The value of poetry

The Laurenziano Pluteo LII 9 Code contains a fine manuscript of the Genealogie, which dates back to1365-1370. The manuscript contains many annotations, which show how the author worked continuously at the text, probably in order to update the content in line with the author’s most recent readings. The way in which Boccaccio worked on this text reminds us clearly of a similar reworking of the Decameron, as can be seen in the manuscript contained in the Hamilton 90 Code. In particular, the habit of keeping on his desk working copies to be elaborated over and over, gives the idea the author conceived literary work as open ended and in some sense never complete.

The two final books of the Genealogie are of particular importance as meta-literary documents. Boccaccio writes in defence of poetry and his own literary dignity, sustaining the superiority of writing over the other arts, in the wake of the polemic initiated by Petrarch. To the proclamation of a militia of letters, which prefigures an  “engagé” integrated intellectual model, are associated affirmations on the recondite sense of poetry. Only the veil of poetry is capable of hiding under a refined and rhetorically elaborate “integumentum” philosophical and theological reality and thus perform an irreplaceable work of mediation towards the understanding of truth. Boccaccio recovered the link between poetry and theology, dear to the Esposizioni on the Divine Comedy and the Trattatello in laude di Dante:

 

Habet enim suas inventiones rethorica, verum apud integumenta fictionum nulle sunt rethorice partes; mera poesis est, quicquid sub velamento componitur et exponitur exquisite. (Genealogie: XIV, VII, 8[1]).

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[1]Genealogie deorum gentilium, ed. V. Zaccaria, in All the works of  Giovanni Boccaccio. ed. V. Branca, vol. 7-8.2, Milan 1998, p. 1402

Genealogie deorum, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea laurenziana, ms. Pluteo 52.9, c. 110v. Boccaccio visualizzato: narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, a c. di V. Branca, Turin 1999, vol. II, p. 61.