Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance

Nesca A. Robb

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000362886
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Idealism in Philosophy

Originally published in 1935, the aim of this title is first to give a clear outline of Florentine Neoplatonism, and then to consider its influence on art and literature during a period that extends roughly from the age of Lorenzo de' Medici to the middle of the sixteenth century and the beginnings of the Counter-Reformation. No rigid divisions of time have been fixed, but with few exceptions the works discussed may be placed between these bounds.

Even within these limits it would require a work of greater dimensions that the present to exhaust so large a subject in all its bearings. The leaven of Neoplatonism had penetrated the thought of the age in many directions; this study is confined to such of its manifestations as were, in a somewhat narrow sense, artistic and literary and to the use and abuse of philosophical ideas for aesthetic purposes.

Chapter IV
The Medici Circle (1)

Poliziano. The Quaestiones Camaldulenses and the Altercazione. Lorenzo’s Selfe D’Amore and Laude. Girolamo Benivieni

The poets of the Academy do not as a group show much real power or originality, and only two, Angelo Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici, have won any widespread fame. In them one may find a literary complement of the art of fifteenth-century Florence, although that art is perhaps more varied and profound than their work. Their range is, in fact, a severely limited one, though within it they often achieve exquisite results. Their poetry is not that of great passions or large conceptions. If one were seeking a hasty definition one might call it the poetry of delight; delight in natural beauty; in youth and gaiety; in country people and pursuits; in art and learning; in all the graces and pageants of a brilliant society; in the humour and at times in the crudities and vulgarities of life. The poets see their world through a tinted haze of literary reminiscence, but their feeling for the past is itself so vital that it does not spoil the freshness of their own perceptions, but becomes instead an essential element in them. The emotion that stirs them most deeply is regret that their joys cannot endure; and their loveliest lines are burdened with the sense of “the lapse of hours.”

Though Lorenzo sometimes shows a warmer humanity, Poliziano was incomparably the greatest artist of the circle. Whether in a Latin “Sylva” or elegy, classical, yet as purely Florentine as a bas-relief of Donatello’s, or in a “canzonetta,” where the popular poetry of Tuscany has been refined to a quintessence by a scholar’s touch, his verse has a melody, a finish, a precision, a delicate pictorial quality that make it perennially charming. He is so perfect that one is left with a thwarted wish that he were somehow greater.

His own predilections were mildly Aristotelian, but in subtler ways Ficino, of whom he always writes in terms of respectful discipleship, may well have been an inspiration to him. His purely scholarly and literary interests were too strong to allow him much time for philosophical studies.¹ As a poet he seems to have kept remarkably detached from the doctrines of the Academy; there are scarcely any direct references to them in his verse, and it is a debatable question whether or not they affected him.

His religious verse is fluent but conventional; his love poetry, with its echoes now of the “stil nuovisti,” now of the popular songs of the countryside, is sometimes bantering, sometimes wistful, sometimes tender, as in the bird-like clarity and freshness of “La Brunettina mia”; but it rarely makes any attempt at a philosophical treatment of its subject. In the “Stanze” addressed by the ghost of a lover to his mistress there is a descant on a theme reminiscent of Cavalcanti and prophetic of Michelangelo, the idea that the beloved’s beauty is an epitome of the beauty of the world.

Costei ha privo il ciel d’ogni bellezza

E tolto i beni di tutto il Paradiso

Privato il Sol di lume e di chiarezza

E posto l’ha nel suo splendido viso.

Al mondo ha tolto ogni sua gentilezza

Ogni atto e bel costume e dolce riso.

Amor le ha dato il guardo e la favella

Per farla sopra tutte la più bella.¹

¹ “. . . sic ego nonnunque de philosophia quasi de Nilo canes bibi fugique” (A. Politianus, Opera Omnia, Basle, 1553, 1 vol., “Miscellaneorum,” p. 310). But in the Lamia: Praelectio in Priora Aristóteles Analytica, p. 451, he defends himself against those who call him a mere “grammaticus.” He was the pupil of Ficino and Argyropoulos and lectured in the Studio Fiorentino on Aristotle and other philosophers. His friendship with Ficino and Pico was no doubt one of the factors that helped to mould his peculiarly personal culture. Native genius he had in plenty, but the Neoplatonists’ belief in the creativeness of the human mind, with its insistence that in knowledge if there are no limits there must be no stagnation, must have helped him to avoid the humanistic vice of worshipping the past too blindly. As Ficino said, Orpheus lost Euridice and Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt because they looked back instead of pressing forward. [Opera, Vol. I, p. 620.] In Poliziano’s handling of his scholarship, so free, so vigorous, so touched by imagination and even by humour, one may see this aspect of Ficino’s thought in action. He has made the past his own in no dead or mechanical sense; his learning and his personality are one thing, and express themselves as a unity.

Apart from this there is little until one comes to the celebrated Stanze per la Giostra,² and there, perhaps, in the picture of a world governed and linked up by love and permeated by secret sympathies and affections, one might see a translation into imaginative language of the thought of the Heptaplus or of Ficino’s Symposium. It would be unsafe to press the point too far, for Poliziano had the traditions of the Golden Age and of the Earthly Paradise to draw upon, but continual association with the Neoplatonists may have coloured his conception and helped to create the delicately unreal and sentimental atmosphere of his poem. It is love “Quel che soggioga il del la terra e l’acque”³ that dominates the Stanze and especially the whole exquisite description of the reign of Venus

. . . ove ogni grazia si diletta

Ove Belta di fiori al crin fa brolo.⁴

Here there are secret sympathies even between inanimate things, The wind plays lovingly through the grasses,

. . . lascive aurette

Fan dolcemente tremolar l’erbette.⁵

and the waters of the fountain feed the trees whose branches shade them from the heat, so that trees and fountain alike increase by mutual liberality.

¹ Angelo Poliziano. Le Stanze, Orfeo, Le Rime, ed. Carducci, 2nd ed., Bologna, Zanichelli, 1911. Cf. Cavalcanti, Tu hai in te i fiori e la verdura. Michelangelo, Poi che le tue bellezze al mondo sieno.

² The Stanze were written to commemorate Giuliano de’ Medici’s love for “la bella Simonetta” and to celebrate his success in a tournament. The poem was cut short by the murder of Giuliano in 1478. As it stands it tells only of the first meeting of the lovers, of Giuliano’s instant infatuation, and of Cupid’s triumphant return to the Kingdom of Venus, which is described in a long sequence of Poliziano’s most delightful octave...