almost the beginning of the friendship between him and me”: “fue quasi
lo principio de l’amistà tra lui e me” (VN 3.14 [2.1]).26 (This origin story
underscores how a friend must be intellectually equipped enough, unlike
the scandalized provincial Dante da Maiano, to grasp that poem’s curious
visionary subject matter.) While the prose of the Vita Nuova thematizes
and theorizes friendship, for instance ranking Beatrice’s brother as “uno, lo
quale, secondo li gradi de l’amistade, è amico a me immediatamente dopo
lo primo” (“one who, according to the grades of friendship, is friend to me
immediately following the first friend” VN 32.1 [21.1]), the poetry of the
Vita Nuova, written long before the prose, avoids the word amico entirely.
   The prose of the Vita Nuova and Convivio on amicitia continues Dante’s
shift away from the formulaic and at times hostile ritualized lyric usage of
amico, foreshadowing its eventual renewal in the Commedia. Much import-
ant theorizing of amicitia is accomplished in Dante’s prose, especially in the
Convivio, a key repository for developments in Dante’s thinking on friend-
ship, as it is for so many other ideological issues.27 Because I am tracking a
rhetoric or semantics of friendship I will focus instead on the prose work
that performs friendship, the De vulgari eloquentia. The linguistic treatise
does not elaborate theories or ideas about friendship like the Convivio.
Instead, it features a poet meditating on poetry by adopting the striking
phrase “amicus eius” as a means of self-identification. To refer to himself,

                                     56

Amicus eius Barolini

that is, Dante invents and uses the phrase “amicus eius,” meaning “his
friend”: he is the friend of the poet named before him in the sentence.
   The first occasion in which Dante uses the label “amicus eius” for
himself is in De vulgari eloquentia 1.10.2:

Tertia quoque,  Latinorum est, se duobus privilegiis actestatur preesse: primo
quidem quod qui dulcius subtiliusque poetati vulgariter sunt, hii familiares et dome-
stici sui sunt, puta Cynus Pistoriensis et amicus eius.28

(Finally, the third part, which belongs to the Italians, declares itself to be superior
because it enjoys a twofold privilege: first, because those who have written vernacular
poetry more sweetly and subtly, such as Cino da Pistoia and his friend, have been
its intimates and faithful servants.)29

Mirko Tavoni glosses “et amicus eius” by noting all the subsequent occur-
rences of the phrase and commenting on Cino’s replacement of Cavalcanti
as “first friend” of the Vita Nuova:

Il primo privilegio, di natura letteraria, del volgare italiano è nella superiorità dei suoi
maggiori poeti, nelle persone di Cino da Pistoia e Dante stesso. È questa la prima
apparizione nel trattato della coppia Cino-Dante. Ne ricorreranno altre cinque (I
xvii 3, II ii 8 due volte, II v 4, II vi 6), sempre espresse con la formula “et amicus eius”
(più l’occorrenza atipica di I xiii 4). Cino da Pistoia, esule come Dante negli anni
del De vulgari, tiene vistosamente il posto che nella Vita Nova era del “primo amico”
Guido Cavalcanti. (pp. 1238–39)

    Nor do other commentators of the De vulgari eloquentia show any
interest in what we might call the semantic and ultimately philosophical
content of this remarkable phrase.30 And yet it is highly significant that
Dante, in finding an alternative to his proper name (likely motivated also
by the desire to avoid the “suon del nome mio, / che di necessità qui si
registra” [Purg. 30.62–63]), should invent the formula amicus eius. Because
the words “amicus eius” are positioned so that they follow the name of
another person, “Cynus Pistoriensis” in the above example, the deictic
function of the possessive adjective “his” is fully experienced: in other
words, the formula requires context and positioning to be decoded, for
we need the referent of “eius” in order to understand whose amicus Dante
is. As a result the phrase is strangely alive and dynamic, constraining the
reader to grasp the dialogic nature of the interaction between “Cynus
Pistoriensis” and “amicus eius”—between Cino and “his friend” Dante.

