Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  So we pass to the triumph of Fortune, in which we learn the stories of Thebes, of Troy, of Carthage, of Alexander, of Pompey, of Niobe, and we are told of the inconstancy of terrestrial things.283 And thus disillusioned, the poet makes the firm resolve to follow his guide in spite of every temptation. Yet almost at once a certain beautiful garden destroys his resolve. For he enters there and finds a marvellous fountain of marble, and a company of fair women who are presented to him under mysterious pseudonyms.284 Among these are the bella Lombarda, the Lia of the Ameto, and finally the lady who writes her name in letters of gold in the heart of the poet.285 And this lady he chooses for his sun, with the approval of his guide, who seems to have forgotten, as he has certainly done, the resolves so lately taken. However, the guide now discreetly leaves him in a somewhat compromising position; and it is thus Fiammetta who leads him into the abandoned road of virtue.286

  These Trionfi were written before the Trionfi of Petrarch, and their true source is to be found not in any of Petrarch’s work, but in the Divine Comedy and in the sources Dante used.287 Boccaccio has evidently studied the great poem very closely. He imitates it not only in motives and symbols and words, but, as we have seen, in the form of his verse, and to some extent in the construction of his poem, which consists of fifty capitoli, each composed of twenty-nine terzine and a verse of chiusa, that is of eighty-eight verses in each.

  The first edition was published in Milan in 1521 with an Apologia contro ai detrattori della poesia del Boccaccio by Girolamo Claricio of Imola. No translation has ever been made.288

  We turn now to the Fiammetta,289 which must have been the last of the works directly concerned with his passion for Maria d’Aquino. Crescini290 thinks it was written in 1343, but others291 assure us that it is later work.292 Crescini’s argument is, however, so formidable that we shall do better to accept his conclusions and to consider the Fiammetta as a work of this first Florentine period. Though concerned with the same subject, his love, the allegory is worth noting, for while in all the other books concerned with Fiammetta he assures us he was betrayed by her, here he asserts that Panfilo (himself) betrayed Fiammetta! Moreover, he warns us that here he speaks the truth,293 but in fact it is only here he is a liar. It is impossible to believe that every one had not penetrated his various disguises, and he must have known that this was, and would be, so. Wishing, then, both to revenge and to vindicate himself — for his “betrayal” still hurt him keenly — and guessing that Fiammetta would read the book, he tells us that it was he who left her, not she him. The book then is very amusing for us who are behind the scenes, as it was, doubtless, for many of those who read it in his day.

  The action is very simple, the story being told by Fiammetta as though it were an autobiography. It begins with a dream in which Fiammetta is warned that great unhappiness is in store for her. She knows Panfilo,294 and suddenly there arises between them an eager love. Warned of the danger they run in entertaining so impetuous a passion, they yet take no heed; till quite as suddenly as it had begun, their love is broken. Panfilo must go away, it seems, being recalled to Florence by his old father. In vain Fiammetta tries to detain him; she can only obtain from him a promise that he will return to Naples in four months. The ingenious lying in that!

  All alone she passes her days and nights in weeping. The four months pass and Panfilo does not come back to her. One day she hears from a merchant that he has taken a wife in Florence. This news increases her agony, and she asks aid of Venus. Then her husband, seeing her to be ill, but unaware of the cause of her sufferings, takes her to Baia; but no distraction helps her, and Baia only reminds her of the bygone days she spent there with Panfilo. At last she hears from a faithful servant come from Florence that Panfilo has not taken a wife, that the young woman in his house is the new wife of his old father; but it seems though he be unmarried he is in love with another lady, which is even worse. New jealousy and lamentations of Fiammetta. She refuses to be comforted and thinks only of death and suicide, and even tries to throw herself from her window, but is prevented. Finally the return of Panfilo is announced. Fiammetta thanks Venus and adorns herself again. She waits; but Panfilo does not come, and at last she is reduced to comforting herself by thinking of all those who suffer from love even as she. The work closes with a sort of epilogue.

