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Updated: June 8, 2025
It is, however, just in this artistic purpose of the setting that one of the chief interests of the Ameto lies; for if in the mingling of verse and prose it is the forerunner of the Arcadia, in the linking together of a series of isolated stories it anticipates Boccaccio's own Decameron.
When the last has ended a sudden brightness shines around and 'there descended with wondrous noise a column of pure flame, even such as by night went before the Israelitish people in the desert places, Out of the brightness cornes the voice of Venus: Ameto, though half blinded by the heavenly effulgence, sees a new joy and beauty shine upon the faces of the nymphs, and understands that the flame-shrouded presence is that, not of the wanton mater cupidinum, but of the goddess of divine fire who comes to reveal to him the mysteries of love.
As for his minor works in the vernacular, the earlier of them shew that he had not as yet wrought himself free from the conventionalism which the polite literature of Italy inherited from the Sicilians. It is therefore inevitable that the twentieth century should find the Filocopo, Ameto, and Amorosa Visione tedious reading.
The following year, 1546, saw the appearance in type of two eclogues, Erbusto and Filena, by a certain Giovanni Agostino Cazza or Caccia, the founder of a pastoral academy at Novara, for whose diversion the pieces were presumably composed. The first of these, Erbusto, is in three acts, and terza rima. The elderly Erbusto is the rival of Ameto in the love of a shepherdess named Flora.
With the exception, indeed, of one or two in Boccaccio's Ameto, it is doubtful whether any vernacular eclogues had appeared at the time. The character of Tirsi belongs to rustic tradition, and must be an experiment contemporary with, if not prior to, Lorenzo's Nencia. The portion before the canzone is in terza rima; that after it, like the prologue, in octaves.
The Ameto is one of Boccaccio's early compositions, written about 1341, after his return from Naples, but before he had gained his later mastery of language.
Again, there is everywhere visible the same artificiality of style which characterizes the Ameto, but purged of its more extravagant elements and less affected and conceited than it became in the works of Lyly and Sidney. Like the Ameto, lastly, but unlike its Spanish and English successors, the Arcadia is purely pastoral, free from any chivalric admixture.
Ameto may be taken as typical of humanity, tamed of its savage nature by love, and through the service of the virtues led to the knowledge of the divine essence.
But what really gives the Ameto its importance in the history of pastoral literature is the manner in which, undisturbed by its religions and allegorical machinery, it introduces us to a purely sensual and pagan paradise, in which love with all its pains and raptures reigns supreme.
And in the 'Ameto' he has described the ennobling and transfiguring power of love in a manner which would hardly be expected from the author of the 'Decameron. In the 'Fiammetta' we have another great and minutely-painted picture of the human soul, full of the keenest observation, though executed with anything but uniform power, and in parts marred by the passion for high-sounding language and by an unlucky mixture of mythological allusions and learned quotations.
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