The Renaissance is one of the brightest periods in Western history, a transition from the medieval harsh darkness to classical clarity and elegance. In our time, many thinkers contemplate the coming of a new Middle Ages; the thought of the Renaissance clearly indicates how far we are from it. This era of brilliance in the 19th century is defined by the word itself: Renaissance, rebirth.
For this new form of thinking, nature – and therefore the Universe – is an inexhaustible palette that enables man to explore through work and creative cognition. Such principles sharply oppose the old medieval model characterized by closed order, rigid forms, and man inclined to excessive contemplation, constrained by the overwhelming power of doctrine and faith over reason.
This difference should not be observed in terms of two impermeable, opposing divisions that are the result of some rough division in space and time, but as an obvious historical sequence. Thus, the Renaissance historically appears as a strong path bilingual, laboriously nurtured in previous centuries, against the restrictive dogmas that directly opposed freedom of thought.
Like the Greeks, the people of the Renaissance possessed that freshness and vitality that gives clarity to thinking and refinement to culture, enabling man to have a sense of ethics and aesthetics.
Florence
Man
Marsilio Ficino was born in 1433 in Figline, near Florence. As the son of Cosimo de Medici’s personal physician, he received appropriate upbringing and education. His father destined him to become a physician and sent him to study medicine in Bologna. While studying Cicero, he became fascinated by Plato’s philosophy, which was then poorly known despite the existing works to which numerous Dialogues were added during the Middle Ages, translated by Leonardo Bruni. Cosimo de Medici employed him to translate the Corpus Platonicum, offering him a villa in Careggi near Florence for this work.
He studied Greek in order to be able to appreciate the significance of Plato’s philosophy in its original form. Ficino was passionate about philosophy and imitated the Greeks in everything, acquiring knowledge of music, astrology, and theology. Thanks to his knowledge of classical Greek language, Cosimo supplied him with various transcripts of Plato’s Dialogues, which Ficino began translating in 1463. The inscription engraved at the entrance of the Academy in Careggi states: “Good governs everything and leads them towards Good. Rejoice now. Do not value wealth, do not seek honors, avoid excessiveness, and do not let yourself be bribed. Rejoice now.”
Ficino is the only thinker of his time who developed a comprehensive and original philosophical system. Plato’s theology and Letters are the main carriers of his philosophical ideas. Using the method and approach of medieval scholasticism, he recognizes Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, the neoplatonic Alexandrian thought of the 3rd and 4th centuries, Saint Augustine, and Saint Thomas as undisputed authorities.
Regarding cosmology, according to Ficino, the Universe is… Unique living organism (zoon) whose constitutive parts are soul and body, therefore it is revealed through visible and invisible forms. The Universe is also a great hierarchy in which each being occupies a certain place (ordo rerum) and possesses its degree of perfection: starting from God and descending through the ranks of angels and celestial spheres, spirit (mind – mens) and soul (anima) connected to the animating body, various animal species, plants, and minerals, all the way to formless prime matter. Light and “observation” will define Ficino’s philosophy, which, despite similarities with Plato’s and Plotinus’s, possesses its own originality: Emanation is replaced by Creation, and Love and Beauty take first place; the pyramid is replaced by a sphere, a sphere in which each element has its attractive force, its individuality that does not disappear but is shared in the phenomenal world, creating interconnections. Unlike Plotinus’s concept of Emanation, Ficino’s light cannot be darkened, i.e. Filth of mistakes does not imprison a man.
Ficino distinguishes four substances: God, Angelic mind, World soul, and World body. World soul is divided into the soul itself with its intellect and nature or life fluid. This gives it the ability to realize the process of creation, which is based on two possible triads: the first – the soul between God and matter, and the second – the soul between nature and the Angelic mind. Ficino refined Plotinus’ concept, making it more symmetrical and assigning the soul a central position.
The entire Universe moves by love, an innate desire for attraction, its principle of affinity. The world is a great harmony, and the Universe is a vast organism.
Good and Beauty
According to Ficino, Good is located at the center, and Beauty on the surface of the sphere, as two aspects of the same reality, like internal and external perfection. These are two parts of the same process, like the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Ficino’s student Pico della Mirandola developed a somewhat different idea, according to which… The difference between Good and Beauty is that Beauty is subordinate to Good, just as aesthetics is subordinate to ethics.
