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 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."
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 (1478-1535), Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?-1546), and Roger Ascham (1515-1568), 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.
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]
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 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 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:
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 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 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.
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 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:
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 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 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 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 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 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 star-lover), he celebrates his great love for Stella, whose name seems to have been suggested by its aptness for setting forth Ficino's 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 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 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.]
L I T E R A T U R E
EDMUND SPENSER
from An Hymn in Honour of Love in Four Hymns
An Hymn in Honour of Beauty
An Hymn of Heavenly Beauty
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Sonnet 9
EDMUND SPENSER
Sonnet 15
Sonnet 81
SAMUEL DANIEL
Sonnet 6
EDMUND SPENSER
Sonnet 45
Sonnet 55
Sonnet 61
Sonnet 72
Sonnet 79
Sonnet 83
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Sonnet 7
EDMUND SPENSER
Sonnet 8
Sonnet 9
Sonnet 16
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Sonnet 10
Sonnet 25
Sonnet 71
Sonnet 72
: SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Sonnet 31
Sonnet 39
Sonnet 4
SAMUEL DANIEL
Sonnet 51
HENRY CONSTABLE
Sonnet 2
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Sonnet 88
EDMUND SPENSER
Sonnet 69
Sonnet 75
SAMUEL DANIEL
Sonnet 40
M U S I C
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
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
P A I 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
A R C H I T E C T U R E
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
S C U L P T U R E
DONATELLO: DAVID; GATTAMELATA; ST. GEORGE
GHIBERTI: GATES OF PARADISE (DOORS OF THE BAPTISTERY, FLORENCE)
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: MADONNA DN CHILD; PIETA
VERROCCHIO COLLEONI (VENICE); DAVID (FLORENCE)