THE RENAISSANCE

Renaissance is the name of the great intellectual and cultural

movement of the revival of interest in classical culture that
occurred in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- a
period which saw the transition from the Middle Ages to modern
times. The inpenetration of Greek and Latin culture that occurred
as a result of the formation of extensive Latin dominions in the
Eastern Mediterranean after the 4th Crusade can be regarded as
the basic condition, if not directly the cause, of the Renaissance. It
began in Italy, and its first period was marked by a revival of
interest in classical literature and the classical ideals. It was a great
revolt against the intellectual sterility of the medieval spirit, and
especially against scholasticism, in favour of intellectual freedom
and its first sign was a passion for the cultural magnitude and
richness of the pagan world. Traces of this revolt can be seen in
Dante (1265- 1321), who, although thoroughly medieval in his
sympathies, chose the Roman poet Virgil as his model, and who,
in the vigour and magnificence of his own verse, was a striking
contrast to his contemporaries and earlier medieval authors.
Petrarch (1304-1374) was the first true poet of the Renaissance.
His poems written in Latin hexameter followed the classical
models of poetry. He travelled to foreign countries and thus was
familiar with a larger world than his predecessors. Further, he may
be said to have rediscovered Greek, which for some six centuries
had been lost to the western world. His friend and disciple
Boccaccio studied that language, and by his master's advice made
a translation of Homer into Latin. In 1360 the first chair of Greek
was established in Florence. Greek scholars were now encouraged
to come from Byzantium to Italy, and in 1396 in turn the learned
Manuel Chrysoloras began to teach in the chair of Greek at
Florence which become the cradle of the classical revival.
Outstanding Italian humanists of that epoch visited Byzantium in
order to learn Greek and to buy old manuscripts, saved from
pillages, conflagrations, and devastation of the invaded country.
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Many Greek texts were brought from Constantinople. Europe was

ransacked for copies of the long unused Latin classics and
copyists multiplied them. Libraries were founded, and schools for
the study of both Greek and Latin in their classic forms were
opened at Rome, Mautua, Verona, and many other towns. Pope
Nicholas V earnestly fostered the new movement and laid the
foundation of the great Vatican collection. Cardinal Bessarion
presided over the formation of the Library of St. Mark at Venice.
Individual scholars went about looking for manuscripts of lost
authors, for coins, medals; for anything that could give a better
knowledge of classical antiquity. After the fall of Constantinople
in 1453 Renaissance gained a further impetus because of a number
of Greek humanists who moved from Byzantium to Italy. In 1462
the Platonic Academy was opened in Florence under the patronage
of Cosimo de' Medici. Its leader became Marcilio Ficino.
The second period of the Renaissance is marked by a continued
zeal for classical study, and by the developmental of a broad
learning and the new view of the intellectual life which is now
known as Humanism. By this time the movement had spread to
Germany, Poland and France, the Netherlands and to other
northern countries, where it developed into the wide scholarship
and sound learning of men like Thomas More, Campanella,
Bruno, Ronsard, Erasmus, and Copernicus. The movement had
gone far beyond the mere revival of classical studies and was felt
in every department of life. In philosophy it gradually replaced the
purely formal methods of thought that scholasticism had fostered.
In science it led to the great discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo,
Kepler and Newton. In architecture it brought about the revival of
the classical style. In the fine arts it inspired new schools of
painting in Italy, such as of Giorgione, Raphael, Leonardo, Bellini,
and Michael Angelo, and the Flemish school in the Netherlands.
In religion its influence can be seen in the revolt of Martin Luther.

Also, it indirectly inspired the passion for exploration that led to

the discovery of the New World.
*****
The Renaissance
The purpose of this set of lecture notes is to offer you the
background necessary for interpreting the heart of Renaissance
literature in England. The background you are receiving here will
enable you to read most of the poetry and the prose with insight in
terms of the philosophical and aesthetic principles which inform
them. We shall point to specific selections in the text and analyze
them in light of the information which follows, and a specific
assignment for this lecture series appears towards the end of the
notes.
For further reading in this period you are directed to Literature as
a Fine Art by Donald J. McGinn and George Howerton. You may
wish to read further in the period, and a selected bibliography
follows this series. References to the art, sculpture, and music of
the Renaissance are also provided at the end of this lecture, and
we shall study some of them during the course of study.
--MICHAEL S. SEIFERTH-CLASSICAL INFLUENCES ON THE RENAISSANCE
Though not entirely satisfactory in itself, the descriptive term
"classical" assists in leading to a unifying principle. In the
literature of ancient Greece and Rome the artists and philosophers
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries discovered an aesthetic
attitude that greatly attracted them, namely, a yearning for
perfection based on the desire to create something ideally
beautiful. consequently, in the manner of Homer and Virgil their
modern imitators invoked the inspiration of the Muses for their
own epics. From the statues of Phidias and Praxiteles the sculptors
hoped to obtain techniques that would enable them to carve the
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perfect human figure. The noble temples of Greece and Rome

