Giovanni Boccaccio from the cycle Famous People

Around 1450, in a country villa just outside Florence, a wealthy magistrate named Filippo Carducci had his reception hall painted with nine great figures from history. It was the first time a private home had been decorated this way, with famous men and women instead of saints. And choosing Boccaccio for the wall has a neat twist to it. The whole idea of collecting illustrious lives came largely from him. A century earlier he had written two catalogues, one on the fates of famous men and one on famous women, and patrons and painters mined them for exactly this kind of gallery. So the man who taught Florence how to celebrate its heroes stands here as one of them, a book in his hand, grouped with Dante and Petrarch as the third of the city's great writers. The frescoes were later whitewashed and forgotten, then rediscovered in 1847 and peeled from the wall to be moved, which is how a villa decoration ended up in the Uffizi.