Ingegno—The Individual and Authority: Decameron, Day I

Abstract

One of the primary challenges in uncovering the moral development of the Decameron is disentangling the basic character of the individual days from the relatively bland and harmless subjects assigned to them by the brigata. While the avowed subjects of the ten days suggest an entertaining but incohesive assortment of narrative topics, the individual days develop specific topics that are at once coherent and subversive; and the full sequence of days is united by a challenging development of its own.¹ An excellent example of this disproportion between label and intention is presented in Day I. This day, which modestly purports to deal with topics “che piú gli sarà a grado” (I. Intro. 114) (treating any subject which most pleases you) (20), reveals itself, as Valerio C. Ferme has remarked,² to be a nonstop series of anecdotes concerning the subversion of authority. No fewer than five of these ten focus on the church, while the other five concern, as targets of satire, two kings, a prince, a wealthy Genoese lord, and a female snob. In each of the ten tales, the subversive weapon—the Goliath-slayer as it were—is ingegno: pure creativity and wit, expressed by an inventive individual in common speech. Viewed in this light, Day I suggests a kind of revolution: a shift in emphasis from institutionalized authority to individual inventiveness. And the day is capped, as we will see, by a canzone that universalizes the value of this inventiveness in terms that evoke Cicero’s treatment of ingenium in De legibus.

Io son sí vaga delta mia bellezza,

che d’altro amor già mai

non curerò né credo aver vaghezza.

[So struck I am by my own beauty

That never could I heed

Another love or find delight therein.]