Timaeus in Paradise
eBook - ePub

Timaeus in Paradise

Metaphors and Beauty from Plato to Dante and Beyond

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Timaeus in Paradise

Metaphors and Beauty from Plato to Dante and Beyond

About this book

Tracing the influence and impact of Plato’s Timaeus—and its major themes, creation and beauty—through the centuries

More than two thousand years after it was written, Plato’s Timaeus continues to fascinate and intrigue its readers. In Timaeus in Paradise, Piero Boitani traces the abiding legacy of the Timaeus, mapping an intellectual journey that begins with Plato and extends to Dante and beyond. In a series of short, lyrical chapters, Boitani sketches a lineage that includes Proclus, Boethius, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, John Scotus Eriugena and Thomas Aquinas. Focusing on Plato’s metaphorical language—which Dante considered comparable to that of the Bible—and the beauty of its images, Boitani shows that these images penetrate deep into European culture, inspiring the anonymous author of the treatise on the Sublime as well as the mystical writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.

Plato’s account of the creation of the cosmos in the Timaeus supplants Hesiod’s myths and Parmenides’s theories—and was described by Johannes Kepler as the best gloss ever on the first chapter of Genesis. Boitani finds its echoes everywhere, from the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral and the frescoes of the Anagni Crypt to the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo. He connects the beauty defined in the Timaeus to the beauties of the Hebrew Bible and to the lilies of the field invoked by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Bringing together philosophy, theology, mysticism, poetry, sculpture and painting, Boitani charts Europe’s intellectual history—a history of ideas and images—by capturing the enduring reverberations of Plato’s summa. Illustrations accompanying the text cover more than two thousand years of iconography.

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Yes, you can access Timaeus in Paradise by Piero Boitani in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. Contents
  7. List of Illustrations
  8. Preface
  9. Note on Translations
  10. 1. One, Two, Three
  11. 2. Emulator of Homer
  12. 3. Pythagorean and Socratic
  13. 4. Parens, fabricator, artifex: Demogorgon and Phaethon
  14. 5. Descendants and Intermediaries
  15. 6. Rachel’s Beauty
  16. 7. The Lilies of the Field
  17. Color Plates
  18. 8. ‘Mira profunditas’
  19. 9. Compunction and Transfiguration
  20. 10. ‘O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas’
  21. 11. Beauty
  22. 12. MetaphorĂĄ
  23. 13. Integumenta; Esthétique du Timée
  24. 14. The Three Days
  25. 15. Towards the altitudo terribilis
  26. 16. The Names of God
  27. 17. Decor, altitudo, gloria
  28. 18. PhilomythĂ­a and Poetry
  29. 19. ‘I love those who love me’
  30. 20. ‘What Timaeus argues about the souls’
  31. 21. ‘The hall-mark of genius’
  32. 22. ‘We must lose ourselves’
  33. 23. ‘Those things that cannot die and those that can’
  34. 24. ‘To new loves Love Eternal opened out’
  35. 25. ‘That deep mind’
  36. 26. ‘Amor quo caelum regitur’
  37. 27. ‘He laughed, self-mockingly’
  38. 28. ‘This reason moved Augustine’
  39. 29. ‘Fountain of light, seedbed of life’
  40. 30. ‘Beings and accidents and modes of life’
  41. 31. The Moon Smiles Among the Eternal Nymphs
  42. 32. ‘Splendour of God!’
  43. 33. ‘The beauty I saw’
  44. 34. Neptune and Lethargy
  45. 35. The Last Simile: The Geometer
  46. 36. Epilogue: Descent from Heaven, Ascent to Art and Science
  47. 37. Afterword: The Unmoved Mover Begins to Move: Literary and Visual Renderings of the Christian Bible
  48. Appendix: The Timaeus
  49. Sigla
  50. Abbreviations
  51. Notes
  52. Further Reading
  53. Illustration Credits
  54. Index of Names