Buffalmacco

Buffalmacco is a painter, companion to Bruno, and one of the Decameron’s recurring architects of practical jokes. His schemes are built less on solitary cunning than on partnership: he and Bruno read their targets’ weaknesses, coordinate their performances, and let their victims’ own assumptions complete the deception. Most often their target is Calandrino, whose credulity makes him both the butt of a joke and its unwitting engine; in another episode, Buffalmacco helps turn Master Simone’s vanity into a humiliating public ordeal.

Identity and Introduction

Buffalmacco is introduced as one of two painters who commonly accompany Calandrino. Bruno and Buffalmacco are described as merry but shrewd, and they keep company with Calandrino partly because his odd habits and simplicity amuse them. Their friendship with him is therefore companionable in appearance but unequal in practice: the painters understand the schemes in which Calandrino believes, while he mistakes their performance for reliable counsel.

That asymmetry is already apparent in the search for the heliotrope. Maso del Saggio begins the deception by talking of marvelous stones in the church of San Giovanni, but Buffalmacco and Bruno take over when Calandrino becomes convinced that a stone can make its bearer invisible. Buffalmacco is not the originator of this particular fraud; his characteristic contribution is to recognize how easily its premise can be turned into a shared performance.

The Heliotrope and Calandrino’s Credulity

When Calandrino proposes gathering black stones from the Mugnone, Bruno argues that the search should be made on a Sunday morning, before the sun dries the stones and when fewer people will be about. Buffalmacco endorses the suggestion. The delay gives the two painters time to agree on their roles, while Calandrino impatiently awaits the appointed morning and treats the false account of the stone’s powers as privileged knowledge.

At daybreak the three leave Florence by the San Gallo Gate and search the riverbed. Calandrino rushes ahead, collecting black stones until he has filled his bosom, tucked up his gown to make a lap, and filled his mantle as well. Buffalmacco and Bruno gather stones too, but their attention is on Calandrino’s belief rather than on finding any magical object. As dinner approaches, they pretend to wonder where he has gone and suggest that he has left them behind after making fools of them by claiming there is a heliotrope in the river.

Calandrino hears them and draws the conclusion they intend: since they cannot see him, he must have found the stone and become invisible. He says nothing, turns homeward, and keeps carrying his load. Buffalmacco sustains the illusion by making the return journey part of the joke. Bruno strikes Calandrino’s shins with a stone, and Buffalmacco then hits him in the small of the back, each blow concealed within their talk as if Calandrino were absent. Their victim feels the pain but remains silent, taking it as further proof that he cannot be seen.

The trick is allowed to continue through the San Gallo Gate, where customs officers who have been forewarned pretend not to notice him. Calandrino reaches his home near the Canto alla Macina with his stones, but his wife, Mistress Tessa, sees him at the stairhead and scolds him for coming home late. Her recognition collapses the supposed invisibility at the moment he has completed his journey. The story’s framing identifies his response as a rage in which he beats her; the joke’s consequences thus fall not only on the credulous searcher but also on the person who interrupts his delusion.

Schemes with Bruno and Master Simone

Buffalmacco’s practical joking extends beyond Calandrino. When the physician Master Simone returns from Bologna, he is richer in inherited property than in learning, yet presents himself in scarlet robes and a large miniver hood. Curious about Bruno and Buffalmacco’s cheerful life despite their poverty, he befriends Bruno, imagining that their good spirits must come from some hidden source of profit. Bruno recognizes that the physician is a fool and enjoys his company; the painters, in turn, accept his invitations and become regular guests at his dinners, wines, and capons.

The physician hopes to join a company and asks how to gain admission. Bruno and Buffalmacco exploit his eagerness by describing a frightening initiation: Master Simone must wait at night on a tomb outside Santa Maria Novella until a black, horned beast arrives, then mount it without calling on God or the saints. Buffalmacco supplies the beast himself. Disguised in an inside-out black fur pelisse and a horned mask, he capers and howls in the piazza while Bruno watches.

Master Simone, trembling, eventually climbs down from the tomb and mounts Buffalmacco, whispering a prayer despite the warning. Buffalmacco carries him on all fours toward Santa Maria della Scala and the Nunnery of Ripole, then pitches him headfirst into a dyke used by local farmers as a cesspit. While Master Simone struggles through the filth and loses his bonnet, Buffalmacco rejoins Bruno at Allhallows Fields, where they laugh over the result and watch from a distance. The supposed passage into an exclusive company becomes a literal fall into a ditch: Buffalmacco gives the physician’s ambition a grotesquely physical answer.

Repeated Deceptions of Calandrino

Buffalmacco also participates in a scheme arising from Calandrino’s little farm. After Calandrino refuses Bruno’s suggestion that they sell the pig he has killed and spend the proceeds together, Bruno, Buffalmacco, and a neighboring priest decide to steal it. Their plan depends on Calandrino’s familiar weakness: the priest will pay at a tavern so that Calandrino, who readily drinks when others pay, becomes drunk. The painters then find the farmhouse door left open and carry the pig away to the priest’s house. Here Buffalmacco’s role is part of a coordinated theft, not merely a verbal tease; Calandrino’s confidence in his companions and his appetite make the plan possible.

In another episode, Buffalmacco joins Bruno and Nello in making Calandrino believe that he is seriously ill. Nello first tells him that his face looks changed; Buffalmacco reinforces the alarm by saying that he appears half dead. When Bruno joins them, the repetition persuades Calandrino that he is feverish, although he feels no actual illness. They take him home, direct him to send his urine to Master Simone, and bring the physician to examine him.

Master Simone announces that Calandrino is pregnant. Calandrino immediately blames Mistress Tessa, complaining that she has insisted on being on top, while she blushes and leaves the room without replying. Buffalmacco, Bruno, and Nello can scarcely contain their laughter. The physician then offers a supposed cure requiring three pairs of fat capons and five silver crowns for medicines. Calandrino, who has inherited two hundred crowns and had been considering buying land, agrees to the expense rather than face childbirth. Buffalmacco’s part in the conspiracy follows the established pattern: several companions confirm one another’s false account until Calandrino treats it as fact and pays to escape the imagined danger.

Narrative Role and Comic Method

The stories repeatedly place Buffalmacco beside Bruno, but their tricks are not identical in scale or setting. In the riverbed, they convert an invented property of a stone into a journey Calandrino undertakes himself; on the road home, stones become both his supposed proof of invisibility and the means of striking him. At the farm, a real pig is stolen through drink and an open door. With Master Simone, Buffalmacco becomes the fabricated supernatural creature that carries a would-be initiate to a cesspit. In the pregnancy deception, he helps transform ordinary remarks about Calandrino’s appearance into a false diagnosis and a costly remedy.

Across these episodes, Buffalmacco’s craft lies in staging agreement. A single deceiver might be doubted, but Bruno, Buffalmacco, Nello, a priest, or a physician can make the invented explanation seem socially confirmed. The victims supply the final step themselves: Calandrino interprets blows as evidence that he is invisible, accepts a pregnancy because his companions say so, and fears exclusion from the company Master Simone longs to join. Buffalmacco’s comedy therefore depends on a sharp divide between what the conspirators know and what their target believes. His recurring role is not simply to trick the gullible, but to arrange the scene so that their own reasoning carries the trick to its consequence.