The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

It was probably in the years 1348–53 that Boccaccio composed the Decameron in the form in which it is read today. In the broad sweep of its range and its alternately tragic and comic views of life, it is rightly regarded as his masterpiece. Stylistically, it is the most perfect example of Italian classical prose, and its influence on Renaissance literature throughout Europe was enormous.

The Decameron begins with the flight of 10 young people (seven women and three men) from plague-stricken Florence in 1348. They retire to a rich, well-watered countryside, where, in the course of a fortnight, each member of the party has a turn as king or queen over the others, deciding in detail how their day shall be spent and directing their leisurely walks, their outdoor conversations, their dances and songs, and, above all, their alternate storytelling. This storytelling occupies 10 days of the fortnight (the rest being set aside for personal adornment or for religious devotions); hence, the title of the book itself, Decameron, or “Ten Days’ Work.” The stories thus amount to 100 in all.

Each of the days, moreover, ends with a canzone (song) for dancing sung by one of the storytellers, and these canzoni include some of Boccaccio’s finest lyric poetry. In addition to the 100 stories, Boccaccio has a master theme, namely, the way of life of the refined bourgeoisie, who combined respect for conventions with an open-minded attitude to personal behavior.

The somber tones of the opening passages of the book, in which the plague and the moral and social chaos that accompanies it are described in the grand manner, are in sharp contrast to the scintillating liveliness of Day I, which is spent almost entirely in witty disputation, and to the playful atmosphere of intrigue that characterizes the tales of adventure or deception related on Days II and III. With Day IV and its stories of unhappy love, the gloomy note returns; but Day V brings some relief, though it does not entirely dissipate the echo of solemnity, by giving happy endings to stories of love that does not at first run smoothly. Day VI reintroduces the gaiety of Day I and constitutes the overture to the great comic score, Days VII, VIII, and IX, which are given over to laughter, trickery, and license. Finally, on Day X, all the themes of the preceding days are brought to a high pitch, the impure made pure and the common made heroic.

The prefaces to the days and to the individual stories and certain passages of especial magnificence based on classical models, with their select vocabulary and elaborate periods, have long held the attention of critics. But there is also another Boccaccio: the master of the spoken word and of the swift, vivid, tense narrative free from the proliferation of ornament. These two aspects of the Decameron made it the fountainhead of Italian literary prose for the following centuries.

The influential 19th-century critic Francesco De Sanctis regarded the Decameron as a “Human Comedy” in succession to Dante’s Divine Comedy and Boccaccio as the pioneer of a new moral order superseding that of the European Middle Ages. This view is no longer tenable, however, since the Middle Ages can no longer be presented as having been wholly ascetic or wholly concerned with God and heavenly salvation in contrast with a Renaissance concerned only with the human.

Also, in particular, the whole corpus of Boccaccio’s work is basically medieval in subject matter, form, and taste, at least in its point of departure. It is the spirit in which Boccaccio treats his subjects and his forms that is new. For the first time in the Middle Ages, Boccaccio in the Decameron deliberately shows humans striving with fortune and learning to overcome it. To be truly noble, according to the Decameron, humans must accept life as it is, without bitterness, must accept, above all, the consequences of their own actions, however contrary to their expectation or even tragic such consequences may be. To realize earthly happiness, each person must confine desire to what is humanly possible and renounce the absolute without regret. Thus, Boccaccio insists both on humanity’s powers and on their inescapable limitations, without reference to the possible intervention of divine grace. A sense of spiritual realities and an affirmation of moral values underlying the frivolity even in the most licentious passages of the Decameron are features of Boccaccio’s work that modern criticism has brought to light and that make it no longer possible to regard him only as an obscene mocker or sensual cynic.

During the years in which Boccaccio is believed to have written the Decameron, the Florentines appointed him ambassador to the lords of Romagna in 1350; municipal councilor and ambassador to Louis, duke of Bavaria, in the Tirol in 1351; and ambassador to Pope Innocent VI in 1354.

Petrarch and Boccaccio’s mature years

Of far more lasting importance than official honors was Boccaccio’s first meeting with Petrarch, in Florence in 1350, which helped to bring about a decisive change in Boccaccio’s literary activity. Boccaccio revered the older man as his master, and Petrarch proved himself a serene and ready counselor and a reliable helper. Together, through the exchange of books, news, and ideas, the two men laid the foundations for the humanist reconquest of classical antiquity.

