Some stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron attained fame less in the original, more in their later retelling. A good example is the tragic tale of Lisabetta related by Filomena on the fourth day, when it was the fifth about those whose love ended unhappily.

In 1818, the British poet John Keats (1795-1821) wrote his version, titled Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, which was published two years later, shortly after the poet’s untimely death at the age of just twenty-five, and it quickly became one of his most popular works. Here I will tell Boccaccio’s original, using his version of the names, being mindful that Keats called his leading lady Isabella rather than Boccaccio’s Lisabetta. Her lover’s name, common to both accounts, is Lorenzo.

Following the death of a rich merchant of Messina, his three sons inherited his riches, while their sister remained unmarried despite her beauty and grace. Lisabetta and Lorenzo, a Pisan who directed operations in one of the family’s trading establishments, fell in love with one another, and their relationship was consummated.

The couple tried to keep their affair secret, but one night one of her brothers saw her making her way to Lorenzo’s bedroom, and Lisabetta remained unaware of her discovery. Her brother was distressed, but decided to keep quiet, and to discuss it with his brothers next morning.

The following day, the brothers decided that they would also keep quiet until the opportunity arose to end their sister’s relationship. Some time later they pretended they were going to the country for pleasure, and took Lorenzo with them. When they reached an isolated location, they murdered Lorenzo and buried his body. They then told their sister that they had sent him away on a trading mission.

Lisabetta was anxious for her lover’s return, and persistently asked her brothers for news of him. Eventually, one of them rebuked her for this nagging, so she stopped mentioning him altogether, but each night kept repeating his name and pining for him. One night, having finally fallen asleep in tears, she saw him in a dream, in which he said that her brothers had murdered him, and revealed where his body was buried.

In her grief, Lisabetta obtained the permission of her brothers to go to the country for pleasure. Once she had located where she thought Lorenzo was buried, she quickly found his corpse, which remarkably showed no signs of decay. As she couldn’t move his whole body for more appropriate burial, she cut off his head and concealed it in a towel.

When she returned home, Lisabetta cried greatly over Lorenzo’s head, washing it with her tears, then wrapped it in cloth and put it in a large pot. She covered it with soil and in that planted some sprigs of basil. These she watered daily with her tears, as she sat constantly beside the pot in between bouts of crying over it. As a result, the basil grew strong and lush, and richly fragrant.

William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil from 1867 is intricately detailed, with several references to the story, such as the relief of a skull on the side of the pot, a red rose on a tray by Lisabetta’s left foot, and a silver watering can at the bottom right. Behind her is the image of a bedroom, possibly showing Lorenzo coming to her in a flashback to their affair.

Joseph Severn’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil from 1877 appears remarkably high in chroma, and shows Lisabetta fondly embracing the pot and crying over the basil. Severn had been a personal friend of John Keats, and painted this just a couple of years before his own death.

Edward Reginald Frampton’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil was probably painted towards the end of the nineteenth century, or possibly in the early twentieth. Lisabetta is kneeling before her pot of basil at an altar, with a crucifix behind.

Ricciardo Meacci’s watercolour of Isabella and the Pot of Basil from 1890 shows Lisabetta embracing her pot of basil, as her three brothers watch with growing anger at her behaviour.

Her brothers began to suspect something, so had the pot removed from her room. This deepened their sister’s grief, and she kept asking after the pot.

John Melhuish Strudwick’s Isabella from about 1886 shows Lisabetta staring in grief at the stand on which her pot of basil had stood. Through the window, two of her brothers are seen making off with the pot, and looking back at her.

The brothers examined its contents and discovered Lorenzo’s head. Scared that his murder might cause them problems, they reburied the head, wound up their business, and left Messina for Naples. Lisabetta’s grief only grew deeper, and destroyed her health completely. Still asking for her pot of basil, she finally cried herself to death. Although the brothers had done everything to keep these events secret, eventually they became widely known, and were celebrated in folk verse.

The first and still greatest depiction of Keats’ retelling is John Everett Millais’ Isabella (Lorenzo and Isabella) from 1848-49, completed before he was twenty, and one of the earliest examples of Pre-Raphaelite art. This is a composite of references to Keats’ poem and Boccaccio’s story, set at an imaginary family meal which the three brothers, Lisabetta and Lorenzo are taking together.

