The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  At Dante’s death, the last thirteen cantos of the “Paradiso” were nowhere to be found. Virgil had never completed the Aeneid. In this too had Dante followed his guide? Despairing admirers finally asked his sons Jacopo and Piero, both “rhymers,” to complete their father’s work. But, as Boccaccio reports, a lucky miracle made this unnecessary. One night, in the ninth month after Dante’s death, while Jacopo di Dante was asleep

  … his father had appeared to him, clothed in the purest white, and his face resplendent with an extraordinary light.… Jacopo asked him if he lived, and … Dante replied: “Yes, but in the true life, not our life.” Then Jacopo asked him if he had completed his work before passing into the true life, and … what had become of that part of it which was missing.… To this Dante seemed to answer: “Yes, I finished it.”

  (Translated by F. J. Bunbury)

  Then Dante, still in the vision, took Jacopo by the hand, led him to the room where Dante had been sleeping, touched one of the walls, and said, “What you have sought for so much is here.” The next morning before dawn Jacopo went to the designated room and there in a hidden recess found the thirteen missing cantos “all mouldy from the dampness of the walls, and had they remained there longer, in a little while they would have crumbled away.”

  Had Dante never written the Comedy he would still have been a creator of modern literature. Early in his years of exile he wrote another work in Italian, the unfinished Convivio, a mini-encyclopedia of philosophy for the layman. And if Dante had never written works in Italian, he would still be a major figure in medieval thought for his Latin treatises. De vulgari eloquentia (1304–5) summarized the biblical account of the origin of language, and admitted the superiority of Latin but defended Italian as a new literary language that all could understand. In De monarchia he described the divine plan for the Roman Empire. The emperor, like the pope, had received his mandate direct from God. Dante, torn between the claims of this world and the next, was the unhappy ambassador—in Latin praising the Italian vernacular, and in Italian marking the paths into the otherworld.

  Death, which did not defeat his works and became the arena for his Divine Comedy, played tricks on Dante’s bodily remains. Too late, the people of Florence tried to bring back their exiled hero. Again and again they tried to persuade the people of Ravenna to yield Dante’s bones to Florence. In 1515 one of their own, the Medici pope Leo X, received a petition from the Florentine Academy with a promise from Michelangelo to make an appropriate tomb in Florence. Leo X authorized a mission from Florence to Ravenna to accomplish their hopes. But “the much wished-for translation of Dante’s remains did not take place,” the envoys reported to Leo X, “inasmuch as the two delegates of the Academy who were sent for the purpose found Dante neither in soul nor in body; and it is supposed that, as in his lifetime he journeyed in soul and in body through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, so in death he must have been received, body and soul into one of those realms.”

  Still, the reason for the pope’s disappointment remained secret. In 1782, when Dante’s tomb in Ravenna was to be renovated, the opening of the coffin again revealed no remains. But no one betrayed the secret of the empty tomb. It was still a secret in 1865, on the six hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth, when Florentines repeated their effort. Now the officials of Ravenna replied that since the creation of a unified Italy, the Florentine Dante was no longer in “exile.” The tomb was to be opened and the remains to be identified during the anniversary celebration. Just then a workman breaking through a wall in the Braccioforte Chapel adjoining Dante’s tomb happened on a secreted wooden coffin. Inscriptions on this coffin and expert examination of the skeleton it contained identified these as the remains of Dante. It was decided to open the original tomb in public. An eyewitness on that day, June 7, 1865, reported the suspense. Would a second skeleton be found there? The original tomb was publicly shown to be empty. The rediscovered skeleton was then assembled and displayed on white velvet under glass to receive the homage of all Italians. Dante’s bones were once again entombed in the city that had given him his last living refuge.

  PART SEVEN

  THE

  HUMAN COMEDY:

  A COMPOSITE WORK

  It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak, and another to listen.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1849)

  Nothing has really happened until it’s been described.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF

  31

  Escaping the Plague

  WAS there escape from the cataloged virtues and vices of Dante’s afterlife? Could there be stories without a moral, of human adventure and misadventure? The horrors of the plague provided Boccaccio with the incentive and the opportunity. But for the writer there was no easy refuge from stereotypes of classic lore and medieval legend with their themes of love and battle, of cowardice, deception, and courage. It was only a natural catastrophe that provided Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) the frame for a human comedy in the modern spirit.