                                            57

Dante Studies 133, 2015

    By referring to himself not by the name “Dante” but by the surrogate
“amicus eius,” Dante stipulates that he is the friend of the poet who is
named before him. In other words, through the label and its positioning
as a personal nametag in the De vulgari eloquentia, Dante makes semanti-
cally real the Aristotelian and Ciceronian idea of the friend as an “other
self ”—the “alter idem” of De Amicitia 21.80. By defining his self as the
friend of his friend, as “amicus eius,” he is saying that to be “his friend” is
to be himself, to be Dante.
    That Dante defines himself as the friend of a friend who is also a poet
is the final step away from the ritualized rivalries of his youth. The De
vulgari eloquentia’s label “his friend”/“amicus eius” embodies both the
Dantean symbiosis of poetry and friendship and the Aristotelian-Cice-
ronian ideal of the friend as an other self. The phrase amicus eius delivers
Dante from the early lyrics to the Commedia by recuperating the noun
amicus—the Latin, reminiscent of Cicero’s De Amicitia, distances the term
further from the combative usage of the early lyric—and through the
presence of the pronoun eius. Central to the label is the idea that to be
“his” is to be “mine.” Although amicus is apparently the more important
word (one that will come into its own when Dante twice pronounces
himself “devotissimus et amicus” in the Epistle to Cangrande, the open-
ing paragraphs of which Brugnoli terms a treatise on friendship),31 it is
the pronoun eius that animates Dante’s semantics of friendship, in which
intimacy is performed over and again by pronouns. In “amicus eius,” the
label that Dante invents for the De vulgari eloquentia, the pronoun “eius”
is the grammatical component that does the work of bridging the two
selves and making them one, a concept adumbrated in Guido, i’ vorrei che
tu e Lapo ed io, where we find the paratactical and interwoven chain of
names and pronouns embraced and held together by the copula e.
    Long after Guido, i’ vorrei, in the post-exile timeframe that includes the
De vulgari eloquentia’s “amicus eius,” Dante wrote sonnets to Cino that
bear the mark of his earliest pronominal intimacy, but that remind us that
pronouns can divide as well as unite.The pronouns in the sonnets to Cino
Perch’io non truovo chi meco ragioni and Io mi credea del tutto esser partito are
redolent of a shared past that Dante is leaving behind. In Perch’io non truovo
Dante writes, “Ah, messer Cin, come ’l tempo è rivolto / a nostro danno
e de li nostri diri” (“Ah, messer Cino, how the times have changed / and
turned against us and our poetry” [12–13]), and in Io mi credea we find
Dante’s poignant farewell to the poetic practices and intimacies of their

                                       58

Amicus eius Barolini

youth:“Io mi credea del tutto esser partito / di queste nostre rime, messer
Cino” (“I thought I had forever bid farewell, / dear Cino, to this poetry
of ours [Io mi credea, 1–2]).
    Because pronouns are markers of intimacy, they are also intensely
present in poems in which friends separate, as we see above, and also in
the more aggressive variant of separation: poems in which friends reprove
and/or deliberately offend each other. Io mi credea is Dante’s delicate
reproof of Cino’s volubility in love, in a set that includes as well Caval-
canti’s much more severe reprimand to his friend, likely written in the
period of Dante’s dejection after the death of Beatrice, I’ vegno ’l giorno
a·tte ’nfinite volte. Inspected closely, the chronologically arranged list of
poets’ names in De vulgari eloquentia 2.6.6 is eloquent with respect to the
shifts in affective alliances occurring in these men’s lives. Here is the list
of 2.6.6, accompanied by incipits of representative poems. It supplements
the shorter list of De vulgari eloquentia 2.5.4 and sketches a mini-history
of the high lyric tradition from its Occitan roots through to the French
poets and thence to the various Italian schools:

Hoc solum illustres cantiones inveniuntur contexte; ut Gerardus, Si per mon Sobretots
non fos; Folquetus de Marsilia, Tan m’abellis l’amoros pensamen; Arnaldus Danielis,
Sols sui che sai lo sobraffan chem sorz; Namericus de Belnui, Nuls hom non pot complir
addreciamen; Namericus de Peculiano, Si com l’arbres che per sobre carcar; Rex Navarre,
Ire d’amor qui en mon cor repaire; Iudex de Messana, Anchor che l’aigua per lo focho lassi;
Guido Guinizelli, Tegno de folle ’mpresa, a lo ver dire; Guido Cavalcantis, Poi che de doglia
core conven ch’io porti; Cinus de Pistorio, Avegna che io aggia più per tempo; amicus eius,
Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona. (DVE 2.6.6)

