Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  I have already said something as to the versions of the Life:599 it remains to add that though the MSS. of the Compendium are rare, those of the Vita are very numerous,600 while the first printed edition of the work was published in Venice in 1477 by Vindelin da Spira before the edition of the Divine Comedy with the comment of Jacopo della Lana, erroneously attributed to Benvenuto da Imola. Prof. Macri Leone describes nineteen later editions, making with his own some twenty-one in all.601

  It is not surprising that the author of this eager defence of Dante, of the first life of the poet, should on the petition of the Florentines for a lecturer in the Divine Comedy have been chosen by the Signoria to fill that honourable and difficult post. His first lecture, as we have seen, was delivered in the church of Santo Stefano on Sunday, October 23, 1373. Already an old man, infirm in health, he can scarcely have hoped to finish his work, and as it proved he was not able to complete a sixth part of it, for attacked by illness in the winter of 1373, he broke off abruptly at the seventeenth verse of the seventeenth canto of the Inferno and returned to Certaldo really to die. That, after that sudden breakdown, if such it was, he never resumed his lectures seems certain, and although it was at the time supposed that Boccaccio had written a complete commentary on the Divine Comedy, and a fourteenth-century Comento, now commonly known as Il Falso Boccaccio,602 was accepted even by the Academicians of the Crusca as his work,603 it seems certain that the fragment we know as his Comento was all that was ever written, though how much of it was actually delivered in lectures it is impossible to say.604

  That the Comento we have and no other is really the work of Boccaccio was proved long ago by Manni,605 for it seems, that when Boccaccio died at last, a dispute arose among his heirs as to the meaning of his Will, the bone of contention being this very Comento, which both Fra Martino da Signa of Santo Spirito in Florence, to whom he had left his books, claimed as part of his library, and also Jacopo his half-brother, to whose children Boccaccio had left all the other property he had.606 The affair was at last referred to the Consoli dell’ Arte del Cambio, the two sides submitting their claims in writing. We find there that Fra Martino, if the Comento were adjudged his property, professed his willingness to let Jacopo have it, a sheet at a time, to copy. Jacopo, however, makes no such offer; we should nevertheless be grateful to him — he was the victor — for in his claim he minutely describes the MS. in question and so enables us to identify it with those we possess.607 “Dinanzi a voi domando,” we read there, “ventiquattro quaderni, et quattordici quadernucci, tutti in carta di bambágia, non legati insieme, ma l’ uno dall’ altro diviso, d’ uno iscritto, o vero isposizione sopra sedici Capitoli, e parte del diciassettesimo del Dante, il quale scritto il detto Messer Giovanni di Boccaccio non compiè....”

  This incomplete work,608 which breaks off so suddenly really in the middle of a paragraph, might seem to be rather a true commentary, a sort of full notes on the work in question, such as is still common in Italy, than a series of lectures delivered vivâ voce. Indeed the living voice is almost entirely absent, and as Dr. Toynbee says, “if it were not for a single passage at the beginning of his opening lecture in which he directly addresses his audience as ‘Voi, Signori fiorentini,’ it would be difficult to gather from the work itself that it was composed originally for public delivery.”609 He seems to have composed it as he would have composed a book, with the utmost care and foresight, often referring some point forward to be discussed later; and thus we may see that he had already considered as a critic and as a commentator the whole of the work, and had made up his mind that such and such a reference would be better discussed at some point in the Purgatorio or at another in the Paradiso, and so refused to discuss it at the moment. His work too is not only filled with Dantesque thought and phraseology, but is in its form composed in the manner of Dante, that is to say, he expounds first the literal meaning, the obvious sense, and then the secondary meaning or sense allegorical, just as Dante does in the Convivio when speaking of his Canzoni, and as he had already begun to do even in the Vita Nuova. Nor was this anything new for Boccaccio; all his life he had himself written in allegory, and had been used to condemn those who found no secondary meaning in the poets.610

