Scene from Boccaccio

Monticelli's Scene from Boccaccio from around 1870 draws on the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio's fourteenth-century collection of tales, which had been a popular literary source for painters since the Renaissance and experienced renewed interest during the Romantic period. The Decameron's framework — aristocratic Florentines retreating to a garden villa during the Black Death to tell stories — offered artists richly costumed outdoor gatherings as subjects, combining the pleasures of the fête galante with the authority of literary reference. For Monticelli, such subjects were vehicles for colour rather than illustration, and his interpretation would have prioritised the visual drama of the scene over faithful narration. By this period the Walker Art Gallery panel represents his confident mastery of the outdoor figural scene, with loosely painted costume and setting serving the larger goal of chromatic orchestration. The literary title lent a respectable cultural weight to what were essentially studies in colour and light.

The panel shows Monticelli's characteristic layering of opaque and semi-transparent passages, with costumes rendered in warm carmines and creams against a cooler landscape ground. Figures are arranged in a loose frieze across the middle distance, faces indicated rather than described.