See It. Say It. Pitied. The Gestures of the ‘Onlookers’ in Cavalcanti’s Rime

A distinguishing feature of Guido Cavalcanti’s poetry is his use of multiple figures and voices to witness the suffering of the lyric ‘I’. Building on critical readings of dialogism in the Rime, this paper discusses the role of the ‘onlookers’ who witness the doleful lover, proposing a parallel with thirteenth-century liturgical representations of the Passion. Through a stylistic analysis, I argue that the implicit gesture in the voice of the onlookers reproduces the gestures of those who witness the scene of the suffering Christ in liturgical representations of the Passion at the time of Cavalcanti. The onlookers serve the function of inviting a specific affective community (of which Cavalcanti and his readers were part) to participate in the scene, and by eliciting an emotional response in the reader/viewer, they are instrumental in articulating the lyric ‘I’ through a parallelism with the figure of Christ.