Lorenzo is sharing a blood orange with Lisabetta, white roses and passion flowers climbing from behind their heads. The dog, acting as a surrogate for Lorenzo, is being petted by Lisabetta, but one of her brothers aims a kick at it. Other symbols are shown of the plot to kill Lorenzo: a brother staring at a glass of red wine, spilt salt on the table, and a hawk pecking at a white feather. The pot of basil is already on the balcony, awaiting Lorenzo’s head. When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, it was accompanied by verses 1 and 21 of Keats’ poem.

The first story on the fourth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron was told by Fiammetta, and relates the tragedy of Ghismonda and her love for Guiscardo.

Ghismonda was the daughter of Prince Tancredi of Salerno, who was known for being a benevolent ruler, but in his later years became a possessive father. He refused to let her marry until she was older than was usual, and when she did, her husband died soon after. She returned to live with her doting father, who had no interest in seeing her married for a second time, so she decided to take a lover instead.

She fell in love with a young valet to her father named Guiscardo, and he fell in love with her. Ghismonda devised an ingenious way of passing him messages concealed inside a reed. They met in an old cavern underneath the palace: Ghismonda’s room had a long-disused door that opened into the cavern, and Guiscardo descended into it from a shaft outside the walls.

Before meeting in this cavern, Ghismonda dismissed all her ladies-in-waiting, telling them she wanted to sleep. She then locked herself in her room, opened the door to the cavern, and descended its staircase to meet her lover, who had roped down from the entrance to the shaft. The couple then spent much of the rest of the day making love in her room before Guiscardo departed.

One day when the couple had arranged to meet in this way, Prince Tancredi came looking for his daughter. Seeing her outside, he settled down in a corner of her room and fell asleep. She was unaware he was there, and proceeded with her lovemaking, during which her father awoke. He remained silent and was undiscovered, eventually climbing out of a window while the couple descended into the cavern to make their farewells.

Later that night, Guiscardo was arrested on the orders of the Prince, and confined to a room in the palace without Ghismonda’s knowledge. Tancredi went to his daughter’s room, where he told her of the dishonour she had brought upon herself. She showed no contrition, nor did she seek her father’s forgiveness, but told her father honestly of the love she shared with Guiscardo, of her youth, and amorous desires. She pleaded her lover’s virtues, and asked that she should bear the brunt of any punishment, rather than her lover.

Prince Tancredi decided to take revenge not on his daughter, but on her lover. He had two of his men strangle Guiscardo, then cut his heart out. The heart was placed inside a gold chalice, and presented to his daughter “to comfort her in the loss of her dearest possession, as she had comforted her father in the loss of his”.

Before she could be given this gruesome present, Ghismonda had called for poisonous herbs, which she turned into a highly toxic potion. When the servants delivered her the chalice, she removed its lid, saw her lover’s heart, and was given her father’s message. Ghismonda raised her lover’s heart to her lips and kissed it. She then thanked the servants for her father’s priceless gift to her, bade farewell to her lover’s heart, and cried profusely over it.

Francesco Bacchiacca’s early painting of Ghismonda with the Heart of Guiscardo from about 1525 shows the rather distant figure crying over the heart, with her apparently disinterested ladies-in-waiting around her. In the foreground is her father’s servant who brought the chalice.

Francesco Furini made at least two similar paintings of Ghismonda, here known by her alternative name of Sigismunda, crying profusely over the chalice. This version is thought to be from about 1620-30, and remains in Prato, Italy.

Thought to date from about 1640, this version known as Sigismunda with the Heart of Guiscardo is now in Birmingham, England. It had previously been attributed to Correggio, and was the inspiration for Hogarth’s much later painting shown below. It had only just been purchased at auction by Sir Thomas Sebright.

Interestingly, Furini’s painting of Mary Magdalene from about the same time is almost identical to the earlier version now in Prato, except that a chalice of myrrh had been substituted for that containing Guiscardo’s heart. All three works are notable for their dramatic chiaroscuro.

Mario Balassi’s Ghismonda with the Heart of Guiscardo from 1650 depicts Ghismonda being taken aback, although in Boccaccio’s account her response is strong and resolute despite the horrific cruelty of her father.

It is perhaps Bernardino Mei, in his Ghismunda from 1650-59, who captures her resolute response best of all, as she stands squeezing the heart in her hand, tears still on her face.

William Hogarth’s Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo from 1759 may come as something of a surprise. Hogarth seemed determined to prove that the ‘modern’ English painter could compete with the “old Italian masters” in handling such heroic narratives. This was one of his last commissions, for Sir Richard Grosvenor, in 1758. He studied Furini’s version (that now in Birmingham), which had been much admired, but when this was completed in 1759, Grosvenor rejected it.

