Genealogia Deorum Gentilium
Genealogia deorum gentilium, known in English as On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles, is a mythography or encyclopedic compilation of the tangled family relationships of the classical pantheons of Ancient Greece and Rome, written in Latin prose from 1360 onwards by the Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio.
Giovanni Boccaccio
Genealogia deorum gentilium, 1532
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. Born in the town of Certaldo, he became so well known as a writer that he was sometimes simply known as "the Certaldese" and one of the most important figures in the European literary panorama of the fourteenth century. Some scholars define him as the greatest European prose writer of his time, a versatile writer who amalgamated different literary trends and genres, making them converge in original works, thanks to a creative activity exercised under the banner of experimentalism.
Portrait by Raffaello Morghen, circa 1822
16th-century portrait of Boccaccio
Portrait by Andrea del Castagno, c. 1450
1845 statue of Boccaccio by Fantacchiotti in Uffizi Gallery