Boccaccio, GIOVANNI, was born either at Paris or at Florence in 1313. He was the illegitimate son of a merchant of Certaldo, and at the age of ten was apprenticed to a merchant of Paris. Disliking commerce, he attempted but quickly abandoned the study of canon law, and was then sent by his father to Naples, with the intention that he should follow a mercantile career. At Naples he gave himself to story-writing in verse and prose; mingled in courtly society; and fell in love with the lady whom, under the name of Fiammetta, he has made as famous as the Beatrice of Dante and the Laura of Petrarch. In the Filicopo she is said to have been an illegitimate daughter of King Robert of Sicily; in the Fiammetta she is represented as a beautiful Neapolitan, of noble but not of royal descent. She appears in a number of Boccaccio's works, and is one of the story-tellers in the Decameron. Up to the year 1350 Boccaccio lived alternately at Florence and at Naples. Between 1340 and 1350 he produced the prose tale of Fiammetta; the Ameto, a pastoral piece; and the Amorosa Visione, in which he sang the praise of his mistress in terza rima. To the same period belong the Filicopo, the Teseide, and the Filostrato. In the Filicopo the story of Flore et Blancheleur, one of the finest of the French 'Romans d'Aventures,' is cast into prose and embroidered with fanciful rhetoric, but is hardly improved in the retelling. The Teseide is a graceful version in ottava rima of the medieval romance of Palamon and Arcite, the same story as forms the subject of Chaucer's Knight's Tale (a poem which is to a great extent translated from Boccaccio's), and of Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen. The Filostrato, which is likewise in ottava rima, deals with the loves of Troilus and Cressida, a story which had become widely popular in various forms after the appearance in 1287 of Guido of Messina's Latin romance of Troilus and Briseis. The heroine's name was changed by Boccaccio, from whose poem Chaucer translated nearly half of his Troylus. The year 1350 may be taken as the beginning of a new period in Boccaccio's life. Until then it is a life given to song and love and adventure. Thenceforth, for some fifteen years, it is the life of an honoured citizen, of a diplomatist intrusted with important public affairs, of a scholar devoted to the cause of the new learning. During this period, in which he formed a lasting friendship with Petrarch, Boccaccio, as Florentine ambassador, visited Rome, Ravenna, Avignon, and the court of the Margrave of Brandenburg. In 1358 he completed his great work, the Decameron, which he had begun some ten years before. In 1360 he lodged in his house the wandering Greek scholar, Leontius Pilatus, whom he persuaded the Florentines to appoint to a Greek professorship, and by whose aid he was enabled to transcribe and forward to Petrarch prose versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He for some time held a chair founded for the elucidation of the works of Dante, on whose Divina Commedia he produced a commentary, now mainly interesting from the light which it sheds on Florentine life in the 14th century. During his last years he lived principally in retirement at Certaldo, and would have entered into holy orders, moved by repentance for the follies of his youth, had he not been dissuaded by Petrarch. He wrote in Latin an elaborate work on mythology, De Genealogia Deorum, and treatises De Claris Mulieribus, De Montibus, &c. He died at Certaldo on the 21st December 1375.
Boccaccio ranks among the great writers of Europe in virtue of the prose tales of the Decameron. This famous book opens with a description of the plague at Florence in 1348. Seven ladies and three gentlemen are introduced, who leave the city and betake themselves in quest of security and distraction to a country villa. There they while away ten days (whence the name Decameron) by each in turn telling stories in the garden. In all, one hundred tales are thus told. Many of these are extremely licentious; others are full of pathos and poetical fancy; several are masterpieces of imaginative creation; all are related in exquisitely graceful Italian. Boccaccio selected the plots of his stories from amid the floating popular fiction of the day, and especially from the fabliaux which had passed into Italy from France. His originality lies in his consummate narrative skill, and in the rich poetical sentiment which transforms his borrowed materials. The influence of his great book upon European literature has been wide and profound. Among his countrymen, by whom he has been generally accepted as an almost incomparable master of Italian prose, he has found many imitators, the most notable being Firenzuola, Bandello, Cinthio, and Grazzini. In France the transformation of the fabliau into the nouvelle was partly due to the example set by Boccaccio. His influence is apparent in such collections of tales as the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles ascribed to Antoine de la Salle, the Grand Paragon de Nouvelles Nouvelles of Nicholas of Troyes (1535), and the Heptameron (1558) of Marguerite of Navarre. Several of Boccaccio's stories are versified in the Contes of La Fontaine, in whose hands they assume a close resemblance to the form under which, as fabliaux, they had crossed the Alps into Italy. The debt of English writers to Boccaccio begins with the translations in Chaucer's Troylus. In the Canterbury Tales the stories told by the Reeve and the Franklin, and the story of Patient Griselda, are founded either on stories in the Decameron or on the same fabliaux as had been recast by Boccaccio. Sidney's Arcadia, says Mr Symonds, 'is a copy of what Boccaccio had attempted in his classical romances.' Cyril Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy, Marston's Parasitaster, and Fletcher's Women Pleased, are examples of plays of which the plots were taken, wholly or partly, from Boccaccio. The scene of the caskets in the Merchant of Venice corresponds to a story in the Decameron. The plot of All's Well that Ends Well is taken from Boccaccio's story of Giletta and Beltramo, and the plot of Cymbeline is partly drawn from the ninth novel of the second day. None of Dryden's works have had more enduring popularity than his Tales from Boccaccio. In later days, Keats (in Isabella), Tennyson (in The Falcon and The Lover's Tale), Longfellow, Swinburne, and George Eliot are among those who have turned for their subjects to the deathless pages of the hundred tales.
Apart from the narrative interest and beauty of conception which mark its finest stories, the salient feature of the Decameron is the contrast between the subjects and the style. The matter is medieval, while the form is classical. Boccaccio collected much that was choicest and most typical in the popular fiction of his day, and handed it down to modern times enshrined in imperishable language. The two great tendencies which run through European literature, the classical and the romantic, are seen working together in the Decameron as they are hardly to be seen elsewhere. The stories retain their medieval colour and flavour; yet the style preserves the classic dignity and elegance, the classic disdain of unessential detail. Despite the indelicacy of many of the novels, the impression left by the book as a whole is neither one of frivolity nor of grossness. The satiric malice and reckless levity of the fabliaux are replaced by a voluptuous melancholy, a refined pensive epicureanism. 'The central idea of the book,' says M. Emile Montegut, 'is that of love, represented as the chief motive force in social life, and the sovereign of the world. Love takes the place which fate held with the ancients, and which free-will holds among Christians.' The same fine critic maintains that the tales have been carefully linked in the order best suited to enforce this central conception. Whether or not they were so arranged, the frame in which they are set is a masterpiece of literary art. The impressive account of the plague at Florence—the description of the burning noon-day calm, which recalled to Ampère the opening of Plato's Phædo—the contrast which haunts the reader throughout the book, between death ravaging the world outside, and the quiet garden with its graceful inmates engrossed in song and story—the poetical fancy which invests Fiammetta and her companions with an undying charm—to these things there is no parallel in the works of Boccaccio's followers, as there is none to the golden perfection of his style.
See Baldelli's and Tiraboschi's biographies; German lives by Landau (1878), and Koerting (1880); Bartoli, I Precursori del Boccaccio; studies by Crescini (1887); and J. A. Symonds, Boccaccio as Man and Author (1894).