Visualizing Boccaccio: Studies on Illustrations of The Decameron from Giotto to Pasolini.

Jill M. Ricketts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. x + 214 pp. $60. ISBN: 0-521-49600-4.

Even a publishing house as prestigious as Cambridge University Press has sometimes made mistakes. Their Short History of Italy, recycled in 1990 from a 1963 update of a World War II original, appeared in its final droopy incarnation with a cover decorated by an aerial photo of the Florentine cathedral complex, eye-catching for the warm red of the city's tile roofs and for something rather more unexpected: it was reversed. Fortunately, Cambridge soon corrected the mistake, replacing that worn out battle horse with a frisky new colt, Christopher Duggan's Concise History of Italy (1994).

Visualizing Boccaccio: Studies on Illustrations of The Decameron from Giotto to Pasolini likewise catches our attention with its cover, seductive at first but wrong on a second take. How can Giotto, who died in 1337, be among illustrators of The Decameron, written after the plague of 1348? And what about the strange note that identifies the splendid fifteenth-century miniature of Ghismonda reproduced on the jacket? It reads nonsensically, "Viennese Cod 2561 (Eug 144) (detail). Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris." Why, in this English book, is part of the information given in abbreviated Italian? How, anyway, can a Paris library be credited for a "Cod(ice)" housed at the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna? How? It can be if the picture has been pirated and if the caption has been plaigirized. Concern only deepens as we open the book and discover no explanation in acknowledgments or introduction for the apparent relationship between Ricketts' title, Visualizing Boccaccio, and that of Vittore Brancas Boccaccio visualizzato, a widely publicized international team project due out as a book from Einaudi in 1998 that has resulted in a number of articles since 1985, when it was announced in Studi sul Boccaccio.

As Rickets applies the term, "visualizing" means both seeing and picture-making. Her aim is to offer a "liberating" feminist interpretation of Boccaccio's Decameron by looking outside it in "different media representations" to recover "subversive" verbal meanings. Given this platform, it is surprising that no visualizations at all figure in chapter 1, on the Griselda story, which "lays bare the ideological prisons of all previous critics," starting with Petrarch. Chapter 2, on Ghismonda (Dec. 4.1), explores the "voyeuristic resonance of the scopic economy" of Tancred's court by "tapping into the deconstructive potential inherent in (four) miniatures" from fifteenth-century manuscripts. Chapter 3 uses Botticelli's spalliere of the Nastagio novella (Dec. 5.8) "to recuperate elements in the tale suppressed by the masculine bias"; in chapter 4, she compares Pasolini in his role as Giotto with "Boccaccio's metaliterary project in the Decameron"; and finally, true to her "emancipatory semiotic," Ricketts contends in chapter 5 that Pasolini's film Decameron is "a fantasmatic negotiation of his subjective homosexuality."

Ricketts's urges as a freedom fighter unleash critical chimeras. She finds, for example, a "watchman in a tower" in an illustration of Ghismonda's story from Ms. 5070, Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal (a caption assigns it to the Bibliotheque Nationale, also thanked for the photo). What the image, in fact, depicts is Ghismonda's lover Guiscardo entering the palace through the secret passageway, which the artist represents as a wide chimney over a chamber where the couple lie in bed having "maravigliosa festa" (translated by Ricketts as a "wonderful party"). Guiscardo's arrival here bears little resemblance to Boccaccio's description, not because the artist is cleverly calling attention to "our own voyeurism" as Ricketts surmises, but for the simple reason that he had not read the Decameron. Traces of brief directions to him in his native Flemish tongue still survive in this princely French version of the text. If Ricketts had read Branca's essay in Boccaccio visualizzato of 1985 (listed in her bibliography), she would have learned these facts, and she would have known that the miniaturist, the Master of Guillebert dc Vets, was going by a visual model, the first fully illustrated Decameron painted for his patron's father by the Master of the Citi des Dames (Vatican Ms. Palat. 1989). Not only is Ricketts ignorant of essential published information on the manuscript as well as its whereabouts; her wild misreading implies unawareness of a fundamental convention in the art she examines, namely, simultaneous reappearances of the same figure within a single frame to signify narrative sequentiality.

Visualizing Boccaccio is skewed helter-skelter to the latest in academic fashion at the expense of a disciplined research core: Ricketts takes the Decameron "Author" literally (he is a fictional character inspired by Ovid, as Janet Smarr, Robert Hollander, and I inter alia have shown); she believes Boccaccio rejected it in old age (the autograph of the Decameron dates from the last years of his life, as Branca and Ricci demonstrated in 1962); she does not know the commentary tradition on Nastagio (others have linked the story to Dante's Inferno); she overlooks key feminist criticism (Christina Olsen's 1992 essay on Botticelli's panels); she lacks philological grounding, proposing that "Classe," Ravenna's ancient port, recalls "chiasso" or chaos (it is related to the Latin for "fleet" and suggests, on the contrary, order). Instead, in a triumph of Trendian, we hear about such things as "ideological writing/rewriting," the notion of "hailing," Lacanian "theory of suture," Kristeva's "chromatic jouissance," Freud's "cynosural oedipal phase," and Sedgwick's views on "maternaphobic and homophobic" culture. Ricketts is perhaps less to blame for the embarrassing problems in her book than the system that trained her and the press that published her. This bizarre, error-strewn submission received neither the benefits of responsible peer review nor reliable copy editing. Is even Cambridge disappearing in the dust of a stampede to modish theory and marketability?

VICTORIA KIRKHAM University of Pennsylvania