BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI. - I. THE LIFE. - Until recently biographers, following in the footsteps of many supposed autobiographical pages, had made of B.'s life, at least up to about his thirtieth year, a rather fabulous life, combining together true events with events that later turned out to be imaginary. Thus, it was believed that he was born in Paris to a Giovanna of royal lineage (called by some De La Roche, giving credence to the signature that B. placed on one of his letters in the Neapolitan dialect); it was also believed that, brought quite early by his father to Florence, he had known not the affection of his mother, abandoned by his father in France, but the hostility of a stepmother, Margherita de' Mardoli, and then also of a half-brother, Francesco; and it seemed certain that he had been sent to Naples to practice commerce, still at a tender age (in 1323 according to Della Torre, or in 1325 according to Torraca, or in 1328 according to Hauvette), and it was said that in Naples, grown older, he — a bastard, but of royal and French blood on his mother's side — had fallen in love (in 1331 according to Della Torre, or in 1333 according to Torraca, or in 1336 according to Hauvette) with a young woman who, like him, was a bastard, but, like him, of royal and French blood on her father's side, Maria de' Conti d'Aquino, natural daughter of King Robert of Anjou, married to a nobleman of the court, the Fiammetta sung in verse and in prose, in fanciful stories of love and sorrow, beautiful, seductive and in the end even treacherous, for all the protests and all the entreaties the enamored poet had addressed to her. But now it has been keenly demonstrated that such reports are characteristic of an entire illustrious literary tradition, by which B., perhaps already by nature eager for excellence and nobility, finally allowed himself to be conquered. So the most reliable data of his youth remain these few: the illegitimacy of his birth, even if not Parisian, but Tuscan and perhaps more Certaldese than Florentine; the year of birth, 1313; the name, which came to him from his paternal uncle; the father, Boccaccio di Chelino, of Certaldo in the Val d'Elsa, a merchant by profession; the name of the stepmother and of the half-brothers, Michele, Iacopo, Minacoda, a certain Donato (?) and perhaps a Francesco who died prematurely; the departure for Naples (but no longer at the age of ten) and the practice of commerce (until 1330?) and then the study of canon law (until 1336?); his frequenting of the Neapolitan court and his friendship with people of the great world, or with scholars, such as Andalone del Negro, most expert in astronomy, and Paolo Perugino, the king's librarian and a lover of the classics and of mythology; the farewell around 1340 to the unforgettable city, which had offered him in the springtime of life an unrepeatable flowering of joys, perhaps also in love troubled or not by much sorrow, but certainly in art, since in Naples he had tested his gifts and received full praise as a poet. Having left Naples and settled in Tuscany, between Florence and Certaldo, he continued his studies and his works, and still loved, and alternated art and love with journeys sought by himself and with commissions offered by others. In 1346 he was at Ravenna with Ostasio da Polenta, and in 1347-48 at Forlì, with Francesco degli Ordelaffi; in 1350 he went as ambassador of Florence to Romagna, and from there returned to Ravenna to deliver, on behalf of the Company of Or San Michele, ten gold florins to Sister Beatrice, the daughter of Dante Alighieri; in the same year he had the good fortune to meet Petrarch in person. In 1351 he was one of the Camerlinghi of the Commune of Florence; and from Florence he was sent, first to Naples, to negotiate the purchase of Prato; then to the Tyrol, to Lodovico of Bavaria, to win him as an ally against Milan; and, finally, to Padua to Petrarch to announce to him the restitution of his goods and to offer him a chair in the Florentine Studio. In 1353 he was again at Ravenna; in 1354 he was twice ambassador of Florence to Innocent VI, at Avignon; in 1355 he was called to be part of the Ufficio di Condotta, and in 1359 he met Petrarch again at Milan. In 1362 he allowed himself to be attracted by an invitation, to Naples, from Francesco Nelli «spenditore» and from Niccolò Acciaioli «gran siniscalco» of that court; but both at Naples and at Tripergoli, near Baia, he found himself ill at ease and returned thence once more disappointed; he