Hogarth then exhibited it with seven other paintings at the Society of Artists in 1761. It was there savaged by the critics, who were apparently repelled by the conflict between the beauty of Sigismunda and the gruesome heart she is touching. Hogarth replaced it in the exhibition, and appears to have made changes to try to assuage its detractors. Unable to sell it or have it engraved for prints, the artist was forced to abandon it, and almost ceased painting for the remaining three years of his life.

Her ladies-in-waiting asked her why she was crying so, as they had not understood what had happened. Ghismonda then poured the deadly potion over Guiscardo’s heart, drank it, and lay down on her bed to await death. Her father was summoned, and Ghismonda asked him a final favour that she should be laid to rest beside Guiscardo. The Prince realised his cruelty and repented for it, ensuring that the two bodies were buried together in honour.

The stories told each day in Boccaccio’s Decameron follow a theme appointed by the ‘ruler’ of that day, as they decree when they are crowned with laurels at the end of the previous day’s storytelling. The theme chosen by the queen of the fifth day, Fiammetta, was the adventures of lovers who survived calamities or misfortunes and reached a state of happiness.

The eighth such story concerns the misfortunes of Nastagio degli Onesti, as told by Filomena. This appears to have been instantly successful, and by the early sixteenth century had been painted by both Botticelli and Ghirlandaio.

Nastagio degli Onesti was a young man from an old and noble family in Ravenna, who inherited a huge fortune, then fell in love with the daughter of a more noble family. His love for her wasn’t returned, though, and she was persistently cruel towards him. This caused the young Nastagio so much grief that he even contemplated suicide.

He continued to try to win her over, and in the course of that spent much of his inheritance. Friends and relatives feared for him and his future, and tried to persuade him to leave the city for a while. He was very reluctant, but finally travelled to Classe, three miles away, in May when the weather was fine.

Once there he wandered off into the local pine woods, thinking as he always did about his cruel love. As he walked in the wood, he heard the screams of a woman in distress. He then caught sight of her running naked towards him. In hot pursuit was a pair of large mastiff dogs, and behind them was a mounted knight brandishing a sword and threatening to kill her.

Nastagio took up a tree branch in her defence, but the knight ordered him by name to keep out, and let him and his dogs give the sinful woman what she deserved. Nastagio challenged the knight, who dismounted and introduced himself as Guido degli Anastagi. He then explained that he had fallen deeply in love with this woman many years ago, but she too had rejected him cruelly. As a result, Guido had killed himself, and was condemned to eternal punishment for that sin. The woman had died shortly afterwards, without repenting her cruelty, and she too was condemned to eternal punishment for her sin.

Their punishment consisted of Guido having to hunt her down in the woods, kill her using the same sword with which he had committed suicide, then cut her back open and remove her stone cold heart. That and her other organs he then has to feed to his dogs. After a short break, she is magically restored, and he has to resume hunting her as before.

Nastagio was horrified by this, stepped back, and watched the dead Guido kill the dead woman with his rapier, and go through the sequence of cutting out her heart and organs. A few moments later, after the ghostly dogs had eaten her organs, the dead woman jumped up and the hunt started all over again.

When he had recovered from the shock, Nastagio came up with a plan to deal with his own predicament. He summoned his friends and relatives, and agreed to stop trying to woo the woman that he loved on one condition, that she and her family should join him in the same place in the pine wood exactly one week later, for a magnificent breakfast banquet.

A week later all her family were present at the meal in the wood, and Nastagio carefully seated the woman he loved so she would get a grandstand view of the proceedings. No sooner had the last course been served, than they heard the dead woman’s screams, and she ran right in front of them.

Many of the guests tried to stop Guido from carrying out this punishment, so he explained to them what he had told Nastagio the week before. Eventually the ghostly couple rushed off again, and the guests talked avidly about what they had witnessed. But the person who was most affected by the spectacle was the cruel woman who Nastagio loved, who had perhaps already put herself in the position of the dead woman.

Nastagio’s plan paid off: the woman he loved soon sent him a servant to inform him that she would do anything he desired. She quickly consented to marriage, and they were wedded the following Sunday.

One perhaps unintended consequence of Nastagio’s breakfast demonstration was that, for some time to come, the women of Ravenna were so frightened of what could happen to them that they responded more favourably to the approaches of men.

The title page of this story in this illustrated manuscript copy of the Decameron from the fifteenth century features a small reminder of the grim human hunt scene at its head.