After the Decameron, of which Petrarch remained in ignorance until the very last years of his life, Boccaccio wrote nothing in Italian except Il Corbaccio (1354–55; a satire on a widow who had jilted him), his late writings on Dante, and perhaps an occasional lyric. Turning instead to Latin, he devoted himself to humanist scholarship rather than to imaginative or poetic creation. His encyclopedic De genealogia deorum gentilium (“On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles”), medieval in structure but humanist in spirit, was probably begun in the very year of his meeting with Petrarch but was continuously corrected and revised until his death. His Bucolicum carmen (1351–66), a series of allegorical eclogues (short pastoral poems) on contemporary events, follows classical models on lines already indicated by Dante and Petrarch. His other Latin works include De claris mulieribus (1360–74; Concerning Famous Women), a collection of biographies of famous women; and De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–74; “On the Fates of Famous Men”), on the inevitable catastrophe awaiting all who are too fortunate.

The meeting with Petrarch, however, was not the only cause of the change in Boccaccio’s writing. A premature weakening of his physical powers and disappointments in love may also have contributed to it. Some such occurrence would explain how Boccaccio, having previously written always in praise of women and love, came suddenly to write the bitterly misogynistic Corbaccio and then turn his genius elsewhere.

Furthermore, there are signs that he may have begun to feel religious scruples. Petrarch describes how the Carthusian monk Pietro Petrone, on his deathbed in 1362, sent another Carthusian, Gioacchino Ciani, to exhort Boccaccio to renounce his worldly studies; and it was Petrarch who then dissuaded Boccaccio from burning his own works and selling his library. As early as 1360, moreover, Boccaccio’s way of life was regarded as austere enough to justify his being entrusted with a pastoral cure of souls in a cathedral. He had taken minor orders many years earlier, perhaps at first only in the hope of being given benefices.

Boccaccio’s circle in Florence was of vital importance as a nucleus of early humanism. Leonzio Pilato, whom Boccaccio housed from 1360 to 1362 and whose nomination as reader in Greek at the Studio (the old University of Florence) he procured, made the rough Latin translation through which Petrarch and Boccaccio became acquainted with Homer’s poems—the starting point of Greek studies by the humanists. The recovery of Latin classical texts—Varro, Martial, Apuleius, Seneca, Ovid, and, above all, Tacitus—likewise occupied Boccaccio’s admiring attention. Even so, he did not neglect Italian poetry, his enthusiasm for his immediate predecessors, especially Dante, being one of the characteristics that distinguish him from Petrarch. His Vita di Dante Alighieri, or Trattatello in laude di Dante (“Little Tractate in Praise of Dante”), and the two abridged editions of it that he made show his devotion to Dante’s memory.

Last years

All these studies were pursued in poverty, sometimes almost in destitution, and Boccaccio had to earn most of his income by transcribing his own works or those of others. In 1363 poverty compelled him to retire to the village of Certaldo. In October 1373, however, he began public readings of Dante’s Divina commedia in the Church of San Stefano di Badia in Florence. A revised text of the commentary that he gave with these readings is still extant but breaks off at the point that he had reached when, early in 1374, ill health made him lose heart. Petrarch’s death in July 1374 was another grief to him, and he retired again to Certaldo. There Boccaccio died the following year and was buried in the Church of SS. Michele e Jacopo.

Boccaccio and the Renaissance

Boccaccio was a man of the Renaissance in almost every sense. His humanism comprised not only classical studies and the attempt to rediscover and reinterpret ancient texts but also the attempt to raise literature in the modern languages to the level of the classical by setting standards for it and then conforming to those standards. Boccaccio advanced further than Petrarch in this direction not only because he sought to dignify prose as well as poetry but also because, in his Ninfale fiesolano, in his Elegia de Madonna Fiammetta, and in the Decameron, he ennobled everyday experience, tragic and comic alike. Although his Teseida and Ninfale d’Ameto invite comparison with classical genres, his Filocolo and Filostrato raised to the level of learned art the literature of chivalry and love that had fallen to the level of the populace. The same attention to popular and medieval themes characterized Italian culture in the second half of the 15th century. Without Boccaccio, the literary culmination of the Italian Renaissance would be historically incomprehensible.