Andrea Gabrieli (c. 1510-1585) - Ricercar

Andrea Gabrieli (1510/32/1533? – August 30, 1585) was an Italian composer and organist of the late Renaissance. The uncle of Giovanni Gabrieli, he was the first internationally renowned member of the Venetian School of composers, and was extremely influential in spreading the Venetian style in Italy as well as in Germany.



Gabrieli was probably a native of Venice, most likely the parish of S. Geremia.



He may have been a pupil of Adrian Willaert at St. Mark's in Venice at an early age. There is some evidence that he may have spent some time in Verona in the early 1550's, due to a connection with Vincenzo Ruffo, who worked there as maestro di cappella -- Ruffo published one of Gabrieli's madrigals in 1554, and Gabrieli also wrote some music for a Veronese academy. Gabrieli is known to have been organist in Cannaregio between 1555 and 1557, at which time he competed unsuccessfully for the post of organist at St. Mark's.



His early style is indebted to Cipriano de Rore, and his madrigals are representative of mid-century trends. Even in his earliest music, however, he had a liking for homophonic textures at climaxes, foreshadowing the grand style of his later years.



In 1562 he went to Germany, where he visited Frankfurt am Main and Munich; while there he met and became friends with Orlande de Lassus, one of the most wide-ranging composers of the entire Renaissance, who wrote secular songs in French, Italian, and German, as well as abundant Latin sacred music. This musical relationship was immensely profitable for both composers: while Lassus certainly learned from the Venetian, Gabrieli took back to Venice numerous ideas he learned while visiting Lassus in Bavaria, and within a short time was composing in most of the current idioms, including one which Lassus entirely avoided: purely instrumental music.

After his meeting with Lassus, Gabrieli's style changed considerably, and the Netherlander became the strongest influence on him.



In 1566 Gabrieli was chosen for the post of organist at St. Mark's, one of the most prestigious musical posts in northern Italy; he retained this position for the rest of his life. Around this time he acquired, and maintained, a reputation as one of the finest current composers. Working in the unique acoustical space of St. Mark's, he was able to develop his unique, grand ceremonial style, which was enormously influential in the development of the polychoral style and the concertato idiom, which partially defined the beginning of the Baroque era in music.



Gabrieli became a prolific and versatile composer, and wrote a large amount of music, including sacred and secular vocal works, music for mixed groups of voices and instruments, and purely instrumental compositions, much of it for the huge, resonant space of St. Mark's. His output includes over a hundred motets and madrigals, as well as a smaller number of instrumental pieces.

Once Gabrieli began working at St. Mark's, he began to turn away from the Franco-Flemish contrapuntal style, which had dominated the music of the 16th century -- instead exploiting the sonorous grandeur of mixed instrumental and vocal groups playing antiphonally in the great basilica. His music of this time uses repetition of phrases with different combinations of voices at different pitch levels; although instrumentation is not specifically indicated, it can be inferred; he carefully contrasts texture and sonority to shape sections of music in a way which was unique, and which defined the Venetian style for the next generation.

His duties at St. Mark's clearly included his compositional endeavors, for he wrote a great deal of music for ceremonial affairs, some of considerable historical interest. Among them, he provided the music for the festivities accompanying the celebration of the victory over the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto (1571).

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[Paolo Veronese (1528 - 1588) - The Battle of Lepanto (1572)]

The Battle of Lepanto (October 7, 1571) occurred when a galley fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of the Republic of Venice, the Papacy (under St. Pope Pius V), Spain (including Naples, Sicily and Sardinia), the Republic of Genoa, the Duchy of Savoy, the Knights Hospitaller and others, decisively defeated the main fleet of Ottoman war galleys.

The five-hour conflict was fought at the northern edge of the Gulf of Patras, off western Greece, where the Ottoman forces sailing westwards from their naval station in Lepanto met the Holy League forces, which had come from Messina.

Victory gave the Holy League temporary control over the Mediterranean, protected Rome from invasion, and prevented the Ottomans from advancing into Europe. This last major naval battle fought solely between rowing vessels was one of history's most decisive, inasmuch as "after Lepanto the pendulum swung back the other way and the wealth began to flow from East to West, a pattern that continues to this day," as well as "a crucial turning point in the ongoing conflict between the Middle East and Europe, which has not yet completely been resolved."

