One hundred tales, one hundred prints: Nomi Silverman and the Decameron
- Irene Michnicki
- May 21
- 7 min read
Updated: May 21
An ongoing artist book collaboration with Nomi Silverman in which we draw on Boccaccio's Decameron to create a project that links the past to the present.
Collaborative artist books: A long conversation
Milestone Graphics has been working with artist Nomi Silverman on an artist book project inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron since 2021. It's the kind of collaboration and artist/printer relationship that's hard to summarize quickly. The book project started as a conversation, grew into a plan, and has been progressing steadily ever since, unfolding further with each exchange and each new impression pulled. Covid initially influenced this project heavily and we have seen so much since then socially, politically and economically. The Decameron Project is truly a response to the ongoing state of our reality and will evolve as we continue to move forward and experience what time will bring within the tumultuous landscape of the world.
"The world Boccaccio described is not as distant as it seems. Covid-19 dismantled our communal structures whose effects we are still absorbing. Refugees flee wars and famine across multiple continents. Economic instability is compounded by a deepening climate crisis. The fragmentation of our shared reality and the erosion of civic life have produced an anxiety that pervades both sides of the political divide. Like Boccaccio's era, ours is marked by fear, transition, and the questioning of social institutions. The need to complete this project is heightened by the current political climate, in which art, history, and the institutions that preserve them are under active threat."
— Nomi Silverman
About The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio, born in 1313, was a 14th century Italian poet and writer that spent his early years in Naples, absorbing the literature of his time. Boccaccio is considered a humanist writer and witnessed the Black Death of 1348 firsthand. The plague killed a large portion of Florence's population and upended nearly every social institution. It is out of that wreckage that The Decameron emerged.
Composed between roughly 1349 and 1353, the work is structured around a frame narrative: seven young women and three young men flee plague-ridden Florence and take refuge in a villa in the hills. Over ten days, each of them tells one story per day, for a total of one hundred tales. The title itself reflects this structure: Decameron derives from the Greek words for ten (déka) and day (heméra). Each day is governed by a different storyteller who sets the theme, which ranges widely, from love and fortune to wit, cleverness, and the absurdities of human behavior. Though none of the tales directly depict the plague, the knowledge is there without a doubt. It is a thread that weaves through every moment of storytelling in the embedded narrative of Boccaccio's Decameron. It's a binge-able tome of medieval tales that feels eerily familiar as a collection of ways to keep oneself entertained during times of quarantine.
The stories are irreverent, evocative, often comic, and at times deeply somber. Boccaccio borrowed freely from folklore, earlier literature familiar to him, and oral tradition. The author so successfully translated his sources into a clear and rich prose style that the book became a cornerstone of written Italian. The Decameron's influence spread quickly: Geoffrey Chaucer drew on it extensively for The Canterbury Tales, and later writers from Shakespeare to Keats to Pasolini have returned to it in turn. Writing in Britannica, scholars describe the text as, even in the twenty-first century, a remarkably fresh and penetrating document of human life.
What draws Silverman to The Decameron and what makes it so apt for the artist book form, is the layering at its core: story within story, voice within voice, the living speaking in full awareness of the dead, the past and the present in conversation. In Silverman's hands, this source material becomes something visceral and immediate. The plague is not a historical backdrop. It is a lens to view our current world.
"Periods of authoritarian rise are accompanied by the suppression of art and literature that challenge the state narrative. We, like Boccaccio’s Florence, are living through a moment of active erasure. Books are being pulled from shelves. Curricula are being stripped of history deemed inconvenient. Cultural institutions are being defunded or dismantled for political purposes. The Decameron itself was not spared in its own time.
When the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola ignited his Bonfire of the Vanities in the center of Florence, it was among the works destroyed. The impulse that fueled that bonfire is not a relic of the medieval world; it is also present tense. The Decameron Project is a response to that erasure. It documents what is actually happening so that it is not lost. Cultural memory is fragile, and without it we become susceptible to those who would rewrite the past to serve their own ends. The future is unwritten, but it will be shaped by what we choose to remember."
— Nomi Silverman
Decameron: The prints
The prints in this project draw on a combination of techniques, with lithography as the primary medium and woodcut playing a supporting role. The two processes bring different qualities to the work: lithography, chemical and direct, captures Silverman's line and mark-making with immediacy; woodcut brings a rougher, more physical energy, with the grain of the wood influencing the print and in other instances the direction of the cut marks and their rougher character. As the project evolves, other techniques may come into play as well. With a little more than half the chapters left to cover, we have room to play.
The prints that have been and will be created for this project are incidents and scenes not particular to Boccaccio's text, but instead distillations of our modern day experience: chaos, grief and endurance.
"Printmaking is central to The Decameron Project both conceptually and materially. In addition to printmaking’s roots as a populist art form, the use of transfer, pressure, and repetition reflects how stories are shared, histories are changed, and events are repeated in collective memory. Predominantly black and white, with sudden flashes of color, that immediacy forces confrontation, echoing the way memory itself operates. Where color does appear, it functions as force rather than description. Each print is unique, yet part of a larger whole, mirroring how individuals live within wider political forces that shape, constrain, and recur across generations."
— Nomi Silverman
Decameron: The artist book
The artist book format suits Silverman's approach well. She has long been drawn to sequences, to the accumulation of marks and images over time. A book holds a reader, organizes a journey through pages and images, and creates space for both movement and pause. The design of the book is still taking shape, and that process of making decisions together, about structure, sequence, paper, and the intervals between images, is itself part of the collaboration.
The project has been years in the making, and the work of realizing it has proceeded in the way that ambitious printmaking projects do: steadily, with the long view in mind. When complete, the artist book will comprise at least one hundred prints, a scope that mirrors Boccaccio's own hundred tales. Each themed chapter will begin with a chosen text, poem, prose, or essay by select poets and historians. The chapters will build on each other and will be individually wrapped in a translucent sheet with the chapter title printed on top. Finally, the full set will be presented in a handmade box, in an edition of 25, as a single artist’s
book in print form.
We expect it will still take a handful of years to reach the finalized version, and of course new things will happen and influence the trajectory of the world and the project. The book, with all its complexity, should earn its scale.
"The Decameron Project does not offer solutions. It offers a framework that steps back from immediate political headlines to ask larger questions about how physical, moral, and social forces shape human behavior and collective responsibility. By grounding the present in a 700-year-old literary structure, the project also offers something less common than outrage: perspective. Boccaccio’s plague era Florence did not know it stood on the threshold of the Renaissance. We find ourselves at a similar threshold, unable to know what lies beyond it. That uncertainty is not a failure of vision; it is the condition of living through change rather than looking back on it.
Art does not promise resolution or soften what is hard to hold. It insists on honesty about what we cannot afford to ignore. It refuses to let us look away. The Decameron Project is that refusal, made visible."
— Nomi Silverman
We will share more about the book's form and expected completion as the project develops. If you would like to be notified when the edition becomes available, please reach out to us directly .
About the Artist
Nomi Silverman
Nomi Silverman is a printmaker, sculptor, and draftsperson whose work centers on storytelling and the human impact of social and political systems. Her work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, among others.
Sources
Nomi Silverman, Artist Statement. nomisilverman.com
Nomi Silverman, Bio. nomisilverman.com
The Decameron. Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Decameron Study Guide. LitCharts
The Decameron. The Public Domain Review
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