Heliotropia - An online journal of research to Boccaccio scholars Volume 4 Volume 4 (2007) Issue 1 Issue 1-2 Article 5 2007 Monuments More Enduring than Bronze: Boccaccio and Paper Inscriptions Jonathan Usher University of Edinburgh Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/heliotropia Recommended Citation Usher, Jonathan (2007) "Monuments More Enduring than Bronze: Boccaccio and Paper Inscriptions," Heliotropia - An online journal of research to Boccaccio scholars: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 5. Available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/heliotropia/vol4/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Heliotropia - An online journal of research to Boccaccio scholars by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Usher: Monuments More Enduring than Bronze: Boccaccio and Paper Inscript Heliotropia 4.1 (2007) http://www.heliotropia.org Monuments More Enduring than Bronze: Boccaccio and Paper Inscriptions n 20 October 1374, in almost the last year of his life, Boccaccio fi- nally received in Certaldo the sad news from Francescuolo da Bros- Osano, Petrarch’s son-in-law, that the great poet had breathed his last in his retreat at Arqua, in mid-July. We do not have Francesco’s letter, which presumably touched also upon a tidy bequest of florins to purchase for his old friend a warm garment for nocturnal study and research: in- somnia was a shared affliction.1 Boccaccio’s delayed reply of 3 November, offering his condolences to Francescuolo, far from being a spontaneous outpouring of grief, is a carefully composed piece of consolatory rhetoric, a genre famously essayed in a long letter of 1361 to the exiled Pino de’ Rossi.2 First Boccaccio treats Petrarch’s elevation to a better life, rhetorically balancing the deceased’s tranquil joy in heaven with the letter-writer’s own continued travails in this earthly life, beset as he is by (graphically de- scribed) illness.