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UT ANIMALIUM PICTURA: ARISTOTLE'S HEART IN THE POETRY OF GIACOMO DA LENTINI

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2020

MATTEO PACE
MATTEO PACE*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College
*
mpace1@conncoll.edu
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Abstract

The essay analyzes the formation of the oft-cited trope of the image engraved (or painted) in the heart, topical in the Sicilian lyric of the thirteenth century, and the ways in which it re-discusses a painstaking issue of Aristotelian physiology. The trope of the “pintura nel core” (figure in the heart), as described in Giacomo da Lentini's Meravigliosa⋅mente and Madonna mia, a voi mando, is immediately assimilated to the faculty of memory, and the human ability to represent external reality by means of signa. This process of formation that happens in the heart and allows the poet to fall in love is reworked in the image of the “pintura” carved like a seal into wax. The lexical choices of Giacomo's poems point to an Aristotelian understanding of sense perception, centered around the key role of the heart, dependent upon the fluidity of its bodily part, and resulting in an internal representation of phenomenal reality. The link between love lyric poetry and physiological learning shows the interdependence of these two fields of medieval culture, and the ways in which a debated scientific issue can be illuminated by the comparative analysis of vernacular literature and philosophical investigation. Giacomo's reworking of these Aristotelian physiological tenets testifies to his poetical ability to engage with medicine and aesthetic representation.

Keywords

Giacomo da LentiniAristotleSicilian schoolmedieval Italian literaturemedicinephysiologyphilosophy of perception
Type
Research Article
Information
Traditio , Volume 75 , 2020 , pp. 225 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © Fordham University 2020

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, May 2017, and on many occasions at Columbia University during my doctoral studies. I thank all the people who provided me with invaluable feedback over these years and also the anonymous reviewer at Traditio. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Any mistakes or omissions that remain are solely my own.

References

1 Any discussion on medieval theories of memory has to start with Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge, 1998); and Bolzoni, Lina, The Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from Its Origins to Saint Bernardino da Siena (Aldershot, 2004)Google Scholar. Important reflections on the persistence of Aristotelian psychological language in thirteenth-century Italian poetry can also be found in Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gentili, Sonia, L'uomo aristotelico alle origini della letteratura italiana (Rome, 2005)Google Scholar.

2 Giacomo is not alone in his treatment of memory-images in the heart. This trope can be investigated in other poems of the Sicilian school, such as Piero della Vigna's Amando con fin core e con speranza (10.5), Iacopo Mostacci's A pena pare ch'io saccia cantare (13.3), Arrigo Testa's Vostra orgogliosa cera (8.1), Ruggeri d'Amici's Lo mio core che si stava (2.2), and the anonymous Già non m'era mestiere (25.13), but a thorough analysis of these poems goes beyond the scope of this article.

3 See Mallette, Karla, The Kingdom of Sicily: A Literary History, 1100–1250 (Philadelphia, 2005), 65–83, at 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 A dichotomy between medical optical theories is at the core of Tonelli, Natascia, “‘De Guidone de Cavalcantibus physico’ (con una notarella su Giacomo da Lentini ottico),” in Per Domenico de Robertis. Studi offerti dagli allievi fiorentini, ed. Becherucci, Isabella, Giusti, Simone, and Tonelli, Natascia (Florence, 2000), 459–508Google Scholar, later revised in eadem, Fisiologia della passione: Poesia d'amore e medicina da Cavalcanti a Boccaccio (Florence, 2015), 3–70.

5 More than one hundred manuscripts reproduce the letter, but the extant sources that are most used in modern editions are as follows: For the version attributed to Frederick II (F): Paris, BNF MS Lat. 8565, fols. 97v–98r; Paris, BNF MS Lat. 8566, fols. 106r–107r; and Paris, BNF MS Lat. 17912, fols. 61v–62v. For the version attributed to Manfred (M): Paris, BNF MS Lat. 8567, fol. 104v. However, the issue of authorship attribution is far from settled. Drawing from the textual history of the epistle, Gauthier, René Antoine, “Notes sur les débuts (1225–1240) du premier ‘averroisme,’” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 66 (1982): 321–74Google Scholar, dates the letter to the year 1263, thus a little less than fifteen years after Piero's suicide (†1249). Fulvio delle Donne, «Per scientiarum haustum et seminarium doctrinarum»: Storia dello Studium di Napoli in età sveva (Bari, 2010), 202–05, and idem, “Un'inedita epistola sulla morte di Guglielmo de Luna, maestro presso lo Studium di Napoli, e le traduzioni prodotte alla corte di Manfredi di Svevia,” Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 74/1 (2007): 225–45, while also contextualizing the letter during Manfred's kingdom on philological bases, and in agreement with Gauthier's chronology, does not exclude a possible pre-dating of a few years for the translations that were supposed to accompany the letter. Brunetti, Giuseppina, Il frammento inedito “Resplendiente stella de albur” di Giacomino Pugliese e la poesia italiana delle origini (Tübingen, 2010), 137–53Google Scholar, remains skeptical about this later chronology and attributes the letter to Piero's epistolary, thus during Frederick II's reign.