(Illustrious canzoni are composed using this type of construction alone, as in this one
by Giraut: Si per mos Sobretos non fos; Folquet de Marselha: Tan m’abellis l’amoros
pensamen; Arnaut Daniel: Sols sui che sai to sobraffan che.m sorz; Aimeric de Belenoi:
Nuls hom non pot complir addreciamen; Aimeric de Peguilhan: Si con l’arbres che per
sobrecarcar; The King of Navarre: Ire d’amor que en mon cor repaire; The Judge of
Messina: Ancor che l’aigua per lo foco lassi; Guido Guinizzelli: Tegno de folle empresa a
lo ver dire; Guido Cavalcanti: Poi che di doglia cor conven ch’io porti; Cino da Pistoia:
Avegna che io aggia più per tempo; and his friend: Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona.)

   The locution amicus eius is particularly telling here, in its final appear-
ance in the linguistic treatise. To choose Cino as the amicus with whom
the “I” is bound through the pronoun eius in the above catalogue is to not
choose Guido Cavalcanti, the poet who was “primo de li miei amici” in

                                            59

Dante Studies 133, 2015

the Vita Nuova and who precedes Cino da Pistoia in the same catalogue.
In other words, the catalogue of De vulgari eloquentia 2.6.6 that names
Cino amicus eius simultaneously denies that title to Guido Cavalcanti.32
Moreover, the poem that represents Cino in the catalogue of De vulgari
eloquentia 2.6.6 is the canzone Avegna ched el m’aggia più per tempo, which
is the canzone of consolation that Cino wrote to Dante after the death
of Beatrice. Perhaps Cino’s consolatoria was everything that Dante wanted
from a friend after the death of Beatrice, but that he did not get from
Guido Cavalcanti.
    In comparison to Cino’s canonic (and clearly well-received) consola-
toria, Guido wrote I’ vegno ’l giorno a·tte ’nfinite volte, a sonnet that in my
commentary I call an “anti-consolatoria”33: a poem that applies to the ailing
friend an electric jolt rather than a warm embrace. As we can see from his
extraordinary incipit, Cavalcanti too is a practioner of the intimacy con-
jured by pronouns (another Cavalcantian instance of painful friendship
caught by pronouns is “Di te mi dòl e di me”34). Let me state clearly here
that I consider I’ vegno ’l giorno a·tte a poem of true and painful intimacy,
in which the “I” professes real feelings whose obsessive nature (“’nfinite
volte”) is commensurate with the experience of friendship,35 and also
that I do not exclude a political dimension from an experientially based
understanding of the poem. Indeed, there cannot but have been a political
dimension to the experience of Dante and Guido’s amicitia, given that
Cavalcanti, a magnate, was excluded by the Ordinamenti di Giustizia of
1293 from participating in public life while Dante, from a non-magnate
family, was not excluded. (That inclusion allowed Dante to set his course
in the direction of public life, culminating in his priorate.36) As Cicero
says, “nothing is more difficult than for friendship to last through life; for
friends happen to have conflicting interests, or different political opinions”
(De Amicitia 8.10).
    In I’ vegno ’l giorno a·tte we find both self and other, as in Guido, i’
vorrei. Here, though, the two are no longer grammatically united by
the copula e; rather the “Io” is disjoined from the “te,” positioned at the
other end of the hemistych. In many ways I’ vegno ’l giorno a· tte seems
to mirror Guido, i’ vorrei, but in reverse. By focusing on the impediments
that, according to Cavalcanti, have now—in the ominous present tense
that takes the place of the gentle and melancholy conditional of Dante’s
poem—threatened to create insuperable obstacles to their friendship, the
earlier message has been upended: “Or non ardisco, per la vil tua vita, /

