Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  567 The record is preserved in the Libro delle Provvisioni, and is printed by Milanesi, op. cit., Vol. I, p. ii: —

  “Super qua quidem petitione ... dicti domini Priores et Vexellifer habita invicem et una cum officio gonfaloneriorum Sotietatum populi et cum officio Duodecim bonorum virorum Comunis Florentie deliberatione solempni, et demum inter ipsos omnes in sufficienti numero congregatos in palatio populi Florentie, premisso et facto diligenti et secreto scruptineo et obtento partito ad fabas nigras et albas per vigintiocto ex eis pro utilitate Comunis eiusdem ... deliberaverunt die VIIII mensis augusti anno dominice Incarnationis MCCCLXXIII indictione XI, quod dicta petitio et omnia et singula in ea contenta, admictantur, ... et observentur, ... secundum petitionis eiusdem continentiam et tenorem....

  “Item supradicto Preposito, modo et forma predictis proponente et partitum faciente inter dictos omnes consiliarios dicti consilii in ipso consilio presentes, quod cui placet et videtur suprascriptam quartam provisionem disponentem pro eligendo unum ad legendum librum Dantis, que sic incipit: ‘Pro parte quamplurium civium etc.’ ... admicti et observari ... et executioni mandari posse et debere ... det fabam nigram pro sic; et quod cui contrarium seu aliud videretur, det fabam pro non. Et ipsis fabis datis recollectis, segregatis et numeratis ... et ipsorum consiliariorum voluntatibus exquisitis ad fabas nigras et albas, ut moris est, repertum fuit CLXXXVI ex ipsis consiliariis repertis dedisse fabas nigras pro sic. Et sic secundum formam provisionis eiusdem obtentum, firmatum et reformatum fuit, non obstantibus reliquis XVIIII ex ipsis consiliariis repertis dedisse fabas albas in contrarium pro non.”

  It will be seen that they voted with beans — a white bean for “No,” a black bean for “Yes.”

  568 Cf. Milanesi, op. cit., u.s., Vol. I, p. iii, and Toynbee, op. cit., p. 99. The record in the Libro delle Provvisioni ad annum 1373 has been destroyed since 1604, when Filippo Valori (cf. Gamba, Serie dei Testi di Lingua, ed. quarta, p. 554, col. a. No. 2006), saw it. He says: “Il qual Boccaccio, oltre al dirsi Maestro dell’ Eloquenza, fu stimato di tal dottrina, che e’ potesse dichiarare quella di Dante, e perciò, l’ anno mille trecento settanta tre, lo elesse la Città per Lettor pubblico, con salario di cento fiorini, che fu notabile; e vedesi questo nel Libro delle Provvisioni.” Cf. Manni, Istoria del Decamerone, p. 101. The facts are, however, recorded in the Libro dell’ uscita della Camera, now in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze. Milanesi, op. cit., p. iii, quotes this document: “1373, 31 Decembris. Domino Johanni de Certaldo honorabili civi florentino electo per dominos Priores Artium et Vexilliferum Justitie dicti populi et Comunis, die XXV mensis augusti proxime preteriti ad legendum librum qui vulgariter appellatur il Dante, in civitate Florentie, pro tempore et termino unius anni incepti die decimo ottavo mensis ottubris proxime preteriti et cum salario centum florenorum auri pio anno quolibet, solvendorum secundum formam reformationis consilii dicti populi et Comunis de hac materia loquentis, pro ipsius domini Johannis salario et paga primorum sex mensium dicti temporis, initiatis die decimo ottavo mensis ottubris proxime preteriti, pro dimidio totius dicti salarii, vigore electionis de eo facte, in summa florenorum quinquaginta auri.”

  569 Cf. Gerola, Alcuni documenti inediti per la biografia del Boccaccio in Giornale Stor. della Lett. Ital., Vol. XXXII (1898), p. 345 et seq.

  570 So Guido Monaldi tells us in his Diario (ed. Prato, 1835): “Domenica a dì ventitrè di ottobre cominciò in Firenze a leggere il Dante M. Giovanni Boccaccio.”

