The Comparative Literature Program (The Italian Specialization) and The Medieval Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center (CUNY) are pleased to invite you to the upcoming lecture by Franziska Meier, titled Boccaccio’s Response to Gerione’s Colors. A Reading of Decameron VI 10.

The lecture discusses Geryon, the monster of fraud in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and its brief, although precise afterlife in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Geryon’s torso features bright colors that surprise at this point of Hell because there is no light left to make them shine. The presentation investigates why Dante chose colors as a distinctive trait of fraud, and the extent to which they are related to a specific meta-poetical reflection on the use of language and of colors as rhetorical features. The  lecture, then, analyzes Decameron’s last novella of the Sixth Day, where Boccaccio explicitly quotes Dante’s verses about Geryon’s colors, and offers a new reading of Friar Cipolla’s preaching performance.

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