VI. A new society of intellect and word

Breaking the rules that confer the privilege of choosing freely what story to tell, Dioneo this time proposes a novella that confirms the theme of the day. This is friar Cipolla’s famous sermon (10), a religious man who is also a born liar, in some ways similar to Ser Ciappelletto in the work’s proemial novella (I, 1). The similarity between the two characters contributes to strengthening the links between the first and the fifth day, adding to the impression that half way through his labours Boccaccio wanted to somehow signal a new beginning to the Decameron, capable of contributing to lending weight to a project in which the exaltation of man’s intellectual capacity takes on an ever more central role. The hapless friar Cipolla is taken for a ride by two crafty characters from Certaldo, who put a handful of coal in the place of the archangel Gabriel’s feather, a false reliquary  entrusted to the none too attentive custody of Guccio Imbratta, the friar’s young servant. In no way perturbed by the hoax, friar Cipolla improvises a convincing justification, seeing the hand of divine providence in the gift of the coals, at once baptised anew as Saint Lawrence’s coals. The friar’s oratory summersaults are built upon hyperbolise, antiphrasis, assonance, play upon words and allegory, for the benefit of grotesque and lewd double meanings. The model that is the subject of parody here is that of the life of the saints, and here we have a further clin d’oeil to Ciappelletto’s confession, hybridised with the relation of  Christian pilgrims’ journeys. The author’s target is bigoted religion and the fetishism of reliquaries, but the amused and kindly tone of some of the quips softens a satire which looks to drawing a smile. Friar Cipolla’s irony seems to be conceived for the purpose of magnifying the power of the spoken word, capable of saving from truly dangerous situations or preserve from public infamy, rather than to feed a polemic against the hypocrisy of the Church. 

Decameron, VI, 4. Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ms. 2561, c. 229v. Boccaccio visualizzato: narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, a c. di V. Branca, Turin 1999, vol. III, p. 227.