BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI

Poet and prose writer; b. probably Florence or Certaldo, Italy, July 1313; d. Certaldo, December 21, 1375. Legend has falsely portrayed the earliest circumstances of his life. Using pseudoautobiographical confidences, vague and mysterious to the point of enigma, that were scattered throughout the youthful works, the 19th century set out to construct an entrancing vie romancée, in which Boccaccio was thought to have been born in Paris of the love of a merchant and a gentlewoman, or even a princess, and later to have been the chosen lover of the beautiful illegitimate daughter of King Robert of Anjou, Fiammetta. If his father, Boccaccio di Chellino, representative of the powerful trading company of the Bardi, was actually in Paris during 1313, then Giovanni was born of an illegitimate affair of his mother at Certaldo or, more likely, at Florence.

He passed his infancy in the San Pier Maggiore section of Florence, in his father's house, where Margherita

de' Martoli had come as wife; she was related to the Portinari (Beatrice's family), and perhaps directly from her or from his first teacher, Giovanni Mazzuoli da Strada, sprang the earliest indications of that Dantean cult that grew throughout his life. When hardly out of boyhood (perhaps about 1325), he was sent into business at Naples with the Bardi Bank, which controlled the finances of the Angevin court. This commercial experience was unhappy and was followed by an equally disappointing study of Canon Law. Boccaccio thereupon turned completely to literature, under the direction and with the advice of the most learned men of the Neapolitan court (e.g., Paolo ve neto, Paolo da Perugia, Andalò del Negro) and of such friends as Cino da Pistoia, Dionigi da San Sepolcro, Barbato da Sulmona, and Giovanni Barrili, who held up to him the example of Petrarch. The carefree and lordly life of the Angevin court and city, necessary meeting place of the Italo-French and the Arab-Byzantine cultures, also deeply influenced his formation.

Fiammetta Period. Against such a background, dominated by both avid cultural interests and easygoing pleasure, Boccaccio desired to weave his great romance of love, centering on the fickle and fascinating figure of Fiammetta and the various heady adventures that had brightened his youth. Though Fiammetta is missing from the elegant portrayal of the aristocratic Neapolitan society within the mythological setting in his first poem, Caccia di Diana (1334?), and from the flowing ottava rima of Filostrato (1335?), which deals with the Troilus-Cressida story, she dominates, directly or indirectly, Boccaccio's other works up to the eve of his masterpiece.

Filocolo, the romantic story of the adventures of Florio and Biancofiore—made all the more valuable by the digressions in which the self-taught young man shows his scholarly enthusiasm, by the autobiographical allusions, and by the storytelling techniques that foreshadow the Decameron —appears to have been produced about 1336 at the direct request of Fiammetta. Teseida (written about 1340–41, perhaps partly in Florence), which tells the story of the love of Arcita and Palemone for Emilia, inserts lyric motifs and love laments that seem to echo and develop the notes in the dedicatory letter to Fiammetta into his ambitious plan for a first Italian epic poem. The Commedia della Ninfe (entitled Ninfale d'Ameto by 14th-century scribes and editors) and the Amorosa visione (one form in 1341–42 alternating prose and verse, the other in 1342–43 in Dantean terza rima ) seem to wish to elevate, by the allegorical literary forms of the prevailing Tuscan tradition, the figure of the beloved to a superhuman level. The Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (composed between 1343 and 1344), the first modern psychological novel, inverts the roles of the two lovers and blends the subtlest motivations with the innermost impulses of an enamored feminine heart.

Thus, nearly all the youthful work of Boccaccio (and even more clearly the Rime of this period), though patently autobiographical, gives evidence of becoming dominated and almost paralyzed by the experiences of love and enthusiasm for culture. But the immediacy of the first writings gradually gives way to a psychological analysis more detached from the sorrowful matter of love, under an interpretative effort sometimes almost allegorical.

The failure of the Bardi Bank forced Boccaccio to return to Florence in 1340 to meet painful domestic difficulties that are reflected in the laments that crop up in the works and letters of those years. Far from alienating him from literary pursuits, however, these harsh realities put him into immediate contact with his city and the life of the mercantile society to which he belonged. After brief periods in Ravenna at the court of Ostasio da Polenta (1345–46) and at Forlì with Francesco Ordelaffi (1347), he was again at Florence in 1348, where he witnessed the terrible plague described in the introduction to his masterpiece.

The Decameron. Shortly before 1348, Boccaccio had sung in ottava rima in Ninfale fiesolano (1344–46?) the story of a fresh and gentle love in the enchanted environs of the Fiesolan countryside. In 1348 he began to prepare and lay out the Decameron (1348–51?), the work that splendidly crowns his youthful experiences and sums up his narrative and romantic preludes in a superb summa of medieval storytelling. The setting is this: to escape the horrors of the plague of 1348, seven young ladies and three young men retire to a Fiesolan hillside; to pass away the time, each one is to tell a story every day, except Friday and Saturday, on a theme and in the order decreed by the one in charge for that day. A hundred novelle, interspersed with depictions of the group's aristocratic way of life, are thus recounted in ten days. In this powerful and multiform narrative work, Boccaccio displayed the "human comedy" of a society captured in both daily and extraordinary battles against ill-fortune. It is, in other words, the extraordinary epic of Boccaccio's own mercantile class.