                                      60

Amicus eius Barolini

far mostramento che·ttu’ dir mi piaccia” (“I now dare not, since you’ve
demeaned yourself, / acknowledge that I like your poetry [9–10]).
   Like Dante’s Guido, i’ vorrei, Cavalcanti’s I’ vegno ’l giorno a· tte features
pronouns and avoids the term amico, which Guido uses in direct address
only with a proper name, in the Guittonian fashion, writing to “Bernar-
do amico mio” in the sonnet Ciascuna fresca e dolce fontanella (verse 3).37
In I’ vegno ’l giorno a· tte, however, the effect of the pronouns is not to
create unity but to emphasize cleavage. By separating and isolating the
“you” from the “I,” the pronouns here signify rupture, not togetherness.
The center of the incipit is the pronoun te—I’ vegno ’l giorno a· tte ’nfinite
volte—and the central te is immediately echoed by the incipit’s concluding
words, “’nfinite volte.” The iteration of forms of tu, te, and ti through-
out the sonnet is underscored and emphasized by the words tuttor and
tutte, and by the many others that echo the tu/te/ti sounds (a list might
include “infinite”,“volte”,“vilmente”,“gentil”,“mente”,“vertù”,“tolte”,
“molte”, “tuttor”, “gente”, “coralemente”, “tutte”, “ricolte”, “presente”,
“partirà”).38 The effect is a kind of rhythmic accompaniment that keeps
unrelenting focus on the ailing and nonresponsive other; the lexicon and
the rhyme sounds of the sonnet seem chosen to hammer the message that
the io and the tu are at odds.
   The sonnet employs pronouns to perform the distance between the io
and the te. This distance is highlighted by the temporal split between the
imperfect tense that marks the time when everything was fine between
the two friends (“Solevanti,” “fuggivi,” “parlavi”) and the menacing
present of the “presente sonetto” (12):

I’ vegno ’l giorno a·tte ’nfinite volte
e trovoti pensar troppo vilmente:
molto mi dol della gentil tua mente
e d’assai tue vertù che·tti son tolte.
Solevanti spiacer persone molte,
tuttor fuggivi la noiosa gente;
di me parlavi sì coralemente
che·ttutte le tue rime avìe ricolte.
Or non ardisco, per la vil tua vita,
far mostramento che·ttu’ dir mi piaccia,
né ’n guisa vegno a·tte che·ttu mi veggi.
Se ’l presente sonetto spesso leggi,
lo spirito noioso che·tti caccia
si partirà dall’anima invilita.

                                            61

Dante Studies 133, 2015

(I visit you a thousand times a day
and find you steeped too much in shameful thoughts.
It pains me deeply that your noble mind
and many virtues have been stripped away.
You once would treat crowds with contempt
and always fled from those who are mundane;
of me you used to speak so cordially
that I collected every poem you sent.
I now dare not, since you’ve demeaned yourself,
acknowledge that I like your poetry,
nor will you see me if I visit you.
If you reread this sonnet several times,
the loathsome spirit persecuting you
will be dispelled from your degraded soul.) (Lansing trans.)

    Cavalcanti’s I’ vegno ’l giorno a· tte captures intimacy as pain, both
experienced and inflicted. A more pugilistic variant of friendship under
pressure takes shape in the tenzone between Dante and his other mag-
nate friend, Forese Donati. We can measure the shift from the opposite
of intimacy in the tenzone del duol d’amore, where Dante Alighieri insists
that he doesn’t know the name of his correspondent, all the while calling
him amico, to the tenzone between Dante and Forese, whom Dante refers
to not only by name but by nickname. In the first sonnet, Forese’s wife is
“moglie di Bicci vocato Forese” (“wife of Bicci called Forese,” Chi udisse
tossir, 2); in the second sonnet Forese is “Bicci novello” (“young Bicci,”
Ben ti faranno, 2); and in the third he is “Bicci novel, figliuol di non so cui”
(“Young Bicci, son of I don’t know who,” 1).39
    Names abound in these poems, where the insults are rooted in familiar-
itas, not in generic social ritual. In L’altra notte Forese imagines that he has
come across the ghost of Dante’s father, called by name “Alaghier” (“ch’io
trovai Alaghier tra le fosse” [“I found Alighieri among the graves”]), and
that Alighiero begs him “Per amor di Dante” (“For the love of Dante,”
L’altra notte, 8 and 12). The injunction “Per amor di Dante, / scio’ mi”
(“For the love of Dante, release me”) is a telling reminder that these
insults, laced with the conventions of vituperation as they may be, are
grounded in an intimacy born of real friendship and love.
    In this context there are intriguing resonances in the Commedia sug-
gesting a kind of psychic bleeding of Dante’s friendship with Forese into
his friendship with Cavalcanti and vice versa.The entire scene of Forese’s
L’altra notte, the sighting of the ghost of the father among the graves

