Il disdegno di Pietro. La poesia di Guido Cavalcanti nelle Prose di Bembo

The aim of this paper is to assess and discuss the scarce presence of Guido Cavalcanti’s poetry in Bembo’s Prose (and his negative judgement on it – which is partly explicitly stated, and partly is inferable from his practices of omission). To do so, the analysis first traces the few references to Cavalcanti outside of the Prose. On the basis of existing studies, it then reconstructs ways in which Bembo received ancient Italian poetry. The discussion, then, focuses on the Prose, reviewing the places where Cavalcanti is quoted (with particular attention to Guido’s relevance to the lists of Provençalisms and archaisms reproved by Bembo). Lastly, the paper examines Bembo’s list of ancient poets in Prose II, ii, 2-7, noting its dependance on the De vulgari eloquentia and its concurrent, substantial ideological extraneousness from the pluralistic canon established by Poliziano in the dedicatory note of the Raccolta Aragonese. In the light of this data, the paper discusses the extent to which, according to Bembo, Cavalcanti is associated with the stylistic coarseness that the author attributes to ancient authors, whose work is relegated prior to Dante’s turning point and, above all, to the supreme a-historified model of the Petrarchan lyric.