Giovanni Boccaccio, founder of modern storytelling
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian poet, writer and scholar of great
importance during Humanism in the 14th century. Writing in the vernacular -
vulgar language - and not in Latin, Boccaccio, together with Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch, helped to
promote the use of Tuscan as a legitimate language for poetic Literature.
Humanism was a transitional literary movement between Troubadourism and Classicism that marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning
of the Modern Age in Europe. It brought ideological, social, cultural
and psychological transformations.
The language of Humanism is rational, historical, political and theatrical.
It is based, above all, on the appreciation of the human being and on the
psychological universe of the characters. Palace poetry, historical chronicles
and theatrical texts were the themes most used by humanist writers.
Boccaccio and the Renaissance
When Boccaccio was born, Dante Alighieri, although exiled since
1300, already dominated the culture of Florence, the city that was the
birthplace of the Renaissance. Dedicating himself to the composition of the Divine
Comedy, Dante would only finish it in the year of his death (1321).
Boccaccio's origins lie with Florentine merchants, and his first language is vulgar
Tuscan.
Boccaccio was a Renaissance in almost every way. His humanism
comprised not only classical studies and the attempt to rediscover and
reinterpret ancient texts, but also the attempt to elevate Literature in modern
languages, leveling it with classical Literature.
He advanced more than Petrarch in this direction did, not only because he
sought to dignify prose and poetry, but also because he ennobled everyday
experience, tragic and comic. The same attention to popular and medieval themes
characterized Italian culture in the second half of the 15th century; without
Boccaccio, the literary peak of the Italian Renaissance would be historically
incomprehensible.
Boccaccio's interest in the ancient world came to a head with her
collection of biographies on remarkable women of antiquity, De mulieribus
claris (On Famous Women), compiled from 1360 to 1374. The search for
"lost" Latin manuscripts in obscure monastic libraries. Your interest
in human affairs in Decameron. Your innovation using ottava rhyme. His
promotion of the vernacular (vulgar language) in prose. These are the reasons
why he came to be considered one of the founders of Renaissance humanism and
one of the Three Crowns of Florence (Dante and Petrarch the other two).
Decameron, his most famous and emblematic work
The Boccaccio's most famous work, Decameron, was the first
totally renaissance one for dealing only with human aspects and without
mentioning religious and theological themes. The themes addressed in it are
diverse and related to love, fortune (destiny) and intelligence.
It was probably between the years 1348 and 1353, and after the death
of his father, that Boccaccio composed the Decameron in the
form in which it is read today. Though romantic in tone and form, it breaks
with medieval sensibilities in its insistence on the human capacity to overcome
and even explore destiny.
Decameron became the standard by which all subsequent prose Literature, in
Italy and abroad, was judged. There were certain critics who found some of the
stories told in the book too vulgar. Hence, it was placed on the Catholic
Church's list of banned books in the mid-16th century. However, talking about
its more lewd elements has not lessened interest in it.
Decameron is a collection of 100 stories spanning a group of 10
friends, seven women and three men. To escape the plague, they flee to a charming village
near Florence. There, each party member can become king or
queen for a day and dictate how the others spend his or her leisure time for 10
days straight.
Both the king and queen decide the theme of the ten stories that each
member must tell. At the end of each day, one of the
accountants sings a canzone of dance. The
songs include some of Boccaccio's best lyrical poetry. There is also a master
theme, centered on the refined bourgeois way of life, which combines respect
for conventions with an open-minded attitude to personal behavior.
The mixture of comedy and tragedy shows
people who follow certain conventions, but who do not judge personal lifestyle
choices. Although the characters enjoy a lewd tale, they are not immoral.
Many of the Decameron derive from medieval folklore (from Europe and
the Islamic world). It is humans overcoming the whims of fate and getting on
with their lives as best they can. This theme can explain the timeless aspect
of literary work. All human life, with its disagreements, feelings, death and
overcoming, is narrated there, as in a fresco. It goes from degradation to
elevation. Nothing human is alien to him. A
new world is born, and a new life.
