In early June 1363, Giovanni Boccaccio received a letter that stung him deeply. Just a few days shy of his fiftieth birthday, he was then at the height of his creative powers. He had already penned at least a dozen major works, including the Decameron, any one of which would have assured him a place alongside Dante and Petrarch in the firmament of Italian literature. Although recent political upheavals had forced him to leave his native Florence, he was still writing feverishly. Yet to his friend Francesco Nelli, the author of the letter, he remained a ‘man of glass’. He was painfully fragile: fickle, oversensitive and quick to anger – in short, a neurotic pain.
Boccaccio denied it, of course. He wrote a long reply, rebutting Nelli’s charges in exhaustive, some might say pedantic, detail. But as Marco Santagata’s biography shows, Nelli was nearer the mark than Boccaccio was prepared to admit. And the ‘proof’ is right there, staring us in the face. Like Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio was a relentlessly autobiographical author. His tales, even when set in another time and place, were embroidered with vignettes of his social world, and he could seldom resist the temptation to insert himself into the plot – either overtly, as the narrator, or discreetly, in the guise of characters. By teasing out the details contained in these literary self-portraits, Santagata argues, it is possible to build up a picture not just of his life, but of his personality too.
And what a striking picture it is. Although Boccaccio was never exiled from Florence, as Dante was, he spent most of his life outside the city and wrote many of his most important works elsewhere. The son of a Florentine merchant and an unknown woman, he was taken to Naples while still in his teens and grew up on the fringes of the Angevin court. He was destined for banking but, realising he hated it, persuaded his father to let him abandon his apprenticeship and study canon law, presumably in preparation for a career in the Church. Just months before completing his degree, however, he suddenly threw in the towel. Flitting around Italy in pursuit of his literary passions, he struggled to shake off a feeling of insecurity and doubt. He craved the approval of the rich and the powerful, yet never quite managed to achieve it. His awkwardness with Latin, then still the lingua franca of intellectual life, was a perennial source of anxiety. His lack of discretion didn’t help either. As Santagata notes, he was prone to flashes of temper and fits of ‘almost infantile egocentrism’. Other than with Petrarch, whom he idolised, his friendships were rarely free of tension. He admired Niccolò Acciaiuoli, a fellow Florentine who rose to become grand seneschal of the Kingdom of Naples, but envied and resented his success. Even his family irked him at times.
That is not to say that Boccaccio was an entirely unsympathetic character. For all his failings, he evidently had a warm heart. He was deeply shaken by the death of his seven-year-old daughter and wrote some of his most touching verse in her memory. But, in Santagata’s telling, such episodes were exceptional.
Santagata helps to solve some puzzling mysteries. Take Boccaccio’s abrupt departure from Naples in 1341. This has always struck scholars as rather strange. Why, having begged his father to let him study canon law, did Boccaccio suddenly throw it up at the last minute? The answer, Santagata claims, lies in one of Boccaccio’s earliest works, the Filocolo. This tells the story of Florio, the son of a Saracen king, and his ‘forbidden’ love for Biancifiore, a Christian slave. It was written, Boccaccio tells us, at the request of the woman he loves, who is called Maria. All of this was perfectly in keeping with the norms of courtly romance, of course. But what is significant here is the identity of the woman in question. According to Boccaccio, she was none other than the illegitimate daughter of Robert, king of Naples; she had been conceived, he said, before Robert came to the throne and raised with the name of a different man. This might have been taken for a literary fantasy or even a poor joke had it not been for the fact that Robert had at least one illegitimate son and a daughter with the same name as Boccaccio’s beloved to boot. The insinuation, Santagata claims, was simply too outrageous to bear. Robert must have made his displeasure clear, leaving Boccaccio with no choice but to head back to Florence in disgrace.
But Santagata’s approach has its limits. At times, he is far too uncritical in his handling of Boccaccio’s self-portraits. All too often, he takes them at face value, as if they offer a direct window onto the author’s life. He rarely, if ever, pauses to consider whether they were representations – that is to say, conscious acts of literary self-creation – rather than exercises in auto-mimesis. Attentiveness to this question alone would complicate any attempt to base a biography on literary self-fashioning. What makes Santagata’s approach especially problematic, however, is that Boccaccio had a habit of projecting himself onto not just a single character but several at once. In the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, for example, he appears as Ameto and also as Ibrida and Caleone. While they may all be reflections of Boccaccio’s self-image to one extent or another, their very plurality is a serious impediment to biographical interpretation.
Even the most basic ‘autobiographical’ information conveyed by these alter egos can be inconsistent. A good illustration of this is the case of Boccaccio’s mother. Although her identity is unknown, several of Boccaccio’s stand-ins do talk about their mothers. The picture is confusing, however. In Filocolo, she is said to be a ‘French princess’ named Gannai. But in the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, she is simply a well-born Frenchwoman of no great distinction. Even though the two depictions are not completely contradictory, it is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile them convincingly. This has led some, like Thomas Bergin, to question whether any faith at all can be placed in the supposition – breezily shared by Santagata – that Boccaccio had a French mother. That may be taking scepticism too far, but at the very least, the question of how much trust we should place in Boccaccio’s literary self-portraits deserves more cautious handling.
Santagata’s biography is hence a work of glass. At its best, it offers a wonderfully clear and vivid window onto the life of a pivotal figure in the history of Italian literature. When seen in the proper light, it glistens with wit and originality. Yet it is fragile, too – just like Boccaccio himself.