  571 Cf. Boll. di Soc. Dant. Ital., n.s., III, p. 38 note. Milanesi in his Introduction to the Comento tells us, mistakenly, that Boccaccio lectured in S. Stefano al Ponte Vecchio. This church, since the church of S. Cecilia was destroyed in Piazza Signoria at the end of the eighteenth century, has been called SS. Stefano e Cecilia, but from the thirteenth century till then it was called S. Stefano ad portam ferram. That it was not here but at S. Stefano della Badia that Boccaccio lectured we know from Monaldi’s diary, and it is confirmed for us by Benvenuto da Imola: “In interiori circulo est Abbatia monachorum sancti Benedicti, cuius ecclesia dicitur Sanctus Stephanus, ubi certius et ordinatius pulsabantur horæ quam in aliqua alia ecclesia civitatis; quæ tamen hodie est inordinata et neglecta, ut vidi, dum audirem venerabilem præceptorem meum Boccaccium de Certaldo legentem istum nobilem poetam in dicta ecclesia” (Comentum (ed. Vernon), Vol. V, p. 145). Dr. Toynbee thinks that S. Stefano is the ancient dedication of the Badia, which was later placed under the protection of S. Mary. If this was so, then it was in the Badia itself that Boccaccio lectured. Mr. Carmichael, however (On the Old Road through France to Florence (Murray), p. 254), states that Boccaccio lectured not in the abbey, but in the little church of S. Stefano ad Abbatiam, formerly adjoining the abbey, and indeed almost a part of it. Unfortunately he gives no authority for this important statement, nor can he now give any. It is, however, a very interesting suggestion, worth examining closely.

  572 It will be remembered that Dante was not only expelled from Florence, but condemned by the Florentines to be burned alive, “igne comburatur sic quod moriatur,” should he be taken. This sentence bears date March 10, 1302.

  573 See supra, p. 20.

  574 De Blasiis, op. cit., p. 139 et seq.

  575 Filocolo, ed. cit., II, p. 377. Cf. Dobelli, Il culto del Boccaccio per Dante in Giornale Dantesca (1897), Vol. V, p. 207 et seq. Signor Dobelli seems to me to lay far too much emphasis on the sheer imitations of Boccaccio. Now and then we find a mere copying, but not often. This learned article of Dobelli’s is traversed, and I think very happily, by a writer in the Giornale Stor. della Lett. Ital., XXXII (1898), p. 219 et seq.

  576 For instance, in the opening of the third part, Filostrato, ed. cit., Pt. III, p. 80, which may be compared with Paradiso, I, vv. 13 et seq.

  Fulvida luce, il raggio della quale

  Infino a questo loco m’ ha guidato,

  Com’ io volea per l’ amorose sale;

  Or convien che ‘l tuo lume duplicato

  Guidi l’ ingegno mio, e faccil tale,

  Che in particella alcuna dichiarato

  Per me appaia il ben del dolce regno

  D’ Amor, del qual fu fatto Troilo degno.

  Filostrato.

  O buono Apollo, all’ ultimo lavoro

  Fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso,

  Come dimandi a dar l’ amato alloro.

  Insino a qui l’ un giogo di Parnaso

  Assai mi fu, ma or con ambedue

  M’ è uopo entrar nell’ aringo rimaso.

  . . . . . .

  O divina virtù, se mi ti presti

  Tanto, che l’ ombra del beato regno

  Segnata nel mio capo io manifesti

  Venir vedra ‘mi al tuo diletto legno

  E coronarmi allor di quelle foglie

  Che la materia e tu mi farai degno.

  Paradiso.

  Or, again, compare Filostrato, Pt. VIII, p. 249, with Purgatorio, VI, vv. 118 et seq.

  . . . . . .

  O sommo Giove ...

  . . . . . .

  . . . . . .

  Son li giusti occhi tuoi rivolti altrove?

  Filostrato.

  E se licito m’ è, o sommo Giove

  Che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso

  Son li giusti occhi tuoi rivolti altrove?

  Purgatorio.

  Or, again, compare Filostrato, Pt. II, p. 58, with Inferno, II, vv. 127 et seq.

  Quali i fioretti dal notturno gelo

  Chinati e chiusi, poi che ‘l sol gl’ imbianca

  Tutti s’ apron diritti in loro stelo;

  Cotal si fe’ di sua virtude stanca

  Troilo allora....

  Filostrato.

  Quali i fioretti dal notturno gelo

  Chinati e chiusi, poi che ‘l sol gl’ imbianca

  Si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo;

  Tal mi fec’ io di mia virtute stanca:

  Inferno.

  Nor are these by any means the only instances; there are very many others. I content myself, h
owever, with a comparison between Filostrato, Pt. VII, p. 238, and the Convito, Trattato IX, which would seem to show that before 1345 Boccaccio knew this work as well as the Comedy.