  But the most characteristic part of the Comento, its greatest surprise for us too, is perhaps to be found in its opening. For after excusing himself with his usual modesty as wholly insufficient for the task, he addresses his audience as “men of lofty understanding and of wonderful quickness of understanding” — facts his commentary does not altogether lead us to endorse, for he feels called upon to explain the simplest things,611 and then after quoting Plato612 in the Timæus as to the propriety of invoking divine aid, he asks for God’s help not in any Christian prayer, but in the words of Anchises in the second Æneid: —

  “Jupiter omnipotens, precibus si flecteris ullis,

  Aspice nos: hoc tantum: et, si pietate meremur

  Da deinde auxilium, pater!”613

  He was so much a man of the Renaissance that he does not seem to have felt it at all inappropriate to ask thus for God’s aid in expounding the greatest of Christian poems, by addressing himself to Jupiter: he merely explains that as the work he is to explain is in verse it is proper to invoke God in verse also.

  Having thus asked for God’s blessing, he proceeds to open his lecture. He first examines the work he is to discuss as to its kind, then as to its causes, its title and school of philosophy. In doing so he shows us that he was aware of the doubtful letter of Dante to Can Grande della Scala,614 for he quotes it, though he names it not. He does not approve of the title — The Comedy — for such is used for low subjects and common people; but Dante’s poem is concerned with the greatest persons and deeds, with sin and penitence, the ways of angels and the secrets of God. The style too of comedy, he asserts, is humble and simple, while Dante’s poem is lofty and ornate, although it is written in the vulgar tongue, and he is obliged to admit that in the Latin it would have had a finer dignity.

  From this he proceeds to discuss Dante’s name and its significance much as he had already done in the Vita, and having decided that the poem belongs to moral philosophy, proceeds, after formally submitting all he may say to the judgment of the Catholic Church, to deal with the Inferno. Yet even now he cannot come at the poem without discussing the Inferno itself, whether there be a Hell, or maybe more than one, where it is placed, how it is approached, what are its shape and size and its purpose, and lastly why it is called Infernus.615 Then on the very brink of the poem he turns away again to discuss why Dante wrote in Tuscan instead of in Latin; and having given practically the same explanation as that we have already noted in the Vita,616 he proceeds at long last to the Commentary proper.

  And here we cannot but be astonished at the extraordinary mixture of simplicity and subtlety, of elementary knowledge and profound learning which are heaped together without any discrimination. There is something here of the endless leisure of the Middle Age in which Boccaccio seems determined to say everything. “One wonders,” says Dr. Toynbee, “for what sort of audience Boccaccio’s lectures were intended.” In the terms of the petition the lecturer was to expound the Commedia for the benefit of “etiam non grammatici.” But it is difficult to conceive that any audience of Florentines, even of Florentine children, however ignorant of Latin, let alone the “uomini d’ alto intendemento e di mirabile perspicacità” to whom Boccaccio refers in such flattering terms in his opening lecture, could require to be informed, as Boccaccio carefully informs it, that an anchor is “an instrument of iron which has at one end several grapples, and at the other a ring by which it is attached to a rope whereby it is let down to the bottom of the sea,”617 or that “every ship has three principal parts, of which one is called the bows, which is sharp and narrow, because it is in front and has to cut the water; the second is called the poop and is behind, where the steersman stands to work the tiller, by means of which, according as it is moved to one side or the other, the ship is made t
o go where the steersman wishes; while the third part is called the keel, which is the bottom of the ship, and lies between the bows and the stern,”618 and so on.

  Nor is this all, for even the Bible stories are retold at length,619 and a whole discourse is given upon Æneas.620 The elementary subjects dealt with at such length cheek by jowl with the most profound questions seems to us extraordinary, nor apparently are we the only readers to be surprised; for possibly on this account Boccaccio was bitterly reproached in his own day for lecturing on the Commedia to the vulgar. He replied, really admitting the offence, and pleading poverty as his excuse in two sonnets,621 one of which I quote here: — 622

  “If Dante mourns, there wheresoe’er he be

  That such high fancies of a soul so proud

  Should be laid open to the vulgar crowd

  (As touching my Discourse, I’m told by thee)

  This were my grievous pain; and certainly

  My proper blame should not be disavow’d;

  Though hereof somewhat, I declare aloud

  Were due to others, not alone to me.

