Guittone d'Arezzo

Guittone d'Arezzo (Arezzo, 123521 August 1294) 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 joining the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In 1256, he was exiled from Arezzo due to his Guelf sympathies.

Biography Son of Viva di Michele and chamberlain of his area, he travelled often for business. A passionate supporter of the Guelfs, he lamented in a celebrated canzone the Ghibelline victory of Montaperti (1260). Guittone had a wife and three children who he would later abandon in 1256 after a spiritual crisis. The group's primary goal was to favor and promote the peace between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions. Guittone died in Florence on 21 August 1294. He willed his estate to build the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, near Florence.

Works His surviving work comprises forty letters and some 300 poems, these dividing evenly between about 140 courtly poems (–), and the moral writing, in verse and prose, that accompanied and followed his conversion . The entire corpus is unified by his inherent sobriety, didactic sententiousness, and stylistic virtuosity. A conflict between the inherited Romance tradition and his learned civic formation and logical, moral temper is already apparent in the 120 courtly sonnets, most of which he links, for the first time in the history of the sonnet, into cycles (five in all, three of them narrative), to probe the moral inconsistencies of the conventional love ethos. The 20 courtly canzoni display a pioneering grasp of the difficult style of the Provençal troubadours (trobar clus).

Following his religious awakening, the tone and subject of Guittone's poems shifted. He started to sign his works as Fra Guittone, and in the canzone "Ora parrà s'eo saverò cantare" he refers to his previous love poems as foolish.