Nicolò de’ Rossi

Nicolò de’ Rossi (c. 1295–c. post-1348) was born in Treviso, Italy, toward the end of the 13th century and died in Venice after 1348. Beyond a preeminent legal activity that allowed him to take part as a Guelph to the unstable political events of those years, he was one of the most important literary personalities of his age in northern Italy. His cultural renown within the Trevisan area is confirmed by the fact that after the completion of his law studies in Bologna in 1318, he was preferred over Cino da Pistoia as professor of civil law at the academic Studium of Treviso, and he was often chosen as one of the members of diplomatic missions in several troublesome circumstances (in particular during the war against Cangrande della Scala). However, his name is primarily remembered because of his fervent literary activity: his poetic production includes more than 400 poems (sonnets and four canzoni, one associated to a Latin commentary) written between 1317 and 1329, collected, almost as a lyric canzoniere, in the manuscript Colombino 7.1.32 preserved at the Biblioteca Capitular in Seville. These poems mainly deal with love subjects (he experienced all the possibilities offered by the coeval tradition, from Guittone’s style to Stilnovo styles), as well as with political, moral, realistic, and religious themes. Furthermore, thanks to the testimony of this manuscript, we are able to recognize him as the author of the first vernacular examples of figurative poetry: by renewing the model of the Latin carmina figurata, he integrated the phonic element into the graphic one through the elaboration of complex visual architectures for four poems. His importance in the Veneto region is also due to his activity as a veritable editor of the Italian lyric tradition, as witnessed by another manuscript (Barberiniano lat. 3953 of the Vatican Library), collecting a wide series of Tuscan texts (by Dante, Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, Cecco Angiolieri, etc.) that constitute a remarkable anthology based on particular criteria of selection and inner order.