[99] The description of the nymph Lia in the Ameto (Op. Volg. xv. 30-33) carries Boccaccio's manner into tedious prolixity.
[100] Boccaccio was a great painter of female beauty and idyllic landscape; but he had not the pictorial faculty in a wider sense. The frescoes of the Amorosa Visione, when compared with Poliziano's descriptions in La Giostra, are but meager notes of form. Possibly the progress of the arts from Giotto to Benozzo Gozzoli and Botticelli may explain this picturesque inferiority of the elder poet; but in reading Boccaccio we feel that the defect lay not so much in his artistic faculty as in the limitation of his sympathy to certain kinds of beauty.
[101] Dante (De Vulg. Eloq. ii. 2) observed that while there were three subjects of great poetry—War, Love, Morality—no modern had chosen the first of these themes. Boccaccio in the last Canto of the Teseide seems to allude to this:
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Poichè le muse nude cominciaro Nel cospetto degli uomini ad andare, Già fur di quelli che le esercitaro Con bello stile in onesto parlare, Ed altri in amoroso le operaro; Ma tu, o libro, primo a lor cantare Di Marte fai gli affanni sostenuti, Nel volgar Lazio mai più non veduti. |
[102] How far Boccaccio actually created the tale can be questioned. In the dedication to Fiammetta (Op. Volg. ix. 3), he says he found a very ancient version of his story, and translated it into rhyme and the latino volgare for the first time. Again, in the exordium to the first Book (ib. p. 10), he calls it:
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una storia antica Tanto negli anni riposta e nascosa Che latino autor non par ne dica Per quel ch'i' senta in libro alcuna cosa. |
We might perhaps conjecture that he had discovered the legend in a Byzantine MS.
[103] Carducci, "Cantilene, etc.," Op. cit. pp. 168, 170, 171, 173.
[104] Op. cit. p. 160.