La doppia faccia dell’amore

Autore: Roberto Antonelli
In: Critica del testo. XXI/3,2018
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Abstract

The essay discusses Romance erotic poetry and the making of the ideal of courtly love as it developed during the XIIth and XIVth centuries, first in the courts of southern France, later in Sicily at the court of Frederick II and eventually by the poets of the Stilnovo, Dante and Petrarch. It touches upon the eterodoxy, as it were, of the cultural phenomenon with respect to monastic tradition in Latin, to illustrate the oppositions around which courtly poetry rotates, as it affords – already in its most ancient examples – both an immediate request and the more abstract need to fill the gap separating the lyric self from the object it addresses. The author also discusses the ways in which the creative imitation of Occitan poetry by Sicilian poets lead to a philosophic discussion of love and its consequences, increasingly centred on the self of the poet, which is the only true protagonist of the poetry of Cavalcanti, Dante and Petrarch.