GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO, 1313-75.
Boccaccio was a scholar possessed with the imagination of a poet, a ready wit and the charming manner which secured for him, the bastard son of a merchant, the welcome of princes and the love of a princess. His com prehensive soul and rich nature epitomize his age and country. He is delighted with the dis covery of an ancient manuscript, first the greatness of Dante's poem and spreads the knowledge broadcast; yet though and scholarly study he finds t e l in literary for business and also for public affairs. ( 1 Filocolo,' 'Filostrato' and Ninfale Fie solano,' are praiseworthy stories, overcharged with ornament; but 'Fiammetta' is a literary event, the first psychological novel. Only Dante's 'Vita Nuova' had contained such sub tle investigation. 'Fiammette is Boccaccio's own love story, and possesses an accent of sincerity that all the borrowed elegance of Latin models cannot disguise.
The (Decamerone) is Boccaccio's immortal masterpiece. Over Florence (1348) hangs the horror of the plague. In a delightful villa out side the city a company of gallant youths and gentle maidens have gone for safety, and to seek distraction from thoughts of death and disease through present enjoyment and the tell ing of tales. The party of 10, during 10 days, tell 100 stories. A crowd of personages are introduced; the diversity of situation, the fer of invention or of adaptation, the abundance of familiar detail rive us unsur passed pictures of Neapolitan and Florentine life of the time. Knights and princes, artists and poets, gentlewomen and merry wives, friends, friars, hostel-keepers, shrewd mer chants and lusty clerks, all move and speak in the gay medley of real life. The attacks on the clergy were warranted by their immorality, and Boccaccio's obscenity completes his picture. He borrows from all sources, chiefly from French fabliaux, with the one purpose of correctly rep resenting the real world around him: its in terests, its virtues, its vices. He is a pagan, as are the shrewd, prosperous Florentine pagans about him, those whom Carducci calls it popolo grass°, enjoying life and indifferent to any future finality. His only reverence is for Art, which he worships so ardently as to have given to his own work a correctness which ranks him as one of the intellectual triumvirate that molded the Italian language, and even the very spirit of the nation.
In perfect contrast with the irreligious and artistic world of Boccaccio and his imitator Franco Sacchetti and their disciples, loomed a great ascetic spirit, an inspired apostle, who subdued the fiercest and humbled the proudest, by declaring the simple message of Jesus Christ; an illiterate woman of humble birth, Santa Caterina da Siena. Unquestioned faith in her self and her holy mission gave authority to her word, eloquence to her epistles and reminis cences, most uncommon among Italian writers of that or any other period. It is another miracle of the power of Faith.
Is QUATTROCENTO - 15TH CENTURY. THE NAISSANCE.
If the quattrocento (15th century) seems to have produced little that is memorable in Italian literature, the barrenness is only seeming. It was a seed-germinating century, wedged in between the glorious 14th and the brilliant 16th century. A century of progress in classical studies, a period notable in the evolution of the national conscience. Petrarch and Boccaccio only a little forestalled their countrymen, and ((Humanise' soon spread over all Italy.
Whether the word °humanism' be given its Latin signification of gentleness, courtliness; or is understood as emphasizing the human rather than the religious ideal it equally accorded with the Italian 15th century spirit — a spirit of rebellion against the papal and imperial in fluences which dominated the Middle Ages. Italians have always claimed to be the inherit ors of the Roman world, and to have uninter ruptedly continued the classic tradition, and the claim was certainly. justified at this time, when Latin civism was asserted in the free Comuni, when emphasis was given to the Latin language, and when under the patronage of Cosimo de Medici, in the Accadeniia Platonica, meeting in the villa belonging to Marsilio Ficino, learned scholars and philosophers, in purely pagan spirit, disputed respecting Plato's and Aristotle's dogmas. Some timid priests, it is true, opposed this humanism, which, with its pagan myths, philosophic inquiry and sensuous beauty threat ened the Church's supremacy. But soon schol arly and epicurean prelates and popes (Niccolo. V and Pio II) were themselves seduced by humanism, and turned the current of reviv ing philosophy and letters to the adornment of the Church, if not to the increase of her faith.