Word: boccaccio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sentiment−in this context a stunning banality−tips Tryon's hand. He is belaboring a tradition that goes back at least as far as Boccaccio and John Lydgate's 15th century monstrosity The Fall of Princes−26,000 lines of bad poetry on the miseries that beset rulers. Something in human nature cannot resist being told that the richest, most powerful and most beautiful are also the most miserable. The plain fact that this is often not true has never weakened the formula's appeal, and Tryon plays it for whatever it is worth...
...Hesdin, is permeated by the Italian trecento-the Madonna stately and subtle as a virgin by Simone Martini. But the greatest impact of Italy was on the artist who was also the greatest of the Berry circle: the Boucicaut Master. An illumination of the Garden of Eden, with Boccaccio sitting reading outside the wall, is full of Italianate elements, from the proportion and drawing of the naked Adam and Eve to the handling of perspective. Yet it is wholly original, and in this exquisite image of paradise, with its angels' wings and apples shining in the lucid...
DECAMERON Pier Paolo Pasolini, an avowed Marxist who makes pallid films of Christianity (The Gospel According to St. Matthew; Theorem), has taken on more than he can eschew. Using ten of Boccaccio's tales, Pasolini twits the church by showing lascivious nuns, self-mocking ghosts, corrupt priests and finally the trials of the painter Giotto, played by Pasolini himself. Giotto was a cornerstone of Renaissance painting; Pasolini plays him as an interior decorator. Boccaccio was famous for his ribaldry; Pasolini is notorious for his vapidity. To adapt the Decameron successfully, a film maker must come to his senses...
...trouble, though, was that Shakespeare, drawing on an episode in Boccaccio's Decameron. foisted on us a plot that is at once preposterous and poorly constructed. To which we must add that his heroine, Helena, lacks motivation, and his supposed hero. Bertram, lacks all semblance of virtue...