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In the second half of the sixteenth century, various Spanish, Italian and French poets resorted to an image foreign to the usual repertoire of amorous subjects: the wound of the lover begins to bleed due to the proximity of the lady. This reflects a popular belief that the mere presence of the murderer can cause "accusing" blood to ooze from the corpse. The idea is already found in earlier Petrarchists, such as Serafino Aquilano or Bernardo Pulci. In addition to trying to clarify the possible relations of influence between these verses, whose sources have not yet been sufficiently studied in some cases, we will see how the theme seems ideal for bringing out the genius of each poet. Finally, we will allude to a passage from the famous De Amore of Ficino which could explain the origin and success of this motif in European Petrarchan poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the Catholic Reformation serious concerns were expressed about the affective potency of naturalistic depictions of beautiful, sensuous figures in religious art. In theological discourse similar anxieties had long been articulated about potential contiguities between elevating, licit desire for an extraordinarily beautiful divinity and base, illicit feeling. In the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in the decades preceding the Council of Trent, a handful of writers, thinkers and artists asserted a positive connection between spirituality and sexuality. Leonardo da Vinci, and a group of painters working under his aegis in Lombardy, were keenly aware of painting's capacity to evoke feeling in a viewer. Pictures they produced for domestic devotion featured knowingly sensuous and unusually epicene beauties. This article suggests that this iconography daringly advocated the value of pleasurable sensation to religiosity. Its popularity allows us to envisage beholders who were neither mired in sin, nor seeking to divorce themselves from the physical realm, but engaging afresh with age-old dialectics of body and soul, sexuality and spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of AI's core abilities is the conjuring up of images that seem familiar to us, based on our individual visual and architectural preoccupations. This splicing of the known with the unknown can create a sense of déjà vu that is both centred and defamiliarised. Italian artist, architect and researcher in visionary architecture Cesare Battelli takes us through some of the characters of the past who have utilised such creative tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the ways evil was conceptualized in the works of Cornelius Agrippa, the most important German representative of the Renaissance humanist current often labelled as Hermetic Neoplatonism. In a heterodox fashion of blending various Christian and non-Christian concepts developed by Marsilio Ficino, Agrippa attempted to further Christianize some aspects of Hermetic and Neoplatonic theology, cosmology and anthropology. This entailed a new interpretation of pagan deities and demons, which Renaissance Neoplatonists in general sought to disconnect from the exclusive domain of evil. A significant aspect of Agrippa's syncretistic attempt was his interpretation of the origin and locus of evil, which, as I argue, reveals a tense coexistence of the classical Thomist concept of privatio boni and anthropological dualism of possibly Gnostic provenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The famous controversy between Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is known to regard the proper use of Platonism in humanist and Christian context. With special attention to Pico's Commentary on a Canzone, the point of disagreement with Ficino, which is not at all obvious, is examined through a close reading. The result is that Pico sees the temptation of a pantheistic and anthropocentric understanding of the relationship between the human realm and God. Whereas Ficino engaged in making pagan philosophy amenable to Christian theology, Pico was concerned with upholding the otherness of the divine. For the humanist agenda, Ficino made plausible that the human world is divinized, while Pico called for the ascent to God. In Pico's view the Neoplatonists secularized the divine, as was evident in Ficino's philosophical theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay has two sections. The first explores the origin of the universe, the four elements, the knot of love, the third essence, and 'Primordial Vessel' by the Florentine Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino. The second part interprets Botticelli's The Birth of Venus of 1485–1486, now at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, drawing upon Ficino's Neoplatonic texts. Particularly some of Ficino's Commentaries on Plato's Dialogues (published in 1484), Symposium (completed in 1469), Philebus (completed in 1469), and Compendium on Timaeus (1480–1491). To this is added Ficino's Theologia Platonica (published in 1482), his Letters (published in 1495), his Commentary on Proclus's Alcibiades I (completed in 1488), and his translation of the Neoplatonic text Corpus Hermeticum , entitled Liber Mercurii Trismegisti de potestate et sapientia Dei (published in 1471). Botticelli's beautiful painting captures the depiction of the goddess Venus's birth as described in Hesiod's Theogony , which Ficino recounted in his Philebus Commentary [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contains an analysis of the influence of the Corpus Areopagiticum on the thought of the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino, in the process of which the author thematizes especially Dionysius’ differentiation of two aspects of the Divine: the radically transcendent, which correlates with the One of the Neoplatonists, and the manifested, energetic emanation of God ad extra, which can be associated with the Intellect. The author points out that this Dionysian theology, later developed by Gregory Palamas, provided valuable conceptual possibilities – which Ficino implicitly used – for the reconciliation of Christian orthodoxy with Neoplatonic metaphysics. And this reconciliation was, after all, one of the main goals of Ficino’s philosophical project. In the context of these considerations, Ficino’s metaphysics of light is also taken into account. Although it was related to the teachings of Dionysius, it diverged from them in a way problematic for Christian theology. The author attempts, in the conclusion of the article, to sketch out a solution to the predicament that arises from the unification of Neoplatonic emanative schema with the teachings of Dionysius the Areopagite on the gift of light.

