De casibus virorum illustrium or Of cases of illustrious men

An increased interest for erudite narrative marks the years of Boccaccio’s maturity, addressing more and more of his time to reading the Greek and Latin classics. Petrarch’s influence also had the effect of consolidating a pre-humanistic taste, evidenced by the portraits of the illustrious men and women the poet composed in his last twenty years of life.

De casibus virorum illustrium is a compendium of historic celebrities fallen into disgrace. The descending parable of fortune marks personalities that belong to every period of history. If the case of Adam, at the start of the sylloge, is exemplary, the biographies of contemporaries, which come at the end and were added upon Petrarch’s advice, are perhaps more incisive. The work has reached posterity in two versions. The first, more compendious, is generally believed to be datable circa 1356-1360; the second, dedicated to Mainardo Cavalcanti, is dated 1373.

In the exemplification of emblematic cases there transpires a moral and civil preoccupation, which translates into an obvious parenthetic intent. A preoccupation with the idea of giving mankind a good shake and awaken it from the deathly sleep that envelopes it (“a desidibus sopitis letalis somnus excutiatur, vita reprimantur et extollantur virtutes”) shows how the reasons behind the writing of the De casibus are close to those of the Divine Comedy. The way the protagonists are presented, which appear to Boccaccio in the form of shadows, cannot but lead to a connection with Dante’s after world. The inspiration of Alighieri’s models is however strongly contaminated with classic motives, such as that of the volubility of Fortune. Already in the Amorosa visione or Amorous vision the blindfolded goddess had been the object of a lengthy doctrinal digression. If the decider of human fate also has in the De casibus a role of prime importance within the horizon of human glory, we must not however forget that it is indeed this last value that is questioned strongly and is considered a perishable and unstable conquest.