  As a work of art the Fiammetta is the best thing Boccaccio has yet achieved. The psychology is fine, subtle, and full of insight, but not so dramatic nor so simple and profound as that in the Filostrato. He shows again that he understands a woman’s innermost nature, her continual doubts of herself, her gift of introspection. The torment of soul that a deserted woman suffers, the helpless fury of jealousy, are studied and explained with marvellous knowledge and coolness. The husband, who, ignorant of all, is so sorry for his wife’s unhappiness, and seeks to console and comfort her, really lives and is the fine prototype of a lot of base work done later in which the cruel absurdity of the situation and the ridiculous figure he cuts who plays his part in it are insisted on. In fact, in the Fiammetta we find many of the finest features of the Decameron. It is the first novel of psychology ever written in Europe.

  The sources of the Fiammetta are hard and perhaps impossible to trace. It seems to have no forbears.295 One thinks of Ovid’s Heroides, but that has little to do with it. Among the minor works of Boccaccio it is the one that has been most read. First published in Padova in 1472, it was translated into English in 1587 by B. Young.296

  From this intense psychological novel Boccaccio seems to have turned away with a sort of relief, the relief the poet always finds in mere singing, to the Ninfale Fiesolano. Licentious, and yet full of a marvellous charm, full of that love of nature, too, which is by no means a mere convention, the Ninfale Fiesolano is the most mature of his poems in the vulgar tongue.

  “Basterebbe,” says Carducci,297 “Basterebbe, io credo, il Ninfale Fiesolano perchè non fosse negato al Boccaccio l’ onore di poeta anche in versi.” It was probably begun about 1342 in Florence, and finished in Naples in 1346. The theme is still love:

  “Amor mi fa parlar che m’ è nel core

  Gran tempo stato e fatto m’ ha suo albergo,”

  he tells us in the first lines. The story tells how the shepherd Affrico falls in love with Mensola, nymph of Diana,298 and how the nymph, penitent for having broken her vow of chastity, abandons the poor shepherd.299 In desperation, Affrico kills himself on the bank of the brook that has witnessed their happiness and that is now called Affrico after him;300 and Mensola, after bearing a son, is changed too into the stream Mensola hard by.301 Pruneo, their offspring, when he is eighteen years old, enters the service of Atlas, founder of Fiesole, who marries him to Tironea. She receives as dote the country between the Mensola and the Mugnone.302

  The sources he drew from for this beautiful poem, so full of learning, but fuller still of a genuine love of nature, prove to us that it was, in its completeness, a mature work. It is derived in part from the Metamorphoses of Ovid, from the Æneid, and from Achilles Tatius, a Greek romancer of Alexandria who lived in the fifth century a.d.303 Moreover, the Ninfale is a pastoral poem that is in no way at all concerned with chivalry; it is wholly Latin, full of nature and the bright fields, expressed with a Latin rhetoric. Curiously enough it has never had much success, especially out of Italy; and though it be voluptuous, it is by no means the immoral book it has been called.

  This, as we have seen, is the third poem which Boccaccio wrote in ottave, and it has been stated, not without insistence, that he was in fact the inventor, or at any rate the renewer, of that metre in Italian.304

  The truth seems to lie with Baldelli. The Sicilians had written ottave, but they had but two rime, and were akin to those of the Provençals. What Boccaccio did was to take this somewhat arid scheme and give it life by reforming it out of all recognition. Moreover, if he was not actually the first poet to write ottave in Italian, he was the first to put them to epic use. There are in fact, properly speaking, no Italian ep
ics before the poems of Boccaccio.

  As for the Ninfale Fiesolano, it was first published in Venice in 1477 by Bruno Valla and Tommaso d’ Alessandria. It has only been translated once — into French — by Anton Guercin du Crest, who published it in Lyons in 1556 at the shop of Gabriel Cotier. This was apparently the last poem on which Boccaccio was engaged — though it may have been put aside for the sake of the Fiammetta, and taken up again — before, about 1344, it seems, he returned to Naples.