  È gentilezza dovunque è virtute.

  Filostrato.

  È gentilezza dovunque virtute.

  Convito.

  577 See supra, p. 183, n. 1.

  578 For date of composition see supra, p. 183, n. 2.

  579 He seems to have copied too the Vita Nuova. Barbi in his edition of the Vita Nuova, p. xiv et seq., speaks of Boccaccio’s MSS. relating to Dante, and notes in a MS. Laurenziano (xc, sup. 136), “scripto per lo modo che lo scripse Messere Giovanni Boccaccio da Certaldo.”

  580 The Carme is given by Corazzini, op. cit., p. 53.

  581 Fam., XXI, 15.

  582 Here we see Petrarch’s absurd hatred of the vulgar tongue. How a man so intelligent and so far in advance of his age in all else could deceive himself so easily as to believe that Latin in his day could be anything but a tongue for priests to bark in is difficult to understand. Apart from the Liturgy and the Divine Office and a few hymns and religious works maybe, no work of art has been produced in it. Had Petrarch been an ecclesiastic, it might be comprehensible; but he was the first man of the modern world. No doubt he was dreaming of the Empire.

  583 ? The Carme.

  584 It must be observed that the Vita appears in many forms, but it will be enough for us to consider the two principal, both of which claim to be by Boccaccio. The whole question is thoroughly dealt with by Macri Leone in his edition of the Vita (Firenze, 1888), and more briefly by Witte, The two versions of Boccaccio’s life of Dante in Essays on Dante (London, 1898), p. 262 et seq., and by Dr. E. Moore, Dante and his early Biographers (London, 1890).

  Of these two versions the longer we shall call the Vita, the shorter the Compendio, but the latter is by no means a mere epitome of the former, for some of the episodes are more fully treated in it, while others are ignored. We shall find ourselves in agreement with the great majority of modern critics if we regard the Vita as the original and the Compendio as a modification of it executed either by Boccaccio or by another, and if we assert that the Vita is by Boccaccio and the Compendio an unauthorised redraft of it, we shall be supported not only by so great an authority as Macri Leone, but by Biscioni, Pelli, Tiraboschi, Gamba, Baldelli, Foscolo, Paur, Witte (who hesitates to condemn the Compendio altogether), Scartazzini, Koerting, and Dr. Moore. On the other hand, Dionisi and Mussi held that the Compendio was the original and the Vita a rifacimento; while Schaeffer-Boichorst thought both to be the work of Boccaccio, the Vita being the original; and the editors of the Paduan edition of the Divine Comedy (1822) thought both to be genuine, but the Compendio the first draft. Dr. Witte enters into the differences between the two, printing passages in parallel columns; Macri Leone is even fuller in his comparison; Dr. Moore also compares them. Briefly we may say that the Compendio is shorter, that it “hedges” when it can and softens and abbreviates the denunciation of Florence, and omits much: e.g. the Vita’s assertion of Dante’s devotion to Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Statius, while inserting certain personal suggestions: e.g. that in his later years Dante having quite recovered from his love for Beatrice ran after other women especially in his exile in Lucca, where he became enamoured of a young girl called Pargoletta, and in the Casentino of another who “had a pretty face but was afflicted with a goitre.” As for Pargoletta, it is not a proper name at all, as Boccaccio knew, for in the same chapter of the Vita he writes: “in sua pargoletta età.” He was incapable of falling into this error, which apparently arose from a confusion of Purgatorio, XXIV, 34-6, and XXXI, 59. In the Compendio the attacks on marriage are not less bitter, only whereas in the Vita they are only against marriage in general, in the Compendio we get an amusing description of the hindrances to Dante’s studies caused by his wife’s complaints of his solitary habits and her absurd interruptions of his meditations by asking him to pay nurse’s wages and see to children’s clothes. The Compendio too in all matters concerning Dante’s contemporaries is more vague. Thus the Vita (possibly wrongly) tells us that in Verona Dante took refuge with Alberto della Scala; the Compendio, more cautious, says with the “Signore della terra.” It also omits the stories concerning Dante at Siena and Paris, and entirely remodels the digressions in chapters ix. and x. of the Vita on Poetry. It omits the extremely characteristic excuse for lechery of the Vita and omits all dates: e.g. that Dante began the Vita Nuova in his twenty-sixth year, as well as the assertion that he was in his later years ashamed of it. There are many other differences also. But it might seem impossible in the face of the evidence brought forward by Macri Leone and others to doubt that the Vita is Boccaccio’s work and not the Compendio. We shall therefore here leave the latter and devote ourselves to the former, only remarking that if Boccaccio wrote the Vita it is improbable that he wrote another work on the same subject, since, if he did so, it must have been written in the last two years of his life, for only one work is referred to by him in the Comento, viz. the Trattatello in lode di Dante. We consider then the Compendio as a rifacimento not from Boccaccio’s hand. The evidence is thoroughly sifted by Macri Leone, op. cit., whom the reader should consult for a complete treatment of the matter.