served classical principles. Influenced by the classical myth that
the universe was created from chaos by strains of music,
musicians aspired to imitate the serenity and harmony that they
imagined would be found in the "music of the spheres."
The general elevation of tone pervading the arts from about 1400
to 1750 may to a considerable degree be attributed to the
philosophical teachings of Plato and Aristotle as reinterpreted by
Christian scholars in the early years of the Renaissance. From the
standpoint not only of the artist but also of the critic, it would be
no exaggeration to term this entire period THE AGE OF
IDEALISM. In other words, in order to understand what the poet
or painter or musician or architect was attempting, each in his own
medium, one must think in terms of a Prometheus reaching for
divine fire. And in considering the completed work, one should try
to avoid evaluating it with the emotional subjectivism of the
Romanticist, the scientific criteria of the Realist, or the
psychological symbols of the Expressionist. Since literature is
made up not only of the expression of the creative imagination but
also of the criticism of the aesthetic philosopher who interprets
both the poetry and the other fine arts of his time, it is necessary to
examine critical, as well as purely creative, literature.
The name "Renaissance" usually given the period ushering in this
Age of Idealism might mistakenly suggest that after a thousand
years western Europe suddenly awoke with an almost unparalleled
burst of activity in every field of human endeavor. The idea of of
revival or rebirth of literature and the other fine arts W.K.Ferguson
attributes to the Italian writers of the Renaissance who found
feudal and ecclesiastical literature and Gothic art uncongenial to
their taste. (The Renaissance, 1940) That the Renaissance
represents a complete break with the past was also the opinion of
such l8th century critics as Voltaire. Its prevalence in our own time
is evident in the only too frequent reference to the period before
1400 as the "Dark Ages."
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Nevertheless most scholars would concede that sometime around

the year 1400--earlier in the south, later in the north--there
occurred a gradual change ushering in the modern era. In support
of this theory, we may cite the transformation of the English
language during the fifteenth century. For example we refer to The
Canterbury Tales as "Middle" English, and in order to read
Chaucer and his contemporaries we need special linguistic
training. But after 1500, when England began to feel the full
impact of the Italian Renaissance, the trend toward modern
language began. The English writings of Sir Thomas More (14781535), Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?-1546), and Roger Ascham (15151568), indeed, are so close to our contemporary idiom that they
usually are considered the beginnings of modern English prose.
This transition from the Middle Ages is generally attributed to the
following causes: The development and the consequent increase in
the number of large cities, particularly at strategic ports; the
breakdown of feudalism and the rise of nationalism; the
secularization of education and the curtailment of the power of the
Roman Catholic Church; the worldliness of the Papacy, which,
incidentally, had much to do with the artistic achievements of the
period, and finally, the revival of interest in the classics, especially
the study of Greek, commonly referred to as "humanism".
As far as the Renaissance in literature is concerned, the influence
of classicism is probably the most important factor. And the two
events that had the greatest effect upon western European
literature were the translations into Latin of Plato's Symposium by
Marsilio Ficino (1468) and of Aristotle's Poetics by Giorgio Valla
(1498). From the fourth century to the fifteenth, when Ficino
translated the complete works of Plato, only three dialogues had
been available--the Timaeus, the Meno and the Phaedo. Though
the Rhetoric, the Politics, the Ethics, and other writings of
Aristotle were familiar to medieval scholars, the Poetics was either
passed over or ignored.
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In addition to translating the complete works of Plato, Ficino

wrote several interpretive essays of Platonic philosophy. Not
content with merely translating the Symposium which contains
Plato's theory of the ascent of the soul from the love of earthly
beauties to the contemplation of the Eternal Idea of the Good and
the Beautiful, Ficino wrote an elaborate commentary, in which he
formulates a theory of aesthetics based upon the principle of
idealism or perfection in artistic creation. This theory of the
interrelationship between love and beauty was destined to set the
standard of artistic criticism for more than three hundred years.
In order to understand artistic idealism, therefore, we must
examine, first, Plato's original dialogue and, second, Ficino's
explanation of it. In the Symposium Plato assembles at a banquet
a number of people, among whom were some of the most
prominent men in Athens--for example, Aristophanes, Alcibiades,
Agathon, and of course Socrates. After dining, one by one they
speak in praise of Eros, or Love, each as he probably would have
spoken in real life. Socrates, who as usual gives Plato's own
viewpoint, reports a conversation that supposedly took place
several years earlier with the wise woman Diotima. She opens
with a general statement that the desire to create is natural to all
mankind. Some men are content merely with begetting children in
order "to provide themselves with immortality, renown, and
happiness." Other "godlike" men, among whom are the poets and
artists, desire to create "beautiful and deathless" offspring
embodying "wisdom along with every other spiritual value." And
in no uncertain terms she indicates to Socrates her preference for
artistic creativity:
Every one would rather have such children born to him than
human off-spring; and when he considers Homer, Hesoid, and the
other able poets, he is envious of such posterity as they have left
behind them, a posterity that confers on them immortal fame and
memory, being itself immortal. [Lane Cooper, Translator]
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Then Diotima outlines the successive stages by which the true