In the context of the Catholic Reformation serious concerns were expressed about the affective potency of naturalistic depictions of beautiful, sensuous figures in religious art. In theological discourse similar anxieties had long been articulated about potential contiguities between elevating, licit desire for an extraordinarily beautiful divinity and base, illicit feeling. In the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in the decades preceding the Council of Trent, a handful of writers, thinkers and artists asserted a positive connection between spirituality and sexuality. Leonardo da Vinci, and a group of painters working under his aegis in Lombardy, were keenly aware of painting’s capacity to evoke feeling in a viewer. Pictures they produced for domestic devotion featured knowingly sensuous and unusually epicene beauties. This article suggests that this iconography daringly advocated the value of pleasurable sensation to religiosity. Its popularity allows us to envisage beholders who were neither mired in sin, nor seeking to divorce themselves from the physical realm, but engaging afresh with age-old dialectics of body and soul, sexuality and spirituality.

The “sfumato” is a new notion, both from an artistic and metaphysical viewpoint. Thanks to this concept, Leonardo brings the reflection on the nature of the cosmos to a level of surprising currency, thus overcoming the dichotomy between the human and the natural world (animals, plants, atmosphere, water, and rock formations). At the same time, the distinction between nature and supernatural reality is also questioned: nature is pervaded by the spirit, i.e., the incorporeal force that animates the entire universe, while the sacred turns out to be rooted in an original dimension that escapes any temporal computation. And it is to this union that such magnificent works such as The Virgin of the Rocks, the Mona Lisa, and Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child are inspired. They are pictorial treatises on the philosophy of nature that are inspired to the divine principle, which pervades creation. At the heart of this deep osmosis between natural exploration and the human-divine world is creativity of the artist, in whose works the world is spiritualized and perfected.

In Love's Labour's Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known as 'erotic melancholy' or 'erotomania', was treated in contemporary medical documents as a real, diagnosable illness, a contagious disease thought to infect the imagination through the eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation of love as a communicable disease is drawn, I suggest, from a neoplatonic tradition led by the work of Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love. Ficino's construction of eros as a kind of 'vulgar love', distinctive from 'heroic love', emphatically denotes lovesickness as a kind of material contagion with the eye as its primary means of transmission, an idea that had a more significant influence in England and on the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all its lighthearted conceits, Love's Labour's Lost takes lovesickness and its etiology very seriously, in ways that have been almost entirely ignored by scholarship on this play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Antikvitás & Reneszánsz is the property of MTA-SZTE Antikvitas es Reneszansz, Forrasok es Recepcio Kutatocsoport and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This lecture explores Erasmus' beliefs about the life of the healthy Christian humanist, from boy student to mature scholar, through the prism of 'history of emotions'. It appraises Erasmus' place in the longer history of scholarly hygiene, a tradition of writing about the physical, psychological, and spiritual health of scholars. What for example does Erasmus have to say about those conditions with which early modern intellectuals were so frequently associated, viz. melancholy and 'hypochondriac' disease? Does he pathologize particular kinds of intellectual activity, and what preventatives or remedies does he prescribe for the occupational hazards, if not diseases, of learning? Finally, what was Erasmus' view of the authority of contemporary learned medicine in relation to these matters? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses translations of Ep. 5,27 by Marsilius Ficinus (Veritas de institutione principis): the work of an anonymous translator (perhaps Ř. Hrubý) and a later translation by O. Velenský. The article also analyses translations of Historia Bohemica by Aeneas Silvius (Konáč, 1510; Adam, 1585). The first Ficinus translation simplifies the ancient realia, avoids Latin infinitive constructions and translates some words with two expressions (multiplication). Velenský imitates Latin grammar in Czech. Konáč adheres to the verbum e verbo method, but substitutes words considered critical by Utraquist readers. Adam translates faithfully, but like the first translator of Ficinus, he uses multiplication and explicates within the translation. The translation style for the more literarily challenging texts was influenced by the translators'/publishers' estimation of the readers' skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annals of Philosophy / Roczniki Filozoficzne is the property of John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

La teoría ficiniana de los furores dio lugar a uno de los debates fundamentales en el seno de las corrientes filosóficas neoplatónicas de los siglos XV y XVI, que se centró en el análisis de la naturaleza, las funciones y los atributos del poeta. Esta cuestión era especialmente significativa a la hora de dotar de completitud a dos de los elementos centrales del sistema de Ficino: la teoría de la catarsis y el postulado de la inmortalidad del alma. Esto generó, en consecuencia, un paradigma estético concordante con la verticalidad de la antropología neoplatónica, que, sin embargo, desdeñaba per se la creación de una poética en sentido estricto. Conforme la metafísica neoplatónica se fue dispersando y transformando a lo largo del Tardorrenacimiento, Giordano Bruno se percató, a partir de una relectura de los textos ficinianos sobre el furor en su obra de 1585 De gli eroici furori, de ciertas inconsistencias incompatibles con una sensibilidad artística y literaria incipiente, creando así un nuevo modelo estético integral. El análisis de esta evolución será el objeto central de este artículo.

