Page 6 - The Decameon On 100 Etchings by Petru Russu - A Homage to Giovani Boccaccio

The Decameron While he was setting up his exhibition, an Italian pointed
out some similarities with Chinese art. Someone else found
analogies with the vivid chromatic of the popular Mexican
engravings. Nevertheless, the exoticism of Petru Rusu’s
images comes from a sort of poetic latitude, from a distance
that he assumes in front of the narration of the facts. It is
-at the most-the same exoticism used by Boccaccio when he
imagined Saladin traveling around the Christian world, around
Lombardy, to test the hospitality and the magnanimity of the
same people he wanted to fight.

There is an entire cycle of medieval legends about Saladin.
Recently, I have met an eminent art scholar, descendant of a
distinguished Crusader knight that had the fortune to benefit
from that magnanimity. He was captured by Saladin, who then
set him free, on the condition that he paid the ransom once
he had returned to his house. But when the knight returned
home, he didn’t find any money to pay the ransom. So, he
An Expressionist Reinterpretation of decided to go back to prison. Saladin was impressed by his
Boccaccio’s Decameron: Petru Rusu’s gesture, and set him free once again only on the condition
Visual Odyssey Through Medieval that he change his name to Saladin d’Anglure. This name still
Legend, Cultural Memory, and the exists after 800 years.
Mechanical Poetics of Modern Art

I make this example, because the exoticism of Petru Rusu
In Petru Russu’s engravings for Boccaccio’s Decameron, tells of a magnificent East. An East of admiration and wonder,
the twisted frenzy of the bodies arouses an impression of that has nothing to do with the tendency to indulge in
true release. It is a release that breaks limits, avoiding the detailed descriptions. It is this exoticism I am writing about.
difference between styles, social situations and historical- An exoticism that Rusu seems to bend into science fiction,
geographical sites. They are not “illustrations” confined populated by characters that look like ancient Egyptians, or
to a particular moment of the European history: although Chinese princes dressed with hundreds of jade stones, as
within the images there are some allusions to the fashion of the ones discovered by the archeologists. Boccaccio will not
that age, a sort of set-designing care, everything wrapped be angry for such interpretation. He himself-while he was
around a dance of vitality that doesn’t want to accept writing about Dante-used to wonder if his illustrious master
stylistic appearances. In the end, the sensation we have is a might have been angry up above. Boccaccio will not be angry,
dépaysement deriving from this attitude, not from a method. because he himself look a lot of freedom regarding the epic
A dépaysement that is not a metaphorical book learning matter he utilized. It was the freedom of a superior distance.
distance, but an aspiration for the totality that excludes Boccaccio was the first author capable of dominating the
pedantic philological discriminations.
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The Decameron