Tuscan Storytellers of the 14th Century

In 1860 Tuscany voted itself out of grand-ducal rule and into the kingdom that Victor Emmanuel already ruled from Turin. In the same year Cabianca showed this canvas at the Promotrice, the Florentine artists' exhibiting society, and the future king of Italy bought it. He was crowned the following March.

What he bought was a scene from 500 years earlier: men and women in medieval dress in a walled enclosure, with lutes, telling stories. The title names them as the storytellers of 14th-century Tuscany, the world of Boccaccio's Decameron, and the state catalogue entry notes how the light is cut into clear flat sections, the method the young painters at the Caffè Michelangiolo were arguing over in exactly that year.

The engraver Angelo Tricca made a print after it for the society's members, and Cabianca went on to paint a second, larger version of the same subject.