Guido Cavalcanti - Historical Background

Historical Background

Cavalcanti was born in Florence at a time when the comune was beginning its economic, political, intellectual and artistic ascendancy as one of the leading cities of Renaissance. The disunited Italian peninsula was dominated by a political particularism that pitted each city-state one against the other, often with this factionalism contributing the fractious and sometimes violent political environments of each comune. The domination of medieval religious interpretations of reality, morality and society were challenged by a rise of new urban culture across Europe that gradually supplanted rural, local, ecclesiastical and feudal ways of thinking. There was an accompanying return to study, interpret and emulate the classics, known as a revival of antiquity. New secular views laid the foundations for modern life in the Western Civilization. As Jacob Burckhardt, Swiss historian and author of the classic The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy described, “It was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people which achieved the conquest of the western world.” In sum, Cavalcanti lived during and helped shape this time of great innovation that was spurred on by a desire to explore, create and experiment with new things.