These examples will suffice to show how Boccaccio distinguished himself from the _trecentisti_ in general. When his style attained perfection in the Decameron, it had lost the pedantry of his first manner, and combined the brevity of the best contemporary writers with rhetorical smoothness and intricacy. The artful structure of the period, and the cadences of what afterwards came to be known as "numerous prose," were carried to perfection. Still, though he was the earliest writer of a scientific style, Boccaccio failed to exercise a paramount influence over the language until the age of the Academies.[127] The writers of the fifteenth century, partly no doubt because these were chiefly men of the people, appear to have developed their manner out of the material of the _trecento_ in general, modified by contemporary usage. This is manifest in the _Reali di Francia_, a work of considerable stylistic power, which cannot probably be dated earlier than the middle of the fifteenth century. The novelist Masuccio modeled his diction, so far as he was able, on the type of the Decameron, and Alberti owed much to the study of such works as the _Fiammetta_. Yet, speaking broadly, neither the excellences nor the defects of Boccaccio found devoted imitators until the epoch when the nation at large turned their attention to the formation of a common Italian style. It was then, in the days of Bembo and Sperone, that Boccaccio took rank with Petrarch as an infallible authority on points of language. The homage rendered at that period to the Decameron decided the destinies of Italian prose, and has since been deplored by critics who believe Boccaccio to have established a false standard of taste.[128] This is a question which must be left to the Italians to decide. One thing, however, is clear; that a nation schooled by humanistic studies of a Latin type, divided by their dialects, and removed by the advance of culture beyond the influences of the purer _trecentisti_, found in the rhetorical diction of the Decameron a common model better suited to their taste and capacity than the simple style of the Villani could have furnished.
Boccaccio died in 1375, seventeen months after the death at Arquà of his master, Petrarch. The painter Andrea Orcagna died about the same period. With these three great artists the genius of medieval Florence sank to sleep. A temporary torpor fell upon the people, who during the next half century produced nothing of marked originality in literature and art. The Middle Age had passed away. The Renaissance was still in preparation. When Boccaccio breathed his last, men felt that the elder sources of inspiration had failed, and that no more could be expected from the spirit of the previous centuries. Heaven and hell, the sanctuaries of the soul, the garden of this earth, had been traversed. The tentative essays and scattered preludings, the dreams and visions, the preparatory efforts of all previous modern literatures, had been completed, harmonized and presented to the world in the master-works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. What remained but to make a new start? This step forward or aside was now to be taken in the Classical Revival. Well might Sacchetti exclaim in that _canzone_[129] which is at once Boccaccio's funeral dirge and also the farewell of Florence to the fourteenth century: