Dante and Ventadorn

Dante’s Vita Nuova, indeed shares many aspect with troubadour poems and especially with the works of Ventadorn. Ventadorn’s sincere love poetry fixates on a woman, and describes her perfection and supreme power over him. Interestingly though the poem focuses on the woman’s perfection, troubadour poems become more about the authors rather than the woman themselves.  Ventadorn embodies this aspect of troubadour poetry in When I Behold the Lark, as he describes his helplessness to escape his lover’s charms. He explains,

she became a mirror to my eye, / whereon I gazed complacently … / like young narcissus, thus to sigh, / and thus expire, beholding thee.

Mirrors reflect exactly anything that exists before them. By describing his lover as a mirror, Ventadorn creates a complex image, for although he looks at his lover, he sees himself. Through the lover, he views his own love. Rather than being attracted to the woman for the love she feels toward Ventadorn, he is attracted to her as a result of his own love. This is made clear by the reference to Narcissus, a mythical man who falls in love with his own reflection. The fact that the woman does not return his love is an important aspect of troubadour poetry. Longing and unattainability are important qualities to the work, without which the poems would not exists. Therefore, if the woman loved Ventadorn back, he would no longer yearn for her and thus, he would have no subject center a poem.

Similar to Ventadorn, Dante emphasizes his beloved’s power by elevating her to a point just shy of divinity. In chapter XIX, Dante asserts that “Heaven lacks its perfection only in lacking her”(36), and he swears that with Beatrice’s creation, “God, intended something new of earth”(36). Rather than redirecting the subject from the beloved back toward himself, however, Dante seems to earnestly worship Beatrice in a way similar to the manner in which one would worship a deity. Unlike Vertadorn, who basks in the not reciprocated love of a woman, Dante wishes fervently for the favor of Beatrice. Through her love, not his own love of her, will Dante himself will gain salvation, just as the love of god saves the soul of a sinner.

            By moving past the longing and unrequited aspects of loves, Dante differs from the earlier works of the Troubadours.