Copyright of Antikvitás & Reneszánsz is the property of MTA-SZTE Antikvitas es Reneszansz, Forrasok es Recepcio Kutatocsoport and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Por volta de 1469, Marsílio Ficino compôs o Commentarium in Convivium Platonis, também conhecido por De Amore, um extenso e complexíssimo comentário ao Symposium de Platão. No sexto discurso da referida obra o nosso pensador insere e desenvolve uma brevíssima referência à figura de Narciso, ao mito de Narciso. Pretende-se neste artigo desenvolver uma apresentação da interpretação de Marsílio Ficino do mito de Narciso. Pretende-se igualmente analisar a questão da inserção do mito de Narciso na obra de Ficino.

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known as ‘erotic melancholy’ or ‘erotomania’, was treated in contemporary medical documents as a real, diagnosable illness, a contagious disease thought to infect the imagination through the eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation of love as a communicable disease is drawn, I suggest, from a neoplatonic tradition led by the work of Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Ficino’s construction of eros as a kind of ‘vulgar love’, distinctive from ‘heroic love’, emphatically denotes lovesickness as a kind of material contagion with the eye as its primary means of transmission, an idea that had a more significant influence in England and on the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all its lighthearted conceits, Love’s Labour’s Lost takes lovesickness and its etiology very seriously, in ways that have been almost entirely ignored by scholarship on this play.

Copyright of Antikvitás & Reneszánsz is the property of MTA-SZTE Antikvitas es Reneszansz, Forrasok es Recepcio Kutatocsoport and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The author revisits an old scholarly dilemma concerning the thought of Cornelius Agrippa, the famous German humanist and occultist, i.e. the conflict between Christian and heterodox elements in his thought. The author approaches this problem by examining Agrippa’s views on human nature and demonstrates through a philological analysis that the German humanist attempted to integrate the anthropological dualism of Hermetic and Neoplatonic provenance into his understanding of Christianity.

Marsilio Ficino’s fame as a translator, not least due to his contributions to theology and the development of hermeticism, has already been established by Frances Yates and debated by Wouter Hanegraaff. For each of his translations of Greek texts, Ficino wrote a preface to guide and to manipulate the reader. This paper presents an analysis of the auctoritas in the paratext of the Corpus Hermeticum, analyzing it as a rhetorical device used by Ficino to express his ideas, particularly the role of Hermes Trismegistus. Ficino used his rhetorical skill not only to translate from Greek to Latin but also to support his theories in commentaries, letters, or, in this case, prefaces.

La Favola d’ Orfeo (1480) de Ángelo Poliziano es uno de los escritos literarios más ricos y enigmáticos del Renacimiento, especialmente en lo que respecta al debate que ha suscitado entre los especialistas a la hora de discernir su trasfondo alegórico. Partiendo de la contextualización general de la obra en el programa simbólico de la Academia neoplatónica de Marsilio Ficino, este artículo tiene por objeto demostrar: (1) Su singularidad en relación al resto de producciones filosóficas y literarias renacentistas de temática órfica; (2) Su particular recepción crítica de tres elementos fundamentales del sistema ficiniano: el amor, el furor y la catarsis; y (3) Su adopción de una novedosa tendencia de corte moralizante en el seno del neoplatonismo renacentista que se halla en explícita consonancia con el cristianismo.

