Although no direct claim for the autonomy of spheres was advanced in the scholastic speculations discussed in Chapter 5, such notions would be put forward in the circles where humanism and the artistic renewal pursued in contact with it emerged in Renaissance Italy. A powerful example was Giorgio Vasari’s assertion that what caused art and architecture to decline from its ancient heights was the substitution of religious values for aesthetic ones by Christianity as it became established under the Roman Empire. This defense of aesthetic autonomy would become more general and explicit as the expansion of the audience for painting and sculpture and the display of art objects in locations specifically dedicated to them – museums and galleries instead of churches or princely and noble residences – confronted viewers with “art as such,” and it would be theorized in Kant’s aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century, which removed both religious and social value from judgments about art. But this development was singularly European. No similar move toward attributing autonomy to the aesthetic sphere would take place in India, China, or Muslim territories, despite the many beautiful objects produced in all of them and the exalted position attributed to artists in some.

Platonic and Plotinian conceptions of beauty played a role in Ficino’s understanding of beauty in De amore and subsequently in Leone Ebreo’s (Judah Abravanel’s) understanding of beauty in Dialoghi d’amore. Plato’s Symposium is an inspiration to both but does not determine the structure of either author. This essay contrasts Ficino’s presentation of seven friends’ viewpoints on love and Leone’s dialogue between Philo and Sophia, who together create PhiloSophy. While Ficino’s letters to Cavalcanti, to whom he dedicates the work, provide further documentation of Ficino’s intent to experience a higher form of love, Leone’s view of Aristophanes’ androgyne as based on a pre-Talmudic Hebraic concept of Adam as a hermaphrodite indicates his subordination of the Symposium to the Hebraic tradition.

The essay shows the influence of Plotinus’ idea of love of intellect alone for the heavenly Venus and the influence of the Middle Stoics and Middle Academics on Ficino’s belief that there are generative seeds of virtue and knowledge in the human soul. Alberti’s concept of concinnitas and measure are at the root of Ficino’s notions of harmony of sounds and harmony of sights. Leone, like Ficino, values the senses of hearing and sight and disparages the senses of taste, smell and touch.

Both authors correlate beauty and virtue. Ficino is a major source for the Renaissance tendency to view the picture of a beautiful woman as a picture of a virtuous woman. Sophia and Philo both grasp the relationship between beauty and virtue and that the highest goal is a love relationship with the Divine Creator; nevertheless, Philo resorts to lecherous longing for Sophia despite recognizing that coppulazione is the moment of a human’s intellectual vision of God.

Texts that warn of the dangers of passionate or excessive love have a history in Western culture going back to antiquity. Writings in this contra-amorem tradition typically characterize obsessive love or lovesickness as a disease and then offer remedies for the sufferer. When interest in Marsilio Ficino’s doctrine of Platonic love began to spread from Florentine philosophical circles to aristocratic courts throughout Italy in the late fifteenth century, some authors writing in the contra-amorem tradition responded directly to the new enthusiasm for Ficino’s ideas. A comparison of two contra-amorem texts – Bartolomeo Platina’s ‘pre-Ficinian’ On Love (c. 1466) and Battista Fregoso’s ‘post-Ficinian’ Anteros (1496) – will illustrate the ways in which the later text directed its arguments against Ficino’s doctrine, and did so with an audience of aristocratic young men particularly in mind. It is noteworthy that Anteros predates the first vernacular popularizations of Platonic love in Pietro Bembo’s Asolans (1505) and Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), and also that Castiglione’s Courtier responds, in turn, to Anteros by assimilating some elements from that work into its own treatment of Platonic love.

This essay undertakes a study of the views of Pico della Mirandola on Platonic love, stimulated as they are by the publication of a poem on the subject published in the mid-1480s by Girolamo Benivieni, a friend of his and of Marsilio Ficino. In a discussion of the Renaissance background, the essay emphasizes the importance of defusing the homosexual element of Platonic love by substituting maidens for boys. It then provides an extended discussion of Pico’s commentary on Benivieni’s poem, in which he draws on, not only the Symposium and Phaedrus of Plato, but also Plotinus’ Ennead III 5: On Love, and Hermeias’ commentary on the Phaedrus. A number of passages from the poem itself are also quoted and discussed.

Ficino’s Christian Platonism is characterized by two overriding features. First, it is expressed in works that are elaborated along traditional medieval lines in the form of commentaries either standing alone or incorporated into writings in other genres. Second, the configuration of this Platonism is inseparable from the history of Platonism as a tradition embodying both a continuous progress towards the light and a rhythmic alternation of revelation and concealment. After exploring this material in detail, it will become clearer how Ficino’s Christian Platonism is at the same time a psychology and a theology grounded in a sort of two-directional hermeneutic. Plato the non-Christian writer is prophetic of his own reading by later non-Christian Platonists who acquired the possibility of this reading on the one hand, through their partial illumination by Christian intermediaries and on the other, through their judicious distinction between the literal truth and non-literalness of some of the master’s most important teachings.

As Charles Dempsey has argued, humanist culture often came about not through the revival of ancient models, but through the recasting of contemporary vernacular culture in light of ancient models. A central thesis of this book is that the ubiquitous humanist practice of solo singing to the lyre took shape principally in Florence, in the circles of Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo de’ Medici/Angelo Poliziano, through adaptation of certain aspects of traditional canterino practice. This chapter sets forth what we know about the cantare ad lyram activity in these circles, establishes its clear relationship to civic practices, and argues for its integral role in both the Neoplatonic philosophy of Ficino and the vernacular poetics of Lorenzo and Poliziano. This leads to new perspectives on both Ficino’s “Orphic singing to the lyre” and Lorenzo’s lifelong involvement with singing to the lyre, both of which are typically regarded as idiosyncratic and tangential to their serious intellectual pursuits. This chapter also provides the occasion for considering the extraordinary figure of Baccio Ugolini, one of the great improvvisatori of his day, and a reassessment of Poliziano’s Fabula d’Orfeo in which Baccio sang the title role in 1480.