Giovanni Boccaccio
1313–1375 · Italy
“A kissed mouth doesn't lose its freshness, for like the moon it always renews itself.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Giovanni Boccaccio
Drew From(3)
who shaped Giovanni Boccaccio
- Boccaccio was Dante's first great champion — he copied the Commedia by hand, wrote his biography, and gave the poem the name "Divine"
- The Decameron's 100 novelle deliberately answer the Commedia's 100 cantos: a "human comedy" set against the divine one
- Read Dante first and Boccaccio's design comes clear — the same scale and structure, turned from the afterlife back toward the flesh-and-blood world
via The Golden Ass
- Two of the Decameron's sharpest sex comedies were lifted, almost intact, from Apuleius's The Golden Ass
- Boccaccio didn't stumble on them — he found the Monte Cassino manuscript, annotated it, and copied out the entire text by hand
- Read the tub trick (VII.2) and the fuller's wife (V.10) in Apuleius first, and you'll watch the medieval frame-tale reach back a thousand years to borrow its filth wholesale
via Metamorphoses
- Boccaccio learned his trade on Ovid in Naples, and contemporaries called him "the Italian Ovid"
- Reading the Metamorphoses first tunes your ear to what the Decameron does with love — the same ironic, transforming desire, now dressed in plague-time Florentine clothes
- Not the closest source (Apuleius and the fabliaux are nearer), but the Ovidian love-and-change matter is woven through the framing and the tales
Inspired(3)
who Giovanni Boccaccio shaped
- Boccaccio's tale of Giletta di Narbona (Day 3, Novella 9) is the whole skeleton of All's Well — the king's miraculous cure, the spurned husband, the bed-trick
- Shakespeare reached it through William Painter's English Palace of Pleasure, the standard route for Italian tales into Elizabethan drama
- One of the Decameron's stories handed Shakespeare a complete, ready-made plot
- Boccaccio built the machine Chaucer would borrow: a company of people, thrown together, taking turns telling stories
- That frame — and roughly a quarter of Chaucer's individual tales — turns up again in The Canterbury Tales a half-century later
- The Decameron is the Italian original behind the most famous storytelling-contest in English
- Boccaccio's tales kept getting picked up and retold for centuries — Dryden is one of the last great translators to mine the Decameron directly
- In Fables, Ancient and Modern, he versified three of these stories — Sigismonda and Guiscardo, Theodore and Honoria, Cymon and Iphigenia — with "Boccace" named right on the title page
- See the prose original, then click through to watch a master of the English heroic couplet recast it as verse
Portraits
The most reproduced Boccaccio likeness: a c.1450 fresco from the Villa Carducci 'Uomini Illustri' cycle, now in the Uffizi; painted ~75 years after his death, it is the standard imagined-yet-canonical Renaissance portrait.
Andrea del Castagno, 1450
Anonymous 16th-c. Florentine-school panel (National Trust collection) following the Giovio/Altissimo type; a clean head-and-shoulders imagined portrait useful as an alternate bust likeness.
Famous Quotes
“It is better to do and repent than not to do and repent.”
“'Tis humane to have compassion on the afflicted; and as it shews well in all, so it is especially demanded of those who have had need of comfort and have found it in others.”
“How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, how many sprightly youths, whom, not others only, but Galen, Hippocrates or Aesculapius themselves would have judged most hale, breakfasted in the morning with their kinsfolk, comrades and friends and that same night supped with their ancestors in the other world!”
“Do as we say, and not as we do.”
About Giovanni Boccaccio
Italian writer and poet, best known for The Decameron, a collection of 100 novellas told by ten young people sheltering from the Black Death. A friend and admirer of Petrarch, he helped establish Italian prose as a literary language. His earthy, comic tales of love, wit, and human folly influenced Chaucer and the entire European novella tradition.