(Iacopo da Lentini, “the Notary”)
(early 13th century)
Generally recognized as the first writer of courtly lyric poetry in Italian, Giacomo da Lentino was a notary in the court of the Emperor Frederick II of Sicily. He is credited with founding the Sicilian school” of Italian poetry, which introduced into Italian many of the forms and themes of the lyrics of the Provençal TROUBADOURS. Giacomo, no mere imitator, is also credited with inventing that most versatile and adaptable of lyric forms, the SONNET. Giacomo’s name appears in legal records between 1223 and 1240. In one of the latest of such documents, he refers to himself as notary of the lord emperor. In his own poems, Giacomo calls himself “the Notary” and says that he was born in Lentino (now Lentini, a city north of Syracuse in Sicily). Other poets refer to him with respect, the most important DANTE himself, who lists Giacomo in Purgatorio XXIV at the head of the leading poets of the previous generation. Two of Giacomo’s tenzone or debate poems (see tenso), one with Frederick’s chancellor, PIER DELLA VIGNA, and one with the abbot of Tivoli, present Giacomo as a recognized expert on the definition and nature of love. Giacomo’s poems do evince a clear debt to Provençal lyrics. In form his 17 extant CANZONI are clearly adopted from the Provençal CANSO. In content Giacomo borrows most of the COURTLY LOVE themes of the troubadours: The lover is the lady’s servant; she acts toward him as a feudal lord. The lover will do anything to prove his worthiness and nobility to the lady, but is apprehensive about declaring his love to her. Partly, of course, this is because of the tale-mongers around the couple and often the jealousy of the lady’s husband. Certain conventional troubadour images appear in Giacomo as well, including the lover as a ship lost at sea, or the lady’s beauty as a rose. Giacomo’s audience, however, was more narrow than the entire court that served as the troubadour audience. Giacomo was writing for a group of other bureaucrats—at once more learned and less diverse than the Provençal court. It is important to note that Frederick II’s court was also significant for its contribution to the transmission of Aristotle to the West, along with his Arabic commentators. In this atmosphere Giacomo and his fellow poets, as well as their audience, looked at love from a more philosophical and intellectual standpoint. Thus Giacomo’s most famous canzone, “Maravigliosamente/ un amor mi distringe,” examines the poem as an imperfect expression of the perfect form of love that exists, in response to the lady’s image, in the lover’s mind:
Like a man who keeps his mind
on a distant thing and paints
the likeness of his thought:
O Beautiful, I do the same:
inside my heart
I bear your image;
(Goldin 1973, 211, ll. 4–9)
But Giacomo’s most original contribution is his invention of the sonnet. Some 25 of his roughly 40 extant lyrics are sonnets, and they are the earliest we possess. Therefore Giacomo is generally credited with inventing the form. In the spirit of intellectualizing love poetry, Giacomo set out to create a poem in which there could be a logical relationship between the structure of the poem and its theme. His sonnets display this sort of logical order, and it is this idea of the intellectual nature of love that takes root later in the Italian tradition of love poetry.
Unfortunately none of Giacomo’s lyrics survives in its original Sicilian. Scribes who copied his poems regularly altered his language to conform to Tuscan after that dialect had become standard in Italy.
Bibliography
■ Goldin, Frederick, trans. German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology and a History. New York: Doubleday, 1973.
■ Jensen, Frede, ed. and trans. The Poetry of the Sicilian School. New York: Garland, 1986.
■ Kleinhenz, Christopher. “Giacomo da Lentino and the Advent of the Sonnet: Divergent Patterns in Early Italian Poetry,” Forum Italicum 10 (1976): 218–232.
■ Langley, Ernest, ed. The Poetry of Giacomo Da Lentino. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1915.
Encyclopedia of medieval literature. 2013.