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PEtRU RUSSU

Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden
www.artaddiction.net

DEcAmERoN | SEX iN thE miDLE AGE in 100 etchings interpretations
There are very few books in the history of literature that can be included
amongst those that have stigmatised and censured the concept of relating,
or, to put it more bluntly, the concept of “telling stories”. And there are
very, very few that have underlined the crucial role of the tale in terms of
the production of socio-cultural notions, themes and values such that the
majority actually shares these.
One of these books is without question the Decameron. Its one hundred
tales, spread out over ten days and shared by ten young people fleeing from
the plague in Florence in about the mid 14th century, the Decameron deftly
combines the most subtle and carnival-like fun with humanistic messages
dense with a multiplicity of meanings. In short, the Decameron is an authentic
tribute to human ingenuity. An epic masterpiece that tells the tales of a
nascent merchant society, of a new, emerging middle class that is already
highly dynamic and yet already in search of pleasure and entertainment just
as it suddenly finds its very existence threatened with extinction.
Like the Divine Comedy, the Decameron can be read on different levels:
Boccaccio’s book, depending on how you decide to delve into it, might seem
to assume the characteristics of a manual on behavioural models based on
transgression, or a situationist compendium steeped in moral precepts. In
either case, it is designed for an a-temporal reader and is, ever and always,
completely devoid of prejudice and conditioning.
If on first reading it gives the impression of being a scandalously outrageous
book, on closer analysis it reveals itself to be pure ethical meditation. It
is almost as if nothing should or could be excluded from the Decameron.
It is a veritable narrative continuum, harmoniously ironic and perfectly
balanced in its peculiar structure: a brilliantly assembled set of tales, whose
subject is always and almost exclusively the end result of the imagination
of a great poet, a literary genius whose ideas about what he wanted were
limpidly clear – and that is, to give life to a narrative phenomenon that would
constitute a break and ”contradiction” in reference to contemporary cultural
phenomenologies, freeing the tale (as literary trope) from the excessively
moralistic backwaters of dogmas and diktats. Thus Boccaccio made the
readers (or listeners) themselves, and not the narrator, fully responsible for
what they were reading, both in positive and negative terms.
whether the work is interpreted as an encyclopaedia dedicated to the
dawn of modern society, as a wide-ranging glossary of the pleasures and  DECAMERoN | sEVENTh DAy /TENTh TALE 1985 AqUA TINTA /AqUA FORTE HAND
contradictions of life, or even as a summation of the precepts of late- COLOURED ENgRAvINgS ON ‘LETEA’ PAPER (ROMANIA) 11.5X7.5 IN. | 20X30 CM.
mediaeval culture, the Decameron is above all unique, able to deal with  DECAMERoN | EIghTh DAy /fIRsT TALE 1985 AqUA TINTA /AqUA FORTE HAND COLOURED
the universal repertory of situations, events and dilemmas that are always ENgRAvINgS ON ‘LETEA’ PAPER (ROMANIA) 11.5X7.5 IN. | 20X30 CM.
present in humankind. A book that would be perfect were it necessary to
carry out experiments or research into a pedagogical communication aiming
to renew vital dialogue between a long-distant past and our own present.

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