[In the following essay, Auerbach offers a close textual analysis of how Boccaccio's style and syntax influence the tone and momentum of his narrative.]

In a famous novella of the Decameron (IV, 2), Boccaccio tells of a man from Imola whose vice and dishonesty had made him a social outcast in his native town, so that he preferred to leave it. He went to Venice, there became a Franciscan monk and even a priest, called himself Frate Alberto, and managed to attract so much attention by striking penances and pious acts and sermons that he was generally regarded as a godly and trustworthy man. Then one day he tells one of his penitents—a particularly stupid and conceited creature, the wife of a merchant away on a journey—that the angel Gabriel has fallen in love with her beauty and would like to visit her at night. He visits her himself as Gabriel and has his fun with her. This goes on for a while, but in the end it turns out badly. This is what happens:

Pure avenne un giorno che, essendo madonna Lisetta con una sua comare, et insieme di bellezze quistionando, per porre la sua inanzi ad ogni altra, si come colei che poco sale aveva in zucca, disse: Se voi sapeste a cui la mia bellezza piace, in verità voi tacereste dell'altre. La comare vaga d'udire, si come colei che ben la conoscea, disse: Madonna, voi potreste dir vero, ma tuttavia non sapiendo chi questo si sia, altri non si rivolgerebbe così leggiero. Allora la donna, che piccola levatura avea, disse: Comare, egli non si vuol dire, ma l'intendimento mio è l'agnolo Gabriello, il quale più che sè m'ama, si come la più bella donna, per quello che egli mi dica, che sia nel mondo o in maremma. La comare allora ebbe voglia di ridere, ma pur si tenne per farla più avanti parlare, e disse: In fè di Dio, Madonna, se l'agnolo Gabriello è il vostro intendimento, e dicevi questo, egli dee ben esser così; ma io non credeva che gli agnoli facesson queste cose. Disse la donna: Comare, voi siete errata; per le piaghe di Dio egli fa meglio che mio marido; e dicemi che egli si fa anche colassù; ma perciocchè io gli paio più bella che niuna che ne sia in cielo, s'è egli innamorato di me, e viensene a star meco ben spesso: mo vedi vu? La comare partita da madonna Lisetta, le parve mille anni che ella fosse in parte ove ella potesse queste cose ridire; e ragunatasi ad una festa con una gran brigata di donne, loro ordinatamente raccontò la novella. Queste donne il dissero a' mariti ed ad altre donne; e quelle a quell'altre, e così in meno di due dì ne fu tutta ripiena Vinegia. Ma tra gli altri, a' quali questa cosa venne agli orecchi, furono i cognati di lei, li quali, senza alcuna cosa dirle, si posero in cuore di trovare questo agnolo, e di sapere se egli sapesse volare; e più notti stettero in posta. Avvenne che di questo fatto alcuna novelluzza ne vanne a frate Alberto agli orecchi, il quale, per riprender la donna, una notte andatovi, appena spogliato s'era, che i cognati di lei, che veduto l'avean venire, furono all'uscio della sua camera per aprirlo. Il che frate Alberto sentendo, e avvisato ciò che era, levatosi, non avendo altro rifugio, aperse una finestra, la qual sopra il maggior canal rispondea, e quindi si gittò nell'aqua. Il fondo v'era grande, ed egli sapeva ben notare, si che male alcun non si fece: e notato dall'altra parte del canale, in una casa, che aperta v'era, prestamente se n'entrò, pregando un buon uomo, che dentro v'era, che per l'amor di Dio gli scampasse la vita, sue favole dicendo, perchè quivi a quella ora et ignudo fosse. Il buon uomo mosso a pietà, convenendogli andare a fare sue bisogne, nel suo letto il mise, e dissegli che quivi infino alla sua tornata si stesse; e dentro serratolo, andò a fare i fatti suoi. I cognati della donna entrati nella camera trovarono che l'agnolo Gabriello, quivi avendo lasciate l'ali, se n'era volato: di che quasi scornati, grandissima villania dissero alla donna, e lei ultimamente sconsolata lasciarono stare, et a casa lor tornarsi con gli arnesi dell'agnolo.

