Angels

Angels in these episodes are less a cast of acting supernatural characters than a powerful religious presence that people invoke, imagine, or exploit. Angel Gabriel is the most prominent: Fra Alberto invents a visitation to seduce Lisetta da Ca' Quirino, and the supposed heavenly lover becomes the means by which the friar’s fraud is eventually exposed. Elsewhere, angels appear in a sheltered young man’s image of beauty and in Ferondo’s invented report of the afterlife. The stories repeatedly leave a distinction between angelic authority and what people claim in its name.

Images of Angels and First Impressions

When Filippo brings his eighteen-year-old son to Florence for the first time, the young man encounters a city full of unfamiliar buildings and asks his father what he sees. Filippo answers his questions, but when they meet young women returning from a wedding, he warns his son to look down and calls them green geese rather than women. The son immediately asks his father to obtain one of them. His response overturns Filippo’s attempt to direct his attention: although raised in isolation and taught about painted angels, the young man finds the women more beautiful than the angels he has seen in pictures.

The comparison places angels within a child’s inherited visual vocabulary, but also emphasizes the force of immediate human attraction. The women are not presented as angels; rather, the image of painted angels is the measure Filippo’s son uses to explain what he sees. His father’s euphemism cannot contain either his curiosity or his desire, and Filippo recognizes that nature has proved stronger than his judgment in bringing the young man to the city.

Angel Gabriel as a Claimed Visitor

Fra Alberto turns the name of Angel Gabriel into an instrument of deception. After Lisetta da Ca' Quirino has boasted of her beauty, Fra Alberto approaches her and begs forgiveness for having disparaged her charms. He claims that a handsome youth with a cudgel appeared to him in a bright light, beat him, and identified himself as Angel Gabriel, who loved Lisetta above all things save God. In Fra Alberto’s account, the angel demanded that the friar obtain her pardon under threat of another beating.

Lisetta accepts this story as true. Fra Alberto then extends the supposed message: Angel Gabriel, he says, has often come to spend the night with her but feared to frighten her, and now intends to visit in human form. Lisetta welcomes the prospect and agrees that he may come whenever he chooses, asking only that he not frighten her. Fra Alberto adds a second deception to the first, claiming that the angel will remove his soul to Paradise and enter his body while he stays with her. The promise of a heavenly visitor thus disguises an ordinary human arrangement: Lisetta is to leave her door open, and Fra Alberto is to enter.

The friar sustains the fiction through visits in angel-form. Lisetta later tells a gossip that Angel Gabriel loves her and comes to lie with her, even claiming that he is a better lover than her husband. Her boast makes private deception public knowledge. The episode’s comic reversal depends on the gap between Lisetta’s confidence in angelic favor and the material circumstances of Fra Alberto’s affair: the angel’s name supplies the disguise, but the friar’s conduct supplies the truth.

Exposure and the Failure of the Disguise

When the story reaches its public conclusion, Fra Alberto is presented as a wild man, his body smeared with honey and flies and gadflies troubling him. At a raised place, he is displayed before a crowd drawn by an announcement promising to show them Angel Gabriel, who supposedly descends at night to comfort Venetian ladies. The reveal is not an angelic manifestation but the removal of Fra Alberto’s mask. The crowd recognizes him, denounces him, and pelts him with filth; his fellow friars eventually take him away amid the public outcry. The account says that he was believed to have died in prison after a wretched life.

The exposure reverses the fraud’s central image. Fra Alberto had represented himself as the human vessel of an angel, supposedly lending his body to a visitor from Paradise; in the public spectacle, he is instead displayed as a disgraced man in a degrading disguise. Angel Gabriel never appears as an independent actor in the episode. The supposed visitation, punishment, and permission to visit Lisetta all come to the reader through Fra Alberto’s lies or Lisetta’s credulous repetition.

Angelic Revelation and Human Invention

A different kind of angelic claim appears when Ferondo returns from his supposed death. After emerging from the tomb, he thanks the abbot and attributes his deliverance from purgatory to the prayers of the abbot, Saint Benedict, and his wife. He then tells the people around him that, before his return to life, a revelation came through an angel. Ferondo recounts elaborate stories about the souls of their dead relatives and the affairs of purgatory, but these accounts are inventions he makes up himself.

The episode therefore uses an angelic message not as confirmation of what the afterlife is like, but as part of a story Ferondo tells after being deceived about his own condition. The account preserves the distinction between what Ferondo believes and what the narrative discloses: the claim of revelation belongs to his fabricated reports, not to an angel witnessed by the reader. Alongside Fra Alberto’s false appearance as Angel Gabriel, it shows how readily the language of heavenly authority can be attached to human performance. Yet the stories do not collapse angels into fraud; they show that the characters’ claims are not proof of angelic action.