Following Plotinus, Ficino further establishes that Beauty is immaterial and criticizes the theory that beauty is based on the Stoic concept of proportion because if Beauty resided in the harmony of parts, then no simple thing would be beautiful. Ficino chooses light over proportion. Within universal Beauty, there is a diminishing (gradation) of light, visible like concentric circles that emanate from greater light to greater darkness.
The ray of universal Beauty is embodied “in angels, archetypes, and ideas; in souls, inspirations, and images; in matter, figures, and forms.” This can be represented by a sphere of radiating light that gradually darkens towards the edges, in matter. This is because the luminous spirituality of Beauty is received by a more or less suitable “substrate,” and it is this reception that gives meaning to arguments in favor of proportion. possessed a deep understanding of beauty, embracing its dimensions, quantity, and color. This perception of beauty aligns with the art that thrived during the Renaissance, particularly with Leonardo da Vinci’s work.
Ficino adopted Plato and Plotinus’ tradition of illumination, which distinguishes two fundamental components of beauty: proportion and light. In this sense, he merges Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with the Christian tradition of the biblical creation. In both texts, light represents a guarantee of divine radiance.
There is another interpretation of Beauty that made Ficino celebrated in Florence at the time: “The beauty of the body is a certain liveliness, delight, and aura due to the presence of its idea.” All visible beauty is spiritual, not only because it is a medium that connects the eye and the object – light, hence spiritual – nor because without light, the eye wouldn’t have the ability to see, and the object wouldn’t be visible. It is spiritual and immaterial because the attainment of beauty itself is immaterial. Ficino guarantees the spiritual and immaterial nature of beauty.
At the time, Florence was the center. She saw the ideal of beauty in Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci. This beautiful woman is undoubtedly a symbol of the Renaissance. The relationships between Botticelli and his great friend Ficino, as confirmed by Gombrich, had a crucial influence on Botticelli’s canvases: in The Birth of Venus, Simonetta’s facial expression shows surprise, which best captures the experience of beauty, while in The Primavera, her face expresses concern (focus) that accompanies the responsible state in which she finds herself – pregnancy. The simplicity of Venus and the seriousness of the mother carrying new life in both paintings also symbolize Florence during the time of the Medicis, as well as Ficino’s ideal of beauty.
Love
According to Ficino, Love is the union with God. We do not ascend and pass through the levels of Beauty through knowledge, but through Love – the one that represents the divine aspiration towards the knowledge of Beauty in God. Love follows the divine image and seeks its likeness and spirituality, as Plato stated in Phaedrus. Love among people also possesses about the hidden search for God. It is a longing for infinity between two opposite and finite concepts: power and death. Love is a brilliantly pure longing and strives for unity with God, which is so difficult for humans to achieve.
But both love and death transcend temporal boundaries. The identity of the lover disappears before the subject of his love, and he “dies” in order to become the initiator of life again through mutuality.
The ray of universal Beauty is embodied “in angels, patterns and ideas; in souls, emotions and images; in matter, figures and forms.” This can be represented by a sphere of radiating light that gradually darkens towards the edges, in matter.
The Soul and Man
The soul occupies a central place in divine creation, simultaneously acquiring the role of gathering sublime luminous and lower dark characteristics. The third or middle essence represents the ascent from the body to God, as well as the descent from God to the body. God and the body constitute two extremes of being, and the Angelic mind does not unite them. The reason for this is because it is turned towards God and forgets about the body. The soul, on the contrary, reaches higher values without forgetting the lower ones, and is therefore immovable like the higher ones, and movable like the lower ones. This freedom and richness of possibilities represent the fundamental difference between humans and other beings: a difference that is based on the human ability to choose between one extreme and another. Unity of soul and body is not a relationship of equality but of dependence: the soul rules, enlivens, and preserves the body. God has destined the soul for two levels of light intensity: one natural and innate, and the other, divine and acquired. Depending on which of these intensities a person uses, they can either surrender to the material world and become bestialized, or, on the contrary, refine and divinize themselves. The proof of our immortality is precisely the ability of the soul to elevate itself towards God. Ficino repeats all of Plato’s arguments that support the immortality of the soul, adding that the soul is capable of measuring time and dividing it, infinitely returning time to the past and being To stretch him towards the future, indefinitely.