ARTH218

Michelangelo

(b Caprese, 1475; d Rome, 1564)

Not true that it’s always grim with mortal sin,
this love for a ravishing beauty here on earth,
as long as it melts the hard heart, shows its worth
as a target for divine love’s arrowhead.

Love shakes, wakes up the soul, grows wings that sped
its skyward flight. Lets even fond fools aspire.
Is the soul’s first step – an impatient one – toward higher
stairs to that heaven the sole Creator’s in.

That’s where the love I speak of longs to be.
Love for a lady’s different. Not much
in that for a wise and virile lover’s trouble.

One love seeks heaven; the other, earth’s vanity;
the soul’s home, one; the other wants taste and touch,
eye fixed on the goods of earth, its gaudy rubble.

From: The complete poems of Michelangelo. Translated by John F. Nims (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 131)

The Platonic Academy in Florence

• Neo-Platonic studies flourished at the Platonic Academy in Florence sponsored by the Medici. This “academy” was not a formal institution but rather a circle of friends who shared a common enthusiasm for Platonic philosophy.

• For Neo-Platonic philosophers, beauty was a reflection of the divine splendour in the created world, while love was a means of rising to the suprasensible world of ideas and ultimately attaining union with God.