According to the most acceptable aesthetic canons of his time, moreover, Boccaccio attached to his varied and iridescent images a didactic value beyond the mere story. Through the ten days into which his 100 stories are arranged he wished to display the extent of man's capacity for good and evil. To this end he pictured man on an imaginary journey that begins with a bitter condemnation of vice (First Day) and concludes with an exaltation of virtue (Tenth Day), after being tested by the three great forces that, as instruments of Providence, are at work in the world (Fortune, Second and Third Days; Love, Fourth and Fifth; Genius, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth; the Ninth Day is a transitional episode).

External Trouble; Interior Growth. His father's death in 1349 plunged Boccaccio even more deeply into family difficulties, but his established literary fame impelled his fellow citizens to entrust him with various civic tasks. In 1350 they sent him as ambassador to the Lords of Romagna and—a more pleasant duty—to present ten gold florins to Sister Beatrice, the nun daughter of Dante, as indemnity for damages sustained by her family. He was named chamberlain for the commune in 1351 and then representative of the republic (in the negotiations for the acquisition of Prato) and ambassador to Ludwig of Bavaria; in 1354 and 1365 he was ambassador to Innocent VI and Urban V at Avignon and in 1367 presented the homage of Florence to Urban V on his return to Rome. But these honorable missions failed to extricate him from the deplorable condition into which the Bardi bankruptcy had cast him. In the hope of bettering his affairs, and prompted by the pleasant memories of his youthful years and the friendship of Niccolò Acciaiuoli who had become the real arbiter of the Angevin court, he betook himself to Naples in 1355, 1362, and again in 1370–71. Nothing came of these ventures, and he returned disillusioned and embittered to Certaldo, where he had withdrawn probably as early as 1361–62.

The material and temporal circumstances of these years, however, are of far less importance than his humanistic development, his cultural interests, and the religious evolution of his thought. These attitudes were already present in the poems and letters of about 1350, but they emerge clearly after his encounter with pe trarch, the most fortunate and decisive encounter for Italian and European culture of the 14th century.

Petrarch's Influence. Boccaccio met Petrarch for the first time in 1350, having eagerly gone some miles out-side Florence to greet him and invite him to be his house guest. Boccaccio spent weeks of unforgettable, animated discourse at Petrarch's home in Padua in the spring of 1351; he was again his guest in 1359 at Milan, in 1363 at Venice, and in 1368 at Padua. They engaged in a voluminous correspondence, constantly exchanged books and literary information, and from 1350 on were generally seiuncti licet corporibus unum animo (though physically separated, one in spirit) as Petrarch wrote. After 1360 especially, Boccaccio's house became one of the chief centers of early Italian humanism, the retreat wherein Coluccio Salutati, Giovanni Villani, Luigi Marsili, and many other early humanists received inspiration, the scriptorium from which flowed marvelous literary discoveries (from Varro to Martial, from Tacitus to Apuleius) and the new interest in Greek that Boccaccio first, among the literary men of the time, had mastered through his dogged, industrious relationship with Leonzio Pilato (1360–62).

These early humanistic attitudes continued to characterize the works of his maturity, which he corrected and recorrected to his death, and established in various editions. The Genealogia Deorum gentilium (1350–75) is a great dictionary of mythology, a monument of prehumanistic culture; the Bucolicum carmen (1351–66?) is a collection of eclogues that are allegorical or allusive to contemporary political events, on the model of Dante and Petrarch. De montibus, silvis, fontibus (1355–74?) is an inventory of classical and contemporary geographical culture; De casibus virorum illustrium (1356–74?), is designed to show the transience of earthly goods and the ruin in store for those who climb too high, with examples drawn from all epochs. De mulieribus claris (1360–75?) sketches the lives of the most noted heroines of antiquity and the Middle Ages up to Queen Giovanna of Naples.

Zeal for the Vernacular. Boccaccio's early humanism, both for these works and in his activity in promoting classical culture, seems less concerned with stylistic and rhetorical principles than does Petrarch's. It is less refined and tends to eclecticism; but it is always supported by a zealous love for poetry, so much so that he feels himself "wholly intended for poetry from as far back as the maternal womb" (Genealogia, 15:10). Better than Petrarch, he—the first apostle of the Dantean cult— synthesizes the wonderful and uninterrupted tradition of the intellectual life, of poetry and culture, from antiquity to his own days. Though he was a chief discoverer of the treasures of ancient Hellas, his vision was not confined within the boundaries of the classics; it encompassed Christian authors, certain medieval writers, and poets who wrote in the vernacular. It is not without significance that the Teseida, the most ambitious of his youthful works, was modeled both on the great Latin epics and on the typically medieval cantari; that in the Decameron classical and later sources were drawn upon; that in the description of the plague that opens this masterpiece he mixes Lucretian facts, gained at second hand, with a page from Paolo Diacono; that his prose rhythms favor Livy more than Cicero, and even more the currently accepted rhetorics and artes dictandi.

It is further significant that, as in his youthful years he had constantly juxtaposed experiments in the vernacular with the required employment of Latin, so precisely during the most characteristically early humanistic years, when he became more directly involved with Greek literature, Boccaccio did not abandon his fond relationship with the muses of the new language and new literature. In witness of this stand the Epistola consolatoria a Pino de' Rossi, (1361–62), addressed to a friend exiled for political reasons; that harsh invective against women that stands out in the Corbaccio (1366?); the Trattatello in laude di Dante (1358–63?); and many vernacular letters to friends. In the same period, too, he undertook to correct and rework the Amorosa visione (which occasioned the Trionfi of Petrarch) and the final version of the De-cameron (the Hamilton autograph). All of Boccaccio's activity, whether as writer or as forceful promoter of humanistic studies, is constantly marked by this notable bilingualism that is not merely verbal but mental and cultural, by this vigorous and vital mixture of ancient and contemporary methods and experiments, by this passion, not rhetorical but human, for poetry, for all poetry.

Precisely because of this profound passion, Boccaccio in those years gathered up and defined in the last two books of the Genealogia Deorum his aesthetic doctrine, a synthesis of the leading poetic ideas of the Middle Ages and of earlier discussions by the men of the generation before that—discussions that heralded the rapidly approaching debates during the chivalric years between 1300 and 1400. Against the doubts and uncertainties of many, Boccaccio shows the complete propriety and high mission of poetry ex sinu Die procedens, of poetry as the anima mundi.

Religious Maturity. Tactfully helped by the serene and profound Christianity of Petrarch, Boccaccio during these years also resolved into a firm religious sensibility the emotional instability of his youth. To consecrate this achievement he received minor orders and in 1360 permission to become a director of souls; he dedicated himself enthusiastically to the study of Dante, on whose "sacred poem" he began to lecture at the church of San Stefano di Badia (1373–74). Just as he was publicly exalting the genius of Dante, the death of Petrarch (July 19, 1374) left a void in his heart. All his writings from then on only repeat the lament for the loss of his great friend, for his own spiritual loneliness. In these final years Boccaccio repudiated the worldliness of his Decameron and even tried to destroy the work's manuscripts. Despite such attempts, he remained for his contemporaries almost hieratically fixed in the role of last survivor of the "three crowns," the last champion of Italian letters.

Bibliography: Opere, ed. v. branca (Milan 1964–); Decameron, ed. v. branca (4th ed. Florence 1965); Eng. tr. j. m. rigg, 2v. (London 1947); The Filostrato, tr. n. e. griffin and a. b. myrick (Philadelphia 1929); Amorous Fiametta, tr. b. young, ed. k. h. josling (London 1929); The Nymph of Fiesole, tr. d. j. donno (New York 1960); The Life of Dante, tr. p. h. wicksteed (San Francisco 1922); Concerning Famous Women, tr. g. a. guarino (New Brunswick, NJ 1963). Three basic but old bibliographies are: a. bacchi della lega, Serie delle edizioni delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio latine, volgari, tradotte e trasformate (Bologna 1875). g. traversari, Bibliografia Boccaccesca (Città di Castello 1907). v. branca, Storia della critica al "Decameron" con bibliografia boccaccesca.. (Rome 1939). On the MSS: see v. branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio (Rome 1958); ed., Studi sul Boccaccio (Florence 1963–). The biographies by g. billanovich, Restauri boccacceschi (Rome 1945) and v. branca, Schemi letterari e schemi autobiografici nell'opera del Boccaccio (Florence 1946) are in strong reaction to the romance built up, on presumed autobiographical confessions, especially by v. crescini, Contributo agli studi di Boccaccio (Turin 1887), a. della torre, La giovinezza di G. Boccaccio (1313–1341 ) proposta d'una nuova cronologia (Città di Castello 1905), and h. hauvette, Boccace (Paris 1914). t. c. chubb, The Life of Giovanni Boccaccio (New York 1930) c. carswell, The Tranquil Hearth: Portrait of Giovanni Boccaccio (New York 1937). a. c. lee, The Decameron: Its Sources and Analogues (London 1909). e. g. parodi, Lingua e Letteratura, 2 v. (Venice 1957). u. bosco, Il Decameron: Saggio (Rieti 1929). b. croce, Poesia popolare e poesia d'arte (Bari 1933). v. branca, Boccaccio medievale (Florence 1956). h. g. wright, Boccaccio in England: From Chaucer to Tennyson (London 1957). g. getto, Vita di forme e forme di vita nel Decameron (Turin 1958). a. d. scaglione, Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages: Chiefly an Essay in the Cultural Context of the Decameron (Berkeley 1963). r. witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients (Leiden 2000). e. h. wilkins, Studies on Petrarch and Boccaccio (Padua 1978).

[v. branca]