“Volan ausel’ per air di straine guise”: gli animali come immagini del fare poetico nella poesia del Duecento e in Dante

The present work focuses on the observation and the study of animal figures as metapoetical meanings that we find in the similies, the metaphors and the transumptiones of the Italian poetry of the XIII century and in Dante’s corpus. Starting from the XII century, indeed, animals began to appear in the Romanic lyric production as metaphors of rhetorical, stylistic and poetical conceptions. Trough animal images, poets could express either their ideas about poetry or about the compositive methods of other writers or even about the rules of a particular literary genre. Considering the interpretative categories of Medieval zoological symbolism, the analysis of the specifical occurrences and of the intertextual relations interowen trough these animal figures, the author provides a wide range of the meanings of a specific animal image and of its metaliteral implications. The section “For a metaliteral bestiary” presents and gives a syntetical comment on the most common animal figures of the Italian poetry of the XIII century: the hypernym of bird, the swan, the nightingale, the crow and the lark. The section “Metapoetical animals in the Commedia”, on the other hand, focuses on the interpretation of the metapoetical animal figures present in Dante’s poem such as the hen, the snake, the starling, the crane, the dove and the eagle.