BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI Italian author, humanist and poet, whose Decameron is one of the earliest works in Italian prose and one of the most famous books in all literature, was born out of wedlock in Paris in 1313' of a French mother, whose name was probably Jeanne (so that he is named after her), and of an Italian father, the Florentine banker and mer chant, Boccaccio di Chellino da Certaldo, commonly called Boc caccino. At a date difficult to determine, but probably as a baby, he was brought to Florence, where his father almost immediately after his return from Paris in 1314 had married Margherita di Gian Donato de'Martoli. Boccaccio's boyhood was thus, as so many of his works lead us to believe, spent in Tuscany, perhaps at Certaldo,perhaps near Florence at Corbignano, where Margheri ta had brought some property to her husband. Of his early years we have very little knowledge, and none at all save what may be gathered from his earlier works which are full of autobio graphical allegory. Before he was seven years old, as he tells us, he was set to learn to read and write. He studied Grammatica under Giovanni di Domenico Mazzuoli da Strada, father of the more famous Zanobi. He began Latin and arithmetic. His father destined him for business, but he early had a lively hatred of such a calling, and desired above all to devote himself to literature and to learning. His father, how ever, was not to be persuaded, and as the boy was unhappy at home with his step-mother, who had now a son of her own, born in 1321, he sent Giovanni to Naples to his commercial correspondents there, to learn business, as is generally believed in Nov. 1328.
Naples was at the height of its splendour under Robert the Wise, and the young Boccaccio, then s, knew how to appreciate the delights of life in an exquisite climate amid all the gaiety and pleasure of that beautiful city, on the outskirts of a brilliant court. In his Filocolo and his Fiammetta he gives us a very vivid impression of the charm of Naples at this time. For six years, however, so he tells us, he did little but waste irrecoverable time with the merchant to whom his father had confided him. He most bitterly reproaches his father for this in his De Genealogiis: "If my father had dealt wisely with me I might have been among the great poets." At length, however, he found opportunity for culture, and met the scholar he calls Calmeta, most probably the astronomer Andalo di Negro, and finally his father allowed him to abandon a business career, though he made it a condition that Giovanni should study canon law. He was attracted by letters and may well have frequented the society of Paolo da Perugia, the librarian of King Robert, who had already begun to collect certain Greek manuscripts on the advice of the Calabrian monk Barlaam, who died Bishop of Gerace. But study by no means occupied all his time: life in that gay city, on the fringe of the court, more and more attracted him, and it was now, on Holy Saturday, March 3o, 1336, in the Church of S. Lorenzo of the Franciscans, that he first caught sight of the woman who was so profoundly to influence his life and shape his work. This was Maria d'Aquino, a young married woman, natural daughter of King Robert, the lady whom he has immortalized under the name of Fiammetta.
The love story thus begun, if we interpret his own accounts aright, ended in utter disaster, but it nevertheless fills his whole life and inspires every book he wrote before the Ninfale Fiesolano and the Decameron. Fiammetta after giving herself to him had betrayed him. His misery at the loss of her was deepened by the fact that the ruin of his father at this time made it necessary for him to leave Naples and his love and return to Florence. It was 'See Petrarca Senili VIII. I. Lett. del 20 luglio 1366 (trad. Fracas sctti) p. 445 Filippo Villani, Le vite d'uomini illustri Fiorentini (Fi renze, 1826) p. 12, tells us that Boccaccio died in 1375 aged sixty-two.
