Bruno

Bruno, a merry and shrewd painter, makes a comic art of turning Calandrino’s simplicity into opportunity. Across several tales, he moves between accomplice, planner, and improviser: he helps persuade Calandrino that a stone can make him invisible, steals his pig and stages a fraudulent test, exploits Master Simone da Villa’s vanity, and fabricates a talisman to encourage Calandrino’s pursuit of Niccolosa. His schemes are not isolated pranks but variations on a pattern: Bruno reads another person’s weakness, constructs a convincing performance around it, and draws money, gifts, or amusement from the resulting credulity.

Identity and Comic Position

Bruno is one of two painters with whom Calandrino spends much of his time; the other is Buffalmacco. Both are described as merry men who are nevertheless well-advised and shrewd. They keep company with Calandrino because his habits and simplicity repeatedly divert them. The contrast between the painters is central to Bruno’s role: Calandrino takes appearances at face value, while Bruno recognizes how easily appearances can be arranged to mislead him.

Bruno’s ingenuity is social as much as verbal. He understands how to recruit collaborators, stage agreement, and give a deception the appearance of independent confirmation. Buffalmacco is his closest partner in the pranks on Calandrino, but Bruno also works with Nello, Filippo, Niccolosa, and a friendly priest when a scheme calls for more participants. His practical intelligence serves amusement and gain rather than any stated larger purpose; the stories repeatedly show him converting Calandrino’s trust into a shared joke at Calandrino’s expense.

The Heliotrope Deception

In the story of the heliotrope, Maso del Saggio first tempts Calandrino with descriptions of wonderful stones and the fabulous land of Bengodi. Bruno and Buffalmacco enter the search as Calandrino’s companions. Bruno does not originate Maso’s initial lie, but he helps turn it into an extended trick. When Calandrino proposes gathering black stones from the Mugnone River where Calandrino searches for the heliotrope stone, Bruno appears to consider the plan seriously, then argues that the search should take place on a Sunday morning, when fewer people will be about and the stones will be easier to distinguish before the sun dries them.

The delay gives Bruno and Buffalmacco time to agree on their performance. At dawn on the chosen Sunday, the three leave Florence by the San Gallo Gate and search the riverbed. Calandrino eagerly gathers black stones, first filling his clothing and then making a load of his mantle. When the others pretend to wonder aloud where he has gone and suggest that he must have gone home, Calandrino concludes that he has found the heliotrope and become invisible. Bruno and Buffalmacco let him keep that belief while striking him with stones as they walk back, presenting each blow as though they expect Calandrino not to be there.

Their performance continues at the gate, where the officers have been forewarned to act as if they cannot see him. Calandrino reaches home carrying his stones, but Mistress Tessa sees him and rebukes him for returning late. The story’s account identifies the consequence: exposed to his wife’s gaze, Calandrino flies into a rage and beats her. Bruno’s part in this episode depends on sustaining Calandrino’s false interpretation through coordinated gestures, staged talk, and help from the gate officers; the supposed invisible stone turns an ordinary collection of stones into evidence for a delusion that the conspirators themselves control.

Theft, Ordeals, and False Diagnoses

Bruno and Buffalmacco’s practical greed becomes explicit in the pig episode. Calandrino owns a small farm near Florence, received as his wife’s dowry, and ordinarily goes there with her to kill and salt the family’s annual pig. When Mistress Tessa is unwell, Calandrino goes alone. He refuses Bruno’s proposal that they sell the animal and spend the money together, insisting that his wife would not believe a story that it had been stolen. Bruno and Buffalmacco therefore decide to steal it themselves, with help from their priest friend.

Bruno supplies the method. Knowing that Calandrino drinks readily when someone else pays, he proposes taking him to a tavern while the priest pretends to cover the bill. Calandrino gets drunk, returns home without securing the door, and goes to bed. Bruno and Buffalmacco then enter and carry the pig to the priest’s house. The next morning, Bruno meets Calandrino’s report of the theft with apparent sympathy, while covertly encouraging him to make a loud show of his distress.

Bruno and Buffalmacco next propose an ordeal to identify the thief. When a bread-and-cheese test seems likely to deter the neighbors from attending, Bruno suggests using ginger boluses and wine instead. Calandrino gives Bruno forty shillings to obtain the supplies. In Florence, Bruno buys ginger boluses from a druggist and has two dog-balls made with fresh hepatic aloes, then covers them with sugar and marks them secretly so that he can distinguish them from the ginger. The story’s heading states the intended payoff: the false test is to make it appear that Calandrino himself has had the pig, enabling the painters to extort money by threatening to tell his wife. The episode shows Bruno’s knack for building a trap that makes the victim’s own participation seem to confirm the accusation.