[However, it chanced one day that Madam Lisetta, being in dispute with a gossip of hers upon the question of female charms, to set her own above all other said, like a woman who had little wit in her noodle, ‘An you but knew whom my beauty pleaseth, in truth you would hold your peace of other women.’ The other, longing to hear, said, as one who knew her well, ‘Madam, maybe you sooth; but knowing not who this may be, one cannot turn about so lightly.’ Thereupon quoth Lisetta, who was eath enough to draw, ‘Gossip, it must go no farther; but he I mean is the angel Gabriel, who loveth me more than himself, as the fairest lady (for that which he telleth me) who is in the world or the Maremma.’ The other had a mind to laugh, but contained herself, so she might make Lisetta speak further, and said, ‘Faith, madam, an the angel Gabriel be your lover and tell you this, needs must it be so; but methought not the angels did these things.’ ‘Gossip’, answered the lady, ‘you are mistaken; zounds, he doth what you wot of better than my husband and telleth me they do it also up yonder; but, for that I seem to him fairer than any she in heaven, he hath fallen in love with me and cometh full oft to lie with me; seestow now?’ The gossip, to whom it seemed a thousand years till she would be whereas she might repeat these things, took leave of Madam Lisetta, and foregathering at an entertainment with a great company of ladies, orderly recounted to them the whole story. They told it again to their husbands and other ladies, and these to yet others, and so in less than two days Venice was all full of it. Among others to whose ears the thing came were Lisetta's brothers-in-law, who, without saying aught to her, bethought themselves to find the angel in question and see if he knew how to fly, and to this end lay several nights in wait for him. As chance would have it, some inkling of the matter came to the ears of Fra Alberto, who accordingly repaired one night to the lady's house, to reprove her, but hardly had he put off his clothes ere her brothers-in-law, who had seen him come, were at the door of her chamber to open it. Fra Alberto, hearing this and guessing what was to do, started up and having no other resource, opened a window, which gave on the Grand Canal, and cast himself thence into the water. The canal was deep there and he could swim well, so that he did himself no hurt, but made his way to the opposite bank and hastily entering a house that stood open there, besought a poor man, whom he found within, to save his life for the love of God, telling him a tale of his own fashion, to explain how he came there at that hour and naked. The good man was moved to pity and it behoving him to go do his occasions, he put him in his own bed and bade him abide there against his return; then, locking him in, he went about his affairs. Meanwhile, the lady's brothers-in-law entered her chamber and found that the angel Gabriel had flown, leaving his wings there; whereupon, seeing themselves baffled, they gave her all manner of hard words and ultimately made off to their own house with the angel's trappings, leaving her disconsolate.]¹

As I have said, the story ends very badly for Frate Alberto. His host hears on the Rialto what happened that night at Madonna Lisetta's and infers who the man he took in is. He exorts a large sum of money from Frate Alberto and then betrays him nevertheless; and he does it in so disgusting a way that the frate becomes the object of a public scandal with moral and practical consequences from which he never recovers. We feel almost sorry for him, especially if we consider with what delight and indulgence Boccaccio relates the erotic escapades of other clerics no better than Frate Alberto (for instance III, 4, the story of the monk Don Felice who induces his lady love's husband to perform a ridiculous penance which keeps him away from home nights; or III, 8, the story of an abbot who takes the husband to Purgatory for a while and even makes him do penance there).

The passage reprinted above contains the crisis of the novella. It consists of Madonna Lisetta's conversation with her confidante and the consequences of their conversation: the strange rumour spreading through the town; the relatives hearing it and deciding to catch the angel; the nocturnal scene in which the frate escapes for the time being by boldly jumping into the canal. The conversation between the two women is psychologically and stylistically a masterly treatment of a vivid everyday scene. Both the confidante who, suppressing her laughter, voices some doubt with simulated politeness to get Lisetta to go on talking, as well as the heroine herself who, in her vaingloriousness, lets herself be lured even beyond the limits of her innate stupidity, impress us as true to life and natural. Yet the stylistic devices which Boccaccio employs are anything but purely popular. His prose, which has often been analysed, reflects the schooling it received from antique models and the precepts of medieval rhetoric, and it displays all its arts. It summarises complex situations in a single period and puts a shifting word order at the service of emphasising what is important, of retarding or accelerating the tempo of the action, of rhythmic and melodic effect.