was comforted, however, by Petrarch, at Venice, in 1363, and from Venice he withdrew to his native Certaldo. But in 1365 and in 1367 Florence again sent him as ambassador to Urban V, first to Avignon and then to Rome; in 1367 he was also at Venice to meet Petrarch, but did not find him and received instead a most affectionate welcome from the poet's daughter, Francesca, and from his son-in-law, Francescuolo da Brossano, and from his little granddaughter Eletta, who reminded him of his own daughter Violante, an illegitimate child as well, tenderly loved by him and sorrowfully mourned ever after her premature death. In the autumn of 1370 he allowed himself to be attracted once more to Naples; and from there he was to have moved to Calabria, as the guest of an old friend of his, Niccolò da Montefalcone, at that time appointed abbot of S. Stefano in Calabria; but the latter, after the offer, had repented of it and had gone off quietly, and moreover carrying away with him a notebook of Tacitus, lent to him by B. And B., once again disappointed, refused every other offer, including that of Ugo count of S. Severino, made in his own name and in the name of Queen Giovanna, and that of Giacomo of Majorca, the queen's husband, and that of Niccolò Orsini, count palatine; and in the spring of 1371 he took refuge once more in Tuscany and perhaps even in Certaldo, whence he did not move again except, for about a year, when he was called to Florence, in October 1373, to lecture on the Commedia of Alighieri in S. Stefano di Badia; and at Certaldo he died on 21 December 1375.
He died solitary and poor, as he had been for almost his whole life, in order to preserve his freedom in the face of compromises in his relations with men and in the intrigue of courts. And he died as a good Christian, gradually detached from the world, and from the taste of the licentious world already exalted in the Decameron; and for fifteen years (1360) made worthy, he perhaps already a cleric, of an ecclesiastical benefice that granted him the faculty of obtaining prebends and care of souls even in a cathedral church, and that would not have been granted to him if his sentiments and his ways of life had not been upright; and for thirteen years (1362) made ever more thoughtful of this life and the next, after the severe and fearful warnings that the monk Ciani gave him on behalf of the Carthusian Pietro Petroni, who had recently died in the odor of sanctity, and on account of which he would even have thrown his masterpiece into the flames, had Petrarch not succeeded in dissuading him.
11. THE WORKS
In the case of the works too, the critics, following in the footsteps of De Sanctis and Carducci, had made B. the singer of the human comedy, as opposed to Dante's, which was divine, and the representative of a new age remotely preparing the way for the modern and present age, which for some would represent the triumph of laicism and idealism together. So that his figure and his work have found themselves and find themselves either condemned in toto by some Catholics or exalted by non-Catholics, whether in the name of that supposed laicist attitude or in the name of art which, if it is true art, is for the idealists always moral. But now more than one scholar has shown that things are not quite like that. It is very true that in his works of invention B. always exalted cleverness, with a constant sympathy for those who have more of it and a consequent justification of cunning and shrewd actions even if shameless; and it is very true that he often proclaims the legitimacy of a love free from every law, with a constant sympathy for those who love freely and a consequent polemic against all those who would condemn excesses and licentiousness, and in particular against the religious, presented with relish as false, self-seeking and lustful people. But, just as the exaltation of free love and the satire against the religious are not isolated voices in the Middle Ages and are not peculiar to B. alone, so B. cannot be taken as the standard-bearer of an anti-Middle Ages, and even less as a Voltaire ante litteram, both because he had no speculative qualities or pretensions and because he had instead and only moments of unbridled and unscrupulous morality; and just as the immoral and irreligious pages do not fill the incriminated works at all from one end to the other, but alternate with pages rich in noble and exquisite sentiments, so too B.'s condemnable attitude has a halt and a redemption still in the vigor of his bodily and mental powers.
