(ca. 1271–early 14th century)
Gianni degli Alfani was a minor Florentine poet in the manner of the DOLCE STIL NOVO style popularized by Guido CAVALCANTI. Seven of his poems are extant, and they tend to be largely derivative, echoing poems of Cavalcanti and DANTE.
Very little is known of Alfani’s life, and, indeed, he has not been definitively identified, though it is likely he was a silk merchant and that, like Dante, he was exiled from Florence during the bitter political struggles between the Black and White Guelfs. He seems to have traveled extensively, but circumstances of his death are unknown. Of Alfani’s seven surviving poems, six are ballate— a kind of traditional dance song with a refrain that had become popular among the stilnovisti. The other is a sonnet specifically addressed to Cavalcanti. Like Cavalcanti, Alfani focuses on the pain and anguish of love, and does use some of the medical imagery (such as the psychology of the “spirits”) that characterized the poetry of his master. But Alfani tends to focus on the moment of anguish itself, rather than examining the inner psychological effects of that moment as the lover contemplates it after the fact. At the end of one of his ballate, for instance, he sends the poem to “Guido” (Cavalcanti). Alfani’s admiration of Guido, his use of scientific imagery, and his concentration of the moment of pain (the “scream of anguish”) are all present:
Then find your way into the mind of Guido,
for only he sees Love,
and show him the spirit that draws forth
a scream from the anguish of my shattered heart.
(Goldin, 1973, 413, ll. 18–21)
Critics of the past often dismissed Alfani as a slavish adherent of the style Cavalcanti initiated. However, some recent critics have seen him, with his focus on the lover’s pain and the lady as cause of that pain, as a precursor of the next major force in Italian poetry, PETRARCH.
Bibliography
■ Goldin, Frederick, trans. German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology and a History. New York: Doubleday, 1973.
■ Tusiani, Joseph, ed. The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry. New York: Baroque Press, 1974.
Encyclopedia of medieval literature. 2013.