Boccaccio illustratore e copista di se stesso

Decameron

An open ended work

The Parigino italiano 482 (7260) kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, (P), was copied by Giovanni d’Agnolo Capponi circa 1360. The 17 pen drawings with shadings with which it is finely decorated had already been considered by Marsand^[1], who in 1835 drew up the catalogue of the library’s works in Italian, old enough to be contemporary to the Decameron, and are today said to have been done by Boccaccio^[2] himself, conferring this code partially autographic and possibly ideographic characteristics.

Over and above satisfying the need for a constitutio textus, a systematic confrontation of B, Mn and P is a useful contribution to the study of variants introduced by the author himself. Three different editions of this collection of novellas have been recognised in these manuscripts, derived, at different times, from the same “working copy” that Boccaccio was wont to keep upon his scriptorium.

This model, continually reworked by the author, shows how the original was constantly “in movement” and confers the Decameron the singular quality of being an open ended work subject to Boccaccio’s continuous modifications. According to the stemma or ‘genealogical tree’ for the manuscripts proposed by Branca^[3], P was probably a youthful copy of the Decameron written circa 1350; Mn was probably subsequent, circa 1470, and, lastly, B, would seem to have been copied by Boccaccio shortly before his death and would thus represent the last degree of reworking reached. An analysis of these documents thus allows us to reconstruct the diachronic phases of the process of composition of the work, permitting an approach of a genetic type for the restitutio or return of Boccaccio’s famous novellas.

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[1]A. Marsand, I Manoscritti italiani della Regia Biblioteca parigina, Paris, 1835-38, vol. I, p. 31.

[2]M.G. Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto-V. Branca, Boccaccio “visualizzato” dal Boccaccio, “Studi sul Boccaccio”, 22 (1994), pp. 197-234.

[3]V. Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. II, Rome, 1991, p. 303.