Resurrecting Dante's Florence: Figural Realism in the Decameron and the Esposizioni

Much of Boccaccio's work is heavilyinfluenced by Dante, and near the end ofhis life he both wrote a treatise celebratingDante and delivered a set of lecturescommenting in detail on the first twenty-eight[sic] cantos of the Inferno. Yet theDecameron is an implicitly anti-Dantean work.

—Norton Anthology of World Literature

So reads the introductory matter to selections from the Decameron in the Norton Anthology to World Literature,² which, after offering preliminary evidence of the relation between these two works (the Decameron's division into one-hundred tales; the pedigree of "prencipe Galeotto" from Inferno V), summarily dismisses any sustained similarities between the two works in favor of a rhetorical opposition. As incorrect as this classification may seem, the critical tradition of Italian studies forged this rhetoric before any misgivings within the marketplace of World Literature. At the end of the nineteenth century, Francesco de Sanctis called the Decameron the "nuova Commedia, non la 'divina,' ma la 'terrestre' Commedia."³ Much later, Erich Auerbach made claims about Boccaccio's realism and the historical content of the Decameron⁴ that were eventually challenged by the work of Vittore Branca:⁵

Il capolavoro del Boccaccio, invece, proprio perché appare nei suoi aspetti più costituzionali e più validi come la tipica "commedia dell'uomo" rappresenta attraverso i paradigmi canonici alla visione cristiana e scolastica della vita e insieme come una vasta e multiforme epopea della società medievale italiana colta e ritratta nel suo autunno splendido e lussureggiante, non si oppone alla Divina Commedia ma in qualche modo le si affianca e quasi la completa.

(Branca 29)

But despite Branca's efforts, a relative lack of formal and historical comparative analysis of these two capolavori continues to exist. Though Carlo Delcorno established that Boccaccio was familiar with Dante's works by 1350, and echoes of Dante's verse have been discerned in the Elegia di madonna Fiammetta, the Caccia di Diana, the Amorosa visione and the Corbaccio,⁶ studies of Dante's presence in the Decameron have truly emerged in the late twentieth century with the work of Bettinzoli, Hollander, and Kirkham.⁷ Yet the presence of nearly verbatim passages in the Decameron and the Esposizioni requires us, I believe, to reconsider the nature of the influence of the Commedia on the Decameron and the chronological terms of Boccaccio's engagement with Dante's work.

Appearing in Decameron I.8, VI.9, and IX.8 and in the text of the later Esposizioni, these "autocitations" not only imply that Boccaccio kept the Commedia in mind while writing the Decameron, but that he himself intended that certain of the hundred novelle be read as a "gloss" of Dante's poem.⁸ Interestingly enough, it is one of Boccaccio's works that explicitly bears witness to his deep knowledge of the Commedia as a source for textual analogues to the Decameron. The collection of Boccaccio's incomplete public lectures on Inferno I to XVII, commonly called the Comento but referred to by Giorgio Padoan as the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante (October 1373–January 1374), often enters into the margins of work on Boccaccio as dantista but have seldom solicited the exclusive treatments such as those mentioned.⁹ The Esposizioni, the first lectura Dantis offered to the people of Florence in the church of Santo Stefano in Badia, most conspicuously demonstrates Boccaccio's close reading of Dante's text, though it is an unfinished work (and most likely not the exact content of the public lectures). To consider these autocitations in the Decameron and the Esposizioni within their Dantean cornice and their interpretation of the changes in Florentine society depicted in the Commedia, a view of Boccaccio as storyteller, chronicler and social commentator emerges, one that should lead to further reconsiderations of his classification in respect to his formidable processor.

While the almost verbatim nature of these passages is often noted by Giorgio Padoan in his edition of the Esposizioni, and certain critics have also noted parallels between these texts, no one has ventured to interpret their...