  False hopes, true poverty, and therewithal

  The blended judgment of a host of friends,

  And their entreaties, made that I did this.

  But of all this there is no gain at all

  Unto the thankless souls with whose base ends

  Nothing agrees that’s great or generous.”

  So much for the vulgar. But, as I have already said, beside these elementary discourses we find a vast mass of learning and research that bears eloquent testimony not only to the extent of Boccaccio’s reading, but also to his eager and careful study of the works of Dante.

  Dr. Toynbee has suggested that it was probably owing to his failing health and energy that he introduced into the Comento so many and so copious extracts from his own previous works, the De Claris Mulieribus,623 the De Casibus Virorum Illustrium,624 the De Montibus, Sylvis, Lacubus, etc.,625 and the De Genealogiis Deorum,626 but I think probably Boccaccio never gave the matter a thought. His business was to expound, and he used his own previous works as works of reference — the best works of the sort, we must remember, that were to be had in his day. To have named these works — he never does refer to them — would have been useless in those days before the invention of the printing press; and then they were themselves mere collections for the most part, the vast notebooks of his enormous reading.

  It is not, however, by any means on them alone he relies, for he uses and lays under contribution, as it might seem almost every writer with whose works he was acquainted.627 Of these, two are especially notable, namely, Homer and Tacitus. He quotes the former six times in all, four times in the Iliad628 and twice in the Odyssey;629 the last quotation from the Iliad being verbatim from the Latin translation of Pilatus which Petrarch had copied, the MS., as we have already noted, being now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris.630 As for Tacitus — and Boccaccio is the first modern writer to show any acquaintance with his work — he uses the fifteenth book of the Annals631 for his account of the death of Lucan, and names his source of information,632 and books twelve to fifteen for his account of the death of Seneca.633 The Comento is thus not only a most precious source of information with regard to the Divine Comedy, but a kind of Encyclopædia Dantesca into which the whole learning of the age, the whole reading of Boccaccio had been emptied.

  We may perhaps gather something of its significance, its importance, and its extraordinary reputation if we consider for a moment the freedom with which it was exploited by the commentators who came after.634 Beginning with the Anonimo Fiorentino, who wrote some thirty years after Boccaccio’s death, perhaps the worst offender, for he never once mentions Boccaccio’s name, while he copies from him page after page, there follow Benvenuto da Imola (1373), Francesco da Buti (1385), who make a very considerable use of his work, the latter especially, while Landino (1481), the best of the Renaissance commentators, freely quotes him,635 calling him “huomo, et per dottrina, et per costumi, et per essere propinquo a’ tempi di Dante, degno di fede.” In the sixteenth century Gelli, who lectured before the Academy of Florence between 1541 and 1561, quotes Boccaccio sixty times, “oftener,” says Dr. Toynbee, “than he quotes any other commentator save Landino.” He more than once declares that Boccaccio has explained a passage so well that he can only repeat his words: “Non saprei io per me trovarci miglior esposizione che quella del Boccaccio.” He at least and indeed for the first time appreciates the Comento truly.

  Considering then this long chorus of praise, though it be more often the silent praise of imitation than the frank commendation of acknowledgment, it is strange that only four MSS. of the Comento have come down to us, three in the Magliabecchiana and one in the Riccardiana libraries in Florence;636 while of these only three are complete.637 Nor is it less surprising that the first printed edition of such a work should not have appeared till 1724.638 This edition and that by Moutier,639 which followed it nearly a hundred years later, founded on the same single MS., are of little critical value, and that of Fratticelli, published in 1844, is but a reprint of the Moutier text. It remained for Gaetano Milanesi, that man of herculean labour and vast learning, to produce the first critical text in 1863, three more MSS. of the Comento having been discovered in the meantime. He divided the book into lezioni, which are but doubtfully of any authority; but his text holds the field, and he was not slow or cold in his recognition of the value of the work of one who, almost a contemporary of Dante, had loved and honoured him, not only in writing his life and composing a commentary on his work, but in verse too, as in this inscription for his portrait: —

  “Dante Alighieri, a dark oracle

  Of wisdom and of art, I am; whose mind

  Has to my country such great gifts assign’d

  That men account my powers a miracle.

