Visualizing Boccaccio

In Boccaccio's studies little effort has been made to use the wealth of visual representations of the Decameron as a means of shedding light on the tales. In this project, I take a feminist position and use literary critical, psychoanalytic and film theories to investigate various visual and verbal versions of the Decameron. I explore the extent to which the narrative is perceived as serving to repress or contain the image, and the extent to which the image may elude or subvert the narrative.In the first chapter I revisit the tale of "patient" Griselda and shift the critical focus away from Griselda's victimization/hagiography to explore the instability that characterizes Gualtieri's subject position. In the second chapter, I question the hierarchical relationship between word and image in several Franco-Flemish illuminations of Dec. IV,1 and provide a different gloss on the power and love relations in the father-daughter-lover triangle, challenging certain endorsements Boccaccio's rhetoric extends. In the third chapter, I discuss Botticelli's spalliere series of Boccaccio's tale of Nastagio. The discrepancies which come to light via the juxtaposition of the two texts allow me to reconstruct and interrogate the premise of female guilt in the story. In the fourth chapter I explore the status of fantasy, imagination and play in the figure of the artist and his work in Pasolini's and Boccaccio's versions of the Decameron. In the final chapter, I explore the homosexual sensibilities in Pasolini's Decameron. I contend that Pasolini's Decameron represents a fantasmatic negotiation of the director's homosexuality an eroticism which is intimately informed by the homophobic and heterosexist culture in which it developed. I argue that the homosexual aesthetic in the film works against the narrative's impulse towards coherence in ways that both indicate the homosexual investment in the film and sublimate its literal expression.The goal of these readings is to use the additional critical insight afforded by the juxtaposition of verbal and visual art to expose the tensions generated by sexual difference that motivate privilege in order to investigate the possibilities for changing the power relations associated with that privilege.