Page 10 - Petru Russo | The 100 Days of Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

Petru Russo’s Engravings for The through all manner of trials, and she endured them all with the utmost patience
and constancy.” Boccaccio’s stories often contain a moral lesson and carry a
Boccaccio’s Decameron warning of the consequences of immoral behavior. Boccaccio also often uses

the stories to satirize the church and its teachings.
Middle European Expressionism and The Decameron:

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Timeless Anthology of 100 In Petru Russo’s engravings for Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” the twisted frenzy
Stories, Brought to Life through Petru Russo’s 100 of the bodies arouses an impression of true release. It is a release that breaks
Fragmented Bodie Etchings. limits, avoiding the difference between styles, social situations, and historical-
geographical sites. They are not “illustrations” confined to a particular moment
of European history. Although within the images there are some allusions to the
fashion of that age, a sort of set-designing care, everything is wrapped around
IIt’s Florence, Italy, in 1348, and the Black Death has ravaged the city. Not far
a dance of vitality that doesn’t want to accept stylistic appearances. In the end,
away, in a nearby villa, sits a group of ten people. Rather than wallow in the
the sensation we have is a dépaysement deriving from this attitude, not from a
misery of the situation, they decide to distract themselves by telling stories.
method. A dépaysement that is not a metaphorical book-learning distance, but
Each day, one person takes a turn telling a tale, and the other nine must follow
an aspiration for totality that excludes pedantic philological discriminations.
with stories of their own.

Petru Russo offers one of the acute variants of local neo-expressionism,
In the end, the tales are gathered together to form “Il Decamerone,” Giovanni
primitivizing in the sense of a surprising synthesis between, we would say, early
Boccaccio’s masterpiece. “Il Decamerone” is an expansive collection of stories,
Romanesque reverberations and extra-European exoticisms, also resorting to
full of wit and humor, that demonstrates the resilience and courage of the
the representational solution of the fragmented body (body in pieces) in the
human spirit in the face of adversity. It is a timeless classic that has inspired
engravings-illustrations for “The Decameron.”
generations of readers with its captivating storytelling and characters.
“The Decameron,” written by Giovanni Boccaccio and illustrated by Petru Russo,
While setting up his etchings, an art collector pointed out some similarities
is an entertaining series of one hundred stories accompanied by one hundred
with Chinese art. Someone else found analogies with the vivid chromaticism
and one etchings. It is widely considered one of the earliest examples of the
of popular Mexican engravings. Nevertheless, the exoticism of Petru Russo’s
Italian Renaissance. The work is set in the 14th century, during the era of the
images comes from a sort of poetic latitude, from a distance he assumes in
Black Death, and tells the story of seven young women and three young men
front of the narration of the facts. It is, at most, the same exoticism used by
who escape the city and retreat to a villa in the countryside, where they spend
Boccaccio when he imagined Saladin traveling around the Christian world,
ten days telling each other stories while waiting for the plague to pass.
around Lombardy, to test the hospitality and the magnanimity of the same
people he wanted to fight.
Over the course of these ten days, each member of the group takes turns
telling a story. The tales they tell range from bawdy humor to romance to
An admiration and wonder that has nothing to do with the tendency to indulge
moral allegories, and reflect the values and culture of medieval Italy. Through
in detailed descriptions. It is this exoticism. An exoticism that Russo seems
these stories, Boccaccio explores themes such as love, religion, death, and the
to bend into science fiction, populated by characters that look like ancient
corrupt nature of society and the Church.
Egyptians or Chinese princes dressed in hundreds of jade stones, like the
ones discovered by archaeologists. Boccaccio will not be angry at such an
The stories range from the funny to the tragic and from the moral to the interpretation. He himself, while writing about Dante, used to wonder if his
immoral. Boccaccio’s writing style is highly entertaining, as he often uses illustrious master might have been angry up above.
contemporary language and makes frequent references to the people and
Boccaccio will not be angry because he himself took a lot of freedom regarding
customs of his time. For example, in the story of Patient Griselda, Boccaccio
the epic matter he utilized. It was the freedom of a superior distance. Boccaccio
writes that “to better test her patience and constancy, her husband put her
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