  My lofty fancy passed as low as Hell

  As high as Heaven, secure and unconfined;

  And in my noble book doth every kind

  Of earthly love and heavenly doctrine dwell.

  Renounèd Florence was my mother, — nay,

  Stepmother unto me her piteous son,

  Through sin of cursed slander’s tongue and tooth.

  Ravenna sheltered me so cast away;

  My body is with her, — my soul with One

  For Whom no envy can make dim the truth.”640

  CHAPTER XVII

  1373-1375

  ILLNESS AND DEATH

  That illness which brought those lectures on the Divine Comedy so swiftly to an end in the winter of 1373 was no new thing; for long, as we have seen, Boccaccio had had a troubled spirit. If he had recovered from his grief at the death of Fiammetta, he had never wholly been himself since his conversion. The disease which then declared itself was no new thing. In his versatile and athletic spirit there had always been a strain of melancholy that had shown itself even in his earliest childhood, when he imagined he was persecuted; on his arrival in Naples as a boy, when only a kiss could restore his confidence; in the long years of his troubled and unstable love and in the loneliness of his manhood; with old age at his elbow it needed but little for his spirit, so easily joyful, to be lost in a strange darkness.

  Already before he had been appointed to that lectureship in Florence he had felt himself seriously ill. Writing at the end of August, 1373, to Messer Maghinardo de’ Cavalcanti he had excused himself for his long delay in answering his letter, pleading the “long infirmity which prevented me from writing to you ... and which only in the last few days has given me a little respite. Since the last time I saw you ... every hour of my life has been very like death, afflicted, tedious, and full of weariness to myself.... First of all I was beset by a continuous and burning itching, and a dry scab, to scratch the dry scales and the flakes of which I had scarce nails enough day or night; then I was afflicted by a heaviness, a sluggishness of the bowels, a perpetual agony of the veins, swelling of the spleen, a burning bile, a suffocatin
g cough and hoarseness, heaviness of head, and indeed more maladies than I know how to enumerate; all my body languished, and all its humours were at war. And so it happened that I looked on the sky without happiness; my body was weary, my steps vacillating, my hand trembled; I was deathly pale, cared nothing for food, but held it all in abhorrence. Letters were odious to me, my books, once so delightful to me, could not please me, the forces of the soul were relaxed, my memory almost gone, my energy seemed drugged, and my thoughts were all turned to the grave and to death.”641

  But this was not all. He had scarcely got so far in his letter, he writes, when on August 12 a new ill befell him. At sunset a burning fever attacked him so fiercely that he could not leave his bed. As the night advanced the fever increased, his head ached violently, and without respite he turned and turned again in his bed, wearily looking thus for some relief. He was alone with only an old servant, who could do nothing but weep. Day came and with it some friends, who would have sent for a physician; but Boccaccio, with less gentleness than Petrarch showed, refused, till at last, utterly worn out, he allowed himself to be persuaded. The doctor who came to him was “a country doctor, accustomed to attend the peasants,” as he says, “but kind and thoughtful.” He told Boccaccio that unless he could rid himself of the poison which was killing him he would be dead in a few days. He brought in a cautery, a furnace, and other terrible instruments used then in medical practice. He then proceeded to use them, burning the patient largely, in many places cutting him with a razor and slashing his skin. He suffered dreadfully, but the doctor told him he was healed. And, it might seem by a direct miracle of God, he was saved out of the hands of this criminal lunatic; he slept, and little by little recovered. He was, however, very feeble. Nothing he can say against doctors can seem absurd, or exaggerated, or less than just when we remember that he had the unhappiness to fall at last into their hands.642