A different kind of staged diagnosis appears when Calandrino inherits two hundred crowns in small coin and talks as if he can afford an estate, yet will not spend money treating Bruno and Buffalmacco to a meal. With Nello, they arrange to make him believe he is ill. Nello first studies Calandrino’s face and suggests that he looks changed; Buffalmacco then reinforces the alarm by saying that he appears half dead. Bruno helps sustain the deception, and Master Simone da Villa is brought in to give it the authority of a physician’s judgment.

Master Simone declares that Calandrino is pregnant. Calandrino immediately blames Mistress Tessa, while she blushes and leaves the room without answering. Bruno, Buffalmacco, and Nello struggle to contain their laughter as the physician laughs openly. Calandrino offers the two hundred crowns he had hoped to use for land to avoid giving birth. The prescribed treatment demands three pairs of fat capons and further payment; Calandrino gives Bruno five crowns and money for the capons. The tale’s heading records the conclusion: after paying for medicines and provisions, Calandrino recovers without giving birth. Bruno’s part in this episode is one of a coordinated chorus, helping an invented bodily crisis acquire credibility through repeated, apparently independent assurances.

Master Simone and Bruno’s Improvisations

Bruno also turns his attention from Calandrino to Master Simone da Villa, a physician who has returned from Bologna in conspicuous scarlet dress and a large miniver hood. The narration describes Simone as richer in inherited property than in learning, and says that he takes an unusual interest in the lives of passersby. Curious about how Bruno and Buffalmacco can live so merrily despite being poor painters, Simone asks Bruno to explain their means.

Bruno answers with a fabricated account of going a-roving: he claims that he and Buffalmacco obtain what they need without stealing or harming anyone. Simone believes him and presses to learn the secret, promising not to reveal it. Bruno heightens the fiction by presenting the knowledge as dangerous and exclusive, then frames Simone’s request as a mark of friendship. When Simone offers his services without charge if Bruno can bring him into the painters’ company, Bruno feigns reluctance and praises the physician’s books, clothes, and supposed cleverness in extravagant terms. He suggests that Simone can reach his goal by using his possessions, while insisting that he cannot simply grant him entry himself. In the surviving account, this is a portrait of Bruno’s method at work: he adapts his invention to the listener, using flattery and secrecy to make an absurd premise attractive.

The Talisman and the Repeated Pattern

Bruno’s most elaborate deception of Calandrino begins when Calandrino confides that he has fallen in love with Niccolosa, Filippo’s wife. Calandrino imagines that she has fallen in love with him, even though he recognizes her as Filippo’s wife, and confides his desire to Bruno while asking for secrecy from Buffalmacco and, especially, Nello, whom he knows to be related to Mistress Tessa. Bruno already knows who Niccolosa is. Instead of correcting Calandrino, he tells Nello and Buffalmacco, then speaks with Filippo and Niccolosa so that they can join in making sport of Calandrino’s passion.

The accomplices let Calandrino believe that Niccolosa responds to his advances. He ogles her while she acts in a way intended to inflame his hopes, and Filippo pretends not to notice. Bruno reports that the woman is receptive, while Calandrino offers extravagant gifts and promises. Bruno and Buffalmacco keep the deception going for roughly two months. Calandrino gives them an ivory comb, a purse, a knife, and other small objects, supposedly for his beloved; they return counterfeit rings of little value and accept refreshments and other attentions for their services.

When Calandrino grows impatient, Bruno changes the promise of a willing meeting into a plan to compel one by means of a written charm. He asks Calandrino to obtain virgin parchment, a live bat, three grains of frankincense, and a candle blessed by a priest. Bruno writes invented characters on the parchment and tells Calandrino that touching Niccolosa with it will make her follow him. He directs him toward a barn as the place to meet her. Meanwhile, Nello goes to Mistress Tessa and tells her that Calandrino is arranging a meeting with another woman, explicitly urging her to avenge the beating he gave her after returning from the stone search.

Across these episodes, Bruno’s defining resource is his ability to make a fiction feel socially confirmed. A companion’s feigned agreement, a physician’s diagnosis, a marked sweet, a counterfeit ring, or a scripted encounter can all serve as apparent proof. The repeated joke is not merely that Calandrino is gullible: Bruno and his collaborators make his own wishes, fears, and boasts supply the material of each deception. Their games bring small profits and entertain the company, but their consequences can also be harsh, as the beating of Mistress Tessa makes clear. Bruno’s comic role therefore joins nimble invention to a persistent imbalance of power: he sees the performance for what it is, while Calandrino is left to mistake its carefully arranged signs for truth.