This gruesome story and ingenious reversal of conventional Christian values became popular and well-known through the fifteenth century, sufficient for it to be depicted in four tempera panels given on the occasion of the arranged marriage of Gianozzo Pucci and Lucretia Bini in 1483. The couple were particularly fortunate in that one of those who made the arrangement, and who had this gift made for them, was Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘the Magnificent’, who was also Botticelli’s patron at the time, and the ruler of the Florentine Republic.

The first panel shows the two figures of Nastagio, at the left, in the pine wood, with the naked woman running towards him, a mastiff sinking its teeth into her buttock. Behind them at the right is Guido, his sword ready to kill the woman when he catches her. In the distance is a coastal landscape intended to locate this near Ravenna, which is close to the Adriatic, although that’s idealised not representative.

Botticelli continues to tell the story using multiplex (‘continuous’) narrative in the second painting. The dead Guido has now caught the dead woman, killed her with his rapier, and with her lying on her face, he is cutting her back open to remove her cold heart. His dogs are already eating her organs at the right, and Nastagio is visibly distressed at the left.

Behind that composite scene is an earlier scene of Guido and his dogs still in pursuit of the woman, preceding the image of the first painting in the series.

In the third painting, Botticelli shows the breakfast banquet a week later, with the dead woman being attacked by Guido’s dogs, and Guido himself about to catch and kill her, in front of Nastagio’s guests.

Nastagio’s love is sitting at the table on the left, from which all the women have risen in distress at the sight, spilling their food in front of them.

The fourth and final panel shows Nastagio’s wedding, the bride and her women sitting to the left, and the men to the right, in formal symmetry. The groom is sat on the other side of the same table as the bride.

Botticelli’s series seems to have been celebrated at the time, and shortly afterwards Ghirlandaio, another Florentine master, was asked to make not copies, but paintings in the manner of Botticelli’s series. Two have survived, and are now both in the US.

Ghirlandaio’s first panel, now in the Brooklyn Museum, is based on Botticelli’s first, with the addition of an extra scene to its multiplex narrative. Up in the right, he adds the scene from Botticelli’s second panel, showing Guido cutting out the dead woman’s heart through her back.

Ghirlandaio’s second panel shows an almost identical breakfast banquet to that in Botticelli’s third panel. This is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I don’t know whether Ghirlandaio’s series extended to a third, completing the story with the marriage feast of Nastagio.

Boccaccio’s strange tale, twisted from source material by Dante, resulted in even more curious paintings. Today we might be only too happy to watch it in a horror movie, but seeing it come to life in a series of panels as a wedding gift? That’s surely typical of the late Middle Ages.

Many great literary works are compilations of shorter tales, set in a framing story. Among the best known are One Thousand and One Nights and Sanskrit epics including Mahabharata. Among the most enduring in post-classical Europe is Boccaccio’s Decameron, whose stories have also proved popular with painters. Over the next couple of months I’m going to summarise those that have been well depicted in this new series, and show those paintings.

Despite the number of scholars who have researched Giovanni Boccaccio’s life over the last seven hundred years, much of it remains vague. He was either born in Florence, or perhaps near the village of Certaldo to the south-west of the city. His father worked for the Bardi bank, but he is thought to have been illegitimate and his mother hasn’t been identified.

We do know that he was born on 16 June 1313, and while still a child his father married a woman from a rich family, then moved to Naples. At the time, that was a major cultural centre, and as a young man Boccaccio immersed himself in that. His father expected him to become a banker, and Giovanni started work as an apprentice in his father’s bank in the city.

Boccaccio had no interest in banking though, and persuaded his father to let him study canon (ecclesiastical) law at the city’s university. When he was in his twenties, his father introduced him to the Neapolitan court and cultural circles around Robert the Wise, King of Naples. Among Boccaccio’s most important influences at this time was the scholar Paolo da Perugia, who had amassed much information about classical myths. Boccaccio became a scholar, particularly of the classical world, a writer rather than an ecclesiastical lawyer, and his future started to crystallise when he wrote his first poetry.

His early works became sources for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (Troilus and Cressida), and the Knight’s Tale.

Boccaccio left Naples in 1341, as tensions were growing between its king and the city-state of Florence, and returned to live mainly in Florence, although he also spent time in Ravenna. He developed great admiration for the work of Dante Alighieri, who had died in Ravenna twenty years earlier, and the great poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304-1374), whom he regarded as his teacher.

Giorgio Vasari is now more famous for his biographies of the important painters of the Renaissance and earlier, but was also an accomplished artist himself. His tribute to some of the greatest writers of the period is Six Tuscan Poets from 1544. From left to right, I believe these to be Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), Guido Cavalcanti, Giovanni Boccaccio, Cino da Pistoia, and Guittone d’Arezzo.