6 As a matter of fact, the rubric of the Manfred version simply reads: “Sedentibus in quadrigis philosophice discipline Parisiensis studii doctoribus universis Manfredus dei gracia etc.,” while the Frederick version underlines the emperor's personal engagement in the making of the translations, “per eum [Fredericum] nouiter translatos.” See Brunetti, Il frammento inedito, 137.

7 Quotations are from the most recent critical edition: L'epistolario di Pier della Vigna, ed. Edoardo D'Angelo et al. (Soveria Mannelli, 2014), 638–41.

8 The first quotation is the incipit of Aristotle's Metaphysics 1.1, 980a 21, in the translatio composita sive vetus, ascribed to an anonymous translator of the twelfth or thirteenth century who worked on the vetustissima translation of James of Venice. See Metaphysica: libri I – IV.4 (translatio composita siue ‘uetus’ – Iacobi Venetici translationis recensio), in Aristoteles Latinus 25.1–1a, ed. Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem (Bruxelles, 1970), 89–155, at 89, consulted via Aristoteles Latinus Database (see n. 44, below); and Gauthier, “Notes sur les débuts,” 323.

9 I diverge from the translation of the editor (“compilazioni…; sulla dialettica e la matematica”), because “mathematica” may well also comprise disciplines that we now consider as proper to physics or astronomy. For example, according to Domenicus Gundisalvi (ca. 1115–ca. 1190), “mathematica” is “speculation of those things that are separated from matter in intellect, but not in being” (speculatio de hiis, quae sunt separata a materia in intellectu, non in esse). See his De divisione philosophia 1, ed. Baur, Ludwig, in “Dominicus Gundissalinus: De divisione philosophiae,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 4/2–3 (Münster, 1903), 15Google Scholar. Therefore, I prefer to consider “sermocinalis” and “mathematica” as referring to the realms of language (that is, logic, grammar, dialectics, rhetoric…;) and abstractive/quantitative sciences (that is, physics, astronomy, and so forth) respectively.

10 Brunetti, Il frammento inedito (n. 5 above), 139–40.

11 Brunetti, Il frammento inedito (n. 5 above), 137–39. On the quantification of medieval libraries, see also Petrucci, Armando, “Le biblioteche antiche,” in Letteratura italiana, ed. Rosa, Alberto Asor (Turin, 1983), 2:528–54, esp. 532–33Google Scholar. Brunetti also discusses the possible abodes of the library since Frederick II never resided permanently in Sicily during his reign. If one of the locations was in Palermo or elsewhere (Messina? Puglia?), another “portable” collection must have followed the emperor and his officials during his travels so that they could execute the bureaucratic functions of the state chancery, and probably to provide the cultural leisure to which they were accustomed. See also Mallette, The Kingdom of Sicily (n. 3 above), 65–83.

12 Brunetti, Il frammento inedito (n. 5 above), 136.

13 The seminal work that links scientific interests at the Hohenstaufen court with Frederick II's own political trajectory is Kantorowicz, Ernst H., Frederick the Second, 1194–1250, transl. Lorimer, E. O. (New York, 1957)Google Scholar. Among more recent studies, two volumes are particularly worthy of mention: Federico II e le scienze, ed. Pierre Toubert and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Palermo, 1994), especially the contributions on scientific and medical topics by M. McVaugh, G. Cavallo, D. Jacquart, and C. Burnett; and Federico II e le nuove culture: Atti del 21esimo Convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 9–12 ottobre 1994 (Spoleto, 1995), most notably the essays by P. Morpurgo and C. Burnett. Abulafia, David, Frederick II. A Medieval Emperor (New York, 1988)Google Scholar is a controversial biography that aims primarily to scale down the impact of the alleged stupor mundi in the culture of the early thirteenth century and fails to recognize any originality in the poetry of the Sicilian court. See also Science Translated: Latin and Vernacular Translations of Scientific Treatises in Medieval Europe, ed. Michèle Goyens, Pieter De Leemans, and An Smets, (Leuven, 2008); Translating at the Court: Bartholomew of Messina and Cultural Life at the Court of Manfred, King of Sicily, ed. Pieter De Leemans (Leuven, 2014); Donne, Fulvio Delle, La porta del sapere: Cultura alla corte di Federico II di Svevia (Rome, 2019), esp. 83–168Google Scholar, but he does not investigate at length the presence of scientific knowledge among the Sicilian poets; and Mallette, The Kingdom of Sicily (n. 3 above).

