In 1353, five years after the Black Death (bubonic plague) killed over fifty percent of the residents of Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio published The Decameron. The book is a compilation of one hundred stories told by a group of seven women and three men, wealthy courtiers all, who try to escape the death around them by travelling to a villa five miles north of the city and pass the time telling each others stories. In many substantive ways the work influenced Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, published some thirty odd years later. The book was written in the vernacular Florentine language – not the Latin of the Catholic Church – just as English vernacular was Chaucer’s language at a time when Anglo-French was spoken at court.
The one hundred stories of The Decameron are mostly about love (or the loss of it), ranging from bawdy to tragic, and infused with humour, satire, irony and bathos. As importantly, the book served to document a moment in history, and described in vivid detail how society lived, laughed, lied and lay together in the face of a devastation society had never experienced before, changing it forever.
In 1347, the plague arrived in Venice and Genoa on ships sailing from the Black Sea, where Eurasia and much of the Silk Road had already been decimated. By 1351 between 30 and 60% of the population of Europe had been killed – some 75 to 200 million people – making it the worst pandemic in human history.
Only six months ago I had travelled to Florence and also Certaldo, the birthplace of Boccaccio, an hour west of Florence. It seems very odd to think that I had been so near in space and time to a modern plague. Four years before that I had travelled to Milan to conduct research, and had walked the streets of what has became the epicentre of the current pandemic.
I feel so sad for the people of Milan, and all of Italy, for what they have experienced and are still suffering through. So much death and loss. Yet some 670 years earlier, the death and loss was much, much greater, and the reasons far less clear. History provides perspective which doesn’t lessen the loss of the present, but does provide a longer lens through which to see humanity’s ability to survive and adapt. I am re-reading The Decameron now not only for the novel I am writing, but given current circumstances, to understand how an artist found a way to deal with such a difficult time. Boccaccio wrote about life and flawed humanity in the vernacular of his day, inspiring many other writers like Chaucer. Thirty years before Boccaccio, Giotto had begun painting scenes depicting three dimensional characters – humans being. Like his crucifix in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, or the Ognissanti Crucifix, both depicting Christ as a man, not an icon.
Both Giotto and Boccaccio were humanists at the beginning of a time of great change, capturing life as they saw it, in three dimensions. They were followed not long after by a wave of visual artists including Ghiberti, Donatello, Brunelleschi, France Angelico who in turn influenced Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Rapael and Titian, who changed the way the world was seen.
I wonder about the works of art that will arise from this time in history, but for now, it is time to be in the moment and live and breath in life and be thankful of many simple things.