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Missa Pater Peccavi: 1 Kyrie (1572)



Motet De Profundis Clamavi (Psalm 130) (1572)



Ricercar in the 12th Mode (c. 1580) (Older, faster)





Ricercar in the 12th Mode (c. 1580) (Newer, slower)



Late in his career he also became famous as a teacher. Prominent among his students were his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli; the music theorist Lodovico Zacconi; Hans Leo Hassler, who carried the concertato style to Germany; and many others.

In addition to his duties at St. Mark's, Gabrieli provided the music for one of the earliest revivals of an ancient Greek drama in Italian translation: Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus, for which he wrote the music for the choruses, setting separate lines for different groupings of voices. It was produced at Vicenza in 1585.

This reflects the the music-drama ideas of the Florentine Camera, at their height (1577-1582) a few years previous to this.

The date and circumstances of his death were not known until the 1980's, when the register containing his death date was found. Dated August 30, 1585, it includes the notation that he was "about 52 years old"; his approximate birth date has been inferred from this.

Gabrieli also composed music for the visit of several princes from Japan (1586), evidently commissioned the previous year and heard after his passing.

His position at St. Mark's was not filled until the end of 1586, and a large amount of his music was published posthumously in 1587.

Evidently Andrea Gabrieli was reluctant to publish much of his own music; his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli published much of it after his uncle's death.

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Venice (Italian: Venezia, Venetian: Venezsia) is a city in northern Italy, the capital of region Veneto, and has a population of 271,251 (census estimate January 1, 2004). Together with Padua, the city is included in the Padua-Venice Metropolitan Area (population 1,600,000). Venice has been known as the "La Dominante," "Serenissima," "Queen of the Adriatic," "City of Water," "City of Bridges," and "The City of Light."

The city stretches across 118 small islands in the marshy Venetian Lagoon along the Adriatic Sea in northeast Italy. The saltwater lagoon stretches along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po (south) and the Piave (north) Rivers. The population estimate of 272,000 inhabitants includes the population of the whole Comune of Venezia; around 62,000 in the historic city of Venice (Centro storico); 176,000 in Terraferma (the Mainland), mostly in the large frazione of Mestre and Marghera; and 31,000 live on other islands in the lagoon.

The Venetian Republic was a major maritime power during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and a staging area for the Crusades and the Battle of Lepanto, as well as a very important center of commerce (especially silk, grain and spice trade) and art in the 13th century up to the end of the 17th century.

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Saint Mark's Basilica (Italian: Basilica di San Marco a Venezia), the cathedral of Venice, is the most famous of the city's churches and one of the best known examples of Byzantine architecture. It lies on St Mark's Square (in the San Marco sestiere or district) adjacent and connected to the Doge's Palace. Originally it was the "chapel" of the Venetian rulers, and not the city's cathedral. Since 1807 it has been the seat of the Patriarch of Venice, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Venice. For its opulent design, gilded Byzantine mosaics, and its status as a symbol of Venetian wealth and power, from the 11th century on the building was known by the nickname Chiesa d'Oro (Church of gold).

The first St Mark's was a temporary building in the Doge’s Palace, constructed in 828, when Venetian merchants stole the supposed relics of Saint Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria. This was replaced by a new church on its present site in 832; from the same century dates the first St Mark's Campanile (bell tower). The new church was burned in a rebellion in 976, rebuilt in 978 and again to form the basis of the present basilica since 1063. The basilica was consecrated in 1094, the same year in which the body of Saint Mark was supposedly rediscovered in a pillar by Vitale Falier, doge at the time. The building also incorporates a low tower (now housing St Mark’s Treasure), believed by some to have been part of the original Doge's Palace. Within the first half of the 13th century the narthex and the new façade were constructed, most of the mosaics were completed and the domes were covered with higher wooden, lead-covered domes in order to blend in with the Gothic architecture of the redesigned Doge's Palace.

While the basic structure of the building has been little altered, its decoration changed greatly over time. The succeeding centuries, especially the fourteenth, all contributed to its adornment, and seldom did a Venetian vessel return from the Orient without bringing a column, capitals, or friezes, taken from some ancient building, to add to the fabric of the basilica. Gradually, the exterior brickwork became covered with various marbles and carvings, some much older than the building itself. The last interventions concerned Baptistery and St Isidor’s Chapel (1300's), the carvings on the upper profile of the façade and the Sacristy (1400's), the Zen Chapel (1500's).

As a "State church," till 1807 the basilica was not subject to the bishop (patriarch since 1451), whose cathedral was San Pietro di Castello. The doge himself appointed for celebrations a special clergy led by the primicerio. The procurators, members of an important organization of the Republic of Venice, were in charge of administration; their seats were the Procuratie, in St. Mark’s Square. All building and restoring works were directed by the proto: great architects such as Jacopo Sansovino and Baldassarre Longhena had this title. Procurators and proto still exist and accomplish the same tasks for the Patriarchate.



The interior is based on a Greek cross, with each arm divided in three naves and emphasized by a dome of its own. This is based on Justinian's Basilica of the Apostles in Constantinople. The marble floor (1100s, but underwent many restorations) is entirely tessellated in geometric patterns and animal designs. The techniques used were opus sectile and opus tessellatum. The lower register of walls and pillars is completely covered with polychrome marble slabs. The transition between the lower and the upper register is delimited all around the basilica by passageways which largely substituted the former galleries.

The spacious interior of the building with its multiple choir lofts was the inspiration for the development of a Venetian polychoral style among the composers appointed maestro di cappella at St Mark's. The style was first developed by a foreigner Adrian Willaert and was continued by Italian organists and composers: Andrea Gabrieli and his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli, and Claudio Monteverdi.

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A ricercar (or ricercare, recercar; the terms are interchangeable) is a type of late Renaissance and mostly early Baroque instrumental composition. The term means to search out, and many ricercars serve a preludial function to "search out" the key or mode of a following piece. A ricercar may explore the permutations of a given motif, and in that regard may follow the piece used as illustration. E.g. "Ricercar sopra Benedictus" would develop motives from a motet titled "Benedictus." The term is also used to designate an etude or study that explores a technical device in playing an instrument, or singing.

In its most common contemporary usage, it refers to an early kind of fugue, particularly one of a serious character in which the subject uses long note values. However the term has a considerably more varied historical usage.

In the sixteenth century, the word ricercar could refer to several types of compositions. Terminology was flexible, even lax then: whether a composer called an instrumental piece a toccata, a canzona, a fantasia, or a ricercar was clearly not a matter of strict taxonomy but a rather arbitrary decision. Yet ricercars fall into two general types: a predominantly homophonic piece, with occasional runs and passagework, not unlike a toccata; and a sectional work in which each section begins imitatively, usually in a variation form. Examples of both types of ricercars can be found in the works of Girolamo Frescobaldi. The second type of ricercar, the imitative, contrapuntal type, was to prove the more important historically, and eventually developed into the fugue.

This second, imitative type first appeared in the middle part of the sixteenth century, and developed parallel to the motet, with which it shared many of its imitative procedures. Instrumental transcriptions of motets were common in the early sixteenth century, and clearly composers began to create works which were like them in character but written for the instrument alone (keyboard or lute were common instruments represented in this development). Since the text of the motet was no longer available as a structural or unifying device, some other method of musical organization needed to be found: variation form proved the most malleable and durable.

During the Baroque era, the imitative ricercar gradually evolved into the fugue, just as the instrumental canzona evolved into the sonata. Some works which are indistinguishable from fugues were called "ricercars" even as late as Bach, with the difference that the note values were generally longer and the character slightly more serious. Good examples are the three-part and six-part ricercars from The Musical Offering (1747) by Johann Sebastian Bach.

[8510 Gervaise / 8510 Andrea Gabrieli / 8510 Bourgeoise]

Francesco Landini (1325-1397) - Ballata

Instrument-maker, organist, poet, singer Francesco Landini (Landino, c. 1325, Florence[?] - September 2, 1397) was the most famous and revered Italian composer of the late 1300's.

His father, Jacopo del Casentino, was a noted painter in the school of


Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267 – January 8, 1337).

Blind from childhood, after contracting smallpox -- Landini mastered many instruments, including the lute (and even invented a few), as well as singing, writing poetry, and composition.



Probably Landini spent some time farther north in Italy prior to 1370, and dedicated one motet to Andrea Contarini, Doge of Venice (1368-1382).

Landini knew many of the other Italian composers, including Andreas da Florentia. Around 1375, Andreas hired him as a consultant for the organ at the Florentine Servite house. Among the surviving records are the receipts for the wine that the two consumed during the three days it took to tune the instrument.

Landini also helped build the new organ Florence Cathedral, which by that time also included Giotto's campanile.


While records of his sacred music exist, his surviving output is exclusively secular, including

89 2-voiced ballate, such as Ecco la Primavera (1396)-- in ABBAA form, with the following verse









Ecco la primavera
Che 'l cor fa rallegrare;
Temp'e d'annamorare
E star con lieta cera.

Spring has come.
It makes the heart joyful;
now is the time to fall in love
and be happy

-- and Poi che de te mi convien (as performed on fiddle and harp, on David Munrow's Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance)



42 3-voiced ballate and

9 more which exist in 2- and 3-voiced forms,

as well as some madrigals, most texts assumed to have been written by the composer, including

"I am Music, and weeping I regret seeing intelligent people forsaking my sweet and perfect sounds for street music."

His output, preserved chiefly in the Squarcialupi Codex, represents almost a quarter of all surviving Italian music of the 1300's.

Landini is the eponym of the Landini cadence (or Landino sixth), a melodic cadential formula often expressed

Ti Ti La Do, with (as in the double-leading-tone cadence), a lower part of Re Do.

However this cadence neither originated with, nor is unique to him.

Numerous contemporary writers attest to his fame, not only as an artist, but as passionately devoted citizen of Florence.

He is buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence.


His tombstone, lost until the 19th century and now again displayed in the church, contains a depiction of him with a portative organ similar to the one shown atop.

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The ballata (plural: ballate) is an Italian poetic and musical form, which was in use from the late 1200's to the 1400's. It has the musical structure AbbaA, with the first and last stanzas having the same texts. It is thus most similar to the French musical "forme fixe" virelai (and not the ballade as the name might otherwise suggest). The first and last "A" is called a ripresa, the "b" lines are piedi (feet), while the fourth line is called a "volta." Longer ballate may be found in the form AbbaAbbaA, etc. Unlike the virelai, the two "b" lines usually have exactly the same music and only in later ballate pick up the (formerly distinctly French) first and second (open and close) endings. The term comes from the verb ballare, to dance, and the form certainly began as dance music.

The ballata was one of the most prominent secular musical forms during the 1300's, the period often known as the Italian ars nova. Ballate are sung at the end of each day of Boccaccio's Decameron (only one musical setting of these poems, by Lorenzo da Firenze, survives). Early ballate, such as those found in the Rossi Codex are monophonic. Later, ballate are found for two or three voices. The most notable composer of ballate is Francesco Landini, who composed in the second half of the 1300's. Other composers of ballata include Andrea da Firenze, a contemporary of Landini, as well as Bartolino da Padova, Johannes Ciconia, and Zacara da Teramo. In the 1400's both Arnold de Lantins and Guillaume Dufay wrote ballate; they were among the last to do so.

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Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 1375) was an Italian author and poet, a friend and correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist in his own right and author of a number of notable works including On Famous Women, the Decameron, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular. Boccaccio is particularly notable for his dialogue, of which it has been said that it surpasses in verisimilitude that of just about all of his contemporaries, since they were medieval writers and often followed formulaic models for character and plot.

The exact details of his birth are uncertain, a number of sources state that he was born in Paris and that his mother was a Parisian, but others deprecate this as a romanticism by the earliest biographers. In this case his birthplace was possibly in Tuscany, perhaps in Certaldo, the town of his father.

He was almost certainly illegitimate, the son of a Florentine merchant and an unknown woman.

Boccaccio grew up in Florence. His father was working for the Compagnia dei Bardi and in the 1320s married Margherita dei Mardoli, of an illustrious family. It is believed Boccaccio was tutored by Giovanni Mazzuoli and received from him an early introduction to the works of Dante. In 1326 Boccaccio moved to Naples with the family when his father was appointed to head the Neapolitan branch of his bank. Boccaccio was apprenticed to the bank, but it was a trade for which he had no affinity. He eventually persuaded his father to let him study law at the Studium in the city.

For the next six years Boccaccio studied canon law there. Then from there he pursued his interest in scientific and literary studies.

His father introduced him to the Neapolitan nobility and the French-influenced court of Robert the Wise in the 1330s. At this time he fell in love with a married daughter of Robert the Wise (known as, King Robert of Naples) and she is immortalized as the character "Fiammetta" in many of Boccaccio's prose romances, particularly Filocolo (1338). Boccaccio became a friend of fellow Florentine Niccolò Acciaioli, and benefited from his influence as administrator and, perhaps, the lover of Catherine of Valois-Courtenay, widow of Philip I of Taranto. Acciaioli later became counsellor to Queen Joanna and, eventually, her Grand Seneschal.

