In the conclusion to the Decameron Boccaccio writes that there will be some hypocritical lady who will no doubt take exception to his use of certain little everyday words, like “hole” and “peg,” “mortar and pestle,” and “sausage.” But surely, he goes on, he should be allowed the same freedom as the painter. No one objects if the painter makes St. George or St. Michael strike the dragon with a “sword” or a “spear,” and “wherever he pleases.” Indeed, the painter “makes Christ male and Eve female, and the feet of Him himself, who wished to die for the salvation of humankind upon the cross, he attaches to the cross sometimes with one nail and sometimes with two.”

This passage has always been troubling to Boccaccio’s editors, especially the phrase “Christ male and Eve female.” Counter-Reformation editors in fact emended “Christ” to “Adam” in order to establish the more suitable counterpart to Eve, and above all to expunge the direct reference to Christ’s masculinity, his sexuality. The manuscripts of the Decameron do not support them. What is more, as Charles Singleton has shown, one of these manuscripts, in Berlin, is a holograph by Boccaccio himself, copied out by him in old age, and in that manuscript the words “Cristo maschio ed Eva femina” appear.

Now, what are we to make of Boccaccio’s statement that painters freely made the male Christ? Does he really mean to say that they depicted a Christ who is male in the same