William Bell Scott’s undated painting of Boccaccio’s Visit to Dante’s Daughter shows the writer paying indirect homage to his illustrious predecessor. Boccaccio wrote the first biography of Dante, at about the same time he was writing the Decameron.

During the 1340s Boccaccio appears to have been developing the idea of a book in which seven characters take it in turns to tell stories. When the Black Death struck Florence in 1348, killing Boccaccio’s stepmother, this provided him with its framing story. He was already building his collection of tales to form the bulk of the book, and it’s thought he started its writing shortly after the Black Death. What is more doubtful is whether Boccaccio was living in Florence when the epidemic struck. However, as it raged through the whole of Tuscany in that year, hardly sparing a village, it’s most unlikely that he didn’t observe its effects somewhere, perhaps in Ravenna.

In 1349, Boccaccio’s father died, leaving Giovanni as the head of the household. In spite of that, he pressed on and had largely completed the first version in 1352. He revised it in 1370-71, and ever since it has been widely read, translated into all major languages, and its stories have inspired many works of art.

Egide Charles Gustave Wappers painted Boccaccio Reading from the Decameron to Queen Johanna of Naples in 1849. Queen Joanna I of Naples (1328-1382) had a reputation that was more than controversial, but Boccaccio was a supporter, and wrote a complementary account in his collection of biographies of famous women, De Mulieribus Claris (On Famous Women).

This miniature by the Master of 1482 and Follower conflates Boccaccio, the Black Death in Florence, and the framing story of the Decameron: Giovanni Boccaccio and Florentines who have Fled from the Plague was painted in about 1485 on vellum, in what must have been one of its first illustrated editions.

The Decameron opens with a description of the horrific conditions and events that overwhelmed Florence when the Black Death struck, then takes us to a group of seven young women who are sheltering in one of its great churches. They decide to leave the city rather than waiting amid its rising pile of corpses, to spend some time in the country nearby. They take some servants and three young men to accompany them there.

Once settled in an abandoned mansion, the ten decide that one of the means they will use to pass their self-imposed exile is to tell one another stories. Over the next two weeks, each tells one story on every weekday, delivering a total of one hundred, hence the title of the book.

Raffaello Sorbi show the group of ten during one of the story-telling sessions in The Decameron from 1876, with the city of Florence in the distance.

Salvatore Postiglione’s undated, ornate and almost illustrative Scene of the Narration of the Decameron is unusual for omitting one of the seven young women, but links visually to their other musical and craft activities.

Relatively few of the hundred tales in the Decameron have been committed to paint. Some are little more than brief fables, or what used to be known as shaggy dog stories. Others are more lengthy novellas with intricate twisting plots. But many have been painted from the Renaissance until well into the twentieth century, and were particularly popular with the Pre-Raphaelites.

The tale of Griselda has cropped up in folk stories across Europe before it was told as the final tale (Day 10, Story 10) of the Decameron. It was then taken up by Chaucer in the Clerk’s Tale, and by Charles Perrault. Francesco Pesellino painted it in this Scene from the Life of the Griseldis from around 1450.

One of the most significant series of paintings of the Decameron is Sandro Botticelli’s Story of Nastagio Degli Onesti, of which this is the first. Boccaccio includes this horrific tale as the eighth story on Day 5, shown by Botticelli in four panels that were commissioned as a wedding gift for a couple whose marriage was partly arranged by Lorenzo the Magnificent (Lorenzo de’ Medici), ruler of the Florentine Republic in the late fifteenth century, and Botticelli’s patron.

One of the earliest and greatest examples of Pre-Raphaelite painting is John Everett Millais’ Isabella (Lorenzo and Isabella) from 1848-49. When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1849, it was accompanied by lines from John Keats’ poem Isabella or the Pot of Basil, referring to the story of the ill-fated love of Lisabetta for Lorenzo, the fifth told on Day 4.

Later in the nineteenth century, Marie Spartali Stillman painted The Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo (1889), showing a scene from the fifth story of Day Ten. This was also painted by John William Waterhouse in 1916-17.

Perhaps the most popular of all the stories in the Decameron with visual artists has been the romance of Cymon and Iphigenia, here shown in Frederic, Lord Leighton’s luscious and languid painting from 1884.

I hope that you will join me in looking at many more wonderful paintings exploring Boccaccio’s stories from the Decameron in the coming weeks.