                                         62

Amicus eius Barolini

and the father’s conjuring of the friendship with his son, seems replayed
in Inferno 10’s encounter (also among the graves) between a man (now
Dante, in place of Forese) and the father of his friend (now Cavalcanti
de’ Cavalcanti, in place of Alighiero Bellincione). In other words, Dante
in Inferno 10 constructs an encounter between himself and the father of
his friend Guido Cavalcanti that in some ways echoes Forese’s imagined
encounter with Alighiero in the tenzone. Moreover, the encounter of Infer-
no 10 is one in which Cavalcanti senior appeals to Dante’s friendship with
his son Guido much as Alighiero appeals to Forese’s friendship with his
son Dante: “per amor di Dante” has become Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti’s
anguished “mio figlio ov’è? e perché non è teco?” (“where is my son?
Why is he not with you?” [Inf. 10.60]).
    Another episode that brings together Cavalcantis and Donatis in a
manner suggestive of the tenzone with Forese is in Inferno 30 (whose botta
e risposta between Sinon and Maestro Adamo has long been considered a
reprise of the manner of the tenzone). Gianni Schicchi, who is a mem-
ber of the Cavalcanti family, impersonates Simone Donati’s uncle Buoso
Donati (Inf. 30.44) in order to secure for him Buoso’s estate. Simone
Donati is the father of Forese Donati, and so Dante here accuses Forese’s
father of greed very much in the spirit of the accusations in the tenzone.
    Forese puts his finger on the tenzone’s deep theme of friendship—and
the connection between love and pain—when he writes: “che qual ti
carica ben di bastone, / colu’ ha’ per fratello e per amico” (“if someone
lays about you with a stick, he’s your friend and brother” [Ben so che fosti
figliuol d’Allaghieri, 10–11]). Here, one’s amico is not an unknown rival
but the equivalent of a brother. The point is that our fratello or amico is
frequently the one we treat most harshly in life—and by whom we in
turn are most harshly treated. Forese hurls much of Dante’s family at him,
presenting Dante’s family as the scourge of his life, and carefully calling
out each member by name. Thus, in the lines “se Dio ti salvi la Tana e ’l
Francesco / che col Belluzzo tu non stia in brigata” (“But God keep Tana
and Francesco for you, that you may find it possible to escape Belluzzo’s
company” [Va’ rivesti San Gal, 10–11]), Forese is invoking Dante’s half-sib-
lings Gaetana and Francesco and his paternal uncle Bello di Bellincione.40
This familiaritas carries over into Dante’s meeting with Forese Donati
on the penultimate terrace of Mount Purgatory, where Dante names his
friend “Forese” (“Bicci” is “vocato Forese,” after all) and where the wife
whose honor he insulted in the 1290s is now affectionately named by

                                    63

Dante Studies 133, 2015

her husband “la Nella mia” (we note the use of the pronoun “mia” to
enhance affection).41
   Along with the naming of names, the encounter with Forese in Pur-
gatorio 23 offers us an exquisite instance of Dante’s ability to conjure
poignancy and intimacy through pronouns. As in Inferno 10, where Dante
transfers to Cavalcanti the affective residue of Forese’s imagined encoun-
ter with the ghost of Alighiero in the tenzone, so in Purgatorio 23 Dante
transfers to Forese some of the affect accumulated in sonnets exchanged
over the years with Cavalcanti. Thus, the intense pronouns of Guido, i’
vorrei and I’ vegno ’l giorno a·tte echo in this evocation of past life shared
together: “Per ch’io a lui: ‘Se tu riduci a mente / qual fosti meco, e qual
io teco fui, / ancor fia grave il memorar presente’ ” (“At this I said to
him: ‘If you should call to mind what you have been with me and I with
you, remembering now will still be heavy’ ” [Purg. 23.116]). Introduced
by the pronouns in the straightforward “Per ch’io a lui,” we come to the
extraordinary verse “qual fosti meco, e qual io teco fui,” where there are
two balanced clauses (qual/qual) on either side of the caesura and where
the pronouns and identity-activating verbs “fosti” and “fui” are chiastically
arranged (fosti/meco/teco/fui) so that they mirror and complete each
other. Here, too, the pronoun plus preposition contractions “meco” and
“teco” are brought into full nostalgic focus by the balanced passato remoto
forms of essere. In “qual fosti meco, e qual io teco fui,” we have reached
the apex of Dante’s pronominal art.
   Unless, that is, we want to reserve that praise for another moment, in
which the verbs do not activate the pronouns, intensely chiastic but still
discrete and separate, but in which the verbs are pronouns. I refer of course
to the language invented for the encounter with Folquet de Marselha,
not himself a friend but one who resides in the heaven of Venus with
Dante’s friend Carlo Martello. (It is worth noting that Dante signals the
intimacy of Carlo’s marriage bond by the pronominal adjective tuo, rem-
iniscent of Forese’s “la Nella mia” in Purg. 23.87: “Da poi che Carlo tuo,
bella Clemenza [Par. 9.1].) Here we find the famous forging of verbs out
of pronouns that yields inluiare, inmiare, and intuare. From the paratactic
linking of names and pronouns in “Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io,”
and from the chiastic mirroring of verbs and pronouns in “qual fosti meco,
e qual io teco fui,” we have arrived at pronouns that have become verbs,
agents not just of intimacy but of super-intimacy, nested inside each other