There is the love of the knight condemned to pursue, kill and eviscerate
(remove or take out the viscera) the woman who had despised his passionate
advances. In the 15th century, this story would serve as a theme for the
painter Sandro Botticelli. Allied to realism and the often licentious
and sensual tone, it motivated the harshest criticisms from religious
authorities and all kinds of censorship.
The prefaces to the individual days and histories and certain passages of
special magnificence based on classical models, with their select vocabulary
and elaborate periods, attract the attention of literary criticism.
However, there is also another Boccaccio: the master of the spoken word and
of fast, vivid, tense narrative, free from the proliferation of ornaments.
These two aspects of the Decameron made it the source of Italian
literary prose for centuries to come. For its style, it is the perfect example
of classic Italian prose. Enormous was its influence on Renaissance Literature
across Europe.
Relevant Critics of the Decameron
The influential 19th century critic Francesco De Sanctis considered
the Decameron a "Human Comedy" in succession to Divine
Comedy and called Boccaccio the pioneer of a new moral order supplanting
that of the European Middle Ages. However, this view is no longer tenable,
since the Middle Ages can no longer be presented as having been wholly mystical
or wholly concerned with God and heavenly salvation in contrast to a
Renaissance concerned only with what is human.
Furthermore, Boccaccio's work is basically medieval in matter, form and
taste, at least in its starting point. What is new is the spirit with which
Boccaccio treats his themes and forms. Deliberately, for the first time in the
Middle Ages, Boccaccio shows man struggling with fortune and learning to
overcome it.
To be truly noble, a man must accept life as it is, without bitterness.
Above all, he must accept the consequences of his own actions, however contrary
to his expectations or even tragic as they may be.
Man, in order to realize his own earthly happiness, must limit his desire
to what is humanly possible and renounce the absolute without regret. Boccaccio
insists both on man'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 that underlie frivolity in even the most licentious
passages are features of his work which modern criticism has brought to light
and which make it impossible to regard him merely as an obscene scoffer or a
sensual cynic.
After all, is the author presenting his own points of view in his
characters, in his fictional stories, in both or neither? This is a complicated
and age-old question of fiction writing.
Boccaccio and Petrarch, an Encounter that Revolutionized Humanist Literature
Of far more lasting importance than official honors was Boccaccio's first
encounter with Petrarch in Florence in 1350. This encounter helped bring about
a decisive change in Boccaccio's literary activity. He revered the older man as
his master. Petrarch proved to be a serene advisor and reliable helper.
Together, through the exchange of books, news and ideas, the two men laid the
groundwork for the humanist reconquest of classical antiquity.
They did not always agree on all matters. Boccaccio, for example,
criticized Petrarch for working with city-state rulers who were politically
against Florence. Boccaccio was also very concerned with creating a partially
fabricated Florentine tradition of new Literature with Dante Alighieri
in his heart, a project that did not interest Petrarch, who did not get along
very well with Dante.
The themes of chivalry and love in these works had long been familiar in
court circles. Boccaccio enriched them with the fruits of his own keen
observation of real life. He sought to present them nobly and illustriously by
a display of learning and rhetorical ornament to make their Italian language
worthy of comparison with the monuments of Latin Literature.
It was also he who elevated to the literary dignity of the ottava rima, the meter of minstrel
verse, which would eventually become the characteristic vehicle of Italian
verse.
Literary focus on humanist scholarship
After Decameron, Boccaccio shifted his literary focus to subjects
considered more important. Indeed, he tended to downplay his achievement,
preferring to follow the trends of what became known as Renaissance Humanism,
which is the study of classical texts and their relevance to contemporary
life.
Focusing on Latin, he devoted himself to humanist scholarship rather than
imaginative or poetic creation. His encyclopedia De genealogia deorum
gentilium (On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles), with 728
entries, was completed in the 1360s. It was the first classical Renaissance
text to give weight to Greek Literature and language and was widely used by
later Renaissance writers. With a medieval structure, but with a humanist
spirit, the work was continuously corrected and revised until the author's
death.
