BOCCACCIO, Giovanni

Nationality: Italian. Born: Paris, 1313. Education: Tutored by Giovanni da Strada; studied law, 1333-39. Career: Apprentice to a merchant, Florence, 1327-33; associated with artists and philosophers, Naples; befriended the poet Petrarch, Florence, 1350; secretary to Francesco degli Ordelaffi and to Ostasio da Polenta; chamberlain of treasury; traveled throughout Italy. Spent his last years in Certaldo. Died: 31 December 1375.

Publications

Short Stories

Filostrato. n.d. /span>

Teseida. n.d.

Decameron. 1348-?.

Novels

Filocolo. n.d.

Fiammetta. n.d.

Corabaccio. 134?.

Poetry

Ameto. n.d.

Amorosa visione. n.d.

Ninfale Fiesolano. n.d.

Other

Life of Dante. n.d.

Bucolicum carmen. 1351-66.

De casibus virorum illustrium. 1355-60

De claris mulieribus. 135?.

De genealogiis deorum gentilium. 135?.

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Critical Studies:

The Tranquil Heart: Portrait of Giovanni Boccaccio by Catherine Carswell, 1937; The Life of Giovanni Boccaccio by Thomas C. Chubb, 1979; The World at Play in Boccaccio's Decameron by Giuseppe Mazzotta, 1986.

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Giovanni Boccaccio is the third member of the famous trinity (the others being Dante and Petrarch) that reigns over Italian medieval literature. Though he trained as a lawyer and worked as a diplomat, he found his true vocation in writing. From his early twenties on, he wrote with equal elegance and fluency in both Latin and the Italian vernacular, producing allegories, romances, epic poems, and learned treatises. In 1348 he witnessed the ravages of the Black Death in Florence, a grueling experience that gave him the idea for his best known work, the Decameron (Ten Days). He began composing it in the following year and finished the first draft in 1351. The technique and presentation of the Decameron's one hundred short stories reveal a master of the genre. Boccaccio was immensely well read and took many of his plots from a wide variety of sources. At the same time he elevated the novella into a genuine art form. His influence on other writers has been widespread, beginning, for example, in France with Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron and continuing in England with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. His life even inspired the romantic operetta Boccaccio (1879) by the Austrian composer Suppé.

The introduction to the Decameron records with grim detail the physical effects of the Black Death on its victims: how a swelling big as an egg appeared in the groin or the armpit of the victim, followed by livid patches all over the body, then death within three days at most. The plague was incurable and was transmitted to others by the slightest touch. Animals as well as humans died in agony.

Amid the stench of rotting corpses, a group of seven young Florentine ladies decide to leave the city and find refuge in the country. They are accompanied by three young gentlemen, each of them smitten by one of the ladies and bound by family links to the other four. The ten refugees set up house in a beautiful mansion surrounded by lovely gardens with sparkling fountains, verdant lawns, and flowers in bloom. Here they pass the time singing, dancing, and playing chess, although their main amusement is telling stories. The Decameron's structure is derived from the refugees' plan that on each day, for 10 days, 10 stories will be told by members of the group.

While scholars detect religious and philosophical implications in the framework of the Decameron, which also contains respectful echoes of Dante, its most striking characteristic is that it suits to perfection Boccaccio's special talent for short fiction. Like many gifted short story writers, he was ill at ease in long-winded works and most at home in recounting brief episodes. The episodes of the Decameron concentrate on such topics as love, passion, lust, and greed, which he treats in styles that can be Rabelaisian, comic, tragic, or romantic. Each day is given a general theme which the stories illustrate, except for the first and ninth days which are left open to the raconteurs. The themes may be the tricks that men play on women and that women play on men, or the challenge of love and how it can be successfully mastered, or the unpredictability of fate and how happiness may be achieved despite ill fortune, or the deceits practiced by adulterous wives, or the destructive power of obsessive love. The combination of these eternal themes with Boccaccio's sprightly storytelling has ensured that the Decameron continues to fascinate and amuse.

Typical of the more Rabelaisian tales is the one about the old bricklayer and his pretty wife, Peronella. One day while she is in bed with her lover, Giannello, the husband returns unexpectedly. She hides Giannello in a barrel. The husband announces that he has at last found a buyer for the barrel. Peronella convinces him that another prospective buyer is already inspecting it, that is to say Giannello, who jumps out and complains that he won't purchase the barrel until it has been properly cleaned. The husband, armed with a scraper, climbs inside and starts to scrape away. As he cleans up the barrel, Peronella leans into it directing the operation from above. Giannello, "who had not achieved total satisfaction that morning before her husband returned home," pleasures her while standing up. This time he completes the deed satisfactorily, just before the husband emerges from the depths of the barrel. Giannello pays the agreed price and bears away his purchase (Day VII, ii).

A similar tale (Day II, v) exemplifies Boccaccio's skill in unfolding a series of events which, though highly improbable when briefly outlined, are entirely credible in context, thanks to his narrative dexterity. Andreuccio goes to Naples with five hundred gold florins in his pocket to buy a horse at a fair. A cunning prostitute defrauds him of the money. He falls into a cesspit, realizes he has been tricked, and, dripping with foul-smelling excrement, wanders the streets where he is recruited by two thieves planning to rob the tomb of an archbishop who has just been buried wearing a ring worth more than five hundred gold florins. They squeeze Andreuccio into the tomb, and he passes out the rich vestments as ordered but keeps the ring for himself. The thieves, furious, shut the lid on him and clear off. Some time later other people arrive with the same intention. They prize open the lid, but, when Andreuccio clutches the leg of the first man to drop inside, they shriek with terror and run away. Andreuccio emerges and goes home with a ring worth far more than the horse he intended to buy.

Such are the bawdy tales, and there are many of this sort, that have given the Decameron a certain notoriety. They teem with sinful friars, lustful abbots, sexy gallants, and lascivious wives. Two young men spend the night with a family, and, thanks to the complicated layout of a cat, a cradle, and three beds, are able to enjoy the favors of both a mother and a beautiful daughter (Day IX, vi.) Few variations on sexual themes escape Boccaccio. He includes wife-swapping (Day VIII, viii), threesomes, (Day VII, vi), and even, rare for a European writer of the period, homosexuality. The wealthy merchant Pietro is a closet gay who has married a beautiful redhead to give himself an air of respectability. She, randy but frustrated, takes as her lover a very pretty young lad. Pietro finds them in bed together, but, instead of becoming angry, he is delighted, because for a long time he has been lusting after this particular boy. So he joins them in bed, and, next morning, the boy goes home "still not quite sure whether he'd served more as a wife or as a husband" (Day V, x.).

Yet bawdiness is only one element in the rich mixture served up by the Decameron. There is also a distinct flavor of the macabre and the tragic. This runs through the tale of the Princess Ghismonda and her lover Guiscardo (Day V, i.). Her disapproving father, Tancredi, orders Guiscardo to be killed and has his heart cut out. He then delivers the heart in a golden chalice to Ghismonda, who takes poison and dies. A similar tale is told of Guillaume de Cabestaing and his love for the wife of his friend Guillaume de Roussillon (Day IV, ix). When Roussillon discovers the affair, he murders Cabestaing and plucks out his heart. His chef having sliced, spiced, and cooked the heart, Roussillon serves it up at dinner to his wife who eats it with relish. When he tells her what she has just done, she throws herself out of the window and is smashed to pieces on the ground below. Another grim subject, though this time with a happy ending, is featured in the tale of patient Griselda (Day X, x). It is a chilling story of vicious male chauvinism. The Marquis of Saluzzo marries a peasant girl for the sake of an heir and puts her through a series of the most humiliating tests. Despite it all she remains loyal and uncomplaining. Boccaccio's moral is that the poor and humbly born are as capable of showing nobility and steadfastness as are those of the most exalted birth.

These bare summaries cannot, however, do full justice to Boccaccio's command of the storyteller's art. Although, like Shakespeare, he often borrows plots, he treats them with such ingenuity that he makes them his own and transmutes them into something fresh and individual. He knows how to catch the reader's interest from the very start and to hold it with many a twist and turn until curiosity is satisfied. Witty, cynical, often satirical, he is a man of the world who nonetheless understands human nature, and although he never fails to entertain, he does not neglect to include a subtle moral. Love and money have always been, and always will be, among the most absorbing passions of men and women. That is why, for nearly seven hundred years, the Decameron has remained a treasure trove not only for the general reader and the scholar but also for novelists, playwrights, composers, and filmmakers.

—James Harding