                                     64

Amicus eius Barolini

in rhetorical copulation: “s’io m’intuassi, come tu t’inmii” (“if I could
in-you myself, as you in-me yourself ” [Par. 9.81]).42
    The pronouns made agents of a transfigured and copulated ontology
in Paradiso 9 can be seen as the apex of the story I am telling, the story
of how the humble pronoun (hailing from the youthful sonnet Guido, i’
vorrei) holds the key to Dante’s mature semantics of friendship and com-
munion. The magic of these pronouns in the Commedia is in some ways
even more beautiful and more expressive in simpler constructions: in the
father’s cry, “mio figlio ov’è? e perché non è teco?” (“where is my son?
Why is he not with you?” [Inf. 10.60]); in the comfort of Virgilio’s “non
credi tu me teco e ch’io ti guidi?” (“Don’t you believe that I am with you
and that I guide you?” [Purg. 3.24]); and in the somatic gravity of “Ver’ me
si fece, e io ver’ lui mi fei” (“He moved toward me and I advanced toward
him” [Purg. 8.52]). I will end with another of these verses, “e come amico
omai meco ragiona,” embedded in perhaps Dante’s greatest tribute to
friendship. I refer to the episode in which Dante transforms the historical
Statius’ tribute to the Aeneid at the end of the Thebaid into the love of his
fictional Stazio for his Virgilio, a love that lasts beyond the grave and the
Christian dispensation.
    In Purgatorio 22 Virgilio invites Stazio to engage in an activity essential
to Dante’s understanding of friendship, that of ragionare: “Ma dimmi, e
come amico mi perdona / se troppa sicurtà m’allarga il freno, / e come
amico omai meco ragiona” (“But tell me, and pardon me like a friend if
too much confidence loosens the reins, and like a friend now talk with
me” [Purg. 22.19–21]). To indicate amicitia in Purgatorio Dante uses the
verb that signals friendship for him as early as the sonnets Deh ragioniamo
and Guido, i’ vorrei, where the poet’s dream is that the group of friends
and their ladies united in the enchanted vasello will “quivi ragionar sem-
pre d’amore” (12)—always talk together of love. In Purgatorio Dante adds
to the pursuit of ragionare insieme the repeated phrase that makes amicitia
explicit, “e come amico”: “Ma dimmi, e come amico mi perdona / se
troppa sicurtà m’allarga il freno, / e come amico omai meco ragiona”
(Purg. 22.19–21). In these verses Dante revisits his old semantics of friend-
ship, which as we know relies heavily on pronouns (here “dimmi,” “mi,”
“mi,” “meco”), and he doubles down on the word amico itself, now fully
repurposed from its early combative deployment in the lyric to become
a token of love and intimacy in the Commedia.

