Master Simone da Villa

Master Simone da Villa is a newly returned physician whose inherited wealth and imposing professional dress conceal a lack of learning and judgment. In the eighth day’s tale, his hunger for admission to a fantastical company makes him the willing subject of Bruno and Buffalmacco’s elaborate prank: he waits in a cemetery for a supposed supernatural messenger, rides what is actually Buffalmacco in disguise, and is dumped into a ditch full of filth. His humiliation does not teach him to distrust the painters; it leaves him more attentive to them, lest they disclose his shame.

Identity and Introduction

Master Simone has returned from Bologna calling himself a doctor of medicine. He is richer in inherited goods than in learning, yet he dresses in scarlet, the color of a physician’s robe, and wears a large miniver hood. His appearance makes a fine show, but the story pointedly separates the signs of professional status from the substance of expertise. The narrator notes that Master Simone’s knowledge seems no greater than what would be needed to treat children for scald-head.

He has taken a house in Florence and is the neighbor of the painters Bruno and Buffalmacco, who are often seen together. Master Simone studies passersby and asks others about their occupations, as if collecting knowledge of people’s habits might furnish the medicines he gives his patients. But his curiosity does not amount to discernment. Hearing that the painters are poor yet cheerful, he cannot imagine that their lightheartedness might be ordinary, and instead decides they must be secretly profiting from some unknown source.

The Painters’ Invention

Master Simone wants to discover how Bruno and Buffalmacco live so merrily. After inviting Bruno to dinner several times, he confides his wonder and asks for the secret. Bruno answers with a fiction: the painters, he claims, go roving, taking whatever they want without harm because they return it after using it. Master Simone believes this account and becomes intensely curious about the supposed company. What he takes for a confidential disclosure is an opportunity for Bruno to exploit his vanity and credulity.

Bruno deepens the deception by presenting secrecy as a grave danger. He tells Master Simone that even learning about the group could bring ruin, then makes the physician’s supposed friendship the reason to confide in him. The invented company grows more enticing through a series of playful boasts and obscure names. Bruno claims to have visited its society and to have exchanged one celebrated woman for another; when Master Simone asks what the unfamiliar term means, Bruno gives him another fabricated explanation. The physician’s inability to recognize the mockery becomes part of the joke.

The deception also develops through hospitality. Master Simone feeds Bruno morning and evening and grows so attached to his company that he seems unable to live without the painter. Bruno repays this welcome with ridiculous decorations: a picture of Lent in the hall, an Agnus Dei at the entrance to the physician’s chamber, a chamber pot above the street door, and a battle of rats and cats in a small gallery. Master Simone admires the battle scene. The paintings make his home a visible record of how readily he mistakes the absurd for distinction.

The Invitation and the Night-time Trap

At last, while Master Simone holds a light for Bruno as he paints the rats and cats, he asks to be admitted to the company. He offers to bring a beautiful serving-wench as proof of his usefulness and advertises his fine appearance, his scarlet gown, his medical title, and his ability to sing. His ambitions are at once social and sensual: membership promises fellowship and prestige, but he also expects access to the woman he says he desires.

Buffalmacco supplies the terms of initiation. Master Simone must wait at the first sleep on a raised tomb outside Santa Maria Novella, wearing one of his finest gowns. A black, horned beast will appear; he must show no fear, invoke neither God nor the saints, and climb onto its back. The painters embellish the prospect with the promise that a countess will make him a Knight of the Bath. Master Simone accepts the story and assures them that cold will not keep him away, boasting that he sometimes rises at night wearing only his fur gown over his doublet.

When evening comes, he secretly takes out his fine gown, makes an excuse to his wife, and goes to the appointed place. Buffalmacco has disguised himself in a black fur pelisse and a horned mask with a devil’s face. He capers and howls in the piazza, while Bruno watches. Master Simone is terrified: his hair stands on end and he trembles, but his desire to see the promised marvels overcomes his fear. He climbs down from the tomb and mounts the apparent beast, though he quietly says a prayer despite the instruction not to invoke God or the saints.

Buffalmacco carries him on all fours toward Santa Maria della Scala and the Nunnery of Ripole. Near the ditches used to empty privies and manure the neighboring fields, Buffalmacco seizes Master Simone by the leg, jerks him from his back, and throws him headfirst into one. The supposed passage into a secret society ends not in a grand reception but in a physical, degrading fall.

Humiliation and Aftermath

Master Simone struggles repeatedly to climb out, falls back, and swallows some of the filth before finally escaping. He is soiled from head to foot and leaves his bonnet behind. Unable to find another way to clean himself, he wipes himself with his hands and returns home. The scene reduces the status he had carefully displayed: the scarlet gown and professional dignity cannot protect him from the literal consequences of believing a fabricated tale.

His wife, seeing his condition, assumes he has been out courting another woman in order to show off his fine gown. She rebukes him for going after other men’s women while having a wife at home, and continues tormenting him as he washes himself through the night. Her accusation is not the truth of what happened, but it gives the prank a further domestic consequence: Master Simone cannot explain his disgrace without exposing his foolish errand.

The next morning, Bruno and Buffalmacco arrive with livid blotches painted on their bodies beneath their clothes. They pretend the company has beaten them because Master Simone broke the rules by calling on God and the saints. He tries to explain that he was thrown into a ditch, but Buffalmacco insists that he disobeyed and claims the painters themselves suffered for it. Faced with their staged injuries and the threat that he has imperiled their standing in the company, Master Simone asks their pardon and begs them not to dishonor him by revealing what happened.

His response completes the reversal. Rather than rebuke the painters or expose their trick, he becomes even more hospitable, entertaining them with banquets and other favors to keep them quiet. The tale’s closing judgment presents the episode as a lesson in sense for someone who has learned little of it at Bologna. Master Simone’s title, clothes, and inherited wealth have not made him wise; his final conduct shows that humiliation alone has not made him more discerning. His fear of public shame has simply tightened his dependence on the men who deceived him.