If one then wishes to define the characteristics of B. as a writer, one must say that, in style, he aspires to give the vernacular the elegance, the perspicuity and the harmonious architecture of the Latin and Ciceronian period; and that, in genre, he is, in works of invention as in those of erudition, the storyteller par excellence. Tales, in substance if not in form, are his works before the return to Florence, that is, up to about 1340: the first, in 18 cantos, in terzine, the Caccia di Diana (c. 1336) describes the hunt conducted under the guidance of Diana by certain graceful ladies, among them the woman loved by the poet who, as soon as the enterprise is finished, wants to hear no more of Diana and consecrates himself with his companions to Venus; the second, the Filocolo, in 5 long books of prose, recounts the loves, first opposed and then happily concluded, of Florio, son of the Spanish king Felice, and Biancofiore, daughter of Quinto Lelio Africano, a descendant of the Scipios, and of Giulia Topazia, a descendant of Julius Caesar, with many other tales interwoven; the third, the Filostrato (1338?), in ottave distributed in 9 parts, sings the unfortunate love of Troilo, son of Priam, for Crisella, that is Briseida, daughter of Calchas and prisoner of the Trojans, fickle and treacherous; and the fourth, the Teseida (1339-40?), in 12 books in ottave, presents the sad and undeserved love affairs of Arcita, and the happy and undeserved ones of Palemone, two young Theban prisoners, in love with Emilia, sister-in-law of Theseus, duke of Athens, and conqueror of the Amazons and the Thebans; in each of which works, and more readily in the Filocolo, either through direct narrations or through the allusive vicissitudes of the protagonists, those so-called autobiographical pages are interwoven, in which episodes of B.'s life and of his love affairs are presented with a skillful mixture of true and false.
Tales, too, are the works after the return from Naples: the first, mixed of prose and terzine, the Ameto or Commedia delle Ninfe fiorentine (1341-42) celebrates the loves of Ameto and the nymph Lia, with interwoven moralizing allegories and autobiographical pages in which it will once again be difficult to discern the true from the fantastic; the second, in 50 chapters in terzine, the Amorosa visione (1342), through figurations and allegories and again references to Fiammetta, seeks in the style of the stilnovo to indicate the redemptive virtue of love; the third, in 9 chapters of prose, the Fiammetta (1343?) narrates, again fantastically, the love affair of Fiammetta and the author, but reversing the situation, that is, making Fiammetta betrayed and not betrayer, and putting in her mouth an invective against men unfaithful in love, whereas in the Filocolo, in the Filostrato, in the Teseida, there had appeared the condemnation of the unfaithful woman or even the invective against all women which then, after the Decameron, would conclude in the Corbaccio; and the fourth, in 473 ottave, the Ninfale fiesolano (1344-46 ca.), sings the great and tragic love of Africo for the nymph Mensola, in the region of Fiesole with another (according to some) autobiographical allusion.
Stories all of it, the Decameron (1348-53 ca.), the masterpiece; 100 of them, told by 7 beautiful young women and 3 young men in 10 days, on the hills north of Florence, to which the company had sought escape from the plague of 1348; stories now tragic now burlesque, now noble now indecorous, now long and adventurous, now rapid and concentrated in a sudden and felicitous witticism; drawn at times from literary sources and at times from oral traditions and from episodes of contemporary life, but always freely reworked; and presented within a frame of refined vagueness, of persons, settings, ornaments, landscapes, according to a taste that makes its first appearance in the Caccia and then more extensively in the Filocolo and in the Ameto. And a story, finally, the Corbaccio (1354-1355), in which amid visions, figurations and divine interventions the previous misogynistic themes are brought to a furious exasperation, an atrocious revenge against a beautiful widow with whom B. would have fallen in love and whose betrayal he would have suffered. Completed, even if not all begun, after the works of fantasy, are those of erudition. But also the 9 ll. De casibus virovum illustrium (1355-60 and revised until around 1374) are themselves stories and cases of fortune, with a moralistic aim, of ancient and contemporary personages who have ill known how to make use of prosperous fortune; and the treatise De claris mulieribus, written immediately after the De casibus and revised until around 1374 and containing 104 biographies of women of ancient or recent times famous for virtue or for vices, has the moralizing intent and at the same time that of pleasant narrative divulgation; and the 15 ll. De genealogis deorum gentilium (begun before 1350, completed in 1360 and subsequently revised) still show the author's narrative and at the same time moralistic interest in the ancient fables; and to a similar interest must also be traced the De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus, et de nominibus maris liber, a collection of notices and stories written almost as an appendix to the De genealogis; and likewise the numerous marginal notes that B. made to some of his works must be referred for the most part to the same taste and the same interest in knowing and making known the cases recounted by others when his fantasy no longer had the sparkling fervor of creative power. Which, moreover, never died out entirely, because even the works of erudition, and even in the parts in which the author declares himself a direct witness, prove to be mixed of true and fantastic, like the Vita di Dante itself (written in a first and longer draft between 1337 and 1362 and then remade in a briefer and more effective form), if not also some part of the Comento alla Commedia (which reaches the beginning of canto XVII of the Inferno).
