Guinizellian Protocols: Angelic Hierarchies, Human Government, and Poetic Form in Dante1

It has long been a staple of literary handbooks that Guido Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil rimpaira sempre Amore” and its presentation of the donna as homologous with a star, angel, or divinity²—though not entirely unprecedented in vernacular lyric³—was a key stimulus for Dante’s conception of his “new style” in the Vita nova and the “dolce stil novo” as a literary movement, and indeed for the idea of a journey to Beatrice in heaven.⁴ The full range and depth of Guinizelli’s influence on Dante’s text, especially in Paradiso, remains however to be assessed.⁵ Among recent surveys is an essay by Piero Boitani that outlines the extent of influence of the canzone in the Vita nova, the Convivio and in the first two cantiche of Dante’s poem.⁶ And in a brief but suggestive essay, Michelangelo Picone pointed out that Guido’s canzone is echoed in Paradiso Canto 28 with the term doppiero, the two-stranded candle or torch that furnishes to the canzone an image for love dwelling in the cor gentile as fire stands on the candle’s tip (“Al cor gentil,” lines 30–31): with this term, Guinizelli’s celebrated text is granted a place, appropriately enough, in Dante’s account of the angelic hierarchies in the Primum mobile, the ninth heaven.⁷

Yet both Boitani’s and Picone’s readings, although acknowledging the broad resonance of Guido’s canzone for Dante’s work, still confine the topics of this recapture largely to the erotics of Guido’s poem: for example, to the negative outcome Guido’s verses have for Francesca, the articulation (by Virgil) of Love at the center of Purgatorio, and Guido’s placement in the circle of the lustful in Purgatorio.⁸ My argument in this essay is that in Dante’s eyes the domain of reference of the original canzone, as implied by its extensive incorporation into Dante’s text near the summit of the Paradiso,⁹ is much wider, and—without diminishing the emphasis on Love, which not only remains central, but proves amplified in its reach—touches on cosmology, politics, and poetics as well. In the following pages, a close analysis of Dante’s account of creation and of angelic activity in Paradiso 28–29 in relation to both “Al cor gentil” and Guinizelli’s sonnet “Caro padre mëo” anchors a reconsideration of his impact on Dante more generally, including Vita nova chapter xx [11], Purgatorio 16–18 and 26, and the canzone “Le dolci rime” along with its commentary in the fourth book of Convivio. I hope to show that Guinizelli’s influence in the Commedia has been considerably underestimated, and that Dante, far from transcending Guinizelli’s poetic example, as sometimes claimed, retains his texts as essential foundations to the Commedia.¹⁰

In the first place, Dante’s account in Paradiso 28–29, within the Primum Mobile, of the angelic hierarchies, and of their creation along with the heavenly spheres and prime matter, recuperates Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil” as the site of two epochal innovations in the subject matter of vernacular lyric poetry: the distinction of potency and act in the description of the psychology of love, and the parallel drawn between angelic obedience to God and the lover’s response to the donna.¹¹ But in addition to revisiting the lyric origins of the representation of the machina mundi¹²—the providential administration of the celestial spheres, and thus of the entire cosmos—what proves to be specifically political-theological about Dante’s references to Gunizelli’s canzone high in paradise is the underlying concept of a universal government that is Boethian in its affirmation of love broadly understood as the governing principle capable of binding together the elements of the universe and of the human city; for Dante, as we know, from at least Convivio Book IV, Chapter 5 until the end of Paradiso, this universal government takes the historical form of the Roman Empire.¹³ In light of this wider understanding of the mediatory and pacificatory role...