The First Italian Ovidian Poems and Their Occitan Models

Chapter 2 Examples (Not) to Follow: The First Italian Ovidian Poems and Their Occitan Models Ovid was widely read in medieval Italy. The previous chapter discussed the cultural and intellectual milieus in which this occurred and the different forms Ovidian texts could take. Reading Ovid, for instance, could mean learning Latin using his poems, or finding Ovidian excerpts in florilegia and prose writings, or reading other poetic works, Ovidian in inspiration, and so on — the thematic and generic variety of Ovid’s works and the even greater variety and range of their medieval artistic afterlives (in different languages, genres, modes of interpretation) mean that the intertwined paths of transmission and inspiration are often hard to untangle. While the previous chapter provided an in- troduction to these texts and contexts, in the present chapter I shift the focus from reading to writing: from “Italian readers of Ovid” to “Italian writers about Ovid.” In the previous chapter, we have seen that the acts of reading and writing are closely connected: the scribe, compiler, commentator, and author (the four different “makers of books” in St. Bonaventure’s definition) are first and foremost readers of the works they transmit; and among the many texts where Italian readers could encounter Ovid were medieval works of poetry in Latin, Occitan, and Old French, considered “Ovidian” because of some kind of con- tact with or inspiration from Ovid’s works. Thus, when we ask how important Ovid was as a model and source of inspiration for the Italian poets writing poetry in the vernacular for the first time, this question needs to be accompanied by another: which Ovid are we talking about? In addressing these questions for the first generations of Italian poets, in this chapter I identify the crucial role of Occitan poetry — another vernacular literature which flourished before the birth of Italian literature, and which in many ways offered the Italian poets an example to adopt and alter Ovidian material. Because many Italian poets had access to Ovid’s writings in Latin, their choices of which Ovidian sources to follow thus reflect artistic preferences, and at times become forceful statements about the status of vernacular poetry. The previously used phrase “Italian writers about Ovid” is to be taken literally: several among the first Italian poets are self-declared readers of Ovidio (the Italian name of the Latin poet) who write about these readings in their poems. In this chapter, I explore the poetic implications of including Ovid in Italian © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004421691_004 74 Chapter 2 verse, how it is similar to and differs from their Occitan models, and how Ovidio became a shared point of reference for a wide variety of poetic concerns. Ovid’s Latin love poetry had long been an example for later love poets. As we will see in this chapter, medieval Italian poets mention Ovidio in their discus- sions about how to write poetry, held in sonnet exchanges, and feature him as the emblem of the kind of poetry they write or no longer wish to write. They treat Ovid’s Metamorphoses similarly. By means of the simile, Italian poets feature a select group of Ovidian characters to underline their own exceptional- ity: the poet is similar to the male Ovidian character (but better), his lady to the female (but more beautiful), and he loves this lady like the male Ovidian character loved his (but more). In this chapter, I trace these ways of integrating Ovidian material in Italian verse, roughly covering the first three Italian poetic movements: from the Sicilian poets, who started to write poetry in Italian during the first decades of the thirteenth century at the court of Frederick II; to the Siculo-Tuscan poets, their followers on the Italian mainland; and the dolce stil novo poets, the innovators of the “sweet new style,” with figures such as Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and Dante. Instead of treating each Italian poet and poem as separate moments in the history of Ovid’s reception, in this chapter and the following I underline how these moments are connected. Medieval Italian readers of Ovid not only looked at the Occitan models, but also responded to the ways in which their Italian prede- cessors read and responded to Ovid. 2.1 Better and More: Ovidian Similes in Vernacular Poetry Ovid was not the first to write about mythological figures, but many times his account in the Metamorphoses became the standard version. Yet how “Ovidian” is a character when we find this character centuries later in a medieval text? Certain stories of the Metamorphoses greatly inspired readers and writers and reappeared in later writings in multiple languages and genres. As these stories lived on, they were — to use the plainest image in this Ovidian context — inevitably and deeply transformed. The two Ovidian stories that are most frequently featured in medieval Italian lyric poetry, the stories of Narcissus and Echo and of Pyramus and Thisbe, have long literary afterlives. In the twelfth century, when interest in all of Ovid’s work flourished, the Narcissus theme began to appear more frequently in literature: Narcissus is featured in the French poems Roman de Troie and Roman d’Alexandre, in the Roman de la Rose (vv. 1437–1508), as well as in several troubadour poems, and is the sole subject .

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