The introductory sentence itself is a rich period, and the two gerunds essendo and quistionando—one in initial, the other in final position, with a leisurely interval between them—are as well calculated as the syntactic stress on la sua which concludes the first of two rhythmically quite similar cadences, the second of which ends with ogni altra. And when the actual conversations begin, our good Lisetta is so enthusiastic about herself that she fairly bursts into song: se voi sapeste a cui la mia bellezza piace … Still more delightful is her second speech with its many brief and almost equisyllabic units in which the so-called cursus velox predominates. The most beautiful of them, ma l'intendimento mio / è l'agnolo Gabriello, is echoed in her confidante's reply, se l'agnolo Gabriello / è vostro intendimento. In this second speech we find the first colloquialisms: intendimento, presumably of social rather than local colour, can hardly have been in polite usage in this particular acceptation (roughly, desiderium, English ‘sweetheart’), nor yet the expression nel mondo o in maremma (which gives us another charming cadence). The more excited she grows, the more numerous are the colloquial and now even dialectical forms; the Venetian marido in the enchanting sentence which stresses the praises of Gabriel's erotic prowess by the adjurational formula, per le piaghe di Dio, and the climactic effect (again Venetian), mo vedi vu, whose note of vulgar triumph is more humorous as, just before, she has again been singing sweetly, ma perciocchè io gli paio più bella che niuna che ne sia in cielo, s'è egli innamorato di me …

The next two periods comprise the spreading of the rumour throughout the town, in two stages. The first leads from la comare to the brigata di donne, the second from queste donne to Vinegia. Each has its own source of motion: the first, in the confidante's impatience to unburden herself of her story, an impatience whose urgency and subsequent appeasement come out remarkably well in a corresponding movement of the verbs (partita … le parve mille anni che ella fosse … ove potesse … e ragunatasi … ordinatamente raccontò); the second, in the progressive expansion, paratactically expressed, of the field covered. From here on the narration becomes more rapid and more dramatic. The very next sentence reaches all the way from the moment when the relatives hear the rumour to the nocturnal ambush, although there is room in it for a few additional details of fact and psychological description. Yet it seems relatively empty and calm compared with the two which follow, in which the entire night scene in Lisetta's house, down to Frate Alberto's bold leap, takes its course in two periods which, however, together constitute but a single movement. This is done by interlacing hypotactic forms, with participial constructions (generally a favourite device with Boccaccio) playing the most important part. The first sentence begins quietly enough with the principal verb avenne and the corresponding subject clause che … venne … ; but in the attached relative clause, il quale (a secondary subordinate clause, that is), the catastrophe bursts: … andatovi, appena spogliato s'era, che i cognati … furono all'uscio. And then comes a tempest of verb forms: sentendo, e avvisato, levatosi, non avendo, aperse, e si gittò. If only by reason of the brevity of the crowding units, the effect is one of extraordinary speed and dramatic precipitation. And for the same reason—despite the learned and classical origin of the stylistic devices employed—it is not at all literary; the tone is not that of written language but of oral narrative, the more so because the position of the verbs, and hence the length and tempo of the intervening sections of greater calm, is constantly varied in an artistically spontaneous fashion: sentendo and avvisato are placed close together, as are levatosi and non avendo; aperse soon follows, but the concluding si gittò appears only after the relative clause referring to the window. I do not quite see, by the way, why Boccaccio has the frate hear of the rumour which is going the rounds. So shrewd a knave would hardly put his head in such a trap, in order to give Lisetta a piece of his mind, if he were at all aware that there was any risk. The whole thing, it seems to me, would be more natural if he had no inkling that something was afoot. His quick and bold escape requires no special motivation in the form of a previously crystallised suspicion. Or did Boccaccio have some other reason for making the statement? I see none.

While the frate swims the canal, the narrative becomes momentarily quieter, more relaxed, slower: we have principal verbs in an imperfect of description, arranged paratactically. But no sooner has he reached the other side than the verbs begin jostling each other again, especially when he enters the strange house: prestamente se n'entrò, pregando … che per l'amor di Dio gli scampasse la vita, sue favole dicendo, perchè … fosse. The intervals between the verbs are likewise brief or urgent. Exceedingly condensed or hurried is quivi a quella ora e ignudo. Then the tide begins to ebb. The ensuing sentences are still packed full of factual information and hence with participial hypotaxes, but at least they are governed by the progressively more leisurely pace of principal clauses linked by ‘and’: mise, et dissegli, e andò. Entrati … trovarono che … se n'era volato is still quite dramatic; but then comes the progressive relaxation of the paratactic series dissero, e ultimamente lasciarono stare, e tornarsi. Of such artistry there is no trace in earlier narrative literature. …

