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Painting Those Stories: Boccaccio’s Decameron
12 January 2022 - 16 March 2022
Wednesdays 10:45 - 12:45
£63.00 – £520.00
Coffee, tea and biscuits are included on arrival and during half-time break
Description
The Decameron’s Big Idea is to create an endless pretext for people to tell each other tales (true or false), not just to pass the time but also to outdo one other in narrative brilliance. Boccaccio’s biography reads like one of the tales: he might have been born in Florence, or in rural Tuscany at Certaldo, or in Paris to a French noblewoman, from whom he was snatched by his Florentine banker father, or was he? Chaucer lapped up Boccaccio. So did Shakespeare. And Keats. And painters and illustrators a-plenty, whose canvases and illustrations will be screened to bring Boccaccio’s stories to exciting non-verbal life head to head with his narratives throughout each session.
“I loved it – more from Graham please. He is a most unusual and stimulating lecturer with an exceptionally broad range of reference and refreshing fearlessness in making links”
Course Outline
12 Jan 2022 – (Boccaccio’s Introduction to The Decameron sets the scene) Dreamed up in a Lockdown: From Florence to Fiesole
Eye-witness or eyewash, the frame is beautifully convincing: ten young Florentines, seven women and three men, fearful of the plague raging in Florence, meet in Santa Maria Novella, decide to head for the hills, and stay in villas in and around Fiesole. They take it in turns to be the storyteller and tell a story a day each for 10 days. A Del Castagno, Vasari, Wappers, F Perellón, Sabatelli, Postiglione, Chagall, T Crivelli, F Podesti, Waterhouse, Monticelli, Dughetti, Bacci, A Di Bonaiuto.
19 Jan 2022 – (from Days One and Two – featuring especially I.4 and II.4) The Monk, The Abbot and their ‘Visitor”, & The Merchant Turned Pirate
Day One is declared a ‘Free’ day of tales on any subject: hence I. 4, about smuggling a ‘girl’ into ‘college’, and how to outwit your Superior. Day Two’s topic – happiness unexpected after misfortune – brings a tale (II.4) of piracy as a short-term career move for an Amalfi businessman. Chagall, Dalì, C Romiti, C Perellón, Steele Savage, Lessi, Malakov, Chalon, Rockwell Kent.
26 Jan 2022 – (from Days Two and Three – including II.5 and 9, and III.1 and 10) Coming up Roses, Art of Survival, Play-dumb Masetto, Put The Devil in Hell
More joy against the odds: setbacks in threes and a jackpot for Andreuccio; Bernabò endures a scam, bankruptcy, loses his wife, is reunited, makes his fortune; Day Three’s theme – reach your goal or find what you’ve lost – has a young gardener get lucky in a convent garden; and sexual fraud co-opts the devil. D H Lawrence, Dalì, Savage, Kent, Perellón, N Riabova, C Romiti, Shakespeare.
2 Feb 2022 – (from Day Four – featuring Introductory story and IV.1, 2 and 9) Brother Philippe’s ‘Geese’, Ghismonda & Guiscardo, The ‘Angel Gabriel’
A goose story with no geese opens Day Four’s theme of love ending unhappily. Be sure of the perils parents unleash who meddle in their offspring’s mate choice; be aware that impersonating the Angel Gabriel can lead to tears; and how self-defenestration may be the only way out. Boucher, Lancret, B Mei, van der Werff, Furini, Balassi, Hogarth, Il Bachiaca, Dalì, Perellón, Chagall.
9 Feb 2022 – (from Day Four, highlighting IV.5) Isabella & The Pot of Basil
More appalling family interference turns love into tragedy in John Keats’s 1818 poem ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’, which stays close to Boccaccio’s tale, outstanding among the 100, of a 14th century ‘honour killing’ and how a woman’s grief can generate ingenious mourning. Holman Hunt, Waterhouse, Manton, Severn, Earles, Millais, Strudwick, Frampton, Alexander, Nowell, Romiti, Keats.
16 Feb 2022 – (Day Five, featuring V.1, and also V.3) Cimon & Efigeneia, Pietro & Agnolella
Day Five celebrates lovers navigating disasters and winning through to happiness. Grown-up Babes in the Wood Pietro and Agnolella flee bandits, get separately lost in a forest, rescued by locals and reunited in a castle. V.1 is a tour-de-force of love, imprisonment, abduction and miracle. Botticelli, di Giovanni, Leighton, Rubens, Millais, Palma Il Vecchio, Matham, Reynolds, B West, Perellón
23 Feb 2022 – (Day Five, centering on V. 8) The Tale of Nastagio Degli Onesti
Happiness seems inconceivable at first in Tale Eight, the lure of which so caught Botticelli’s imagination that he painted it in four dramatically beautiful episodes: a haunting vision of hunt, kill and instant revival in a forest inspires young Nastagio to a new strategy of wooing his once-cruel beloved. Botticelli, Davide Ghirlandaio, G F Watts, 15th century MS, H Fuseli, Rockwell Kent, Prinsep.
2 Mar 2022 – (Day Six, including VI.2, 9 and 10; and Day Seven, featuring VII.2 and 9) A Baker Socrates; The Lover in The Barrel; Lydia, Pyrrhus & The Pear-Tree
The gift of the gab and a quick wit pay handsome dividends in these tales of give-as-good-as-you-get, two can play at that game, or just be wily and win. Damned cheek has its come-uppance. Hide in a barrel and make a virtue of it. Blame your husband’s eyesight for what he thought he saw. Dalì, Chagall, Fra Angelico, di Niccolo, A & E Balbusso, Trifon, Daniloff, Savage, Cranach the Elder.
9 Mar 2022 – (Days Eight and Nine, featuring VIII. 3, 6, 7 and IX. 2, 3) Calandrino and Co.; Spying at Night; Isambetta; The Pregnant Man
Day Eight is about men and women alike playing tricks on one another. Prospecting for gold is one thing, but there are even bigger fools. How to steal your own pig and be proved guilty. Day Nine proves an abbess a hypocrite about ‘having men in’, and the ‘pig-stealer is ‘cured’ of pregnancy. Briggs, A Giannini, Steele Savage, Chagall, W Klemke, Castagnola, Buffalmacco, Kent, Disertori.
16 Mar 2022 – (Day Ten, featuring X.5, 9 and 10) The Enchanted Garden; The Drama of Patient Griselda
Day Ten honours those who are generous out of love. Wanting a garden out of season needs magic, but how do you pay the magician? And in the most famous tale of them all, an absolute bastard subjects his wife to unimaginable trials and she, staggeringly, endures. Stothard, Stillman, Waterhouse; Master of the Griselda Legend, Pesellino, A di Giovanni Toscani, Il Pontormo, Cope, Byam Shaw.