                                      65

Dante Studies 133, 2015

                                               NOTES
      1. See Dante’s Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the ‘Vita Nuova,’ ed. and comm. Teodolinda
Barolini, with new verse translations by Richard Lansing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2014). Dante’s Lyric Poetry is a revised and expanded translation of Rime giovanili e della ‘Vita Nuova,’
ed. and comm. Teodolinda Barolini with notes by Manuele Gragnolati (Milan: Rizzoli, 2009). See
also Teodolinda Barolini, “Sociology of the Brigata: Gendered Groups in Dante, Forese, Folgore,
Boccaccio—From Guido, i’ vorrei to Griselda,” Italian Studies 67, no. 1 (2012): 4–22.
      2. It was only after I had worked my way through the corpus of Dante’s early lyrics that I under-
stood enough about Dante’s semantics of amicitia to gloss the word amico. Hence the treatment of
the tenzoni between Dante Alighieri and Dante da Maiano, where the word amico is featured, is less
developed in the 2009 Italian version of my commentary than in the 2014 English edition.
      3. There is certainly room for a chapter on Dante in the critical literature on friendship. Friend-
ship: A History, ed. Barbara Caine (London: Equinox, 2009), features Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande as
the prime example of “Friendship between Unequals” in the chapter devoted to “The Latin West”
(pp. 98–100). Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical
Discourse, eds. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010)
offers a brief discussion of the Vita Nuova in Classen’s Introduction (pp. 66–67), and the comment that
Dante’s “rich work, especially the Divina Commedia, would lend itself well for further examinations
of what friendship might have meant for this intellectual giant” (p. 66).
      4. See http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/ under “amico.”
      5. Emilio Pasquini, “Amico,” Enciclopedia Dantesca, 6 vols. (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia
Italiana, 970–1978), vol. 1: 203–8, citation on p. 204.
      6. The text of Dante da Maiano’s poems is from Rime, ed. Rosanna Bettarini (Florence: Le
Monnier, 1969). Translations of lyric poetry in this essay are Richard Lansing’s, with the exception
of the tenzone with Forese.
      7. The texts of Dante’s poems (and of Cavalcanti’s I’ vegno ’l giorno a·tte ’nfinite volte) are from
Rime, ed. and comm. Domenico De Robertis (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2005).
      8. For amico, see also La dispietata mente, verse 35, and Tre donne, verses 17 and 97. For amica, other
than Savete giudicar, see Madonna, quel signor, verse 4, and O dolci rime, verse 8.
      9. The responses to Dante da Maiano’s Provedi, saggio may be found in Bettarini’s edition of
Dante da Maiano.
    10. See Rime della ‘Vita Nuova’ e della giovinezza, eds. Michele Barbi and Francesco Maggini
(Florence: Le Monnier, 1956), p. 174. I follow Egidi’s incipits where they vary from Barbi’s; see Le
rime di Guittone d’Arezzo, ed. Francesco Egidi (Bari: Laterza, 1940).
    11. Guittone’s knowledge of Cicero’s De Amicitia seems confirmed by the canzone Se di voi,
donna gente (Egidi, 1), where Guittone cites an author on friendship who is presumably Cicero: “Ché
sì como l’Autore / pon, ch’amistà di core / è voler de concordia e desvolere” (“For, as the Author
states, friendship of the heart is wanting and not wanting in common” [72–74]). Finfo amico, dire io,
voi presente (Egidi, 217) expounds on discretion in praising a friend, while Mastro Bandino amico, el meo
preghero (Egidi, 28) is a sonnet asking for instruction in love. There are many more poems in which
Guittone names his interlocutors.
    12. The once fashionable argument that Dante da Maiano was older than Dante Alighieri was
dismissed by Dante da Maiano’s editor, who writes that Dante da Maiano “doveva essere un po’ più
giovane di Chiaro e di Monte e press’a poco dell’età dell’Alighieri”; see Rosanna Bettarini, ed., Dante
da Maiano, Rime, p. xvi. The (non) issue of age in turn influenced the attribution of the poems, the
history of which can be found in my Rime giovanili e della ‘Vita Nuova’, pp. 57–58, and Dante’s Lyric
Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the ‘Vita Nuova,’ p. 44.
    13. On Dante da Maiano’s Di ciò che stato sè dimandatore, its “position of literary scepticism and
biological reductionism” (p. 112), see Justin Steinberg, “Dante’s First Dream between Reception and
Allegory: The Response to Dante da Maiano in the Vita nova,” in Dante the Lyrical and Ethical Poet,
eds. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Martin McLaughlin (Legenda, 2010), 92–118.

                                                    66