artist, beginning with a love of the transitory physical beauties of
the intellect, may attain to his ultimate goal which is the
knowledge of the Eternal Beauty:
He who pursues the proper road to this result...must in youth begin
to visit beautiful forms, and first, if he be let aright by him who
leads, must love one single object...and thereof must engender fair
discourses. Then, however, he must come to see that the beauty in
a given object is brother to the beauty of the next one, and, if he
must hunt for beauty in the visible form, what folly if he failed to
judge that the beauty in all objects is single and the same! But
when he reflects on that, he will abate his violent love of one,
disdaining this and deeming it a trifle, and will become a lover of
all fair objects. Thereafter he must recognize that beauty in the
soul is of a higher worth than beauty in the body...until, if
perchance a person with a gentle soul should have but little
comeliness of body, he is content to love that person, and to care
for him, and to engender and discover such discourses as will
improve the young. And thus, in turn, he will be forced to view the
beauty in the pursuits of life, and in the law, and to see that it is all
one self-consistent genus, till he takes the beauty of the body for a
trifle. After occupations, he must needs be led to forms of
knowledge, to behold, in turn, the beauty of the sciences, and,
gazing at the realm, now vast, of beauty, no longer will he, like a
menial, cleave to the individual form, to the beauty of a stripling
or some man, or of some one pursuit living in a wretched slavery
and talking tattle; no, turned about towards the vast sea of beauty,
and contemplating it, he will give birth to manifold and beautiful
discourse of lofty import, and concepts born in boundless love and
wisdom; till there, with powers implanted and augmented, he has
the vision of one single science, the science of that beauty I go on
to.
...He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and
who has come to see the beautiful in successive stages and in
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order due, when now he nears the goal of the initiation, will
suddenly behold a beauty of wondrous nature, and, Socrates, this
is that for which all the former labors were undertaken; a beauty,
first of all, which is eternal, not growing up or perishing,
increasing or decreasing; secondly, not beautiful in one point and
ugly in another, nor sometimes beautiful and sometimes not, nor
beautiful in one relation and ugly in another, not beautiful in this
place and ugly in that, as if beautiful to some, or others ugly;
again, this beauty will not be revealed to him in the semblance of a
face, or hands, or any other element of the body, nor in any form
of speech or knowledge, nor yet as if it appertained to any other
being, a creature, for example upon the earth, or in the sky, or
elsewhere; no, it will be seen as beauty in and for itself, consistent
with the itself in uniformity for ever, whereas all other beauties
share it in such fashion that, while they are ever born and perish,
that eternal beauty, never waxing, never waning, never is
impaired. Now when a man, beginning with these transitory
beauties, and through the rightful love of youths ascending, comes
to have a sight of that eternal beauty, he is not far short of the goal.
This is indeed the rightful way of going, or of being guided by
another, to the things of love: starting from these transitory
beauties, with that beauty yonder as a goal, ever to mount
upwards, using these as rungs, from one going on to two, and from
two to all fair bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful
pursuits, and from beautiful pursuits to beautiful domains of
science, until, mounting from the sciences, he finally attains to
yonder science which has no other object save eternal beauty in
itself, and knows at last the beauty absolute.
This Eternal, or Ideal Beauty surpassing all earthly beauties but
attainable only through an initial love of them, Plato identifies the
True and the Good. Thus he links moral with aesthetic values.
Fascinated with the concept of this interrelationship between love
and beauty, Ficino, in his Commentary, likewise envisages a
symposium at which certain Florentine intellectuals, including
8

himself, explicate each of the definitions of love in the original

dialogue. In interpreting Socrates' speech, Ficino, like St.
Augustine and Dante, identifies the Platonic idea of Beauty and
Goodness with the Christian God. Love of God, the Ideal Beauty,
writes Ficino, brought order out of chaos in the creation of the
universe:
In the beginning, God created the substance of the Angelic Mind,
which we also call Essence. This, in the first moment of its
creation, was formless and dark, but since it was born from God, it
turned toward God, its own source, with a certain innate desire.
When turned toward God, it was illumined by the glory of God
Himself. In the glow of His radiance its own passion was set
ablaze. when its whole passion was kindled, it drew close to God,
and in cleaving to Him, assumed form....Before the approach came
the kindling of passion, before that the illumination by the divine
light, before that the first inclination of desire, and before that the
substance of the disorderly Mind. It is that still formless substance
which we mean by Chaos; that first turning toward God we call
the birth of Love; the infusion of the divine light, the nourishing of
love; the ensuing conflagration, the increment of love; the
approach to God, the impact of love; and the giving of the forms,
the completion of love. The composite of all the Forms and Ideas
we call in Latin a mundus, and in Greek, a cosmos, that is
Orderliness. The attractiveness of this Orderliness is Beauty. To
beauty, Love, as soon as it was born, drew the Mind, and led the
Mind formerly un-beautiful to the same Mind made beautiful. And
sop we may say that the nature of Love is this, that it attracts to
beauty and links the un-beautiful with the beautiful. [Sears R.
Jayne, translator]
In order to know God, who is both the Good and the True as well
as the Beautiful toward which man by natural love is driven, he
must first become acquainted with the Good, which at the same
time is the Beautiful:
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By avoiding evil we pursue the good. The evil deeds of man are
the same as his ugly deeds. Likewise, the good are the same as the
beautiful. Certainly all the laws and codes provide nothing but
instruction to man himself to avoid the ugly and cleave to the
beautiful.
Through love man achieves goodness:
When we say Love, we mean by that term the desire for beauty,
for this is the definition of Love among the philosophers.
Ficino then defines beauty:
Beauty is, in fact, a certain charm which is found chiefly and
predominantly in the harmony of several elements. This charm is
threefold: there is a certain charm in the soul, in the harmony of
several virtues; charm is found in material objects, in the harmony
of several colors and lines; and likewise charm in sound is the best
harmony of several tones. There is, therefore, this triple beauty: of
soul, of the body, and of sound.
While the mind apprehends the beauty of the soul, the beauties of
the body and of sound are perceived only by the eyes and the ears,
respectively. The other senses--smell, taste, and touch--are not
associated with the perception of beauty and hence have nothing
to do with love, which is the desire to enjoy beauty. On the
contrary, the desire that they provoke is not love but lust, or
madness. Ficino carefully distinguishes between grossly physical
and purely spiritual love:
If love in relation to man desires human beauty itself, and the
beauty of the human body consists in a certain harmony; if that
harmony is a kind of temperance, it follows that love seeks only
what is temperate, moderate, and decorous. Pleasures and
sensations which are so impetuous and irrational that they MOVE
the mind from its stability and unbalance a man, love does not
only desire, but hates and shuns, because these sensations, being
so intemperate, are the opposites of beauty. Ugliness and beauty
are opposites. The impulses, therefore, which attract to these two,
seem to be mutually opposites. It follows that love and the desire
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for physical union are not only not identical impulses, but are
proved to be opposite ones.
Nevertheless, by stressing the important function of the eyes and
ears, Ficino links physical with spiritual love:
The doors of the soul seem to be the eyes and the ears, for though
these many things are carried into the soul, and the desires of the
soul and its nature clearly shine out through the eyes. A lover
spends most of his time looking at the face of the loved one and
listening to his voice. Rarely does his mind withdraw into itself.
He particularly emphasizes they eyes:
All love begins with sight. But the love of the contemplative man
ascends from sight into the mind; that of the voluptuous man
descends from sight into touch, and that of the practical man
remains in the form of sight.
In fact, he "scientifically" explains how the eye perceives beauty:
Just as this vapor of blood, which is called spirit, since it is created
from the blood, is like blood, so it sends rays like itself through
the eyes as though through glass windows. And as the sun, which
is the heart of the universe, sends out from its orbit its light, and
through its light its own strength to lower things; so the hear of
our body, but its own kind of perpetual motion stirring the blood
nearest to it, from it pours spirits throughout the whole body, and
through them sparks of light through the various single parts, but
especially through the eyes. Of course the spirit flies out to the
highest part of the body, since it is very light; moreover, its light
shines more richly through the eyes (than through the other parts)
because the eyes themselves are for seeing and are above the rest
of the parts and the most transparent and clear of all the parts.
The love of spiritual beauty, in turn, leads to the knowledge of
God, or Infinite Beauty:
That single light of the single truth is the beauty of the Angelic
Mind, which you must worship above the beauty of the soul.
This...excels the beauty of bodies, because it is neither limited to
space nor divided according to the parts of matter, nor is it
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corrupted. It excels the beauty of the soul because it is