Copyright of Antikvitás & Reneszánsz is the property of MTA-SZTE Antikvitas es Reneszansz, Forrasok es Recepcio Kutatocsoport and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The essay presents a large variety of meanings attributed to the vision by some thinkers of the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici. In particular, the analysis of the works of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino allows to study the dichotomy between sensitive knowledge and intelligible knowledge starting from the dialectic between vision and blindness of the "mind's eye". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Portrait of Mr W. H." was published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1889 and a second "version," as it is often termed, was written at various points between then and 1893, but it did not appear until 1921 and then only in a limited edition. This second text, first tentatively titled The Incomparable and ingenious history of Mr W. H. and here called the Rosenbach manuscript, is twice the length of the earlier piece, and in its tone, tenor, and range of reference very different. This article argues why it is important to distinguish carefully between Blackwood's "Mr W. H" and the Rosenbach manuscript. There is much to learn about Wilde's compositional practices and developing interest in doing so. [120 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annals of Cultural Studies / Roczniki Kulturoznawcze is the property of John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Institute of Cultural Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Tommaso Giannini (1556–1638) was a prominent professor at the ferrarese Studium between sixteenth and seventeenth century. Probably influenced by Platonic sympathies nurtured by the Court and partly by the University milieu, in 1587 he published his first work titled De providentia ad sententiam Platonis et Platonicorum liber unus, which was a catalyst for his academic career. A compilative work in essence, the De providentia displays a large amount of sources always tacitly used: Marsilio Ficino, Jacques Charpentier, Giulio Serina, Stefano Tiepolo, Teofilo Zimara, Bessarion, Agostino Steuco and amid the ancients Plotinus, Plutarcus, Sirianus, Proclus (read in Teofilo Zimara and Leonico Tomeo), Giamblicus, Apuleius, Calcidius, Ammonius, Psellus. A small place is reserved to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and precisely to his Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem. The aim of the paper is to provide a supplement of analysis of Giannini’s interest in Pico’s works considering his later writings, each one commonly identified as Disputationes Aristotelicae.

Copyright of L'Année Rabelaisienne is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Antikvitás & Reneszánsz is the property of MTA-SZTE Antikvitas es Reneszansz, Forrasok es Recepcio Kutatocsoport and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper focuses on L'Amorosa Filosofia, perhaps the most compelling response to Ficino's De Amore produced in the sixteenth century, as it is centered on the notion of love as philautia, based upon a naturalistic and psychological interpretation. The learned lady Tarquinia Molza, the most important interlocutor of Francesco Patrizi, affirms that love, from its beginnings in the inner self to its end, when reaching the divine, cannot but be a phenomenon that engages the sense of touch, showing a naturalistic attitude toward the body and an interest in the mediation between matter and spirit. Contrary to popular notions of self-love as selfish and callous, an honest man must necessarily love himself first in order to love others. In The Praise of Folly, Erasmus also tackles the concept, making Folly praise Philautia as a fundamental means for happiness. More relevant to Patrizi's work, in Mario Equicola's De Natura de Amore, there is a long digression on the virtues of self-love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Hipogrifo: revista de literatura y cultura del siglo de oro is the property of Hipogrifo: revista de literatura y cultura del siglo de oro and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay traces the central role played by the notion of seeds and germs for understanding the complex metaphysics at work in both Ficino's reinterpretation of Greek philosophy for a Humanist audience, and in Kant's own efforts to describe the moral shaping of humankind that he took to be the heart of the Enlightenment project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marsilio Ficino's Latin translation of the Greek Corpus Hermeticum was carried out in 1463 at Cosimo de' Medici's request and first printed in Treviso in 1471 without Ficino's consent. This translation, together with Ficino's preface running through Trismegistus's life and writings, was the starting point of modern Hermetism. The striking success of the Pimander - by far the most widespread of Ficino's works - is demonstrated by more than 40 extant manuscripts, 24 printed editions up to the end of the sixteenth century, and renaissance translations in many vernacular languages. In the preface to the Pimander Ficino aimed to outline a new portrait of Hermes Trismegistus, which replaced the medieval ones. Before Ficino, a profile of Hermes Trismegistus could be found only in Arabic Hermetic literature translated into Latin during the late Middle Ages. But in Ficino's new profile of Hermes still lurks a fundamental aspect of medieval - i.e. Arabic - Hermes. Studying this aspect of Ficino's profile of Hermes means reconstructing an important chapter in the history of Hermetism in the early modern age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shadowy deity Demogorgon, whom Giovanni Boccaccio identifies as the uncreated progenitor of the pagan pantheon, enjoyed an illustrious literary afterlife. The information about Demogorgon that Boccaccio presents in the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri [Genealogy of the Pagan Gods] (and which Boccaccio claims derives indirectly from a lost, extremely ancient Greek poem) captured the interest of thinkers connected with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century revival of Platonism and syncretism, as this essay will demonstrate by examining Demogorgon's presence in the works of three Renaissance authors: Ugolino Verino, Marsilio Ficino, and Leone Ebreo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to trace the history of the manuscript tradition of the Metaphrasis in Theophrastum by the Greek philosopher Priscian of Lydia (6th cent. CE), with a view to constituting a new critical edition of the text. A detailed analysis of the eight extant codices shows that Laur. Plut. 87. 20 is the common ancestor of the others. Nevertheless, Monac gr. 461 should also be given due consideration, since it testifies to Marsilio Ficino's textual emendations, which are also reflected in his Latin translation of the Metaphrasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]