It seems Boccaccio enjoyed law no more than banking, but his studies allowed him the opportunity to study widely and make good contacts with fellow scholars. His early influences included Paolo da Perugia (a curator and author of a collection of myths, the Collectiones), the humanists Barbato da Sulmona and Giovanni Barrili, and the theologian Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro.

In the 1330's Boccaccio became a father of two illegitimate children, Mario and Giulio. In the 1340's Boccaccio became a father again, of another illegitimate child, Violante. He was born in Ravenna, where Boccaccio was a guest of Ostasio I da Polenta from about 1345 through 1346.

In Naples, Boccaccio began what he considered his true vocation: poetry. Works produced in this period include Filostrato and Teseida (the source for Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale respectively), Filocolo, a prose version of an existing French romance, and La caccia di Diana, a poem in octave rhyme listing Neapolitan women.

The period featured considerable formal innovation, including possibly the introduction of the Sicilian octave to Florence, where it influenced Petrarch.

Boccaccio returned to Florence in early 1341, avoiding the plague in that city of 1340, but also missing the visit of Petrarch to Naples in 1341. He had left Naples due to tensions between the Angevin king and Florence. His father had returned to Florence in 1338, where he had gone bankrupt. The death of his mother occurred shortly afterward. Although dissatisfied with his return to Florence, Boccaccio continued to work, producing Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (also known as Ameto) a mix of prose and poems, in 1341, completing the fifty canto allegorical poem Amorosa visione in 1342, and Fiammetta in 1343 The pastoral piece Ninfale fiesolano probably dates from this time also. In 1343 Boccaccio's father re-married, to Bice del Bostichi. His children by his first marriage had all died (except Boccaccio) and he was gladdened by the birth of a son, Iacopo, in 1344.

In Florence, the overthrow of Walter of Brienne brought about the government of popolo minuto. It diminished the influence of the nobility and the wealthier merchant classes and assisted in the relative decline of Florence. The city was hurt further, in 1348, by the Black Death, later represented in the Decameron, which killed some three-quarters of the city's population.

From 1347 Boccaccio spent much time in Ravenna, seeking new patronage, and despite his claims, it is not certain whether he was present in plague-ravaged Florence. His stepmother died during the epidemic and his father, as Minister of Supply in the city was closely associated with the government efforts. His father died in 1349 and as head of the family Boccaccio was forced into a more active role.

Boccaccio began work on the Decameron around 1349. It is probable that the structures of many of the tales date from earlier in his career, but the choice of a hundred tales and the frame-story lieta brigata of three men and seven women dates from this time. The work was largely complete by 1352. It was Boccaccio's final effort in literature and one of his last works in Italian, the only other substantial work was Corbaccio (dated to either 1355 or 1365). Boccaccio revised and rewrote the Decameron in 1370-1371. This manuscript has survived to the present day.

From 1350 Boccaccio, although less of a scholar, became closely involved with Italian humanism and also with the Florentine government. His first official mission was to Romagna in late 1350. He revisited that city-state twice and also was sent to Brandenburg, Milan, and Avignon. He also pushed for the study of Greek, housing Barlaam of Calabria, and encouraging his tentative translations of works by Homer, Euripides, and Aristotle.

In October 1350 he was delegated to greet Francesco Petrarca as he entered Florence and also to have the great man as a guest at his home during his stay. The meeting between the two was extremely fruitful and they were friends from then on, Boccaccio calling Petrarch his teacher and magister. Petrarch at that time encouraged Boccaccio to study classical Greek and Latin literature. They met again in Padua in 1351, Boccaccio on an official mission to invite Petrarch to take a chair at the university in Florence. Although unsuccessful, the discussions between the two were instrumental in Boccaccio writing the Genealogia deorum gentilium; the first edition was completed in 1360 and this would remain one of the key reference works on classical mythology for over 400 years. The discussions also formalized Boccaccio's poetic ideas. Certain sources also see a conversion of Boccaccio by Petrarch from the open humanist of the Decameron to a more ascetic style, closer to the dominant fourteenth century ethos. For example, he followed Petrarch (and Dante) in the unsuccessful championing of an archaic and deeply allusive form of Latin poetry. In 1359 following a meeting with Pope Innocent VI and further meetings with Petrarch it is probable that Boccaccio took some kind of religious mantle. There is a persistent, but unsupported, tale that he repudiated his earlier works, including the Decameron, in 1362, as profane.


[Illustration of one of the women featured the 1374 biographies of 106 famous women, De Claris Mulieribus, by Boccaccio - from a German translation of 1541]

In 1360 Boccaccio began work on De mulieribus claris, a book offering biographies of one hundred and six famous women, that he completed in 1374. Two centuries later, approximately in 1541, this work was translated into the German language by Heinrich Steinhöwel and printed by Johannes Zainer, in Ulm, Germany. The secondary title caption, a subtitle, of the German translation reads Hie nach volget der kurcz sin von etlichen frowen / von denen johannes boccacius in latin beschriben hat, vnd doctor hainricus stainhöwel getütschet.

Following the failed coup of 1361, a number of Boccaccio's close friends and other acquaintances were executed or exiled in the subsequent purge. Although not directly linked to the conspiracy, it was in this year that Boccaccio left Florence to reside in Certaldo, and became less involved in government affairs. He did not undertake further missions for Florence until 1365, and traveled to Naples and then on to Padua and Venice, where he met up with Petrarch in grand style at Palazzo Molina, Petrarch's residence as well as the place of Petrarch's library. He later then returned to Certaldo. He met Petrarch only once again, in Padua in 1368. Upon hearing of the death of Petrarch (July 19, 1374), Boccaccio wrote a commemorative poem, including it in his collection of lyric poems, the Rime.

As noted, he returned to work for the Florentine government in 1365, undertaking a mission to Pope Urban V. When the papacy returned to Rome from Avignon in 1367, Boccaccio was again sent to Urban, offering congratulations. He also undertook diplomatic missions to Venice and Naples.

Of his later works the moralistic biographies gathered as De casibus virorum illustrium (1355-74) and De mulieribus claris (1361-1375) were most significant.

Other works include a dictionary of geographical allusions in classical literature, De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus, et de nominibus maris liber (a title desperate for the coining of the word "geography"). He gave a series of lectures on Dante at the Santo Stefano church in 1373 and these resulted in his final major work, the detailed Esposizioni sopra la Commedia di Dante.

Boccaccio and Petrarch, also were two of the most educated people in early Renaissance in the field of archaeology.

Boccaccio's change in writing style in the 1350's was not due just to meeting with Petrarch. It was mostly due to poor health and a premature weakening of his physical strength. It also was due to disappointments in love. Some such disappointment could explain why Boccaccio, having previously written always in praise of women and love, came suddenly to write in a bitter Corbaccio style. Petrarch describes how Pietro Petrone (a Carthusian monk) on Boccaccio's death bed sent another Carthusian (Gioacchino Ciani) to urge him to renounce his worldly studies.

Petrarch then dissuaded Boccaccio from burning his own works and selling off his personal library, letters, books, and manuscripts. Petrarch even offered to purchase Boccaccio's library, so that it would become part of Petrarch's library.

His final years were troubled by illnesses, some relating to obesity and what often is described as dropsy, severe edema that would be described today as congestive heart failure. He died at the age of sixty-three in Certaldo on 21 December, 1375, where he is buried.

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The Decameron (subtitle: Prencipe Galeotto) is a collection of 100 novellas by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, probably begun in 1350 and finished in 1353. It is a medieval allegorical work best known for its bawdy tales of love, appearing in all its possibilities from the erotic to the tragic. Many notable writers such as Chaucer are said to have drawn inspiration from The Decameron (See Literary sources and influence of the Decameron below).

The title is a combination of two Greek words meaning "ten" and "day."

Decameron is structured in a frame narrative, or frame tale. Boccaccio begins with a description of the Black Death and leads a group of seven women and three men who flee from plague-ridden Florence to a villa in the (then) countryside of Fiesole for two weeks. To pass the time, each member of the party tells one story for each one of the nights spent at the villa. Although fourteen days pass, two days each week are set aside: one day for chores and one holy day during which no work is done. In this manner, 100 stories are told by the end of the ten days.


