Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75)

Encyclopædia Orbis Latini

Italian poet and storyteller, author of the Decameron.

Born in Paris, the illegitimate son of a Tuscan merchant by a French woman, he was educated at Certaldo and Naples by his father, who wanted him to take up commerce and law. In Naples he met (1336) the woman (dubiously identified as Maria d’Aquino, illegitimate daughter of King Robert) whom he was to immortalize in prose and verse as Fiammetta. She is reputed to have introduced him at court and to have urged him to write (c.1340) his early Filocolo, a long vernacular prose romance. Other early works include the poem Filostrato, which infused the legendary story of Troilus and Cressida with the atmosphere of Neapolitan court life; the Teseide, a poem in the style of the Aeneid; the psychological romance La Fiammetta (written c.1344); the pastoral Ninfale d’Ameto; and the allegorical Amorosa visione, imitative of Dante. Boccaccio had been recalled to Florence in 1341, and there he met (1350) the great poet Petrarch, who became a lifelong friend. Emulating Petrarch, he became a Latin and Greek scholar and worked vigorously to reintroduce Greek works. In his middle years Boccaccio wrote (1348–53) his great secular classic, the Decameron, a collection of 100 witty and occasionally licentious tales set against the somber background of the Black Death. The tales treat a wide variety of characters and events and brilliantly reveal man as sensual, tender, cruel, weak, self-seeking, and ludicrous. With the Decameron the courtly themes of medieval literature began to give way to the voice and mores of early modern society. Boccaccio achieved stylistic mastery in the Decameron, which became a model for later efforts toward an endemically Italian style. After completing the tales, Boccaccio experienced a severe emotional crisis, during which he wrote the satire Corbaccio, a savage attack on the female sex. In the next years there followed Bucolicum carmen [pastoral songs], the huge De casibus virorem illustrium and De claris mulieribus (biographies of famous men and women), the mythological treatise De genealogiis, and the geographical dictionary De montibus. Boccaccio’s old age was troubled by poverty and ill health, but his activity continued. He was commissioned (1371) by the commune of Certaldo to read daily from his beloved Dante, and in 1373 in Florence he began the lectures which became his famous Commento on the Inferno. There are several translations of the Decameron and also many anthologies and collections of particular stories in translation.