Medieval Studies Antonio da Tempo and Gidino da Sommacampagna
by
Francesco Marco Aresu
  • LAST REVIEWED: 24 April 2019
  • LAST MODIFIED: 24 April 2019
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396584-0266

Introduction

Antonio da Tempo (A. d. T.) of Padua [?] (b. end of the 13th century–d. after 1339) was a judge, poet, and metricologist. He participated in Padua’s protohumanistic cultural milieu at the intersections of juridical and rhetorical Studies, French literature, and Siculo-Tuscan Poetry. He is the author of correspondence sonnets and other poems cited as example in his own treatise on metrics, the Editions: Summa artis rithimici vulgaris dictaminis, for which he is best known. The Summa is a study of Italian metrical forms (sonettus, ballata, cantio extensa, rotundellus, mandrialis, serventesius, motus confectus), with a clear prominence given to the sonnet. Translated and adapted at least three times over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, it remained the most popular versification textbook until Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (1525). The biography of Petrarch and the commentary to Petrarch’s Fragmenta once attributed to him are nowadays considered the work of a homonym. The most popular vernacular rewriting of Antonio’s Summa is Gidino (or Ghidino) da Sommacampagna’s Editions: Trattato e Arte deli Rithimi Volgari. Gidino, however, never references his source. A poet, preceptor, and soothsayer at the Scaliger court, Gidino (Verona [?], b. 1320–1330–d. before 1400) planned the Trattato (completed around 1381–1384) while serving a prison sentence after falling into disrepute following the death of his patron, Cangrande II. The Trattatto, preserved in a single manuscript, expands on Antonio’s classification of meters by adding equivoci, bisticci, asticci, composizioni, and contrasti. Gidino also develops the analysis of aequivocatio and multilingual poems and provides a more detailed exemplification of sirventesi and madrigali.

Antonio da Tempo

The nonspecialist will find it hard to read works by or on A. d. T. No complete edition with translation of his corpus exists. Scholarship on A. d. T. lacks a book-length monograph on his life and works. Article-length essays on specific aspects, positivistically oriented archival researches, and relatively rigorous encyclopedia entries constitute the bibliographic corpus on A.

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