Decameron
- The decameron day 4 story 9
- Ghismonda with the heart of guiscardo story
- Ghismonda with the heart of guiscardo
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LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Decameron, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fiammetta thinks it’s cruel to be asked to tell tales of unhappy lovers, especially since the company left Florence to avoid their woes. Nevertheless, she will fulfil Filostrato’s command with the story of Tancredi and his daughter (later identified as Ghismonda). Tancredi loves Ghismonda so much that he takes longer than usual to find her a husband, and when she’s quickly widowed, he doesn’t bother to find her a new husband at all but keeps her home with himself.
Day 4 begins with a complaint about the theme and a suggestion that Filostrato’s desire to hear stories of misery is, in some important way, as unbalanced as the chaos the brigata left behind in Florence. Nevertheless, the company is made up of self-controlled young men and women, and she will follow the command of her (temporary) sovereign to the best of her ability. Her tale begins with a harsh reminder of the second-class and objectified position of women, who are
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This is part of a series on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The Decameron is having a comeback. The fourteenth-century Italian masterpiece is “on Everyone’s Coronavirus Reading List” and “shows us how to survive coronavirus.”[1] Decameron-inspired book clubs and collections of Coronavirus tales are popping up all over the Internet.[2] Commentators have astutely recognized the similarities between Giovanni Boccaccio’s description of plague-stricken Italy and our new normal as COVID-19 wreaks havoc across the globe.[3]
Reading these recent pieces, one might believe that the Decameron is mostly about the Black Death of 1348, but the plague takes up a relatively tiny fraction of the work. After the Introduction, Boccaccio’s brigata—the group of seven young women and three young men who narrate the Decameron’s tales—escapes ravaged Florence. Safely in the countryside, they do not ruminate on the conditions of the plague. They imagine life beyond it. Although Boccaccio laments the dissolution of social bonds in his Introduction, the hundred stories rec
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Sigismunda mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo
Painting by William Hogarth
| Sigismunda mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo | |
|---|---|
| Artist | William Hogarth |
| Year | 1759 |
| Medium | Oil-on-canvas |
| Dimensions | 100.4 cm × 126.5 cm (39.5 in × 49.8 in) |
| Location | Tate Gallery, London |
Sigismunda mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo, fully titled Sigismunda mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo, her murder'd Husband,[1] is an oil painting by British artist William Hogarth. Finished in 1759, it was the principal piece of the eight works he displayed at the Exhibition of 1761 at Spring Gardens. It was the final and most ambitious of his attempts to secure for himself a reputation as a history painter. It depicts a dramatic moment in one of the novelle in Boccaccio's Decameron. While Hogarth had expected this work to be acclaimed as a masterpiece of dramatic painting, the work was met with criticism and ridicule. In the catalogue of the exhibition of Hogarth's works at the Tate Gallery in 2007, the criticism was de
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