fundamentally eternal and is not disturbed by the passage of time,
but since the light of the Angelic Mind shines in the series of
innumerable ideas, and it is fitting that there be a unity above all
the multitude of everything, a unity which is the origin of all
number; this light necessarily flows from one single principle of
everything, which we call the One Itself.
So the simple light of the One Itself is everything is infinite
beauty, because it is neither soiled by the stains of matter, like the
beauty of the body, nor, like the form of the soul is it changed by
the passage of time, nor, like the beauty of the Angelic mind, is it
spent in vast number; and every quality separate from extraneous
additions is called infinite by the natural philosophers....So the
light and beauty of God, which is pure, freed from all other things,
is called, without the slightest question, infinite beauty. But
infinite beauty demands a vast love also. Wherefore...you must
worship God truly with infinite love, and let there be no limit to
divine love.
Thus, in Ficino's scheme of things the love for a fellow human
being becomes a simple preparation for the love of God, which,
according to the interpretation of P.O. Kristeller, "is the true and
real content of human desire and is only deflected toward persons
and things by the reflected splendor of divine beauty and goodness
in them." (The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, tr. Virginia Conant)
Since Ficino regards the love between two individuals as a mutual
love entirely free from any sensual element and limited only to
eye, ear, and thought, the difference between the sexes, which
assumes considerable importance in the usual concept of love,
loses its basic importance. Consequently, not only a man and a
woman, but also two men or two women, may thus be united by
the sentiment of love. This love between friends, based as it is on
the love of the soul for God, Ficnio terms divine, or "Platonic"
love. In fact, Ficino was the first to use this somewhat hackneyed
phrase with reference to the intellectual love between friends.
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Ficino's contemporaries found particularly pleasing his argument