  Boccaccio’s early life followed the fortunes of his father. Born in Florence in 1313, an illegitimate son, he seems still to have been received amiably into his father’s household. His stepmother, a relative of Dante’s Beatrice, may have been the “reliable source” for his life of Dante. After a good education in Latin and accounting, at fourteen he was sent by his father to the Bardi firm’s branch office in Naples to learn the banking business. Six unhappy years there as an apprentice banker were followed by another six years learning canon law at the university. When the kings of Naples needed a full line of credit to finance their defense of the papal cause, the young banker was welcome at court. There “lusty young lords and cavaliers” attended “the bravest and most honorable ladies, shining in glittering gold and adorned with their precious and most rare jewels.” These Neapolitan delights stayed with him all the rest of his life, drawing him back to the scenes of his youth.

  One glittering lady in particular, known under the pseudonym of Fiammetta, would play a leading role in Boccaccio’s life and work. At their first meeting, “the shining eyes of the fair lady, all sparkling, looked into my eyes with a piercing light … which, passing through my eyes, struck my heart so deeply with the beauty of that fair lady, that it resumed its earlier trembling which still endures.” Boccaccio never married, but he did father five children by unidentified mistresses.

  When his father’s firm went bankrupt about 1340, Boccaccio returned to Florence, where he would remain a Neapolitan in exile. “Of my being in Florence against my will I shall tell you nothing,” he wrote back to his boon companion in Naples, “for it would have to be set forth not in ink but in tears.” And he signed himself, “Fortune’s enemy.”

  Boccaccio’s early works were a product of Naples’s fertile literary life. When he returned to Tuscany at the age of twenty-seven, he had already written poetry and prose on conventional themes of myth and chivalry. In terza rima he recounted a contest between Diana and Venus, and the pursuit by young lovers. Il Filostrato, the story of Troilus and Criseida, was a long epic of the love of two friends for the same woman that would provide a basis for Chaucer’s poem and Shakespeare’s play. And from Teseide, set in Athens in the time of Prince Theseus, Chaucer fashioned his Knight’s Tale.

  In Florence, without the patronage of his father or the diversions of a brilliant court, Boccaccio found it hard to feel at home. After a trip to Ravenna seeking employment or benefaction, he returned to Florence in the spring of 1348 at the horrendous climax of the Black Death. Now, in place of the Greek gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, knights and ladies of his earlier works, Boccaccio created his own version of the Human Comedy. And his tales of daily life would survey the succulent sensualism of medieval life.

  Seeing the ravages of the Black Death, Petrarch envied “happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe, and will look on our testimony as fable!” A Carthusian monk, after attending the burial of his prior and all thirty-four others in his monastery, with onl
y his dog for a companion went searching for a refuge. “No bells tolled and nobody wept no matter what his loss,” a Sienese chronicler reported, “because almost everyone expected death … people said and believed, ‘This is the end of the world.’ ” We know now that the cause of the Black Death is a plague bacillus that thrives in the stomach of a particular flea that lives in the fur of the black rat. The “bubonic” form infects the bloodstream, causing buboes, or swellings of the lymph glands, and internal hemorrhages, while the more lethal and more communicable pneumonic form enters the respiratory system.

  In the fourteenth century, when neither cause nor remedy was known, the plague was a melodramatic reminder of how a whimsical Fortune ruled mankind. All the more so because Europe had been relatively free of the most lethal epidemic diseases since about the eighth century. The Jews, of course, were among the first to be blamed, and across Germany, the Flagellants led thousands of Jews to slaughter. The plague had arrived in Europe in October 1347, at the Sicilian port of Messina on Genoese ships coming from the Black Sea. Within three years it would cut down a third of the population of Europe.

