Guido Cavalcanti
(there is much in that word wherewith to confute those who find no irony in his sonnets), “and habile, and a great talker.” On the “sixth day” (Novel ix.) the queen herself tells how he leapt over an exceeding great tomb to escape from that bore, Betto Brunelleschi. Other lines we have of him as: “noble and pertinent and better than another at whatever he set his hand to”; among the critics, Crescimbene notes, “robustezza e splendore”; Cristofore Landiano, “sobrio e dotto, and surpassed by a greater light he became not as the moon to the sun. Of Dante and Petrarcha, I speak elsewhere.”
Filippo Villani, with his translator Mazzuchelli, set him above Petrarch, speaking of him as “Guido of the noble line of the Cavalcanti, most skilled in the liberal arts, Dante’s contemporary and very intimate friend, a man surely diligent and given to speculation, ‘physicus’ (? natural philosopher) of authority… worthy of laud and honour for his joy in the study of ‘rhetoric,’ he brought over the fineness of this art into the rhyming compositions of the common tongue (eleganter traduxit). For canzoni in vulgar tongue and in the advancement of this art he held second place to Dante, nor hath Petrarch taken it from him.”
Dino Compagni, who knew him, has perhaps left us the most apt description, saying that Guido was “cortes e ardito, ma sdegnoso e solitaro,” at least I would so think of him, “courteous, bold, haughty,
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