Lisetta da Ca' Quirino

Lisetta da Ca' Quirino is a Venetian merchant’s wife whose confidence in her own beauty and credulity toward a supposedly holy friar turn religious authority into the instrument of a sexual deception. She believes Fra Alberto’s story that the Angel Gabriel loves her, accepts the friar’s visits in angelic disguise, and eventually boasts of the affair to a gossip. Her tale moves from private vanity to secret intimacy and then to public exposure—not through a deliberate confession, but through the very self-display that first made her vulnerable.

Identity and Circumstances

Lisetta is introduced as a young woman married to a great merchant who has gone with the galleys to Flanders. While he is away, she attends confession with other women at the feet of Fra Alberto, a friar whose reputation appears to offer a safe setting for spiritual counsel. The story has already shown the distance between that reputation and his conduct: formerly a thief, pimp, forger, and manslayer, he has become a preacher and priest without abandoning his vices. His tears and sermons have won him public trust as a confessor, counsellor, guardian of money, and depositary of wills. Lisetta encounters him not as the notorious man he once was, but as a figure whose apparent holiness conceals a practiced deceiver.

The narrator characterizes Lisetta as vain and foolish, and her first exchange with Fra Alberto supplies the evidence for that judgment. Asked whether she has a lover, she takes the question as an opportunity to rank her beauty above that of other women. She insists that her charms are exceptional and that she could have lovers if she wished, but that she does not bestow them indiscriminately. Fra Alberto recognizes her vanity and her susceptibility. He rebukes her at first, presenting himself as a moral instructor; when she insults his judgment of beauty, he lets her leave without pressing the matter. The rebuke becomes the opening move in a more calculated approach.

The Angel Gabriel Deception

After allowing several days to pass, Fra Alberto visits Lisetta at home with a trusted companion. In private, he apologizes for having disparaged her beauty, claiming that he was punished for it that very night. He describes a vision in which a handsome youth with a cudgel identified himself as the Angel Gabriel, declared his love for Lisetta, and ordered the friar to obtain her pardon. The supposed angel, Fra Alberto says, has many times wished to spend the night with her but feared to frighten her; he now proposes to come in a human form and asks her to decide when he should visit.

Lisetta accepts this invented revelation as truth. Her earlier pride is confirmed by a story tailored to flatter it: Gabriel supposedly loves her above all others, and the extraordinary attention of a celestial being makes her beauty seem not merely exceptional but heavenly. She tells Fra Alberto that the angel is welcome whenever he chooses to come, provided he does not frighten her. She also refers to her devotion to Gabriel, saying that she lights a candle for him wherever she sees his image. Her piety does not protect her from the fraud; it supplies the religious language in which Fra Alberto makes the fraud persuasive.

Fra Alberto then asks her to let Gabriel visit in the friar’s own body. He explains that the angel will remove his soul to Paradise and enter his body while he stays with her. Lisetta agrees to this arrangement, understanding it as a charitable favour to the friar as well as a privilege granted by the angel. She promises to leave the door open. That night Fra Alberto arrives in costume, dressed in white as an angel. Lisetta kneels before him; he blesses her and signals that she should go to bed. The disguise and ritual gestures turn the private encounter into what she believes is a sacred visitation, while the friar uses the opportunity for his own pleasure.

Secret Visits and Self-Display

Fra Alberto returns repeatedly in angelic guise, and Lisetta accepts the visits without suspicion. After their first night together, she goes to him and reports the encounter as proof that his body had been occupied by Gabriel. She points to a kiss mark under his left breast as evidence of their intimacy. Fra Alberto pretends to consider whether the mark confirms her account, sustaining the fiction rather than correcting it. In this arrangement, the friar’s body is the practical means of the affair, while Lisetta’s belief that his soul is elsewhere allows her to interpret the encounter as contact with an angel.

The deception also depends on Lisetta’s desire to be recognized as uniquely beautiful. Fra Alberto tells her that the angel considers her the fairest woman in the world, and she later repeats that praise when disputing female beauty with a gossip. At first she withholds the identity of her admirer, but her companion’s questions draw out the secret. Lisetta says that Gabriel loves her more than himself; when the gossip expresses doubt that angels engage in such affairs, Lisetta insists that Gabriel does so, comes often to lie with her, and is a better bedfellow than her husband. The private story has become a public boast, and the boast reveals the very conduct she had been instructed to keep secret.

Exposure and Narrative Significance

The account’s decisive irony lies in the difference between Lisetta’s understanding and the audience’s. She takes Fra Alberto’s costume, invented vision, and explanations about his soul as proof of an angelic visitation. The audience knows that the supposed messenger is the friar himself, exploiting her pride and using religious authority to arrange access to her. Lisetta’s vanity gives the lie its appeal, but Fra Alberto constructs and directs it; her credulity is not the source of his disguise so much as the condition he knowingly manipulates.

Lisetta’s indiscretion helps set the exposure in motion: by telling a gossip that Gabriel is her lover, she makes the secret vulnerable to circulation. The story’s later public reckoning falls directly on Fra Alberto. In Venice, a crowd recognizes him when his mask is removed; people abuse and pelt him, and his fellow friars carry him away to the convent, where he is believed to have died in prison. The evidence does not relate Lisetta’s own fate after the affair becomes public, so her ending remains unreported. Instead, the narrative closes on the contrast between the man who had been taken for holy while doing evil and the public disgrace that follows when his impersonation is exposed. Lisetta’s role sharpens that contrast: a false angel can command her belief because the friar has made his deception look like the fulfillment of her own vanity and devotion.