Dictamina

The four epistles ascribable to 1339 are in two different parts of the Zibaldone Laurenziano XXIX 8. Crepor celsitudinis, Mavortis milex extrenue and Nereus amphytritibus are part of the same palimpsest  and are in cc.51r-52r; the Sacre famis is instead in cc. 65 r-v. Rhetorical exercises modelled on Dante’s epistles to Cino da Pistoia and Moroello Malaspina, Boccaccio’s dictamina also betray an apulean re-use. The first letter, addressed to the Duke of  Durres, and that of the Sacre famis, addressed to, as was the Nereus amphytritibus, an unknown recipient, give a chronological and geographical contour to the epistles. In particular, the topological specification apud busta Maronis Virgilii “at Virgil’s sepulchre”, repeated in both, sets these two letters within the tradition of  ecfrastic epigraphy, already put to fruit for the Elegia di Costanza.

In the Mavortis milex Boccaccio appeals to a learned man of letters and of very pure behaviour, from Avignon. This was not someone he knew personally, but only indirectly because of his fame, through a common friend. Evident analogies with Petrarch’s biography in the De vita allow us to identify the recipient as the poet from Rieti, although the address is missing because the letter is worn. Abandoned by his beloved, Boccaccio asks Petrarch for help in finding renewed tranquillity through study. An allusion of a metaliterary type has been discovered behind the thin plot to this narrative pretext with “il compito di registrare, attraverso il gioco delle personificazioni, il passaggio tra due tempi della propria esistenza: quello passato, contraddistinto dalla passione d’amore e da un esercizio delle lettere eminentemente lirico; quello del tempo a venire, segnato dalla libertà e da una pratica poetica più elevata.”[1].(The task of recording, through the play of personifications, the passage between two periods of one’s existence: that passed, marked by the passions of love and an eminently lyrical exercise in letters; that of times to come, marked by freedom and a more elevated poetic practice”.

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[1]C. Cabaillot, La Mavortis Miles: Petrarca in Boccaccio ?, in Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio. Memoria, scrittura e riscrittura. Atti del Seminario internazionale di Firenze-Certaldo (26-28 aprile 1996), a c. di M. Picone-C. Cazalé Bérard, Firenze 1998, pp. 129-139, cit. p. 135.