Figures of Love: Imagining Amore in the Early Italian Tradition

Love is often represented physically in early Italian poetry, but its physical form is not always described. This ambiguity is exacerbated by the fact that several figures went by the name amore: the classical Cupid, a courtly Lord, and even the Christian God. Contested and charged with metaliterary intent, these figures appear at the centre of debates around the emerging Italian poetic programme, although the traditions they represent are not as antagonistic as scholarship has insisted. Arguing for a new way of reading amore, this paper examines the layers of culture—classical, Christian, medieval, Mediterranean—that informed the figuration of love in medieval Italian poetry and the visual traditions surrounding it, recovering the mercurial and syncretic inheritance of the Italian amore and the polysemous mode of reading it invites.

Rebecca Bowen is an associate fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence (Max-Planck-Institut) and a postdoctoral research associate on the AHRC project ‘Envisioning Dante: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page’, a collaboration between the University of Oxford and the John Rylands Library. Her research focuses on text-image relations in medieval Italian poetry. Her work has been published in Dante Studies, Italian Studies, Filologia Antica e Moderna and other journals. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar, and is currently finishing her first monograph, an intellectual and iconographic history entitled Figures Love: Amor from Antiquity to the Italian Middle Ages.

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