D'Jara on Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) (D'Jara Culpepper)

Born in Paris,  Boccaccio was an Italian poet and scholar. He was the son of a Tuscan merchant, Boccaccio di Chellino. He passed his early childhood rather unhappily because his father had no sympathy for his literary inclinations and sent him to learn business in Naples when he was around fifteen years old. During this time of study, Boccaccio mixed with the learned men of the court and the friends and admirers of Petrarch, through whom he came to know the work of Petrarch himself.

“Of far more lasting importance than official honors” was Boccaccio’s first meeting with Petrarch in Florence in 1350. This meeting brought about a decisive change in Boccaccio’s literary activity. Boccaccio revered the older man as his master, and Petrarch proved himself to be a ready counselor and reliable helper.

Through their correspondences (i.e. exchange of books, news, and ideas), the two men laid the foundations for the humanism of the Renaissance and raised vernacular literature to the level and status of the classics of antiquity. This meant for Boccaccio that, after the Italian prose of one of his most famous works, The Decameron, he wrote nothing in Italian (with some exceptions) and turned instead to Latin, devoting himself to humanist scholarship.

The meeting with Petrarch, however, was not the only cause of the change in Boccaccio’s writing. Another contributor may have been premature weakening of his physical powers and disappointments in love, as would explain the shift from his general praising of women and love to the misogynistic tone of another work, Corbaccio. Beyond this, there are signs that he may have begun to feel religious scruples. Petrarch described how Carthusian monk Pietro Petrone, on his deathbed in 1362, sent another Carthusian, Gioacchino Ciani, to exhort Boccaccio to renounce his worldly studies.

Boccaccio’s circle in Florence was of vital importance as a nucleus of early humanism. Leonzio Pilato, whom Boccaccio housed from 1360 to 1362 and whose nomination as reader in Greek at the Studio (the old University of Florence) he procured, made the rough Latin translation through which Petrarch and Boccaccio became acquainted with Homer’s poems—the starting point of Greek studies by the humanists.

The recovery of Latin classical texts—Varro, Martial, Apuleius, Seneca, Ovid, and, above all, Tacitus—likewise occupied Boccaccio’s admiring attention. Even so, he did not neglect Italian poetry, his enthusiasm for his immediate predecessors, especially Dante, being one of the characteristics that distinguish him from Petrarch. His Vita di Dante Alighieri, or Trattatello in laude di Dante (“Little Tractate in Praise of Dante”), and the two abridged editions of it that he made show his devotion to Dante’s memory.

Boccaccio, impoverished, retired to the village of Certaldo in 1363. Yet, in October 1373, he began public readings of Dante’s Divina commedia in the Church of San Stefano di Badia in Florence. A revised text of the commentary that he gave with these readings still exists but breaks off at a point, representing when he had fallen ill and lost heart in his work in 1374. Petrarch’s death in July 1374 grieved him more, and he retired back to Certaldo, where he died on December 21 of the following year.

Information: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giovanni-Boccaccio#ref755

Bottom Picture Info: Engraved portrait of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) by Raffaello Sanzio Morghen (1758-1833) after Vincenzo Gozzini, dated 1822 (Picture found on Boccaccio’s Wikipedia page)

Top Picture: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-decameron-john-william-waterhouse.html