In the case of Frate Alberto … we are told his previous history, which explains the very specific character of his malicious and witty shrewdness. Madonna Lisetta's stupidity and the silly pride she takes in her womanly charms are unique in their kind in this particular mixture. And the same holds true of the secondary characters. Lisetta's confidante, or the buono uomo in whose house Frate Alberto takes refuge, have a life and a character of their own which, to be sure, is only hastily indicated but which is clearly recognizable. We get an inkling of what sort of people Madonna Lisetta's relatives are, for there is something sharply characteristic in the grim joke, si possero in cuore di trovare questo agnolo e di sapere se egli sapesse volare. The last few words approach the form which German criticism has recently come to call erlebte Rede (free indirect discourse). Then too the setting is much more clearly specified than in the fabliau. The events of the latter may occur anywhere in rural France, and its dialectical peculiarities, even if they could be more accurately identified, would be quite accidental and devoid of importance. Boccaccio's tale is pronouncedly Venetian. It must also be born in mind that the French fabliau is quite generally restricted to a specific milieu of peasants and small townspeople, and that the variations in this milieu, insofar as they are observable at all, owe their existence exclusively to the accidental place of origin of the piece in question, whereas in Boccaccio's case we are dealing with an author who in addition to this Venetian setting chose numerous others for his tales: for example Naples in the novella about Andreuccio da Perugia (II, 5), Palermo in the one about Sabaetto (VIII, 10), Florence and its environs in a long series of droll tales. And what is true of the settings is equally true of the social atmosphere. Boccaccio surveys and describes, in the most concrete manner, all the social strata, all the classes and professions, of his time. The gulf between the art of the fabliau and the art of Boccaccio by no means reveals itself only in matters of style. The characterisations of the personages, the local and social setting, are at once far more sharply individualised and more extensive. Here is a man whose conscious grasp of the principles of art enables him to stand above his subject matter and to submerge himself in it only so far as he chooses, a man who shapes his stories according to his own creative will.

As for Italian narrative literature before Boccaccio, the specimens known to us from that period have rather the character of moralizing or witty anecdotes. Their stylistic devices as well as the orbit of their views and concepts are much too limited for an individualised representation of characters and settings. They often exhibit a certain brittle refinement of expression but in direct appeal to the senses they are by far inferior to the fabliaux. …

Whatever we choose from among the products of the earlier period—be it the crude, boorish, sensory breadth of the fabliaux, or the threadbare, sensorily poor refinement of the Novellino, or Salimbene's lively, vividly graphic wit—none of it is comparable to Boccaccio. It is in him that the world of sensory phenomena is first mastered, is organised in accordance with a conscious artistic plan, caught and held in words. For the first time since antiquity, his Decameron fixes a specific level of style, on which the relation of actual occurrences in a contemporary life can become polite entertainment; narrative no longer serves as a moral exemplum, no longer caters to the common people's desire to laugh; it serves as a pleasant diversion for a circle of well bred young people of the upper classes, of ladies and gentlemen who delight in the sensual play of life and who possess sensitivity, taste, and judgement. It was to announce this purpose of his narrative art that Boccaccio created the frame in which he set it. The stylistic level of the Decameron is strongly reminiscent of the corresponding antique genus, the antique novel of love, the fabula milesiaca. This is not surprising, since the attitude of the author to his subject matter, and the social stratum for which the work is intended, correspond quite closely in the two periods, and since for Boccaccio too the concept of the writer's art was closely associated with that of rhetoric. As in the novels of antiquity, Boccaccio's literary art is based upon a rhetorical treatment of prose; as in them, the style sometimes borders on the poetic; he too sometimes gives conversation the form of well-ordered oratory. And the general impression of an ‘intermediate’ or mixed style, in which realism and eroticism are linked to elegant verbal formulations, is quite similar in the two cases. Yet while the antique novel is a late form cast in languages which had long since produced their best, Boccaccio's stylistic endeavour finds itself confronted by a newly-born and as yet almost amorphous literary language. The rhetorical tradition—which, rigidified in medieval practice into an almost spectrally senile mechanism, had, as recently as the age of Dante, been still timidly and stiffly tried out on the Italian volgare by the first translators of ancient authors—in Boccaccio's hands suddenly becomes a miraculous tool which brings Italian art prose, the first literary prose of postclassical Europe, into existence at a single stroke. It comes into existence in the decade between his first youthful work and the Decameron. His particular gift of richly and sweetly moving prose rhythms, although a heritage from antiquity, he possessed almost from the beginning. It is already to be found in his earliest prose work, the Filocolo, and seems to have been a latent talent in him, which his first contact with antique authors brought out. What he lacked at first was moderation and judgement in using stylistic devices and in determining the level of style; sound relationship between subject matter and level of style had still to be achieved and become an instinctive possession. A first contact with the concept of an elevated style as practised by the ancients—especially since the concept was still influenced by medieval notions—very easily led to what might be termed a chronic exaggeration of the stylistic level and an inordinate use of erudite embellishment. This resulted in an almost continuously stilted language, which, for that very reason, could not come close to its object and which, in such a form, was fit for almost nothing but decorative and oratorical purposes. To grasp the sensory reality of passing life was completely impossible to a language so excessively elevated.

