Editor’s Note

Abstract

In 1901, the British artist and critic Roger Fry painted a desco da sposalizio—a marriage tray, in honor of the recent wedding of Bernard Berenson andMary Costelloe (fig. 1). He chose to celebrate their matrimony, performed in a civil ceremony in Florence and then in the small chapel on the grounds of I Tatti in late December 1900, using an image drawn from day 3 of Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which the brigata of seven women and three men dally in a walled garden that seems made for love. Furnished with a fountain and beautiful flowers, the setting is so perfect as to seem a veritable “paradiso,” as the group opines. This is where they will spend their Sunday telling stories, based on the theme declared by the day’s queen, Neifile, who asks her companions to talk about those who have been graced by Fortune’s wheel and acquired something they had lost or long desired. Fry correspondingly depicts the fountain in the garden’s midst, offering us a view of nearby Florence in the distance and—possibly—the river Mensola as it ambles along behind the garden wall. While as Caroline Elam observes, “there is no attempt at exact topography,” the Mensola as a backdrop makes sense, given its proximity to one of the brigata’s purported gathering places in Poggio Gherardo and to Boccaccio’s own house, as well as to Villa I Tatti, which the Berensons had been renting for several months. Fry alludes in his inscription (“Anno MDCCCCI”) not to Boccaccio whose setting he so clearly imitates but to the Berensons themselves, who “a guisa degli antichi villeggianti della riva Mensolana sempre si dilettanto con i [sic] amici loro”—“scherzando e favellando delle sciocchezze dell’umana [sic] genere” (like those of long ago who vacationed in villas, are always delighting themselves with their friends, joking and telling stories about the foolishness of the human race). Given the opening essay by Andrew Hui called “Things in the Decameron,” the image seemed an appropriate choice for this issue’s cover. While there may not be many “things” in the desco da sposalizio save for flowers, fruit-laden trees, and the imposing fountain and villa wall, Fry’s painting—influenced by both deschi from the quattrocento and the pre-Raphaelite movement of the late nineteenth century—