Boccaccio, Giovanni

Abstract

Boccaccio is one of the greatest writers of the Western literary tradition and among the most prolific authors of Italian literature. Today he is renowned for his narrative masterwork, the Decameron, a collection of 100 tales which aims to portray the late medieval/early modern world in a realistic manner. Boccaccio’s narrative style is a milestone on the way to the creation of Western realism. His model brought about the Italian novelistic genre which would thrive until the end of the seventeenth century. Boccaccio also wrote romances in narrative poetry and prose, lyric poetry, letters, vernacular biographies (viz., of Dante and Petrarch), a commentary on Dante’s Inferno (cantos 1–17), Latin poems, biographies and treatises, among which the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, a 15 book encyclopedia on classical myths. Here he claims as his own achievement the reconstructed unity of the Ancient Greek and Latin world in his age. Though his culture remained essentially Latin and vernacular, he was indeed the first to value Greek culture as more important than Latin, so that he fostered the return of the Greek language to the West by promoting the first Latin translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as the first chair of Greek at the Florentine University. Geoffrey Chaucer read and imitated Boccaccio’s epic romances as well as, most likely, some of his Decameronian tales. In the Cinquecento Pietro Bembo singled out Boccaccio’s prose writing as the best model of style for any works composed in the Italian vernacular.