that since the body and soul are inseparable the desires of the body
are not in themselves evil but are evil only when regarded as ends
in themselves rather than as the means of attaining to the
knowledge of God. This doctrine may be largely responsible for
the popular opinion that men of the Renaissance were essentially
worldly. Living in the materialistic twentieth century, however, we
must be careful not to confuse their secularization or "laitization"
as it might be termed with reference to the German Reformation,
with irrelegion or atheism, for above all, the Renaissance was a
period of high idealism in which the religious spirit was an
important component. It was not that heaven was now disregarded
as man's ultimate abode, but rather that life on earth took on a new
charm as a thing of joy in itself, a contradistinction to the
medieval concept of worldly existence as preparation for another
life to come. this change in viewpoint was partly the result of a
new spirit of scientific inquiry, a renewal of man's interest in, and
curiosity concerning, the natural world around him. Whether
regarded as cause or result, these attitudes were not unrelated to
the voyages of discovery to the exploratory activities of such
adventurous spirits as Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, and Cortez,
and to the technological developments in astronomy, printing, and
countless other areas.
Among the many literary artists captivated by the philosophy that
man rises from love of earthly beauty to that of heaven was
Baldassare Castiglione, who in 1528 adapted this philosophy as a
sort of rhetorical conclusion for his guide to polite politics, Il
Cortegiano (The Courtier). In the first two books of this handbook
Castiglione sets down the specifications for the ideal gentleman,
and in Book III he describes the ideal gentlewoman. These
personages are typified in the Renaissance ideal of the Universal
Man (L'uomno universale), whose distinguishing hallmark was
assumed to be breadth of interest and versatility of
accomplishment. Ability to discourse upon many subjects and in
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many fields was held in such high regard that there arose a
veritable cult of eloquence--at its best, brilliant and witty, at its
worst, superficial and vituperative.
Book IV, after explaining how the courtier can assist his prince-another popular concept of the Renaissance discussed by such
humanists as Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More--Castiglione
has Count Gonzaga, the misogynist, ask whether the ideal courtier,
if he has the qualities of a lover, can be old, for maintains the
Count, only an old, experienced man is capable of advising his
prince. In reply Pietro Bembo defines love as "a certain coveting
to enjoy beauty" and then launches into a discourse on love
obviously derived from Ficino. But instead of using the abstract
language of the philosophers, Bembo, in the idiom of courtly love
already familiar in the poetry of the troubadours, in Dante's Vita
Nuova, and in the sonnets of Petrarch, describes the yearning of
the human soul for beauty. In terms of actual courtship, beauty is
personified as the Lady, and the love of beauty becomes her
Lover. differentiating among three kinds of love--sensual, rational,
and intellectual--Bembo points out that beauty may be perceived
through the senses, through reason, or through understanding:
Of sense ariseth appetite or longing, which is common to us with
brute beasts; of reason ariseth election or choice, which is proper
to man; of understanding, by the which man may be partner with
angels, ariseth will. Even as therefore the sense knoweth not but
sensible matters and that which may be felt, so the appetite or
coveting only desireth the same; and even as the understanding is
bent but to behold things that may be understood, so is that will
only fed with spiritual goods. Man of nature endowed with reason,
placed, as it were, in the middle between those two extremities,
may, through his choice inclining to sense or reaching to
understanding, come nigh to the coveting, sometime the one,
sometime the other part.
Sensual love Bembo condemns as illusory:
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When the soul then is taken with coveting to enjoy this beauty
["that appeareth in bodies and especially in the face of man"] as a
good thing, in case she suffer herself to be guided with the
judgment of sense, she falleth into most deep errors, and judgeth
the body in which beauty is discerned to be the principal cause
thereof; whereupon to enjoy it she reckoneth it necessary to join as
inwardly as she can that body, which is false; and therefore whoso
thinketh in possessing the body to enjoy beauty, he is far deceived,
and is moved to it, not with true knowledge by the choice of
reason, but with false opinion by the longing of sense. Whereupon
the pleasure that followeth it is also false and of necessity full of
errors.
While conceding that a young man naturally tends toward sensual
love, he maintains that an older and wiser man will practice
restraint:
Since the nature of man in youthful age is so much inclined to
sense, it may be granted the courtier, while he is young, to love
sensually. But in case afterward also, in his riper years, he chance
to set on fire with this coveting of love, he ought to be good and
circumspect, and heedful that he beguile not himself to be led
willfully into the wretchedness that in young men deserveth more
to be pitied than blamed and contrawise in old men, more to be
blamed than pitied.
The rational lover, indeed, will be content to satisfy the higher
senses with gazing upon his beloved and listening to her voice:
Therefore, when an amiable countenance of a beautiful woman
cometh in his sight, this is accompanied with noble conditions and
honest behaviors, so that, as one practised in love, he wotteth well
that his hue hath an agreement with hers, as soon as he is aware
that his eyes snatch that image and carry it to the heart, and that
the soul beginneth to behold it with pleasure, and feeleth within
herself the influence that stirreth her and by little and little setteth
her in heat, and that those lively spirits that twinkle out through
the eyes put continually fresh nourishment to the fire, he ought in
15

this beginning to seek a speedy remedy and to raise up reason, and

with her to fence the fortress of his heart, and to shut in such wise
the passages against sense and appetites that they may enter
neither with force nor subtle practice....
And as a man heareth not with his mouth, or smelleth with his
ears, no more can he also in any manner wise enjoy beauty, nor
satisfy the desire that she stirreth up in our minds, with feeling,
but with the sense unto whom beauty is the very butt to level at,
namely, the virtue of seeing. Let him lay aside, therefore, the blind
judgment of the sense, and enjoy with his eyes the brightness, the
comeliness, the loving sparkles, laughters, gestures, and all the
other pleasant furnitures of beauty, especially with hearing the
sweetness of her voice, the tenableness of her words, the melody
of her singing and playing on instruments (in case the woman
beloved be a musician), and so shall he with the most dainty food
feed the soul through the means of these two senses which have
little bodily substance in them and be the ministers of reason,
without entering farther toward the body with coveting unto any
longing otherwise than honest...
...It is not a small token that a woman loveth when she giveth unto
her lover her beauty, which is so precious a matter; and by the
ways that be a passage to the soul (that is to say, the sight and the
hearing), sendeth the looks of her eyes, the image of her
countenance, and the voice of her words, that pierce into the
lover's heart and give a witness of her love. [Italics Added]
Unlike the sensual lover, the rational lover, thus receiving the
image of his beloved through his eyes and cherishing it in his
heart, will suffer no distress when separated from her but will
joyfully contemplate her image:
Where no other inconvenience ensueth upon it, one's absence from
the wight beloved carrieth a great passion with it; because the
influence of that beauty when it is present giveth a wondrous
delight to the lover, and, setting his heart on fire, quickeneth and
melteth certain virtues in a trance and congealed in the soul, the
16