14 Antonelli, Giacomo da Lentini, shows in his running commentary all of the intertextual references to Giacomo in the later poetical tradition. On the prosodic features of Giacomo and his followers, see also Antonelli, Roberto, “Rima equivoca e tradizione rimica nella poesia di Giacomo da Lentini. I. Le canzoni,” Bollettino del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani 13 (1977): 20–126Google Scholar. See also n. 71 of Antonelli's commentary ad locum for further literature on Giacomo's biography.

15 Although focusing exclusively on the previous and subsequent literary tradition of the trope, see Antonelli, “Rima equivoca e tradizione rimica,” 43–46 and n. 73; Simonelli, Maria Picchio, “Il ‘grande canto cortese’ dai provenzali ai siciliani,” Cultura neolatina 42 (1982): 201–38Google Scholar; Bruni, Francesco, “Le costellazioni del cuore nell'antica lirica italiana,” in Capitoli per una storia del cuore. Saggi sulla lirica romanza, ed. Bruni, Francesco (Palermo, 1988), 79–118Google Scholar; Mancini, Franco, La figura nel cuore fra cortesia e mistica: Dai Siciliani allo Stilnuovo (Naples, 1988), 41–65Google Scholar; and Fratta, Aniello, Le fonti provenzali dei poeti della scuola poetica siciliana: I postillati del Torraca e altri contributi (Florence, 1996)Google Scholar.

16 Respectively, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. Lat. 3793, and Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Redi 9. See Antonelli's cappello introduttivo to Madonna, dir vo voglio, in Giacomo da Lentini, 5–10, both for the philological issues at stake and the persistence of the debate in the Duecento tradition.

17 On the history of this dichotomy and the importance of the Tristan tradition, see Costanzo Di Girolamo, “«Cor» e «cors»: itinerari meridionali,” in Capitoli per una storia del cuore, 21–48. On the poetical debates on love circulating between Bernart de Ventadorn, Raimbaut d'Aurenga, and Chrétien de Troyes, debates that shook the fundamental issues at stake in courtly ideology, and the long-lasting influence of Thomas of Britain's Tristan, see Roncaglia, Aurelio, “Carestia,” Cultura neolatina 18 (1958): 121–37Google Scholar; Girolamo, Costanzo Di, “Tristano, Carestia, e Chrétien de Troyes,” Medioevo romanzo 9 (1984): 17–27Google Scholar; and Rossi, Luciano, “Chrétien de Troyes e i trovatori: Tristan, Linhaure, Carestia,” Vox Romanica 46 (1987): 26–62Google Scholar.

18 A theme not extraneous already to Bernart de Ventadorn, who explicitly connects his poetical production (and value) to his love inspiration. See, for instance, the cansos Chantars no pot gaire valer (BdT 70.15) and Can vei la lauzeta mover (BdT 70.43).

19 Citations from Folquet's poems are from the following edition: Le poesie di Folchetto di Marsiglia, ed. Paolo Squillacioti (Pisa, 1999).

20 On the possible mystical underpinning of courtly love in the Provençal tradition, see Mancini, La figura nel cuore (n. 15 above). On the theological correlation between holy relics and the object of reverence, see Bynum, Caroline Walker, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, 2007)Google Scholar.

21 Antonelli, Giacomo da Lentini, 295–96.

22 Antonelli, Roberto, Repertorio metrico della scuola poetica siciliana (Palermo, 1984), lxi–lxiiGoogle Scholar. All the examples analyzed in the course of his study and relevant to our discussion are listed under the rubric “rmsic 2.”

23 See Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini, ed. D'Arco Silvio Avalle (Milan, 1992), 1:ccxxviii–ccxxix.

24 See Rohlfs, Gerhard, Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, trans. Persichino, Salvatore (Turin, 1996), 1:70–88Google Scholar. On the same note, see also Menichetti, Aldo, Metrica italiana: Fondamenti metrici, prosodia, rima (Padua, 1993), 508Google Scholar.

25 Note that here cera must be taken solely as a Gallicism for “face,” and thus with an open /ɛ/ sound, while sera, “evening,” derives from Lat. sēra.

26 See Gianfranco Folena, “Cultura e poesia dei Siciliani,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno (Turin, 1970), 1:273–347, at 306. For the quotation from Alberto da Massa, see Poeti del Duecento, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Milan, 1960), 1:359–61.

27 See, for instance, the parallel construction individuated — but then rejected — by Antonelli in Chiaro Davanzati's Per la grande abondanza: “fue in terra formata / la gioia del mondo” (“the joy of the world was created on earth,” vv. 17–18), cited from Chiaro Davanzati, Rime, ed. Aldo Menichetti (Bologna, 1965), 178–80.

28 As a matter of fact, Antonelli's commentary ad locum (296) proposes a reading of line 43 as “ritrassi nel volto, nei sembianti,” but the overall meaning of vv. 43–44 is not clear and thus left unexplained.

29 Ricketts, Peter T., Concordance de l'Occitan médiéval (Turnhout, 2001)Google Scholar.

30 See Thomas d'Angleterre, Tristan et Yseut, in Tristan et Yseut. Les premières versions européennes, ed. Christiane Marchello-Nizia et al. (Paris, 1995), 153–55.

31 See Roncaglia, Aurelio, “La statua d'Isotta,” Cultura neolatina 31 (1971): 41–67Google Scholar, who explicitly connects Giacomo's image to the Roman de Tristan and the “querelle des images” reconstructed in his pages. In his commentary ad locum (295–96), Antonelli goes even further in affirming that a later reader of Giacomo, the Siculo-Tuscan poet Guittone d'Arezzo, contaminated these verses with Meravigliosa⋅mente in his poem Se de voi, donna gente (vv. 106–110, as copied in La). While I agree with Antonelli on the Tristan allusion in Guittone's lines, I do not take them as evidence for Giacomo's dependence on the Tristan romance. The fact that Guittone is contaminating Giacomo's image with Thomas does not confirm a correct interpretation of Giacomo's original.

32 Not to be confused with the homonymous fourteenth-century translator of medical texts, according to Galle, Griet, “The Anonymous Translator of the Translatio Vetus of De sensu,” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 50 (2008): 105–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bloch, David, “Nicholaus Graecus and the Translatio Vetus of Aristotle's De sensu,” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 50 (2008): 83–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar, proposes however to identify this translator as the Nicolaus Grecus who helped Robert Grosseteste in his Greek-Latin translations, and possibly also as the Nicolaus Siculus who translated Aristotle's De mundo.

33 Since the monumental (and yet ongoing) project of the Aristoteles Latinus, the bibliography on the Latin translations of the Aristotelian corpus is difficult to summarize concisely. For a detailed analysis of the textual transmission of the works, see Aristoteles Latinus. Codices, ed. George Lacombe (Rome, 1939–55). The groundbreaking works of Lorenzo Minio-Paluello remain essential to assessing the philological method of medieval translations. See the collection of essays by Minio-Paluello, Lorenzo, Opuscola: The Latin Aristotle (Amsterdam, 1972)Google Scholar. On the transmission and interpretation of the natural treatises, see also Parva naturalia: saperi medievali, natura e vita: Atti dell’11esimo convegno della Società italiana per lo studio del pensiero medievale, Macerata, 7–9 dicembre 2001, ed. Chiara Crisciani, Roberto Lambertini, and Romana Martorelli Vico (Pisa, 2004); and Les Parva naturalia d'Aristote: fortune antique et médiévale, ed. Christophe Grellard and Pierre-Marie Morel (Paris, 2010).

34 For example, Essays on Aristotle's De anima, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Rorty (New York, 1995) shows how the contemporary interpretations of the Aristotelian text are still part of the modern philosophical debates on the human mind.

35 See Charles, David, “Aristotle's Psychological Theory,” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 24 (2008): 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “Aristotle on Desire and Action,” in Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Dorothea Frede and Burkhard Reis (Berlin, 2009), 291–307. For a more complete assessment of the philosophical debate, see the excellent and explicative appendix “Gli interpreti di Aristotele e le teorie della mente contemporanee,” in Giulia Mingucci, La fisiologia del pensiero in Aristotele (Bologna, 2015), 269–84, whose book was instrumental in the writing of this section.

36 Translations of the Aristotelian texts are from The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translations, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, 1984), with chapter divisions from the Didot edition Aristotelis Opera Omnia Graece et Latine, 5 vols. (Paris, 1874–89), and lines from Bekker's Aristotelis Opera, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1837). Quotations in the original Greek text are from the following Clarendon editions (Oxford Classical Texts): Aristotelis De Anima, ed. William D. Ross (New York, 1956); and Aristotle, Parva Naturalia, ed. William D. Ross (New York, 1955).

37 On De an. 2.11, 424a 1–2 and the physical nature of sense-perception, see Mingucci, La fisiologia del pensiero, 113–33.

38 On the meaning of this “completion,” see Mingucci, La fisiologia del pensiero, 132. See also Giardina, Giovanna, “Sensazione e alterazione in Aristotele, De anima, II 5,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 25 (2014): 29–65, esp. 63–65Google Scholar.

39 See Mingucci, “La cera di Aristotele: Un'immagine aristotelica di filosofia della mente,” Philosophia 7/2 (2012): 87–116, for an articulation of the image in Aristotle and a semantic comparison with other philosophical texts. See also Mingucci, La fisiologia del pensiero, 113–44.

40 This connection is fully developed later by Galen in his physiological system. For a thorough analysis of the emergence of an encephalocentric physiological theory, see Manuli, Paola and Vegetti, Mario, Cuore, sangue e cervello: Biologia e antropologia nel pensiero antico (Pistoia, 2009), especially 41–72 and 163–210Google Scholar; and Frampton, Michael, Embodiments of Will: Anatomical and Physiological Theories of Voluntary Animal Motion from Greek Antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages, 400 B.C.–A.D. 1300 (Saarbrücken, 2008)Google Scholar. See also van der Eijk, Philip, Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity: Doctors and Philosophers on Nature, Soul, Health and Disease (New York, 2005), 119–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with extensive bibliography.

41 Mingucci, “La cera di Aristotele,” 87–88, where the author also investigates the importance of the wax in the history of technics and philosophy before the work of Aristotle.

42 On this point, Mingucci, “La cera di Aristotele,” 91–94 refers also to Meteor. 4.9, 386a 18–22: “Some things, e.g. copper and wax, are impressible, others, e.g. pottery and water, are not. The process of being impressed is the sinking of a part of the surface of a thing in response to pressure or a blow, in general to contact. Such bodies are either soft, like wax, where part of the surface is depressed while the rest remains, or hard, like copper.”

43 See Gregoric, Pavel, Aristotle on the Common Sense (New York, 2007), 65–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which he analyzes the terminological nuances of the expression in Aristotle and argues that, although employed with respect to sense-perception, it “has not yet crystallized into a technical term” (125).

44 The entire paragraph reads: “Manifestum enim est quoniam oportet intelligere huiusmodi aliquid fieri per sensum in anima, et in parte corporis habentis ipsam, ut animalium pictura, passio est cuius et habitum dicimus memoriam esse” (“it is in fact clear why we must think that which is produced through sensation in the soul, and in the part of the body that possesses it, [to be] some sort of a picture of a living being — an alteration whose state we call memory”). Quotations from the Latin translations of Aristotle are from the edited texts of Aristoteles Latinus, under the care of the Union Académique Internationale (Bruges, 1943). This ongoing project can be accessed online at the Aristoteles Latinus Database (ALD), a collaborative project between the Union Académique, the Aristoteles Latinus Centre, and the Centre “Traditio Litterarum Occidentalium.”

45 The rest of the sentence reads: “ut figura quedam vel motus sensibilis, sicut sigillantes anulis” (“as an image of some sort or a sensitive movement, as those who enclose [documents] with their signet-rings”). James of Venice is well aware of the parallel loci in which Aristotle uses the image of the ring in wax, because he translated them with consistent language. With respect to the passage of De anima 2.12 describing sense-perception as an engraving of an image without the matter of the object, James translates that it happens “ut cera anuli sine ferro et auro recipit signum” (“as wax receives the seal of the signet-ring without the iron or the gold”). And in De anima 3.12, while mentioning the appropriate materiality of wax as a parallel for the depth of the impression engraved by sensation, James renders “sicut si in cera signum ingrederetur usque in finem” (“as if a seal would penetrate in wax as deep as it is allowed to”).

46 And see also the conclusive statements of Juv. 3, 469a 10–14: “all sanguineous animals have the supreme organ of the sense-faculties in the heart, for it is here that we must look for the common sensorium belonging to all the sense-organs. These in two cases, taste and touch, can be clearly seen to extend to the heart, and hence the others also must lead to it.” In his commentary and edition of the biological works of the philosopher, Diego Lanza refers to other passages (De juv. 3, 469a 10–b 3; De part. an. 2.10, 656b 24–25; De gen. an. 2.6, 743b 24) in which Aristotle identifies the heart as the central sensorium and thus the organ common to the perception of time and memory. See Aristotele, Opere biologiche, ed. Diego Lanza and Mario Vegetti (Turin, 1971), 1123, n. 4, with reference to the commentaries to the Parva naturalia, ed. Jules Tricot (Paris, 1951); and John Beare (Oxford, 1908).

47 See Antonelli's introduction in Giacomo da Lentini, xxxvi–xl. For other documentation of Giacomo's life and professional activity, see Sciascia, Laura, “Lentini e i Lentini dai Normanni al Vespro,” in La poesia di Giacomo da Lentini: Scienza e filosofia nel XIII secolo in Sicilia e nel Mediterraneo occidentale (Palermo, 2000), 18–31Google Scholar; Langley, Ernest F., The Poetry of Giacomo da Lentino, Sicilian Poet of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1915), xv–xixGoogle Scholar and 131–35; and de Propris, Fabio, “Giacomo (Iacopo) da Lentini,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 2000), 54:210–14Google Scholar. Biographical information on the other poets of the court can be found in the cappelli introduttivi to the individual poets in Di Girolamo's edition of Poeti della corte di Federico II.

48 On the allocutive orientation of Giacomo's poetry and the dichotomy between interior and exterior that semantizes the heart as the former, see Raffaele Pinto, “La parola del cuore,” in La poesia di Giacomo da Lentini, 169–92.

49 I agree with Antonelli in his commentary ad locum (54) where he corrects Giorgio Agamben on the meaning of the word parete to be taken as a second person plural of the verb parere, “to appear, to manifest oneself,” and not as a noun meaning “wall or fresco.” For Agamben's idiosyncratic reading, see Agamben, Giorgio, Stanze. La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Turin, 1977), 81Google Scholar.

50 Allegretto, Manuela, “Figura amoris,” Cultura neolatina 40 (1980): 231–42Google Scholar. This essay owes a great deal to Bruno Nardi, “Filosofia dei rimatori italiani del Duecento e in Dante,” in idem, Dante e la cultura medievale, ed. Paolo Mazzantini (Rome, 1983), 1–92, esp. 1–13. Nardi identifies in Andrea Capellanus the inspiration for Giacomo's Amor è uno disio che ven da core. Nardi's goal is also to reconcile Aristotle's cardiocentric physiology with the Galenic medical writings, through the solution described by Avicenna in Canon medicinae, bk. 1, fen 1, doctr. 6, ch. 1 (Venice, 1490), 20ra. The argument is more fully developed in Allegretto's essay, although without recognition of Nardi's work.

51 See the recent contributions on the topic by Danielle Jacquart, “La fisiognomica: Il trattato di Michele Scoto,” in Federico II e le scienze (n. 13 above), 338–53; Charles Burnett, “Michael Scot and the Transmission of Scientific Culture from Toledo to Bologna via the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen,” in idem, Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages: The Translators and their Intellectual and Social Context (Farnham, 2009), 101–26; and idem, “Master Theodore, Frederick II's Philosopher,” in idem, Arabic into Latin, 225–85.

52 Brugnolo analyzes the biblical intertext of John 1:14 (“et verbum caro factum est”) in the image of the embodied heart. See Brugnolo, Furio, “‘Accessus’ ai Siciliani: «Madonna, dir vo voglio»,” Siculorum Gymnasium 53 (2000): 113–33, esp. 119Google Scholar.

53 Antonelli stresses the internal proximity of the poetic, absent object, as phrased in Madonna mia, a voi mando, Meravigliosa⋅mente, and S'io doglio non è maraviglia, where “quell'essere ‘lontano’ eppure interiormente vicino […;] costituisce la cifra forse più significativa della ricerca lentiniana.” See Giacomo da Lentini, 285.