Medicina y política en Francesco Patrizi: el cuerpo de La Ciudad Feliz
Besides some disagreements, La citta felice of Francesco Patrizi has usually been considered both as a work belonging to the utopian genre of sixteenth century or as a philosophical portrait of the real Venice. In this essay, I maintain, instead, that La citta felice was born in Patrizi’s mind from his attempt to support the Aristotelian political, aristocratic, order and to justify it according to the principles of the philosophical and Platonic medicine of Marsilio Ficino. Such an attempt led him to describe the polis as a human body, applying the Hippocratic-Galenic system to explain its internal functions and considering that the political order of the city arises from the civic body’s needs for maintaining the quantity and quality of natural, vital and animal spiritus.
The Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine
In order that the necessity and the substance of the spirit may be more fully shown, we must revisit and recall the doctrines of the ancient philosophers. The Academics4 were the first to suppose, when they realized that two entirely dissimilar natures cannot be associated together without the interposition of a suitable mean, that our soul, created by the supreme maker of all things, before its emanation and immigration into this thick and solid body, put on as a simple garment a certain shining, pure body like a star, which, being immortal and eternal, could never be detached nor torn away from the soul, and without which the soul could not become an inhabitant of this world. Then they surrounded the soul with another body, also fine and simple, but less pure, less shining and splendid than the first, not created by the supreme maker, but compounded of a mixture of the finer elements, whence it is named aerial and aethereal. Clothed with these two bodies the soul, entering this frail and mortal body, or rather thrown like an exile into a loathsome and shadowy prison, becomes a guest of the earth until, having broken from this prison and having returned, joyful and free, to its home, it is made a fellow-citizen of the gods.
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
Emphasizing the primary importance of Hermetism in Renaissance thought, Yates demonstrates that Bruno was at once a rational philospher and a magician - burned at the stake - with an unorthodox religious message. Her acclaimed study gives an overview not only of Renaissance humanism but of its interplay - and conflict - with magic and occult practices.