Bruno and Buffalmacco's Pranks and Conspiracies

Bruno and Buffalmacco's Pranks and Conspiracies form a recurring comic partnership in which two shrewd painters make their ingenuity most effective by working together. They choose susceptible targets, build a deception out of plausible details, and coordinate its performance; one may originate or explain the scheme while the other supplies the crucial action. Their friendship is shown less through declarations than through repeated collaboration, shared laughter, and the ease with which each understands what the other is doing.

Identity and Working Partnership

Bruno and Buffalmacco are painters who spend much of their time together. The stories describe them as merry men who are also well-advised and shrewd, a combination that distinguishes them from the simple-witted Calandrino. They associate with him because his manners and simplicity divert them, but their amusement depends on more than individual cleverness: together they can sustain a performance, reinforce one another’s inventions, and turn an isolated deception into a scene with an audience.

Their work has a recognizable division of labor without becoming a rigid formula. Bruno often gives a scheme its verbal shape, supplying a story or an interpretation that Calandrino accepts; Buffalmacco supports the plan and helps make its staged evidence convincing. In other episodes, Bruno takes the lead in cultivating a new mark, while Buffalmacco carries out the physical deception. Each can rely on the other to recognize the moment when a suggestion should become action. Their partnership is thus both practical and theatrical: the trick must be planned, but it must also be acted convincingly before its victim.

The Heliotrope Deception

The first extended demonstration of their cooperation begins with Maso del Saggio, who has decided to amuse himself at Calandrino’s expense. In San Giovanni, Maso and a friend pretend to discuss wondrous stones within Calandrino’s hearing. The tale of the distant land of Bengodi and its impossible abundance draws Calandrino into the conversation; the promised wonders prepare him to believe in the heliotrope, a stone said to make its bearer invisible. This opening deception belongs to Maso, but Bruno and Buffalmacco take over the plot and make it their own.

Calandrino forgets the stone’s name but insists that its black appearance will guide the search. Bruno accepts the premise and proposes a delay: the sun has dried the stones along the Mugnone, making black ones harder to distinguish, and a working day risks attracting other seekers. Buffalmacco backs Bruno’s advice. Their agreement sends all three out at dawn on Sunday, through the San Gallo Gate, to search the riverbed. Bruno and Buffalmacco pick up stones too, allowing Calandrino to think they are pursuing the same goal while the pair prepares the next part of the performance.

Once Calandrino has filled his clothes and mantle with stones, Bruno asks where he is. Buffalmacco pretends not to know, and Bruno suggests that Calandrino must already have gone home after making fools of them. Their feigned complaint supplies the proof Calandrino needs: he decides the heliotrope must be working because his companions cannot see him. The two men then turn that belief into a physical joke, pelting him with stones as he makes his way back. At the gate, officers whom Bruno and Buffalmacco have forewarned pretend not to see him, extending the deception into the city. The joke ends at Calandrino’s house, where Mistress Tessa sees her heavily laden husband and scolds him for returning late. Her ordinary greeting punctures the invisibility he had mistaken for fact; the friends’ coordinated fiction has carried him all the way home before reality catches up with him.

The Pig Theft and the Use of Hospitality

The later pig episode repeats the partnership’s method with a more deliberate theft. Calandrino has gone alone to his small farm, near Florence, to kill and salt the family’s annual pig because Mistress Tessa is unwell. Bruno and Buffalmacco learn that she is not there and visit a neighboring priest who is their close friend. When Calandrino shows them the pig, Bruno proposes that they sell it and tell his wife it was stolen. Calandrino refuses, convinced that she would not believe him and would drive him from the house.

After Calandrino gives them an awkward invitation to supper and they leave, Bruno and Buffalmacco decide to steal the pig themselves, with the priest’s help. Bruno identifies the means: take Calandrino to the tavern, let him drink while the priest pretends to pay the bill, and then use the fact that he will be alone at home. The plan succeeds. Calandrino drinks heavily, returns late, leaves the door open, and goes to bed; the two painters enter quietly and carry the pig to the priest’s house. Their use of hospitality is part of the mechanism of the theft: a paid-for evening of drinking disguises the operation and makes Calandrino’s own habits work against him.

On the next morning, Bruno and Buffalmacco return to hear Calandrino lament the missing pig. Bruno quietly encourages him to maintain the story that it has been stolen. The tale’s heading further identifies the next stage of their joint fraud: they make Calandrino undergo an ordeal with ginger boluses and sack, substitute dog excrement compounded with aloes, and use the apparent result to claim that he himself took the pig. They then demand blackmail to keep the supposed discovery from his wife. The theft therefore becomes not merely a prank but a second deception built on top of the first: the pair exploit Calandrino’s fear of being disbelieved and his wish to avoid domestic consequences.

Master Simone and the Staged Beast

The painters’ partnership also draws in a target beyond Calandrino. Master Simone da Villa, a wealthy but poorly learned physician, studies Bruno and Buffalmacco because he cannot understand how two poor painters seem to live so merrily. Bruno befriends him, recognizes his foolishness, and takes pleasure in his company. When Master Simone wants access to the painters’ company, Bruno shares the matter with Buffalmacco. Buffalmacco eagerly joins the plan, and the two accept the physician’s lavish dinners and suppers while allowing him to believe that his learning and fine speech will secure their favor.

When the physician makes his request, Buffalmacco pretends to be furious with Bruno for revealing the secret and then turns the performance into a mock compliment to Master Simone’s intelligence. Their joint flattery prepares him to believe that a supernatural marvel awaits him. The roles sharpen: Buffalmacco creates the expectation of an extraordinary encounter, while Bruno stays close enough to witness the outcome and take part in the joke. Master Simone, convinced that he will see a beast and perhaps be honored by a countess, puts on his scarlet doctor’s gown and waits at Santa Maria Novella.

Buffalmacco appears in a black fur pelisse worn inside out and a horned devil-faced mask. He capers and howls until the frightened physician climbs down from a tomb and mounts his back. Still playing the beast, Buffalmacco carries him toward the Nunnery of Ripole, then throws him headfirst into a dyke where refuse is dumped for manure. Bruno has followed the performance; afterward, the two men meet near Allhallows Fields and watch from a distance to see what the muddied physician will do. They have used the doctor’s fine clothes and appetite for distinction against him: the gown he hoped would establish his status becomes part of the spectacle, and his return home gives his wife grounds to accuse him of having gone after another woman.

Recurrence and Narrative Function

The stories present the two painters as a continuing pair rather than as strangers brought together for a single trick. A later teller explicitly introduces another Calandrino story because the company has already heard of Calandrino and his friends. Elsewhere, their names recur as a familiar duo whose cheerful poverty and apparent freedom from worldly concerns attract Master Simone’s attention. These callbacks make each new episode legible through the audience’s memory of their earlier work: the targets change, but the partnership’s fluency remains.

Their comic power rests on a contrast between the friends’ shared intelligence and their victims’ eagerness to believe. Calandrino’s search turns black stones into false evidence of invisibility; Master Simone’s desire for admission to the painters’ company turns a masked man into a supernatural beast. In both cases, Bruno and Buffalmacco do not rely on a single lie. They construct a sequence of supporting acts, enlist accomplices or bystanders when useful, and remain together to witness the consequences. The repeated pattern makes their relationship the stories’ instrument of comic invention: Bruno’s talk and Buffalmacco’s performance combine to expose how readily confidence, vanity, or credulity can be made to serve a trick.