Of the other works, besides the Argomenti, in terzine, and the Rubriche, in prose, of the Divina Commedia; and besides the 24 surviving Epistole, of which some are fragmentary and two translated into the vernacular, of some stylistic interest and no more; and besides the other Latin and vernacular writings of lesser account, including 155 certain Rime and 12 uncertain, let the Buccolicum carmen be remembered, 15 eclogues written between 1351 and 1366. In some of them he treats of subjects concerning the kingdom of Naples (III-VI) or Florence (VII and IX); in others he touches more closely on his own life (I, II, VIII, XIV) or the Christian faith (X-XI); but together with the XIV, which laments the untimely death of Violante, the XII fixes attention, containing the resolve, under the guidance of Petrarch, to leave vernacular poetry for Latin, and the XV, which praises Petrarch as master of virtuous and religious life; and then again the XIII, which shows the superiority of poetry over every other earthly good, and the XVI which, together with the dedication of the work to Albanzani, expresses the sense of disheartened weariness that the A. feels in contemplating his poor life and reaffirms faith in the ancient aspiration, the dulcis et ingens libertas. These pages, together with the others variously scattered in the works of fantasy exalting doctrine, genius, poetry, and together with those of the De genealogis or of the Vita di Dante or of the Comento written in defense of poetry and of his love for it, soul of the world and gift of God and means of redemption and of elevation, are to be kept particularly in mind in order to understand the man, the poet, and also the Christian, who is moreover well presented in the epitaph that is his and that was engraved on his tomb in the church of S. Iacopo at Certaldo: Hac sub mole iacent cineres ac ossa Johannis. / Mens sedet ante Deum, meritis ornata laborum / mortalis vitae. Genitor Boccaccius illi, / patria Certaldum, studium fuit alma poesis. - See Pl. CII.
Bibliography2 works
For the fortune of B. and of his works see: F. Zambrini and A. Bacchi della Lega, Bibliografia boccacensa. Serie delle ediz. delle opere di G. B., latine, volgarì, tradotte e trasformate, in Propugnatore, 8 (1875); G. Traversari, Bibliografia boccacensa. I: Scritti intorno al B. e alla fortuna delle sue opere, Città di Castello 1907; V. Branca, Linee di una storia della critica al Decameron, Milano 1939; and as an excellent example of the fortune of the Decameron, even if limited to the first novella, see L. Fassò, Saggi e ricerche di storia letteraria, ivi 1947, pp. 31-90.
For the biography see: H. Hauvette, B. Etude biographique et littéraire, Parigi 1914; C. Grabher, B., Torino 1941, and for many new corrections G. Billanovich, Restauri boccaceschi, Roma
1945 and V. Branca, Schemi letterari e schemi autobiografici nell'opera del B., in La bibliofilia, 40 (1947).
For the knowledge of the man and of the work, besides the books already cited, see: B. Croce, La novella di Andreuccio da Perugia, Bari 1911; id., Il B. e il Sacchetti, in Poesia popolare e poesia d'arte, ivi 1935, pp. 81-105; U. Bosco, B., Rieti 1929; A. Schiaffini, Il B., in Tradizione e poesia, Genova 1934, pp. 243-87 and also pp. 218-42 (2nd ed., Roma 1943, pp. 167-97 and also pp. 151-166); N. Sapegno, Il B., in Il Trecento, 2nd ed., Milano 1942, pp. 276-400; A. Chiari, Polemica sul B., in Indagini e letture, Città di Castello 1946, pp. 35-87; G. Billanovich, La leggenda dantesca del B., in Prime ricerche dantesche, Roma 1947, pp. 20-86. - Among the commentaries: A. Momigliano, Quarantassone novelle commentate, Milano 1924, and L. Russo, Venticinque novelle del Decameron, Firenze 1939.
Alberto Chiari