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.
Botticelli's Mythologies: A Study in the Neoplatonic Symbolism of His Circle
The history of Botticelli's fame has still to be written. In such a history the fascination which his 'pagan' subjects exerted on his discoverers in the nineteenth century would form an important part.' To generations of art lovers these pictures provided the back-cloth, as it were, for the stage of the Florentine quattrocento and the colourful drama of the Renaissance which they saw enacted on it. As this dream begins to recede, the need for a more strictly historical interpretation of Botticelli's mythologies becomes more apparent. We have become too much aware of the complex cross-currents of the late fifteenth century to accept the picture of the period which the literature on Botticelli still presents to us.2 The interpretation to be put before the reader in these pages tries to provide a hypothesis more in keeping with the available evidence, some of which has not been considered before. It takes its starting point from sources which show that Marsilio Ficino was the spiritual mentor of Botticelli's patron at the time the 'Primavera' was painted and that the Neoplatonic conception of the classical Gods was discussed in their correspondence. While it does not aspire to give 'proofs' in matters of interpretation where proofs cannot be given it tries to show that a coherent reading of Botticelli's mythologies can be obtained in the light of Neoplatonic imagery. The examples from Ficino's writings quoted in support of these arguments should not obscure the fact that vast tracts of this literature still remain unexplored and that a further search may yield better and closer parallels. Though a polemic against earlier interpretations could not be wholly avoided it should not be taken to imply that anything like finality is claimed for the present attempt. There is, in fact, an important assumption which this interpretation shares with all previous theories. It is an assumption which may any day be overthrown by a lucky find: the hypothesis that Botticelli's mythologies are not straight illustrations of existing literary passages but that they are based on 'programmes' drawn up ad hoc by a humanist. That such programmes for paintings existed in the quattrocento we can infer from con-