This shift from writing fiction to educational works was probably due to
his correspondence and friendship with Petrarch. Boccaccio once sent him a
letter telling him that he had burned some of his own poetry after comparing it
unfavorably to his friends.
The exact sources of Boccaccio's knowledge of the ancient Greek world are
unknown, but it is likely that he acquired the knowledge through his close
friendship with Paolo de Perugia, a medieval collector of ancient myths
and tales.
Boccaccio's profound personal and literary changes
The encounter with Petrarch, however, was not the only
cause of the change in Boccaccio's writing. A premature weakening of their
physical strengths and disappointments in love may also have contributed to
this. Some of these occurrences would explain how Boccaccio, having always
written in praise of women and love, suddenly came to write the bitterly
misogynist Corbaccio.
Furthermore, there are signs that he may have begun to
feel religious scruples. Amidst the Chartreusein, the French Alps is the
Grande Chartreuse. There live Catholic monks of the Carthusian
who avoid contact with the outside world and focus on contemplation and prayer.
Petrarch describes how, in 1362, the Carthusian monk Pietro Petrone, on
his deathbed, sent Gioacchino Ciani, another Carthusian monk, to urge
Boccaccio to renounce worldly studies.
Petrarch was then the one who prevented Boccaccio from
burning his own works and selling his library. Furthermore, as early as 1360,
Boccaccio's way of life was considered austere enough to warrant his being put
in charge of a pastoral care of souls in a cathedral. He had received smaller
requests many years before, perhaps at first only in the hope of receiving
benefits.
Boccaccio's circle in Florence was of vital importance
as the nucleus of early Humanism. Leonzio Pilato, whom Boccaccio hosted
from 1360 to 1362, did the crude Latin translation through which Petrarch and
Boccaccio were introduced to Homer - the starting point of Greek studies
by the humanists.
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. Dele Vita di Dante
Alighieri, or Trattatello in laude di Dante (Small
Treatise in Praise of Dante), and the two abridged editions he made show his
devotion to Dante's memory.
From 1373, Boccaccio studied Greek and gave a series of public lectures in
the church of San Stefano di Badiain Florence on Dante's work. This was
the first time a non-classical writer had been studied by college-level
students.
Brief biography
Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313, in Tuscany (or in Paris), the son of Boccaccino
da Chellino, who left Certaldo, an agricultural village in Italy, to
work at the Bardi in Florence. Nothing is known about his mother, except
that she may have been French (it used to be thought he was born in Paris).
Poet and scholar, he laid the foundations for Renaissance Humanism and elevated
vernacular (vulgar, popular) Literature to the level of the classics of
antiquity.
Around the age of 15, Giovanni was sent to study business, finance, and
canon law in Naples, at the banking house of Bardi, the wealthy family
that gave him access to the court in that city. In this milieu, Boccaccio
experienced the aristocracy of the commercial world, mingled with court
scholars and Petrarch's friends and admirers. He also met and fell in love with
Fiammetta, a woman who would be an important character in his literary
work in the first half of his career, including the Decameron.
Unfortunately, for Giovanni, Bardi's banking house went bankrupt and his
father's finances plummeted. Called back to Florence around 1340, his career
prospects took a serious dip when the cold hand of poverty beckoned.
In 1350, he was appointed ambassador to the court of Romagna.
The following year he served outside Italy as ambassador to Tyrol, and
in 1354, he played the same role in the Vatican. That same year
he was appointed ambassador of the Florentine government in the city of
Ravenna. It was the beginning of a series of trips through Italy.
All these studies were carried out in poverty,
sometimes near destitution, and Boccaccio had to earn most of his income by
transcribing his own works or those of others. In 1363, poverty forced him to
retire to the village of Certaldo. In October 1373, however, he began
the public readings of the Divine Comedy, in the Church of San
Stefano di Badia, in Florence.
A revised text of the commentary he came up with on
these readings still exists, but breaks off at the point he arrived at when,
early in 1374, illness made him despondent. Petrarch's death in July 1374 was
another pain for him, and he retired permanently to Certaldo. There he died on December 21,
1375 and was buried in the
Church of San Michele e Jacopo.
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