  CHAPTER VI

  1341-1343

  IN FLORENCE — HIS FATHER’S SECOND MARRIAGE — THE DUKE OF ATHENS

  Those years which Boccaccio spent in Florence between 1341 and 1345, and which would seem for the most part to have been devoted to literature, the completion of the works already begun in Naples, the composition of the Amorosa Visione, the Fiammetta, and the Ninfale Fiesolano, were personally among the most unhappy of his life, while publicly they brought the republic of Florence to the verge of ruin. And indeed he was an unwilling victim. That he hated leaving Naples might seem obvious from his own circumstances at that time; nor were the political conditions of Florence encouraging. He had left a city friendly to men of letters, full of all manner of splendour, rich, peaceful, and, above all, governed by one authority, the king, for a distracted republic divided against itself and scarcely able to support a costly foreign war.305 Nor were the conditions of his father’s house any more pleasing to him.

  Soured by misfortune, Boccaccino seems at this time to have been a melancholy and hard old man. The picture Giovanni gives us of him is perhaps coloured by resentment, and indeed he had never forgiven his father for the desertion of the girl he had seduced, the little French girl Jeanne, Giovanni’s mother;306 but it is with a quite personal sense of resentment he describes the home to which he returned from Naples — that house in the S. Felicità quarter which Boccaccino had bought in 1333:307 “Here one laughs but seldom. The dark, silent, melancholy house keeps and holds me altogether against my will, where the dour and terrible aspect of an old man frigid, uncouth, and miserly continually adds affliction to my saddened mood.”308 That was in 1341 one may think; and no doubt the loss of Fiammetta, his own poverty, and the confusion of public affairs in Florence added to his depression; and then he was always easily cast down. But as it happened, things were already improving for him.

  It will be remembered that in the romance which passes under her name Fiammetta tells us that Panfilo (Giovanni), when he deserted her, promised to return in four months. Later309 she says, when the promised time of his return had passed by more than a month, she heard from a merchant lately arrived in Naples that her lover fifteen days before had taken a wife in Florence.310 Great distress on the part of Fiammetta; but, as she soon learnt, it was not Giovanni, but his father, who had married himself.

  Is there any truth in this story? Assuredly there is. We know, indeed, that Boccaccino did marry a second wife, whose name was Bice de’ Bostichi, and that she bore him a son, Jacopo;311 but we do not know when either of these events happened. If we may trust the Fiammetta, which says clearly that Giovanni’s father married again about five months after his son returned home, and if we are right in thinking that that return took place in January, 1341, then Boccaccino married his second wife in the spring, or more precisely in May, 1341. That they were man and wife in May, 1343,312 we know, for, thanks to Crescini, we have a document which proves it. Beyond that fact all is conjecture in this matter. Yet it is significant that we find Boccaccino, on December 13, 1342, acquiring half a house in the popolo di S. Ambrogio in Florence,313 and yet, as we know from the document just quoted,314 in May, 1343, he was still living in popolo di S. Felicità.315 For what possible reason could Boccaccino, ruined as he was, want half a house in which he did not propose to live? Had family history repeated itself? Was Giovanni in some sort again turned out of his father’s house by his second stepmother as he had been by the first, and for a like reason — the birth of a legitimate son? It was for him, then, that Boccaccino bought the half-house in popolo di S. Ambrogio, and the occasion was the birth of Jacopo his son by Madonna Bice? It is possible, at any rate; and when we remember the efforts the old man had already made in his poverty for the comfort of a son who had disappointed him in everything, it seems more than likely. Nor can we but accuse Giovanni of ingratitude when we think of his constant allusions to his father’s avarice and remember these benefits.316

  Such, then, are the few and meagre personal events that have in any way come down to us of Boccaccio’s life while he was writing all or nearly all those works of his youth which we have already examined, between his return to Florence in January, 1341, and his departure once more for Naples in 1344 or 1345.

  These years, materially none too happy for him but full after all of successful work, were disastrous for Florence. That tranquillity and internal peace which so happily followed the death of Castruccio Castracani and of Charles of Calabria in 1328, in which, among other splendid things, Giotto’s tower was built, had been broken in 1340, when the grandi, who held the government, having grown oppressive, a rebellion headed by Piero de’ Baldi and Bardo Frescobaldi was only crushed by a rising of the people. Things were quiet then for a moment, but the grandi would heed no warning, and as one might expect, their insolence grew with their power. Nor was it only at home that things were going unhappily for Florence. When Louis of Bavaria, who claimed the empire against the will of the Pope, left Italy — it was the Visconti who had called him across the Alps in fear of the House of Anjou — some of his Germans, after Castruccio’s death, seized Lucca and offered to sell it to the Florentines, who refused it. They repented later; and when it had come into the hands of Martino della Scala of Verona and Parma, who, in straits himself on account of Visconti, offered to sell it again, they found a competitor in Pisa, who was ready to dispute the city with them. Nevertheless they bought it, only to find that the Pisans, knowing the wealth of Florence and expecting this, had sat down before it. A war followed in which nothing but dishonour came the way of Florence, and Lucca fell into the hands of Pisa. This so enraged the Florentines that they rose against the grandi, who, at their wits’ end what to do, asked their old ally Robert of Naples for help. This was in 1341. It was not, therefore, to a very prosperous or joyful city that Boccaccio returned from Naples; the words he put into the mouth of Fiammetta317 were fully justified.

  King Robert, however, did not send help to Florence at once. He was thinking always of Sicily and had been busy with the conquest of the Lipari Islands,318 but when he did send it, in the person of Walter, Duke of Athens and Count of Brienne, a French baron, it proved to be the worst disaster of all. Yet at first the Florentines rejoiced, for they knew Walter of old, who had been vicegerent in Florence for Charles of Calabria in 1325, and as Machiavelli tells us, his behaviour had been so modest that every one loved him. That was not his attitude now, nor does it tally with Boccaccio’s lively account of him,319 which certainly reads like the work of an eye-witness and supports our belief that he was in Florence during 1342 and 1343 — those disastrous years.

  For as it happened, the Duke arrived in Florence at the very time when the enterprise of Lucca was utterly lost. The grandi, however, hoping to appease the people, at once made him Conservator and later General. But they had alienated every one. The nobili, long since their enemies, had always maintained a correspondence with the Duke ever since he had been vicegerent for Charles of Calabria; they thought now that their chance was come when they might be avenged alike on the grandi and the people; so they pressed him to take the government wholly into his hands. The people, on the other hand, smarting under new taxes and oppression and insolence and defeat, to a large extent joined the nobili against the grandi. In this conspiracy we find all the names of the great popular families, Peruzzi, Acciaiuoli, Antellesi, and Buonaccorsi, whom the unsuccessful war, among other things, had ruined, and who hoped thus to free themselves from their creditors.

  The Duke’s ambition, bei
ng thus pampered and exasperated, over-reached itself. To please the people he put to death those who had the management of the war, Giovanni de’ Medici, Nardo Rucellai, and Guglielmo Altoviti, and banished some and fined others. And thus his reputation was increased, and indeed a general fear of him spread through the city, so that to show their affection towards him people caused his arms to be painted upon their houses, and nothing but the bare title was wanting to make him their Prince.

  Being now sure of his success, he caused it to be signified to the Government that for the public good he judged it best that they should transfer their authority upon him, and that he desired their resignation. At first they refused, but when by proclamation he required all the people to appear before him in the Piazza di S. Croce (for he was living in the convent as a sign of his humility), they protested, and then consented that the government should be conferred upon him for a year with the same conditions as those with which it had been formerly given to Charles of Calabria.

  So on September 8, 1342, the Duke, accompanied by Giovanni della Tosca and many citizens, came into the Piazza della Signoria with the Senate, and, mounting on the Rhingiera, he caused the articles of agreement between him and the Senate to be read. Now when he who read them came to the place where it was written that the government should be his for a year, the people cried out, “For his life. For his life.” It is true, Francesco Rustichesi, one of the Signori, rose up and tried to speak, but they would not hear him. Thus the Duke was chosen lord by consent of the people not for a year, but for ever; and afterwards he was taken and carried through the multitude with general acclamation. Now the first thing he did was to seize the Palazzo della Signoria, where he set up his own standard, while the Palazzo itself was plundered by his servants; and all this was done to the satisfaction of those who maliciously or ignorantly had consented to his exaltation.