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45 At last, here’s Dreyer’s probable source— but does it matter that we found it? So let us finally return to our search for that defining footnote, the source that Dreyer quotes with his tapestry. Here is one possibility: in the eighth story of the fifth day of the Decameron, Boccaccio tells the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti, a noble gentleman of Ravenna, who loves a girl from the even nobler family of Traversaro. She, naturally, spurns his advances. One day, while walking in the woods outside of town, a terrible vision appears to Nastagio: a knight in armor hunts down a beautiful naked young lady, who is killed and devoured by the knight’s dogs. The knight tells Nastagio that he too was in love with a cruel woman, so much so that he killed himself. Now both she and he are condemned to the hell of repeating this scene every day—he as punishment for his suicidal blasphemy, she as punishment for her cruel and unfeeling heart. So Nastagio goes home and decides to stage a feast in the forest, to which he invites the young woman and her family to dine, right on the spot where he had seen the vision. Sure enough, the scene is replayed at the appointed hour, but this time Nastagio’s cruel young love interest looks on. She immediately understands the moral of the spectacle and, terrified, agrees to marry Nastagio on the spot. Thematically, we are on ground very similar to Dreyer’s. Gertrud is nothing to her lovers if not unattainably cruel, but in a modern, sort of divorced, way— the film is, to a certain extent, the painting of her grounds for divorce, a divorce from romantic love itself, as well as from her husband and lovers. The image of the woman attacked by the hounds is first a kind of dream image, and then becomes embodied as artistic production—and in both texts this takes place  Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 420–26. At l a st , h ere’ s D reyer’s p roba ble s o u rce — b ut d o e s it m att e r t hat we foun d i t? 46 at a big banquet. But whereas in Boccaccio the theatrical spectacle of maidenmurder is first envisioned and then impressarioed by a man and leads directly to the theatrical spectacle of marriage, in Gertrud it is a woman who sees the spectacle first, as interior vision, only to be confronted by it again in the form of scenic decoration. Here, in its modern incarnation, it seems only an objectification of Gertrud’s understanding of the perils of marriage itself, not an exhortation to stay married. But perhaps the greatest citational “irony”—to use the term in scare quotes for a moment—that Dreyer’s quotation of Boccaccio invokes is that it is a visual rendering of Boccaccio’s decidedly verbal text. It produces for vision what was originally a verbal rendering of an event figured as primarily visual. Before I go on with some of the interpretational consequences of all this, I want to flag one more irony.We now have a “source” or reference for the tapestry , that is, a prior, culturally sanctioned text whose story appears to be imaged forth on the wall behind Gertrud. It fits both in terms of some of the important visual details and clues (although I have been more than a bit selective in not mentioning some of the details Dreyer leaves out), and in terms of the thematic and narrative motifs the two texts have in common; and we can even assume that Söderberg himself, Dreyer’s immediate source, might have intended or known of some of these links. (After all, where did Söderberg come up with the image to begin with?) And, finally, by noting the difference between the original text and its new use in Dreyer’s work, we can clear out a discursive space where we can attribute meaning to the specific choices of selection and quotation Dreyer has made. All well and good, except for one small nagging question: does the relatively “minor” nature of the text we are citing really “justify” its use in the film, especially when we consider the macabre and sexually charged violence of the image? Virgil is one thing, but the eighth story of the fifth day of the Decameron is another. In other words...

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