which, nourished with the heat of love, flow about and go

bubbling nigh the heart, and thrust out through the eyes those
spirits which be most fine vapors made of the purest and clearest
part of the blood, which receive the image of beauty and deck it
with a thousand sundry furnitures....The lover, therefore, that
considereth only the beauty in the body, loseth this treasure and
happiness as soon as the woman beloved with her departure
leaveth the eyes without their brightness, and consequently the
soul as a window without her joy. For since beauty is far off, that
influence of love setteth not the heart on fire, as it did in
presence....To avoid, therefore, the torment of this absence, and to
enjoy beauty without passion, the Courtier by the help of reason
must full and wholly call back again the coveting of the body to
beauty alone, and, in what he can, behold it in itself simple and
pure, and frame it within his imagination sundered from all matter,
and so make it friendly and loving to his soul, and there enjoy it,
and have it with him day and night, and in every time and place
without mistrust ever to lose it; keeping always fast in mind that
the body is a most diverse thing from beauty, and not only not
increaseth but diminisheth the perfection of it.
Through his imagination, indeed, the rational lover will make her
image even more beautiful than it actually is;
He shall not take thought at departure or in absence, because he
shall evermore carry his precious treasure about with him shut fast
within his heart. And besides, through the virtue of imagination,
he shall fashion within himself that beauty much more fair than it
is indeed.
Then using this image as a stair, he will ascend, in the manner
prescribed by Plato and Ficino, to a higher beauty:
But among commodities the lover shall find another yet far
greater, in case he will take this love for a stair, as it were, to climb
up to another far higher than it. The which he shall bring to pass, if
he will go and consider with himself what a strict bond it is to be
always in the trouble to beheld the beauty of one body alone. And
17

therefore, to come out of this so narrow a room, he shall gather in

his thoughts by little and little so many ornaments that mingling
all beauties together he shall make a universal concept, and bring
the multitude of them to the unity of one alone, that is generally
spread over all the nature of man. And thus shall he behold no
more the particular beauty of one woman, but a universal, that
decketh out all bodies.
Having once beheld "The beauty that is seen with the eyes of the
mind," if he falters not, he will eventually arrive at the love of the
understanding, or the intellect, which is the highest form on love,
and he will perceive the universal beauty:
And therefore, burning in this most happy flame, she [the soul]
ariseth to the noblest part of her, which is the understanding, and
there, no more shadowed with the dark night of earthly matters,
seeth the heavenly beauty; but yet doth she not for all that enjoy it
altogether perfectly, because she beholdeth it only in her particular
understanding, which cannot conceive the passing great universal
beauty; whereupon, not thoroughly satisfied with this benefit, love
giveth unto the soul a greater happiness. For like as though the
particular beauty of one body he guideth her to the universal
beauty of all bodies, even so in the last degree of perfection
through particular understanding he guideth her to the universal
understanding. Thus the soul kindled in the most holy fire of
heavenly love fleeth to couple herself with the nature of angels,
and not only clean forsaketh sense, but hath no more need of the
discourse of reason, for, being changed into an angel, she
understandeth all things that may be understood; and without any
veil or cloud she seeth the main sea of the pure heavenly beauty,
and receiveth it into her, and enjoyeth that sovereign happiness
that cannot be comprehended of the senses.
Thus, through this manual of good manners, rendered palatable to
the popular taste by its verisimilitude resultitng from the
introduction of characters from real life and the use of sprightly
dialogue, the influence of Plato's theory of the interrelationship of
18

love and beauty extended beyond the humanists to the general

reading public.
Further increasing this tendency toward idealism, Valla's
translation of Aristotle's Poetics made this important treatise
available to the learned world. The numerous editions,
translations, and commentaries that appeared during the sixteenth
century attest to its widespread appeal. Perhaps its greatest impact
upon literary art was produced by Aristotle's refutation therein of
Plato's objection to poetry on the ground that instead of calming it
excites our meanest passions. While conceding that poetry,
especially dramatic poetry, might excite the emotions in order to
allay and regulate them and through this aesthetic process to
purify and ennoble them, Aristotle maintains that poetry possesses
a higher reality than that of ordinary, everyday life, namely, the
reality of eternal probability. Dealing not with particulars but with
universals, the poet, unlike the historian, depicts not what has been
or what is but what might have been or what ought to be. And just
as Plato identifies the Beautiful with the True and the Good, so
Aristotle emphasizes the ethical value of poetry by justifying it on
the grounds of morality in that it presents an idealized
representation of life--an imitation of life in its noblest aspects.
With the principle of perfection as derived ultimately from Plato
and Aristotle thus firmly established as an aesthetic principle of
Renaissance art, it was inevitable that it should affect Italian
lyrical poetry, already tinged with an idealism that may be traced
back to Plato by a much more devious route than that of the
humanistic revival of the classics: in other words, from Petrarch,
whose songs and sonnets in praise of Laura became the models of
Renaissance poetry, to Dante's Vita Nuova and the songs of the
troubadours, thence to the Moors, who brought Neo-Platonism to
Spain, thence around the Mediterranean coast of Africa to
Alexandria, and finally to Athens. Petrarch, like Dante, considered
allegory an essential poetic art. Just as Belatrice in the Vita Nuova
strongly suggests an idealized love since later in the Divina
19

