In summer-time how glad am I
     When over lea or down
     A country lass mine eyes espy,
     Of maidens all the crown.

     Oh!  Paradise!  How glad am I
     When o’er the heavenly down
     God and God’s Mother I espy,
     Of women all the crown.

The Italian poets, far more profound than the Provencals, saw a goddess in the beloved (whom they always addressed as Madonna), and humbled themselves before her.  Social differences, which played such a prominent part in the North, are here ignored.  The impecunious poet no longer extols the princess, the wife of his lord and master.  There is no question of such a relationship; the poet is a free citizen of the town, subject only to the emotion of the heart, and his song carries its own reward.  It has ceased to be the married woman’s privilege to be lauded and extolled; the maiden of unaristocratic origin, who to the poets represents more strongly the ideas of purity and perfection, has usurped her place.  We know that Lapo Gianni, Dino Frescobaldi, Guinicelli and Dante worshipped a maiden untouched by as much as a sensuous thought, and Frescobaldi decided the question whether it were better to love a married woman or a maiden, in favour of the latter.  The feeling of those lovers was pure and lofty, and they had the power of giving it perfect expression.

In a canzone, the authorship of which is ascribed to both Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia, it is said of the beloved dead that God needed her presence to perfect Heaven, and that all the saints now worship her.  She was a miracle of perfection while she was yet on earth, but now: 

     Look thou into the pleasure wherein dwells
     Thy lovely lady, who is in heaven crowned,
     Who is herself thy hope in heaven, the while
     To make thy mem’ry hallowed she prevails.

     Of thee she entertains the blessed throngs,
     And says to them, while yet my body thrave
     On earth, I gat much honour which he gave,
     Commending me in his commended songs.

(Transl. by D.G.  ROSSETTI.)

At the conclusion of his finest poem, “Al Cor Gentil,” Guinicelli, next to Dante doubtless the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, says:  “God will ask me after my death:  ‘How could’st thou have loved aught but Me?’ And I will reply:  ’She came from Thy realm and bore the semblance of an angel.  Therefore in loving her, I was not unfaithful to Thee!’” Here we have the perfection of metaphysical eroticism:  the beloved woman is God; he who loves her, loves God in her.

Cavalcanti maintained in a poem that an image of the Madonna actually bore the features of his lady.

     Guido, an image of my lady dwells
     At San Michele, in Orto, consecrate,
     And daily worshipped.  Fair, in holy state,
     She listens to the tale each sinner tells. 
     And among them who come to her, who ails
     The most, on him the most does blessing fall;
     She bids the fiend men’s bodies abdicate;
     Over the curse of blindness she prevails,
     And heals sick languors in the public squares....