Original heliogravure from "Contes de Boccace", as interpreted by Marc Chagall.
Le Berceau - The Cradle
Pinuccio, a gentleman from Florence, thought one evening of going with a friend of his named Adrian to ask for a bed with an innkeeper who had a daughter with whom he was in love. In his only room, the host offered the best of his beds to the two strangers, while his daughter slept in a second bed and he slept with his wife in a third. Near which he placed the cradle of his newborn child. Pinuccio wasted no time in joing the innkeeper's daughter. Adrian later had to get up in the night, and he moved the cradle to manoeuvre himself out of the room. He did not return it to its original position before he returned to his bed. Later the innkeeper's wife had to get up and go out of the room, and when she returned she found the cradle and used it as her guide to her bed. Unfortunately as it had been moved, she got in to the wrong bed, as the cradle was positioned by the bed where Pinuccio's friend was sleeping. The innkeeper's wife mistook this man to be her husband. When Pinuccio had finished with the girl, he wanted to return to his own bed, but because the cradle was in the wrong position he got into bed with the innkeeper and proceeded to tell him (thinking he was Adrian) all about his experiences with the innkeeper's daughter. The wife had by this time realised her mistake and had then climbed into bed with her daughter, swearing to her husband that she had not left his side all night. In all the confusion, Pinuccio then declared to the innkeeper that Adrian had been sleepwalking and talking in his sleep and that he should not take any notice of anything he had said.
This original heliograph is from Marc Chagall's wonderful graphic interpretation of Boccacio's "Decameron", inspired by an original coloured medieval illustration taken from an original manuscript in the library of the Duke of Burgundy of the same scene.
Featured in Verve Magazine Number 24 and published in 1950.
Marc Chagall (1887- 1985) was born Moishe Shagal near the city of Vitebsk, Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. Chagall was the eldest of nine children. The family name, Shagal, is a variant of the name Segal, which in a Jewish community was usually borne by a Levitic family. Chagall's art can be understood as the response to a situation that has long marked the history of Russian Jews. Though they were cultural innovators who made important contributions to the broader society, Jews were considered outsiders in a frequently hostile society. Chagall himself was born of a family steeped in religious life; his parents were observant Hasidic Jews who found spiritual satisfaction in a life defined by their faith and prayer. In 1910, Chagall relocated to Paris to develop his artistic style where he enrolled at Académie de La Palette, an avant-garde school of art. In 1914 he returned to Russia during which time he worked as a stage designer and art teacher, before returning to Paris in 1922.Marc Chagall’s dreamlike compositions depict aspects of the artist’s personal and family histories, and those of Eastern European folklore at large. Flying figures, elements of Jewish tradition, peasant life, and animals are frequent motifs. Chagall’s practice—which spanned painting, printmaking, books, ceramics, and stained glass—was immensely influential in the development of 20th-century art: His supernatural subjects and emotional gestures bridged the work of earlier avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Fauvism, and Symbolism with later modernist styles such as Surrealism. Chagall’s career was disrupted by the World Wars, and while the artist moved between Russia, France, and the United States, he managed to exhibit widely during his lifetime both within the continent and in the U.S. His work belongs in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Chagall also produced stained-glass windows for Hadassah University Medical Center’s Abbell Synagogue in Jerusalem, the Saint-Étienne Cathedral in Metz, the United Nations building in New York City, and the St. Stephen church in Mainz, Germany.