[Decameron, painting by Sandro Botticelli from 1487]

Each of the ten characters is charged as King or Queen of the company for one of the ten days in turn. Each character tells a tale of a unique individual's personal experience. This charge extends to choosing the theme of the stories for that day, and all but two days have topics assigned: examples of the power of fortune; examples of the power of human will; love tales that end tragically; love tales that end happily; clever replies that save the speaker; tricks that women play on men; tricks that people play on each other in general; examples of virtue. Only Dioneo, who usually tells the tenth tale each day, has the right to tell a tale on any topic he wishes, due to his wit.

Each day also includes a short introduction and conclusion to continue the frame of the tales by describing other daily activities besides story-telling. These frame tale interludes frequently include transcriptions of Italian folk songs. The interactions among tales in a day, or across days, as Boccaccio spins variations and reversals of previous material, forms a whole and not just a collection of stories.

Boccacio made similar Greek etymological plays of words in his other works. The subtitle is Prencipe Galeotto, which derives from the opening material in which Boccaccio dedicates the work to ladies of the day who did not have the diversions of men (hunting, fishing, riding, falconry) who were forced to conceal their amorous passions and stay idle and concealed in their rooms. Thus, the book is subtitled Prencipe Galeotto, that is Galehaut, the go-between of Lancelot and Guinevere, a nod to Dante's allusion to Galeotto in "Inferno V," who was blamed for the arousal of lust in the episode of Paolo and Francesca.



[From an edition of Boccaccio's "De Casibus Virorum Illustrium" showing Lady Fortune spinning her wheel]

Beyond the unity provided by the frame narrative, Decameron provides a unity in philosophical outlook. Throughout runs the common medieval theme of Lady Fortune, and how quickly one can rise and fall through the external influences of the "Wheel of Fortune." Boccaccio had been educated in the tradition of Dante's Divine Comedy which used various levels of allegory to show the connections between the literal events of the story and the hidden Christian message. However Decameron uses Dante's model not to educate the reader, but to satirize this method of learning. The Roman Catholic Church, priests, and religious belief become the satirical source of comedy throughout. This was part of a wider historical trend in the aftermath of the Black Death which saw widespread discontent with the church.

Many details of the Decameron are infused with a medieval sense of numerological and mystical significance. For example, it is widely believed that the seven young women are meant to represent the Four Cardinal Virtues (Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude) and the Three Theological Virtues (Faith, Hope, and Charity). It is further supposed that the three men represent the classical Greek tripartite division of the soul (Reason, Spirit, and Lust, see Book IV of Republic). Boccaccio himself notes that the names he gives for these ten characters are in fact pseudonyms chosen as "appropriate to the qualities of each". The Italian names of the seven women, in the same (most likely significant) order as given in the text, are: Pampinea (the flourishing one), Fiammetta (small flame), Filomena (faithful in love), Emilia (rival), Lauretta (wise, crowned with laurels), Neifile (cloudy), and Elissa (God is my vow). The men, in order, are: Panfilo (friend of all), Filostrato (beaten by love), and Dioneo (of God).



[John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) - A Tale from the Decameron]

The compelling way in which the tales were written and their almost exclusively Renaissance flair made the stories from the Decameron an irresistible source that many later writers borrowed from.

Notable examples include:

The famous first tale (I, 1) of the notorious Ser Ciappelletto was later translated into Latin by Olimpia Fulvia Morata and translated again by Voltaire.

Martin Luther retells tale I, 2, in which a Jew converts to Catholicism after visiting Rome and seeing the corruption of the Catholic hierarchy. However, in Luther's version (found in his "Table-talk #1899"), Luther and Philipp Melanchthon try to dissuade the Jew from visiting Rome.

The ring parable is at the heart of both Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's 1779 play Nathan the Wise and tale I, 3. In a letter to his brother on August 11, 1778, he says explicitly that he got the story from the Decameron. Jonathan Swift also used the same story for his first major published work, A Tale of a Tub.

Posthumus's wager on Imogen's chastity in Cymbeline was taken by Shakespeare from an English translation of a fifteenth century German tale, "Frederyke of Jennenm",whose basic plot came from tale II, 9.

Both Molière and Lope de Vega use tale III, 3 to create plays in their respective vernaculars. Molière wrote L'ecole de maris in 1661 and Lope de Vega wrote Discreta enamorada.

Tale III, 9, which Shakespeare converted into All's Well That Ends Well. Shakespeare probably first read a French translation of the tale in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure.

Tale IV, 1 was reabsorbed into folklore to appear as Child ballad 269, Lady Diamond.

John Keats borrowed the tale of Lisabetta and her pot of basil (IV, 5) for his poem, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.