  In the winter of 1348, when the plague reached Florence, the flower of late medieval Europe, the city was already reeling from civil disorders. Two of its most important banks, including Boccaccio’s father’s firm, had failed. Boccaccio was understandably exaggerating when he reported “that more than 100,000 human beings lost their lives within the walls of Florence, what with the ravages attendant on the plague and the barbarity of the survivors toward the sick.” We now know that at least half of Florence’s 100,000 population died in that plague year. People would retire apparently well and die of the disease before they awoke. Seldom did an afflicted person survive more than five days. The usual course was much shorter. A doctor, it was said, might catch the disease at the patient’s bedside and die before he could leave the room. The chronicler of Florence, Giovanni Villani (1280?–1348) ended his life in the middle of a sentence—punctuated by the Black Death.

  Luckily for us, Boccaccio was there and survived to write the Decameron between 1348 and 1352. His eyewitness account of the plague became the “Introduction to the First Day.” “To take pity on people in distress is a human quality which every man and woman should possess,” Boccaccio begins, while asking the reader’s sympathy for his own frustration in love. To all who have been kind to him he offers this book and “where it seems to be most needed”—to women.

  And who will deny that such encouragement, however small, should much rather be offered to the charming ladies than to the men? For the ladies, out of fear or shame, conceal the flames of passion within their fragile breasts, and a hidden love is far more potent than one which is worn on the sleeve, as everyone knows who has had experience of these matters. Moreover they are forced to follow the whims, fancies and dictates of their fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, so that they spend most of their time cooped up within the narrow confines of their rooms, where they sit in apparent idleness, reflecting on various matters, which cannot possibly always be pleasant to contemplate.

  (Translated by G. H. McWilliam)

  He promises “to provide succour or diversion for the ladies, but only for those who are in love, since the others can make do with their needles, their reels and their spindles. I shall narrate a hundred stories or fables or parables or histories or whatever you choose to call them.” These were to be recited in ten days by seven ladies and three young men who had fled the plague.

  In the “Introduction to the First Day” he apologizes for the “unpleasantness” of what he must now describe, the “deadly pestilence” of 1348. “And were it not for the fact that I am one of many people who saw it with their own eyes, I would scarcely dare to believe it.” He recounts the terrifying spread of the disease, the futile efforts to avoid infection, the callousness of frightened Florentines. “In the face of so much affliction and misery, all respect for the laws of God and man had virtually broken down and been extinguished in our city.” Women lost their modesty, men lost their inhibitions. Natural feelings were smothered and “more often than not bereavement was the signal for laughter and witticisms and general jollification.”

  One Tuesday morning at the height of the plague seven young ladies are praying in the deserted church of Santa Maria Novella. Then in come three young men (none less than twenty-five years of age) “in whom neither the horrors of the time nor the loss of friends or relatives nor concern for their own safety, have dampened the flames of love.” One of the ladies, Pampinea, proposes that the young men join them just outside Florence in a country estate for the duration of the plague—“shunning at all costs the lewd practices of our fellow citizens and feasting and merrymaking as best we may without in any way overstepping the bounds of what is reasonable.” Then, “in a spirit of chaste and brotherly affection,” accompanied by one or two maids and three manservants, they all take up residence in a palace with a spacious garden two miles outside the city.

  To entertain themselves for the next two weeks they agree that every day one of them will reign as king or queen, will announce a theme for the storytelling, and call on each to tell a story. The sovereign for the day names the king or queen for the next day, and so it will go until each of the ten has reigned and they have told one hundred tales. Just as Dante’s Divine Comedy, which Boccaccio much admired, has one hundred cantos, so Boccaccio offers his hundred tales. A deeper parallel has been suggested. Perhaps plague-stricken Florence was Boccaccio’s Hell, the storytelling palace and gardens embellished by pastoral peace and lyric and dance were his Paradise, and the tales themselves were his Purgatory.