in 1341 that he came back to Tuscany and immersed himself in work. But during his love affair with Fiammetta he had already begun three works, and possibly finished two of them: the Filo colo, the Filostrato and the Teseide. In all these works and in the Ameto, the Amorosa Visione and the Fiammetta which fol lowed them, his state of mind is visible. They are extraordinarily personal. A single thought seems to fill his mind: he had loved a princess and been loved in return; she had forsaken him; but she remained the lodestar of his life. He writes really of nothing else but this. Full of her he sets himself to enchant her with stories, to glorify her, to tell over and over again—under how many disguises!—his own story. It was the story of Florio and Biancofiore which he tells us had charmed Fiammetta at first hearing, when he had told it to her in the convent parlour at Sant' Arcangelo a Baiano, and it is round this tale that the enormous romance of the Filocolo (1st ed. Venice, 1472) is written. As he tells us in the first page, this was the first book he made to please her. It is the longest of his works after the Decameron—which the episode of the Questioni in the fourth book prophesies. He seems to have abandoned it in Naples at the end of the third book and to have resumed it later on his return to Florence, when he felt the need of expressing what he was suffering. What this was is obvious in the Filostrato (1st ed. Luca Veneto, 1480?), a poem in ottava rima, its first use in Italian, on the story of Troilus and Cressida. This is one of the loveliest and most spontaneous of his works. It has a special interest for us, for Chaucer drew upon it very largely for his Troilus; no fewer than 2,700 lines, nearly ha,lf the Italian poem, being literally translated by Chaucer into English. This is about a third of Chaucer's poem. In the Teseide (1st ed. Ferrara, 1475), another epic poem, we have the same state of mind. It is full of the agonies of his jealousy. It is prefaced by a letter to Fiammetta in which he tells her he has written this poem to please her—"thinking of past joy in present misery." As for the con tent, it must be enough here to say that it provided Chaucer with his Knight's Tale in the Canterbury Tales. It was begun in the shadow of Virgil's tomb, is modelled on the Aeneid, written in 12 books and has precisely the same number of lines as Virgil's poem. It is about twice as long as the Filostrato. All these books seem to have been begun in Naples; the Ameto (1st ed. Rome, 1478) may *well have been conceived in Florence; the whole action takes place in the country about Fiesole, where his father had a villa and podere. We see here, too, the influence of Dante and Petrarch; the Ameto is indeed a sort of Dantesque allegory of prose scattered with verses. There follows the Amorosa Visione (1st ed. Milan, 1521), a long poem which recalls the happier time of his love, and which is dedicated to Fiammetta in an acrostic. In its construction and precision it reveals the study of Dante. It consists of so capito/i, each composed of 29 terzine and a verse of chiusa; that is to say there are 88 verses in each capito/o.
The last work directly concerned with Boccaccio's passion for Maria d'Aquino is the Fiammetta (1st ed. Padua, 1472). The action is very simple, but it is remarkable in this: here we have the love story told by Fiammetta as though it were her autobiog raphy. But it is she who weeps for Giovanni, who has deserted her. This is the first psychological novel of Europe. Thereafter he turns away from the misery of his love story and writes a delicious idyll, the Ninfale Fiesolano (1st ed. Venice, 1477), the most mature of his poems—the loves of Affrico and Mensola, two small streams that flowed by his father's house at Corbignano near Florence. All bitterness is lost in music. He describes with the greatest affection and enthusiasm this country he loved best between the village of Settignano and Fiesole, which later was to be the setting of the Decameron.
But all that bright world about Florence, so full of voices for Boccaccio, was presently to be silenced by the most appalling material calamity that has ever befallen Europe—the Black Death of 1348. Three out of five persons died in Florence. The grass grew in the streets. People said the end of the world had come. In a sense they were right. It was the end of the Middle Age.
We do not know where Boccaccio was at this time. Did he perhaps close Fiammetta's eyes and bear her to the grave? If he did he was soon recalled to Florence by his father's death. And there, after that vengeance, whether of God or outraged nature, in which all he loved had been lost to him, he set himself to put in order that great Human Comedy which has given him immortality.
In the very opening page of the Decameron (1st dated ed. Venice, 1471) we see that even after writing six works in prose and verse about her, even now she is dead, he cannot forget Fiammetta. The great Proem opens with her unspoken name and closes too in the same fashion. And of those seven ladies and three youths who are the protagonists of the Decameron it is only she named Fiammetta who lives. But strangely enough Boccaccio himself is absent ; you will scarcely find him in all the hundred tales of that work which best represents his genius, his humour and wide tolerance and love of mankind.
The Decameron is an absolute work of art, as detached as a play by Shakespeare or a portrait by Velasquez. The scheme is formal and should be compared with that of The Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales. There are ten protago nists, three youths and seven ladies, and the horror which is de signed to set off the stories is a universal pestilence which has already half depopulated the City of Florence, and from which they all fled away to the exquisite seclusion of a great villa garden on the slopes under Fiesole, where they spend their time in telling the stories that have made this work immortal. It is the stories that matter. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales the tales often weary us but the tellers never do: in Boccaccio the tales never weary us but the tellers always do. The Decameron is a world in itself, and its effect upon us who read it is the effect of life which includes, for its own good, things moral and immoral. The book has the variety of the world and is full of an infinity of people who represent for us the 14th century in Italy in all its fullness. It deals with man as life does, never taking him very seriously or without a certain indifference, a certain irony and laughter. Yet it is full too of a love of courtesy, of luck, of all sorts of adventures both gallant and sad. Even Chaucer is not so complete in his humanism, his love of all sorts and con ditions of men. What immorality there is, is rather owing to the sources of some of the tales than to any invention on the part of Boccaccio, who softened much of their original grossness and later came to deplore what remained. But it is in its extraordinary variety of contents and character that the Decameron is chiefly remarkable. We are involved in a multitude of adventures, are introduced to innumerable people of every class, and each class shows us its most characteristic qualities. The book is full of people—living people—that is the secret of its immortality. And yet it must be confessed that while the book is a mirror of the world and doubtless as true to the life of its time as any book ever written, it lacks a certain idealism, a certain moral sense which even from a purely aesthetic point of view would have given a balance, a sense of proportion, to it. It is, however, the greatest, as it is the first, prose work in the Tuscan tongue, and it holds its own even with the Divine Comedy because of its humanity.
