The Garden of Delights in Boccaccio’s <i>Amorosa visione</i>

Abstract This article focuses on the final cantos of Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione, a poem that has long been deemed his most Dantean work, as it follows Dante’s terza rima rhyme scheme as well as the Commedia’s premise of a lost pilgrim searching for his true path. Boccaccio mounts a significant challenge to Dante’s salvific poetics in the garden landscape at the end of the Amorosa visione, replacing Dante’s visio Dei of Paradiso 23—where the Commedia reaches one of its spiritual crescendos through the triumphs of Christ and Mary, the spirit over the flesh—with the vision of his earthly beloved, who is also evocatively named Maria. Through this juxtaposition of the two garden scenes, the author argues that Boccaccio boldly foregrounds and embraces terrestrial carnality by diverging from Dante’s celestial quest, as the younger poet suggests an alternative path to salvation that espouses the temporal and tangible.