Commedia she becomes an abstraction, so Petrarch's Laura seems

to represent the ideal woman.
By the time the influence of Petrarch had reached England through
the translations and imitations of Sir thomas Wyatt (1403-1547)
and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey (ca. 1517-1547), the
English poets were already familiar with the philosophy of
classical idealism. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), in his Defense
of Poesy (ca. 1583), which J>E> Springarn terms "a veritable
epitome of the literary criticism of the Italian Renaissance,"
defines poetry as the expression of the imagination, whether in
verse or in prose, the chief aim of which is to create people and
things better or entirely different from those of the real world:
The poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection [as that of
natural objects], lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth
grow, in effect, into another nature; in making things either better
than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew; forms such as never
were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras,
furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not
enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging
within the zodiac of his own wit. (The Works of Sir Philip Sidney,
Cambridge: At the University Press, 1923.)
Even if other indebtedness to Plato and Aristotle in this important
essay were ignored, Sidney's insistence upon poetic idealism
would would reveal his kinship with the Italian humanists. The
Defense of Poesy, indeed, epitomizes the prevailing literary
criticism of the Renaissance.
Sidney's own creative writing furnishes ample proof that he
practiced what he professed. Following Petrarch and his French
imitators, Sidney composed sonnets filled with Platonic conceits.
Again like Petrarch, he gives his sonnets a greater unity by
directing then all toward one particular lady and connecting them
by a tenuous narrative thread. Calling himself Astrophel (or starlover), he celebrates his great love for Stella, whose name seems
to have been suggested by its aptness for setting forth Ficino's
20

theory of the importance of the sense of sight in love, for Sidney

impresses his reader with the beauty of the eyes of his "star." After
praising Stella's matchless features, he introduces a dramatic
complication in the form of parental insistence that Stella marry a
wealthy suitor instead of her true lover Astrophel. The
disappointment gives him an opportunity to contrast the agonies of
the sensual lover with the philosophical calm of the rational lover.
Further emphasizing the superiority of idealized or platonic, love
over physical desire, Astrophel feigns an adulterous love for
Stella, which serves as a foil to offset her inviolable chastity in
repelling him. By overcoming his sensual desires, he, in turn, is
led up the stair of love, as it were, toward the intellectual love of
God. Thus, in accordance with Plato, Ficino, and Castiglione, who
maintain that love of earthly beauty must precede that of the ideal,
the siege that the poet lays to the heart of his mistress, whose
wondrous beauty transcends that of all other women, allegorically
represents the artist's yearning for perfection.
Sidney's success inaugurated a vogue in sonnet writing that raged
for more than a decade. It seems as though almost every poet of
any consequence became seized with the desire to emulate the
inventor of Astrophel in the extravagance of his praise of the ideal
lady of his dreams. Samuel Daniel celebrated his undying passion
for Delia, Henry Constable for Diana, Thomas Lodge for Phillis,
Robert Tofte for Laura, Bartholomew Griffin for Fidessa, William
Smith for Chloris, Richard Lynche for Eiella, William Percy for
Coelia, Giles Fletcher for Licia, and so on. Each poet, in
describing his mistress, whose identity presumably was concealed
under a fictitious name, uses a vocabulary of conventional
metaphors. For example, he exaggerates the power of her beautiful
eyes, which Ficino terms the "windows of the soul." Furthermore,
he promises to immortalize her beauty in his poetry. She, on the
contrary, is almost invariably indifferent to his impassioned pleas.
As a result, he "wails in woe and plunges in pain" to borrow the
phrase of one of these sonneteers describing the imaginary agonies
21

of unrequited love. He tries to find solace in sleep, usually without

success. When separated from his beloved, he carries her image in
his heart. In short, the subject matter of these sonnets was
narrowly restricted; originality was not desirable; indeed, the aim
of the poet was to demonstrate his ability to to rework these stock
ideas into new patterns. Thus the sonnet cycle became a sort of
measuring rod of poetic skill.
Since each cycle consists of about a hundred sonnets, the total
number that came into print mounts well into the thousands.
Because of the gentleman's code that prohibited a poet from
seeking publication, many more doubtless were written but have
been lost. The moving eloquence ...has prompted readers to search
for autobiographical information in them. Yet in this great age of
English drama it was only natural that these poets, many of whom
also were dramatists, would adopt such dramatic principles as
surprise, irony, and climax. Recalling Sidney's distaste for realism,
shown in his scorn of the historian who is perforce "captivated to
the truth of a foolish world," the reader should steer clear of a
literal interpretation of the sonnets. Instead, in the light of the
Platonic tradition, he should regard the sonnet cycle as a poetic
allegory of Platonic love and beauty, similar, perhaps to Titian's
painting of "Sacred and Profane Love."
The influence of Plato and his Renaissance interpreters was by no
means confined to the sonnet but extended to other forms of
English poetry and even to the prose of the period. Perhaps the
most obvious example of Platonic idealism, indeed, is the poem
Four Hymns written by Edmund Spencer (1552-1599) in
celebration of love and beauty,, both earthly and divine. In English
prose, beginning with such humanistic master pieces as More's
Utopia (originally written in Latin in 1517 and translated into
English in 1551 by Richard Robinson), Elyot's The Boke Named
the Governour (1531), and Ascham's Scholemaster (1570), and
ending with the euphuistic romances of John Lyly (1554?-1606),
Robert Greene (1558?-1592), and Thomas Lodge (1558-1625), the
22

