Buffalmacco and Bruno's Schemes against Calandrino

Buffalmacco’s relationship with Calandrino is a recurring comic partnership in which Buffalmacco and Bruno turn Calandrino’s credulity against him. In two schemes, they exploit his desire for sudden wealth and his fear of his wife’s anger: first they persuade him that he has found an invisibility stone, then they steal his pig and manipulate a sham ordeal into an accusation against him. Calandrino’s confidence that he understands events becomes the means by which the two companions control them.

The Companions and Their Imbalance

Calandrino is a painter described as simple-witted and given to strange habits. He spends much of his time with Bruno and Buffalmacco, both painters, who are merry but also shrewd and well-advised. They keep company with him because his simplicity provides them with amusement. The relation is therefore companionable in form but unequal in knowledge: Calandrino treats them as trusted friends, while they repeatedly use that trust to make him the object of a joke.

The contrast is especially clear when Calandrino decides that a magical stone could make its bearer invisible. After hearing Maso del Saggio’s invented account of wonder-working stones, Calandrino seeks out Bruno and Buffalmacco before pursuing the opportunity, wanting his closest companions to join him. He tells them that the stone is in the Mugnone and imagines using it to take money unnoticed from the moneychangers. His confidence that he has shared a valuable secret with friends gives Bruno and Buffalmacco the opening to turn the search into a performance staged entirely for his benefit.

The Invisibility-Stone Hoax

Bruno and Buffalmacco conceal their amusement and encourage Calandrino to search for every black stone in the riverbed. They accept his plan to go on a Sunday morning, when the riverbanks will be quieter, and accompany him out of Florence through the San Gallo gate. Calandrino races ahead, filling his clothes and mantle with stones; the others collect some as well, but know that no magical stone has been found.

When Calandrino is heavily laden, Bruno and Buffalmacco pretend that he has disappeared and that they have been left behind by a foolish companion. Calandrino hears them and interprets their apparent inability to see him as proof that the stone is working. The trick depends not on hiding the stones or on any genuine magic, but on directing Calandrino’s interpretation of what he hears. He silently turns for home, convinced that his friends cannot see him.

The companions then reinforce that belief while pelting him with stones. Bruno strikes his shins, and Buffalmacco hits him in the small of the back; Calandrino feels the blows but says nothing, taking the pain as further evidence that he remains unseen. At the gate, officers who have been warned by the two men pretend not to notice him, while laughing at the joke. The staged indifference extends the deception from the riverbank into the city and lets Calandrino carry his cumbersome haul all the way home.

The spell, in Calandrino’s mind, fails only when Mistress Tessa addresses him at his house. He blames his wife for making him visible and beats her in a rage. Bruno and Buffalmacco follow at a distance, then enter as if they have only just arrived. They find the room full of stones and Mistress Tessa bruised and weeping. Rather than confess the trick, they accuse Calandrino of abandoning them during the search. Exhausted and upset, he explains that he had found the stone and recounts how they had failed to see him. The episode makes their complicity especially sharp: they manufacture his false certainty, watch it expose him to humiliation, and then present themselves as the injured parties.

The Stolen Pig and the False Ordeal

The later pig episode repeats the same imbalance under different circumstances. Calandrino owns a small farm near Florence, where he and Mistress Tessa usually go to kill and salt a pig. When she is unwell one year, he goes alone. Bruno and Buffalmacco learn that he is without her and visit a neighboring priest, their friend. Calandrino welcomes them and shows them the pig, explaining that it is intended for his household. Bruno suggests selling it and pretending it was stolen, but Calandrino refuses, certain that his wife would not believe the story and would drive him from the house.

After leaving Calandrino, Bruno and Buffalmacco decide to steal the pig themselves. Bruno proposes taking Calandrino to a tavern, where the priest can pay for the drinks and encourage him to drink heavily. The plan succeeds: Calandrino goes home late, leaves the door open, and falls asleep. Bruno and Buffalmacco then enter and carry the pig to the priest’s house. Their theft makes Calandrino’s earlier fear of being disbelieved part of the trap: when he discovers the open door and missing pig the next morning, his genuine complaint sounds exactly like the false excuse Bruno had proposed.

Bruno initially pretends to doubt that the pig was stolen, and Buffalmacco offers to discover the culprit through an ordeal. To make neighbors willing to attend, Bruno proposes ginger boluses and wine instead of bread and cheese. Calandrino gives him money for the supplies, not knowing that Bruno buys ordinary ginger boluses and two dog-balls made with bitter aloes, covers the latter with sugar, and marks them so he can distinguish them. At the gathering, Bruno gives Calandrino the marked balls. Calandrino spits out the first when he tastes the bitterness; ashamed after the others notice, he struggles to chew the second before finally casting it out too. The assembled company takes this staged reaction as proof that Calandrino stole the pig himself.

Repeated Pattern and Consequences

After the neighbors leave, Buffalmacco accuses Calandrino of having sold the pig and pretended it was stolen to avoid sharing the proceeds. Bruno supplies a further invented suspicion: Calandrino supposedly keeps a mistress and may have sent her the pig. They also revive the earlier Mugnone episode, accusing him of having tricked them by pretending to find the magic stone. The reference turns their old hoax into supposed evidence against him, reversing their actual roles as the original deceivers and casting Calandrino as a habitual cheat.

Calandrino swears that he is innocent, but the two companions threaten to tell Mistress Tessa everything unless he gives them two pairs of capons. He pays rather than face the prospect of her anger. Bruno and Buffalmacco leave with the capons, while Calandrino is left with the loss of the pig and the humiliation of having been made to appear guilty. Across both episodes, their method is consistent: they identify what Calandrino most wants or fears, arrange circumstances that seem to confirm his mistaken belief, and then make him bear the consequences. His friendship with them supplies the access their schemes require; their knowledge of his credulity supplies the advantage that repeatedly turns companionship into comic exploitation.