In Boccaccio's case, to be sure, the situation was different from the beginning. His innate disposition was more spontaneously sensory, inclined towards creating charmingly flowing and elegant forms imbued with sensuality. From the beginning he was made for the intermediate rather than the elevated style, and his natural bent was strongly furthered by the atmosphere of the Angevin court at Naples, where he spent his youth and where the playfully elegant late forms of the chivalric culture of Northern France had taken stronger hold than elsewhere in Italy. His early works are rifacimenti of French romances of chivalric love and adventure in the late courtly style; and in their manner, it seems to me, one can sense something characteristically French: the broader realism of his descriptions, the naïve refinement and the delicate nuances of the lovers' play, the late feudal mundaneness of his social pictures, and the malice of his wit. Yet the more mature he grows, the stronger become the competing bourgeois and humanist factors and especially his mastery of what is robust and popular. In any case, in his youthful works the tendency towards rhetorical exaggeration—which represented a danger in Boccaccio's case too—plays a role only in his representation of sensual love, as do the excess of mythological erudition and of conventional allegorising which prevail in some of them. Thus we may assert that despite his occasional attempts (as in the Teseida) to reach out for something more, he remains within the limits of the intermediate style—of the style which, combining the idyllic and the realistic, is designated for the representation of sensual love. It is in the intermediate, idyllic style that he wrote the last and by far the most beautiful of his youthful works, the Ninfale fiesolano; and the intermediate style serves too for the great book of the hundred novelle. In the determination of stylistic level it is unimportant which of his youthful works were written partly or wholly in verse and which in prose. The atmosphere is the same in them all.

Within the realm of the intermediate style, to be sure, the nuances in the Decameron are most varied, the realm is no narrow one. Yet even when a story approaches the tragic, tone and atmosphere remain tenderly sensual and avoid the grave and sublime; and in stories which employ far more crudely farcical motifs than our example, both language and manner of presentation remain aristocratic, inasmuch as both narrator and audience unmistakably stand far above the subject matter, and, viewing it from above with a critical eye, derive pleasure from it in a light and elegant fashion. It is precisely in the more popularly realistic and even the crudely farcical subjects that the peculiarity of the intermediate elegant style is most clearly to be recognized; for the artistic treatment of such stories indicates that there is a social class which, though it stands above the humble milieu of everyday life, yet takes delight in its vivid representation, and indeed a delight whose end is the individually human and concrete, not the socially stratified type. All the Calandrinos, Cipollas, and Pietros, the Peronellas, Caterinas, and Belcolores are, like Frate Alberto and Lisetta, individualised and living human beings in a totally different way from the villein or the shepherdess who were occasionally allowed to enter courtly poetry. They are actually much more alive and, in their characteristic form, more precise than the personages of the popular farce, as may be apparent from what we have indicated above, and this although the public they are meant to please belongs to an entirely different class. Quite evidently in Boccaccio's time there was a social class—high in rank, though not feudal but belonging to the urban aristocracy—which derived a well bred pleasure from life's colourful reality wherever it happened to be manifested. It is true, the separation of the two realms is maintained to the extent that realistic pieces are usually set among the lower classes, the more tender and more nearly tragic pieces usually among the upper. But even this is not a rigidly observed rule, for the bourgeois and the sentimentally idyllic are apt to constitute borderline cases; and elsewhere too the same sort of mixture is not infrequent (e.g. the novella of Griselda, X, 10).