With the Decameron, Boccaccio's work as a creative artist came to an end. It is true that we have the mysterious and savage satire of the Corbaccio (1st ed. Florence, 1487), begun immedi ately after the Decameron was finished, that is about 1353, but the passion which had inspired everything he had done, and made him a great creative artist, here turns round, sneers at itself and we get that wild invective, laughable in its malice, against Woman, which characterizes it. From this time—he was more than 4o years old—he devotes himself to scholarship, for gets love, and turns to friendship: the second great influence of his life appears—Petrarch.
But before he gives himself wholly to his friend he turns—is it for consolation ?—to the study of Dante. As soon as the Cor baccio is finished we find him at work on the Vita di Dante (1st ed. Venice, 1477), the earliest life of the poet, whose Divine Comedy he copies with his own hand in order to send it to Petrarch ; and we may understand how great a pioneer Boccaccio was in the appreciation of Dante when we learn from this fact that Petrarch had no copy in his library.
Even in his youth Boccaccio had regarded Petrarch with an enthusiasm and an unswerving modesty that, lasting as it did till his death, was one of the beautiful traits of his character. In 1351, in the name of Florence, he went to Padua to recall Petrarch from exile, and was his guest for some days. He was a witness of Petrarch's enthusiasm for "sacred studies," and more and more in accordance with Petrarch's doctrine we see him giving up all work in the vernacular and setting all his energy in the study of antiquity and the acquirement of learning. From a creative writer of splendid genius he became a scholar, a scholar of vast reading, but mediocre achievement. Little by little he seems to have gathered his notes into the volumes we know as : De Monti bus, Sylvis, Fontibus, etc., a sort of Dictionary of Geography; the De Casibus Virorum Illustriurh in nine books, which deals with the vanity of human affairs from Adam to his own time; the De Claris Mulieribus, which begins with Eve and comes down to Giovanna, queen of Naples, and the De Genealogiis Deorum, a cyclopaedia of learning concerning mythology. In all these works it must be admitted we see Boccaccio as Petrarch's disciple. Yet they must not be too much depreciated. They rendered great service; their vast usefulness is witnessed by their enormous popularity and the large number of editions through which they have passed. They were the text books of the Renaissance. Nor was this all his service. In 1358 there was introduced to Petrarch a certain Leon Pilatus, who gave himself out for a Greek, and Petrarch, who possessed a Greek ms. of Homer which he could not read, seized the opportunity to obtain a translation. In this he was not successful ; so presently, bored with the barbarous Pilatus, he turned him over to Boccaccio, who with the utmost devotion took this disagreeable barbarian into his house, caused a Chair of Greek to be given him in the University of Florence, and quietly and heroically put up with his ferocious and repellant manners and bad temper till he obtained the translation ; and thus it is to Boccaccio that we owe the restoration of Homer to the western world.
During the time he was engaged on this arduous and heroic task he was in a state of great spiritual distress, and hardly com forted by the wise letters of Petrarch. He was never wholly cured of a sort of disillusion and melancholy which went with a curious regret for the greatest achievement of his life. In this state of mind his good fortune was the friendship of Petrarch, which, to gether with a love of children very characteristic of him, appears always like a ray of sunshine in what proved to be a lonely and even gloomy old age, hard and bitter and passed in poverty. So poor was he that it seems his friends in Florence, hearing of his misery, founded the first Cathedra Dantesca to relieve him. He delivered his first lecture in the Church of Santo Stefano on Oct. 1373, at the age of 6o. In the winter of that year he was attacked by illness and returned to Certaldo, really to die. In the hands of an ignorant doctor he suffered tortures, and then a new ill befell him. In the summer of 1374 Petrarch died. He wrote a wonderful letter to Petrarch's son-in-law, full of adoration for his friend and anxiety about his works. That letter was his swan song; though he lingered on for some months, he can scarcely be said to have been alive. He died on Dec. 21, 1375, and was buried in the Church of SS. Jacopo e Filippo at Certaldo.