Life and creativity of Giovanni Bocaccio

Giovanni Bocaccio was born in Florence or Certaldo in 1313. The life of this renowned Italian humanist writer has been poorly studied. He is probably an illegitimate child of Bocacino, a prolific Italian merchant from Certaldo. At the age of 15, his father sent him to Naples to study at the same time as a lawyer and a merchant at the expense of the wealthy trade family Bardi . He is immediately conquered by the magic of the beautiful coastal city and gives up all the pleasures that the then Naples offers him. He managed to enter the local royal court, becoming a lover of the beautiful lady Maria d'Aquino, the daughter of King Robert. She is suffering painfully the separation with the beloved Maria d'Aquino and forced to return to Florence , where she finally settled after his father's death. It enters the political life of Florence, with a number of important political and diplomatic missions. He established a correspondence with Petraka, who encouraged him to study the culture of Antiquity. He died on 21 December 1375.

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As a teenager, Giovanni Bocaccio wrote the biography of his genius predecessor, titled "Dante's Life". Renowned researcher at the Italian Renaissance, Burckhardt, states that "many biographical collections and lives of famous men and women have emerged at the beginning of the 14th century:" The first significant independent achievement is probably "Dante's Life" by Bocaccio , he continues. Slightly written, rich in wills, this work still conveys the living feeling of the extraordinary nature of Dante ... Later, under the influence of his beloved, Bocaccio abandons his teaching and is totally attuned to literary creative work. His first story is titled "Philocolo" ("II Filocolo"). Later, he became known as the author of the sentimental novel "Elegy for Madonna Fiameta" (1343), which today is valued by historians of Italian literature as the first psychological novel of the Early Renaissance. Most of Boccaccio's work is written in Italian. It includes lyrical and epic works ("Philostrato" and "Tezeida"), allegorical poetry (Amorosa Visione) and the novel "Ameto". In his poem "The Vampire's Vision," the poet Bocacho lends himself to the latest late medieval allegory in allegories. He is tempted to put his verses in the field of ancient mythology and history.

In his novel, "Ameto", Bocaccio describes the gifting and elevating power of love in a way that we would hardly expect from such a grounded, reflective young author. There he depicted a blonde and a chestnut woman approximately as one painter would have written a hundred years later. Because even here his desire to prove his high education outstrips the art and generally does not comply with it. "The chestnut woman finds some features that we would call classical, notes Burckhardt. The author describes in detail the the large, broad head of the woman. In this verbal portrait there is a premonition of the cult of the great shapes that will displace the ideal of the radiating grace of female beauty: the eyebrows are joined in a gracefully curved line, the nose is milder, the breast is wider and bigger, the hands are moderately long . In these traits, a new concept of female beauty is embodied, which unconsciously approaches the ideal of female beauty of late classical antiquity. In her novel "Elegy for the Madonna of Fiameta, Bocaccio recreates in detail a painful human drama. His descriptions have already matured the observations, although their exposure is quite overwhelmed and follows an uneven rhythm. In this work, in some places, the author's self-effacement joy seems to prevail in the eloquence of phrases, filled with impressive poetic twists. Jacob Burckhardt is inclined to accept this novel as the female parallel of the Dante collection "The New Life "/or at least aroused by the urge to come from it.