The social prerequisites for the establishment of an intermediate style in the antique sense were fulfilled in Italy from the first half of the fourteenth century. In the towns an elevated stratum of patrician burghers had come to the fore; their mores, it is true, were still in many respects linked to the forms and ideas of the courtly structure, but, as a result of the entirely different social structure, as well as under the influence of early humanist trends, they soon received a new stamp, becoming less bound up with class, and more strongly personal and realistic. Inner and outer perception broadened, threw off the fetters of class restriction, even invaded the realm of learning, hitherto the prerogative of clerical specialists; and gradually gave it the pleasant and winning form of personal culture in the service of social intercourse. The language, so recently a clumsy and inelastic tool, became supple, rich, nuanced, flourishing, and showed that it could accommodate itself to the requirements of a discriminating social life of refined sensuality. The literature of society acquired what it had not previously possessed: a world of reality and of the present. Now there is no doubt that this gain is strictly connected with a much more important gain on a higher stylistic level, Dante's conquest of a world, made a generation before. …

Its most conspicuous distinguishing characteristics, if we compare [our text] with earlier narratives, are the assurance with which, in both perception and syntactical structure, it handles complex factual data, and the subtle skill with which it adapts the narrative tempo and level of tone to the inner and outer movement of the narrated events. This we have tried to show in detail above. The conversation between the two women, the spreading of the rumour through the town, and the dramatic scene at Lisetta's house are made a clearly surveyable, coherent whole within which each part has its own independent, rich, and free motion. … In our story, after the relatives reach home con gli arnesi del agnolo, Boccaccio continues as follows: In questo mezzo, fattosi il dì chiaro, essendo il buon uomo in sul Rialto, udì dire come l'agnolo Gabriello era la notte andato a giacere con Madonna Lisetta, e da cognati trovatovi, s'era per paura gittato nel canale, nè si sapeva che divenuto se ne fosse. [Broad day come, the good man with whom Fra Alberto had taken refuge, being on the Rialto, heard how the angel Gabriel had gone that night to lie with Madam Lisetta and being surprised by her kinsmen, had cast himself for fear into the canal, nor was it known what had become of him.] The tone of seeming seriousness, which never mentions the fact that the Venetians on the Rialto are bursting with laughter, insinuates, without a word of moral, aesthetic, or any other kind of criticism, exactly how the occurrence is to be evaluated and what mood the Venetians are in. If instead Boccaccio had said that Frate Alberto's behaviour was underhand and Madonna Lisetta stupid and gullible, that the whole thing was ludicrous and absurd, and that the Venetians on the Rialto were greatly amused by it, not only would this procedure have been much clumsier but the moral atmosphere, which cannot be exhausted by any number of adjectives, would not have come out with anything like the force it now has. The stylistic device which Boccaccio employs was highly esteemed by the ancients, who called it ‘irony’. Such a mediate and indirectly insinuating form of discourse presupposes a complex and multiple system of possible evaluations, as well as a sense of perspective which, together with the occurrence, suggests its effect. …

Nor does Boccaccio scorn the direct method of characterisation. At the very beginning of our text we find two popular phrases which serve to set forth Lisetta's stupidity directly and graphically: che poco sale avea in zucca and che piccola levatura avea. Reading the beginning of the novella we find a whole collection of things similar in form and intent: una giovane donna bamba e sciocca; sentiva dello scemo; donna mestola; donna zucca al vento, la quale era anzi che no un poco dolce di sale; madonna baderla; donna poco fila. This little collection looks like a merry game Boccaccio is playing with his knowledge of amusing colloquial phrases and perhaps it also serves to describe the vivacious mood of the teller of the tale, Pampinea, whose purpose it is to divert the company, who have just been touched to tears by the preceding story. In any case, Boccaccio is very fond of this sort of play with a variety of phrases drawn from the vigorous and imaginative language of the common people. Consider for instance the way in which (in novella 10 of the Sixth Day) Frate Cipolla's servant, Guccio, is characterised, partly directly and partly by his master. It is a striking example of Boccaccio's characteristic mixture of popular elements and subtle malice, ending in one of the most beautiful extended periods that he ever wrote (ma Guccio Imbratta il quale era, etc.). In it the stylistic level shifts from a most enchanting lyrical moment (più vago di stare in cucina che sopra i verdi rami l'usignolo) through the coarsest realism (grassa e grossa e piccola e mal fatta e con un paio di poppe che parevan due ceston da letame, etc.) to something approaching horror (non altramente che si gitta l'avoltoio alla carogna), yet all the parts form a whole by virtue of the author's malice which glints through everywhere.

Notes

1. Decameron, translated by John Payne (Macy Library Edition).