Decameron

Literary and iconographic models

In the central story that acts as a support for the novellas of the Decameron one can identify a persistent recourse to a technique of encompassing into one frame a series of stories, very common in the oriental tradition. The Thousand and One Nights was one such collection of novellas, told for the purpose of keeping away the risk of death. Equally, the Book of Sindbad or Story of the Seven Sages tells the tale of a young prince, who, unjustly slandered and condemned to death, succeeds, by narrating a string of tales for several days, to assert his innocence, save his life and gain his throne. The work must have been quite well known in medieval Europe, judging from the many translations, in Castilian (Sendbar or Libro de los engaños), in Latin, with the title of Dolopathos, in archaic French, in which language it is called Li ystoire de la male maraste, and in Italian, and could thus represent an important antecedent for the framework of the Decameron[1].

The contraposition between the Eden like bucolic country landscapes, the background to the brigade’s narrative, and the infernal condition of urban Florence, infested with the plague, would seem to repropose the dichotomic reality illustrated in the Triumph of Death in the Camposanto Pisano[2]. The effect of iconographic inter-text was in all probability known to Boccaccio, a lover of the figurative arts and an illustrator himself, as testified to by the figurative elements of the manuscript of the Decameron and the drawings of the codice parigino or Parisian 482, recently ascerted to by an authentic manuscript. An allusion to the purgatorial songs of Matelda, that is the morphology of the paradise on earth of Dante’s Divine Comedy, would seem to contaminate itself with the richly imaginative garden of the Roman del la rose and could be discovered to be a model for the countryside setting for the  performance of the novellas of the Decameron. This last is clearly as much influenced by the romance experience of the jeu parti as by the game of courtly love, evoked in the Neapolitan episode in the Filocolo.

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[1]M. Picone, Il Decameron come macrotesto: il problema della cornice, in Introduzione al Decameron, a c. di M. Picone-M. Mesirca, Firenze 2004, pp. 9-31, con indicazione della bibliografia pregressa dell’autore su questo tema.

[2]L. Battaglia Ricci, Ragionare nel giardino. Boccaccio e i cicli pittorici del Trionfo della morte, Roma 1987.