Lope de Vega also used parts of V, 4 for his play No son todos ruiseñores (They're Not All Nightingales).

The title character in George Eliot's historical novel Romola emulates Gostanza in tale V, 2, by buying a small boat and drifting out to sea to die, after she realizes that she no longer has anyone on whom she can depend.

Tale V, 9 became the source for works by two famous nineteenth century writers in the English language. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used it in his "The Falcon of Ser Federigo" as part of Tales of a Wayside Inn in 1863. Alfred, Lord Tennyson used it in 1879 for a play entitled The Falcon.

Molière also borrowed from tale VII, 4 in his George Dandin, ou le Mari Confondu (The Confounded Husband). In both stories the husband is convinced that he has accidentally caused his wife's suicide.

The motif of the three trunks in The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare is found in tale X, 1. However, both Shakespeare and Boccaccio probably came upon the tale in Gesta Romanorum.
At his death Percy Bysshe Shelley had left a fragment of a poem entitled "Ginevra", which he took from the first volume of an Italian book called L'Osservatore Fiorentino. The earlier Italian text had a plot taken from tale X, 4.

Tale X, 5 shares its plot with Chaucer's "The Franklin's Tale", although this is not due to a direct borrowing from Boccaccio. Rather, both authors used a common French source.
The tale of patient Griselda (X, 10) was the source of Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale." However, there are some scholars that believe Chaucer may not have been directly familiar with the Decameron, and instead derived it from a Latin translation/retelling of that tale by Petrarch.
Christine De Pizan often restructures tales from Decameron in her work "City of Ladies"
Tzvetan Todorov used the Decameron as the basis for The Grammar of the Decameron (1969), an exploration of the general structure of all narrative.

Boccaccio, in turn, borrowed the plots of almost all of his stories. Although he only consulted French, Italian, and Latin sources, some of the tales have their ultimate origin in such far-off lands as India, Persia, Spain, and other places. Moreover, some were already centuries old. For example, part of the tale of Andreuccio of Perugia (II, 5) originated in second century Ephesus (in the Ephesian Tale). The frame narrative structure (though not the characters or plot) originates from the Panchatantra, which was written in Sanskrit before 500 AD and came to Boccaccio through a chain of translations that includes Old Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin.

Even the description of the central current event of the narrative, the Black Plague (which Boccaccio surely witnessed), is not original, but based on the Historia gentis Langobardorum of Paul the Deacon, who lived in the eighth century.

Some scholars have suggested that some of the tales for which there is no prior source may still have not have been invented by Boccaccio, but may have been circulating in the local oral tradition and Boccaccio may have just happened to be the first person that we know of to record them. Boccaccio himself says that he heard some of the tales orally. In VII, 1, for example, he claims to have heard the tale from an old woman who heard it as a child.
However, just because Boccaccio borrowed the storylines that make up most of the Decameron doesn't mean he mechanically reproduced them. Most of the stories take place in the fourteenth century and have been sufficiently updated for the author's time that a reader may not know that they had been written centuries earlier or in a foreign culture. Also, Boccaccio often combined two or more unrelated tales into one (such as in II, 2 and VII, 7).

Moreover, many of the characters actually existed, such as Giotto di Bondone, Guido Cavalcanti, Saladin and King William II of Sicily. Scholars have even been able to verify the existence of less famous characters, such as the tricksters Bruno and Buffalmacco and their victim Calandrino. Still other fictional characters are based on real people, such as the Madonna Fiordaliso from tale II, 5, who is derived from a Madonna Flora that lived in the red light district of Naples. Boccaccio often intentionally muddled historical (II, 3) and geographical (V, 2) facts for his narrative purposes. Within the tales of the Decameron the principal characters are usually developed through their dialogue and actions so that by the end of the story they seem real and their actions logical given their context.

Another of Boccaccio's frequent techniques was to make already existing tales more complex. A clear example of this is in tale IX, 6, which was also used by Chaucer in his "The Reeve's Tale", but more closely follows the original French source than does Boccaccio's version. In the Italian version the host's wife (in addition to the two young male visitors) occupy all three beds and she also creates an explanation of the happenings of the evening. Both elements are Boccaccio's invention and make for a more complex version than either Chaucer's version or the French source (a fabliau by Jean de Boves).

[8365 Herman Monk / 8325 Landini / 8325 Gherardello]