Serie von vier Gemälden zu Boccaccio's »Decameron«, »Gastmahl des Nastagio degli Onesti«, Szene: Dritte Episode

A banquet in the woods turns to chaos as a hunted woman and her ghostly pursuer burst through the tables. Nastagio planned it: he wants the girl he loves to see this, and change her heart.

The story behind the painting

The tale of Nastagio degli Onesti is the eighth story of the fifth day of Boccaccio's Decameron, written between 1348 and 1351, a day devoted to loves that begin unhappily and end well. This third panel, tempera on wood dated 1483, is about 83 by 142 cm according to Wikipedia and 84 by 142 cm according to Wikidata. Nastagio has learned that the infernal hunt in the pine wood near Ravenna repeats every Friday. So he invites his friends, Paolo Traversari, his wife, his daughter and their relatives to a banquet on that very spot. He hopes that the woman he loves, seeing the horrible spectacle of the endless punishment of two damned souls, will change her mind and accept him.

What to look for

The setting is the same as before, forest in front, water behind, a fortified town on the left and mountains on the right, but some trees have been cut down to make room for the table, as the stumps in the foreground show. On the fence around the banquet hang the coats of arms of the Pucci, the Medici and the Pucci-Bini, framed by wreaths. In the middle of the table the hunted woman suddenly appears, bitten in the thighs by a black dog and a white dog, followed by the knight in a golden breastplate, his sword raised. The women on the left leap up and overturn the table with all its food, while Nastagio, his back to us, tries to calm them. A musician raises his drums at the dogs; another has dropped his lute on the table.

Meaning and intent

The men at the centre show less fear, and on the far right, near the tents, other figures seem to ignore the scene while Nastagio, appearing a second time, explains what is happening. Showing two successive moments in one picture is a medieval way of storytelling that strengthens the narrative. The source calls the tale essentially pagan. The careful rendering of tableware and furniture gives the panel a particular historical interest. The colours are bright, the space is harmonious, and the drama is matched by slender, graceful figures, in an atmosphere mixing fable and reality.

Legacy

The panel belongs to a series of four, commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent as a wedding gift for Giannozzo Pucci and Lucrezia Bini, probably for a bed head or a cassone; both families' coats of arms appear in the scenes. The four panels stayed in the Pucci palace in Florence until they were sold in 1868. They then passed through several collections; in 1929 Francisco de Asís Cambó bought three from the heirs of Joseph Spiridon and in 1941 gave them to the Prado. The fourth, the wedding banquet, was lost from view for centuries and reappeared in Florence in April 2004 at a Botticelli and Filippino Lippi exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi; according to this source it may never have left the Pucci palace. Critics agree that Botticelli conceived all four scenes, but believe the execution was partly given to assistants, especially Bartolomeo di Giovanni for the first three and Jacopo del Sellaio for the last.