  But Boccaccio was a refugee from Dante. Unlike the Divine Comedy, which is ranged in orderly levels of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, Boccaccio’s Human Comedy reveals the bewildering miscellany of human experience. The topics for the Decameron days are conspicuously earthy and heterogeneous. Boccaccio not only does not preach but does not even reveal a sense of sin. Unlike Dante, he does not take responsibility for the truth of the stories told. Instead he assigns this responsibility to the tellers of the tales, whose varying credibility adds spice, ambiguity, and nuance.

  So Boccaccio creates a human panorama of love, courage, cowardice, wit, wisdom, deceit, and folly, seen through the eyes of the ten young people. The themes of the Days all somehow touch on the mysteries of Fortune. On Day I and Day IX, each may choose any theme. But the other days have their special themes: (II) on people who, after misfortunes, attain an unexpected state of happiness; (III) on those who attain their desires (or recover what was lost) through their ingenuity; (IV) about those whose loves have an unhappy ending; (V) who suffer misfortune but finally attain happiness; or (VI) who, by a clever gambit have managed to escape loss or danger; (VII) the tricks wives have played on their husbands; (VIII) men or women on their lovers, or by men on men; on a final day (X) about those who have acted generously or courageously.

  This catalog of human experience does not commit tellers or listeners to any philosophy or theology. Boccaccio’s world shows no cardinal virtues or deadly sins. A third of the stories take place in Florence, and more than three quarters are set in Italy. But the rest come from across the world, from England to China, from antiquity to Boccaccio’s day, where most occur. The actors include peasants and workers along with the familiar knights and squires, pilgrims, and abbots of the troubadours. Women play leading roles.

  The Decameron with good reason has been called “the epic of the merchant class.” Instead of celebrating the canonical medieval virtues, the stories tell us how much can be accomplished by a quick wit, a ready tongue, shrewdness, and foresight in the marketplace. What all men and women share is their struggle to defeat ill fortune and exploit good fortune while satisfying their sexual desires. Boccaccio has escaped from Dante’s allegory into the everyday world of love and lust, wit and deception, stinginess and generosity. If he does not teach the art of living virtuously, he does teach the “art of living
well.”

  Boccaccio confessed that few of the stories were entirely his own invention. He appropriated the elements of his tales from Spain, France, Provence, and the Near East, from folklore, myth, and legend. Surprisingly, even his “eyewitness” account of the plague was adapted from the chronicle of an eighth-century Italian Benedictine monk, Paulus Diaconus. But he had the modern talent for renewal, for making twice-told tales seem new.

  The very concept of a human comedy, a secular sampling of man’s everyday experiences on earth, had to be created by Boccaccio. In a favorite tale, the very first on Day I, we taste the flavor of the Decameron as we follow the surprising career of a notary, Cepperello of Prato, who delighted in lying and cheating. “He would take particular pleasure, and a great amount of trouble in stirring up enmity, discord and bad blood between friends, relatives and anybody else; and the more calamities ensued, the greater would be his rapture.… Of women he was as fond as dogs are fond of a good stout stick.… He would rob and pilfer as conscientiously as if he were a saintly man making an offering.” He was hired to go to Burgundy to use his guile to collect unpaid bills. But in the midst of business he suddenly fell ill, and his death seemed imminent.

  The two Florentine brothers with whom he was lodging feared the consequences for them if this wicked blasphemer died on their premises. How could they get rid of their unwelcome lodger—alive or dead? Cepperello, overhearing their concerns, asked them to summon a holy friar for his confession. The naive friar listened dutifully to Cepperello’s sanctimony. His excesses of kindness and generosity revealed him as an uncanonized saint. For example, he even confessed to the sin of boasting of his virginity. He confessed to his “gluttony” when, after long periods of fasting or prayer, “he had drunk water as pleasurably and avidly as any great bibber of wine.” The greatest sin of his life, he finally recalled, was that as a child he had once rudely cursed his mother. When Cepperello died, the priest arranged a service “of great pomp and ceremony” in the monastery. Thereafter the townspeople celebrated the purity of his life, “called him, and call him still Saint Ciappelletto. Moreover it is claimed that through him God has wrought many miracles, and that He continues to work them on behalf of whoever commends himself devoutly to this particular saint.”