recognition of the concept that the True and the Good are always
associated with the Beautiful.
The concept of perfect beauty consisting of the True, the Good,
and the Beautiful, as derived from the asesthtics of Plato and
Aristotle, thus becomes the essence of the artistic philosophy of
the Renaissance. At the same time it serves as a means of
correlating literature with the other fine arts of the period. The
balance and proportion in a typical example of the Renaissance
painting such as Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" are
comparable to the regularity and formailty, as well as to the
elevated content, of Spenser's Four Hymns. The idealized
representation of the human figure in the Venuses of Titian and the
Madonnas of Raphael expresses the same inherent attitude toward
art as the matchless perfection of Sidney' Stella and Daniel's Delia.
Perhaps even more closely akin to the sonnets are the madrigals
and motets of Renaissance music. Indeed, there has probably
never been a more direct relationship between music and literature
than the one between madrigal and sonnet during this Renaissance
period. Parallel in structure, each conditoned by the technical
compulsions of its own art, and similar in spirit and tone, the two
forms are unthinkable without each other.
But beyond these fairly obvious parallels in the different arts is the
true correlative, which is to be found not so much in the creation
itself as in the artist's own philosophy. In the renaissance in
particular, and to a great extent in the subsequent periods
preceding Romanticism, this philosophy resolves itself into a
search for perfection, for ideal beauty--for symmetry, proportion,
and balance.
SPECIFIC CORRELATIONS WITH THE OTHER FINE ARTS
[You will be provided with a list of specific readings and specific
illustrations from the art, music, architecture, and music of the
Renaissance; many of the illustrations will be discussed in class.]

23

ART, MUSIC, AND LITERATURE

LI T E R AT U R E
The Idealization of Love and Beauty
:
EDMUND SPENSER
from An Hymn in Honour of Love in Four Hymns
An Hymn in Honour of Beauty
An Hymn of Heavenly Beauty
The Lady's Superlative Beauty
:
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Sonnet 9
EDMUND SPENSER
Sonnet 15
Sonnet 81
SAMUEL DANIEL
Sonnet 6
The Idealization of her Beauty
EDMUND SPENSER
Sonnet 45
Sonnet 55
Sonnet 61
Sonnet 72
Sonnet 79
Sonnet 83
The Role of the Eye in Love
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Sonnet 7
EDMUND SPENSER
Sonnet 8
Sonnet 9
Sonnet 16
The Warfare between Sense and Reason
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
24

Sonnet 10
Sonnet 25
Sonnet 71
Sonnet 72
The Suffering of the Sensual Lover Separated From his Beloved
: SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Sonnet 31
Sonnet 39
Sonnet 4
SAMUEL DANIEL
Sonnet 51
HENRY CONSTABLE
Sonnet 2
The Solace of the Rational Lover Separated from his Beloved
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Sonnet 88
The Promise of Immortality in Verse
EDMUND SPENSER
Sonnet 69
Sonnet 75
SAMUEL DANIEL
Sonnet 40
MUSIC
BYRD: HAEC DIES
CABERZON: DIFERENCIAS SOBRE EL CANTOLLANO DEL
CAVALLERO
DOWLAND: COME AGAIN, SWEET LOVE
GABRIELI, ANDREA: ANGELUS AD PASTORES AIT;
RICERCARI
GABRIELI, GIOVANNI: JUBILATE DEO; SONATA PAIN E
FORTE
JANQUIN: AU JOLY JEU; CE MOYS DE MAI; LE CHANT DES
OISEAU
25

JOSQUIN DES PREZ: AVE COELORUM DOMINA; AVE

VERUM; FAULTE D'ARTGENT; INCARNATUS (AVE REGINA
COLORUM; JE NE PUIS; SALVE REGINA
PALESTRINA: ALLA RIVA DEL TEBRO; HODIE CHRISTUS
NATUS EST; KYRE AND GLORIA (MISSA PAPAE MARCELLI);
SANCTUS (MISSA ASSUMPTA EST MARIA); SICUT CERVUS;
TU ES PETRUS
PAI N T I N G
BELLINI, GIOVANNI: DOGE LEONARDO LORENDANO;
FRARI MADONNA
BOTTICELLI: BIRTH OF VENUS
GOZZOLI: JOURNEY OF THE MAGI
LEONARDO DA VINCI: LAST SUPPER; MADONNA OF THE
ROCKS; MONA LISA
RAPHAEL: DIOTALEVI MADONNA; DISPUTA; MADONNA DE
SAN SISTO
SARTO, ANDREA DEL: MADONNA OF THE HARPIES
TITIAN: ANNUNCIATIOPN; PORTRAIT OF POPE PAUL III;
SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE; VENUS AND ADONIS
ARC HITECTURE
BLOIS: CHATEAU (FRANCIS I WING)
CHAMBORD: CHATEAU
FLORENCE: MMEDICI-RICCARDI PALACE; PAZZI CHAPEL;
PITTI PALACE
ROME: FARNESE PALACE
VENICE: VENDRAMINI PALACE; CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA
DEI MIRACOLI
VERONA: PALAZZO POMPEI
SCULPTURE
DONATELLO: DAVID; GATTAMELATA; ST. GEORGE
GHIBERTI: GATES OF PARADISE (DOORS OF THE
BAPTISTERY, FLORENCE)
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: MADONNA DN CHILD;
PIETA
26

VERROCCHIO COLLEONI (VENICE); DAVID (FLORENCE)

27