Ficino and Italian Renaissance Art
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The intention of this dissertation is to examine the relation between the thought of Marsilio Ficino(1433-99) who was the leader in the Italian Renaissance Platonism of the 15th century, and the arts of the period materially. In connection with the immortality of the soul which is the central concept in Ficino’s own Platonism, he developed the aesthetic thought that was characteristic of the Renaissance period through the concepts of beauty, the radiance of divine goodness, and of love for it as the motive in the ascent of the human soul to God. Based upon Ficino’s platonic cosmology, beauty is the splendor of the divine countenance, in which the actively loving God first lights the angels, then illuminates the human souls, and lastly shines the material world. Another principle of beauty, as the precondition for the revelation of this beauty, is the mathematical order. Accordingly, beauty is the lucid proportion(lucida proportio), and it motivates the ascent of the human soul by arousing love. Especially, the notion of the harmonious structure of the universe, which derives from the emanation of the divine splendor, had a vast influence on the arts of the Italian Renaissance by invoking the images of art and artist involving divinity. Because of the excellent capacity of the human soul which desires to become God at the center of the universe, all artistic activities are an imitation of the divine Creator’s activities. Art, which handles, changes, and forms the materials of the world, is the production of a god on earth, and a reflection of the divine. To the extent that art materializes the intelligible into the sensible and represents it in the beautiful form, it motivates the human ascent to God, the absolute Beauty. Because the artistic activities prove the creative capacities of human beings, the privilege of the artist is established by the possibility of intuitive knowledge, which is superior to conceptual method. Thus the role bestowed upon Renaissance artists was to intuit intelligible principles from sensible experiences―through divine madness, allegorical vision, and genius―and to represent them in beautiful forms, all to make sure that the human soul would reach the supreme vision through aesthetic contemplation. In particular, the works of four great masters who were representatives in the Renaissance arts showed the influence on the arts of Ficino’s thought well. The concept of the beauty as ‘concinnitas’ in Alberti who took the lead in artistic theory of Renaissance, and the view of art in Leonard Da Vinci, ‘the universal man,’ who realized the ideal of artist as a god on earth proved the connection with the platonic thinking. Also the artworks of Botticelli and Michelangelo who vividly pictured the ideas circling around the axes of Ficino’s philosophy as the mythical and the allegorical images, made clear that the aesthetics of Ficino is the metaphysical foundation for defining the concept of the art in Renaissance period and interpreting the works of art. Indeed, the aesthetics of Ficino appropriately explains and justifies the typical attitude of the great Italian Renaissance artists of the 15th century.
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