Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta

A negative example

The presence of symbolic figures (Lover-Love-Book-Public), recognisable as a constant in Boccaccio’s works, points to a predilection, typically medieval, for prosopopeia that appears as revitalised in Boccaccio through the institution of relationships between the personifications, which can be codified within a precise theory of literary communication. Boccaccio distances himself from the sense of companionship of faithful lovers typical of the stilnovo, in which the exchange between  “transmitter” and “recipient” presupposed the profession of the same erotic ideology. Suffice it to think of, for example, the inaugural sonnet of the Vita nuova, “A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core” (Vita Nova: 1[1]), where the call for help Dante addresses to “those in love”, for the purpose of obtaining an explanation to the oneiric allegory, is born from the clear cultural identity between author and public. Boccaccio innovatively places at the extremes of the circle of communication two figures in antithesis, exploiting the pattern of the “negative model”. The story of Fiammetta acts as an admonishment, inviting the reader to embrace a different amorous ethic, by illustrating an example not to be followed. We can see in this  parenetic moral a certain nostalgia for a painfully lived through experience, which has its roots in the author’s literary biography.  A clue is offered by the fact that the young protagonists of Boccaccio’s Rhymes reappear in the Elegia with completely capsized roles. Fiammetta suffers because she is distanced from Panfilo exactly as Boccaccio had been embittered by his transfer to Florence, which had provoked, in the Rhymes, his distancing from his Neapolitan mistress. This recovery of the somewhat thin narrative inventio of the first lyrical attempts, albeit through a studied distortion, is confirmed by the reproposal of some Neapolitan marine landscapes, already sung in verse, and makes it possible to unmask the identity of the lady, set somewhere between the author’s hypostasis  and the idealisation of the lady he had loved in Naples.

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[1]Dante Alighieri, Vita Nova, ed. G. Gorni, Turin 1996, pp. 23-25.