Boccaccio - Decamerone - 2000

Bound volume with a slipcase: The Decameron and Its Time—the Tre-Quattrocento in a marvelous synthesis of art and literature, of words and images.

For the first time in a luxury edition, together with critical, annotated, and illustrated content, curated by Vittore Branca, known worldwide as the most authoritative scholar of Boccaccio, the edition presents not only the text of the narrative masterwork of the new Europe, the Decameron, but also the visual interpretation—miniaturist, graphic, and pictorial—with which its author himself wished to accompany it, later followed by the greatest artists of his age and the early Renaissance. Alongside the critical text, annotated and presented by Branca with a suggestive introduction, are reproduced in full—and with the most refined technique—the thirty color drawings by Boccaccio himself in his autograph manuscript and in that of a friend; the 115 watercolors by five Giotto-style masters in the code written in 1427 by Lodovico Ceffini; the 100 miniatures for the Duke of Berry executed in the early 1400s by the famous Maître de la Cité des Dames and his collaborators; the 104 woodcuts from the 1492 incunabulum De Gregori, probably from Carpaccio’s workshop. Beside these illustrations are reproduced the masterpieces inspired by the Decameron by the most acclaimed masters of cassoni and great artists such as Botticelli, Leonardo, Carpaccio, Pesellino, and others. Completing the volume are images of ambience drawn from the great painting cycles of the Tre-Quattrocento: thus a Decameron immersed in its time. To narrate with words and to narrate with images are thus presented for the first time—and studied in their complementarity by Branca—in the masterpiece of medieval European narrative, still exemplarily present in today’s storytelling and in the taste of the contemporary reader.