  585 The Early Lives of Dante, tr. by P. H. Wicksteed, m.a. (King’s Classics, Chatto and Windus, 1907). This little book, besides preface and introduction, contains Boccaccio’s Vita in English, as well as Leonardo Bruni’s and three appendices.

  586 Cf. Mr. Wicksteed’s translation, p. 41.

  587 As Mr. Wicksteed’s translation is the version of the Vita most likely to come into the hands of English readers, I propose here to traverse his “warnings” and “cautions.” Whatever scholars may “appear to be settling down to,” this at least is certain, that of writers upon Dante, Boccaccio is the only one who in professing to write a life can have had absolutely first-hand evidence. The points that Mr. Wicksteed wishes to warn us against are three. Boccaccio asserts that Dante was licentious, that he was a bitter political partisan, and that when he had once left Gemma he never returned to her or allowed her to follow him. In order that we may be quite sure what Boccaccio says, as well as what Mr. Wicksteed thinks he says, I quote Mr. Wicksteed’s translation (p. 79): “... there was no fiercer Ghibelline than he, nor more opposed to the Guelfs. And that for which I most blush, in the interest of his memory, is that in Romagna it is matter of greatest notoriety that any feeble woman or little child who had but spoken, in party talk, in condemnation of the Ghibelline faction would have stirred him to such madness as to move him to hurl stones at such, had they not held their peace; and in such bitterness he lived even until his death. And assuredly I blush to be forced to taint the fame of such a man with any defect; but the order of things on which I have begun in some sort demands it; because that if I hold my peace concerning those things in him which are less worthy of praise, I shall withdraw much faith from the praiseworthy things already recounted. So do I plead my excuse to him himself, who perchance, even as I write, looketh down with scornful eye from some lofty region of heaven. Amid all the virtue, amid all the knowledge that hath been shown above to have belonged to this wondrous poet, lechery found most ample place not only in the years of his youth, but also of his maturity; the which vice, though it be natural and common and scarce to be avoided, yet in truth is so far from being commendable that it cannot even be suitably excused. But who amongst mortals shall be a righteous judge to condemn it? Not I. Oh, the impurity, oh, the brutish appetite of men.” The passage as to Gemma will be found at the end of the interpolation against marriage (p. 27), at the end of which he says: “Assuredly I do not affirm that these things chanced to Dante; for I do not know it; though true it is that (whether such like things or others were the cause) when once he had parted from her [Gemma] who had been given him as a consolation in his sufferings! never would he go where she was, nor suffer her to come to where he was, albeit he was the father of several children by
her.” Let us take these things in order.

  Boccaccio asserts, much to Mr. Wicksteed’s distress, it seems, that Dante was a bitter and intolerant politician. He will have none of it. Well, let Dante speak for himself. When he hails as the “Lamb of God” a German king whom the Guelfs defeated and most probably poisoned; when he speaks of Florence, the Guelf city, as “the rank fox that lurketh in hiding, the beast that drinketh from the Arno, polluting its waters with its jaws, the viper that stings its mother’s heart, the black sheep that corrupts the whole flock, the Myrrha guilty of incest with her father,” according to Mr. Wicksteed, we ought not to consider him a bitter politician at all; indeed only an “ill-informed” and “superficial” person like Boccaccio would call him so. To ordinary men, however, such semi-scholastic, semi-Biblico-classical language sounds like politics, and fierce party politics too, and one cannot conceive what other explanation Mr. Wicksteed would offer us of it. Mr. Wicksteed tells us that when Boccaccio declares that it was well known in Romagna that he would have flung stones at any who “in party talk had but spoken in condemnation of the Ghibelline cause” he was speaking figuratively. Perhaps so; but I doubt if Mr. Wicksteed, had he had the happiness to be a Guelf, would have cared to put Dante to the proof. And we may well ask what would have deterred the man, who in hell thought it virtuous to cheat Frate Alberigo and leave him blinded by his frozen tears, from hurling a few stones on behalf of his cause?