In Plato, the Symposium and the Phaedrus were especially influential. In the Symposium, of which Ficino wrote a Neoplatonic interpretation, Plato talks about love of beautiful bodies as the first step toward love of the divine. In the Phaedrus there is a tension between the two horses that pull the soul's chariot, one of which wants to lustfully grab the body of the beautiful boy he has dragged the chariot to, while the other restrains the first. In the allegory, both are necessary: the lustful horse draws the soul near to the beautiful object and makes it feel desire, but the other turns the desire into restrained contemplation, leading to the transformation of low desire into its higher forms.
In Renaissance art, there were two Venuses and two Cupids. For example, Equicola's program for Costa's Comus called for two Venuses and two Cupids, and they are indeed there in the painting (Campbell Cabinet of Eros p. 210f). The popular, earthly Venus (typically shown clothed, as also in Titian's so-called Sacred and Profane Love) is on the right, holding a syrinx between the lyre-player's legs. A wingless Cupid clings insecurely to her shoulder. On the left is the celestial Venus, nude, touching a winged Cupid holding laurel wreaths. (For the whole painting, see http://www.wga.hu/art/c/costa/lorenzo/isabellc.jpg.)
Già conteplando in alto i'vedo Amore
nel ciel fra gli altri dei lucido e chiaro
dolce piatoso, stabile e preclaro
con due belli occhi e pien d'ogni valore.
Non arco e strali in man, ma di dolore
celeste un lauro tien, e quel sí caro
porge ad ognun perch'è di nulla avaro,
sol lui mirando il suo divin splendore.
Poi mi rivolgo, ed vedo sparsa in terra
qua l'ombra sua da lui tutta diversa
chiamata Amor, palida, armata e cica.
Alora (sento dir) il se disserra
dal cor un fumo e a gli occhi s'attraversa,
ch'n coral modo il veder nostro acieca.
(Once in contemplation I saw Amor on high, bright and clear among the other gods in heaven, sweet, merciful, eternal and renowned, with two beautiful eyes and full of every virtue; He holds no bow in arrow in hand, but a heavenly laurel crown, and this precious thing he offers to all who only admire his divine splendor, becuse he is no miser. Then I looked back here, and saw here his shadow, totally different from him, let loose on earth: he is acalled Amor, pallid, armed, and blnd. Thus I've herd it said that he lets loose smoke in the heart and enters through the eyes, thus depriving us of our own sight.)In the Platonism known before the Renaissance, however, it was pointedly by renouncing "beautiful bodies" and acting in accord with Christian virtue that one was able to ascend, until one arrived at a truth beyond concepts. This doctrine, that of the docta ignorantia, had been articulated by Augustine (and defended, notably, in the 15th century by Nicholas of Cusa in his De Docta Ignorantia, 1440). Henry Chadwick, in Augustine, pp. 52-53 (in Google Books, a different edition, at http://books.google.com/books?id=HuxXNesm9dYC&pg=PT90&lpg=PT90&dq=Augustine+docta+ignorantia&source=bl&ots=G8lfAm6FsS&sig=rhsqPBFuaF_WJdlIWCfbFgpZMAE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lI6ET4GRFqHaiQLIj831BA&ved=0CDsQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=Augustine%20docta%20ignorantia&f=false; scroll up slightly), says, quoting Augustine:
"We move toward God not by walking but by loving " (non ambulando, sed amando)... .Hence the negative path, which surrounds the idea of God with exclusively negative epithets, is not the only way. Certainly we can more easily say what God is not than what he is. But at least our ignorance is informed, docta ignorantia (E [Epistulae] 130.28)... Here Augustine made his own a paradox he found in Porphyry. The contemplation of God is beyond intellection, and "somehow such things are known by a not knowing, and so by this kind of knowing a mysteriousness is realized" (CD [De Civitas Dei] xii.7; C [Confessiones] xii.5).But in Augustine's hands "loving" means, if we are attain to the divine state, its higher form of morality. Chadwick quotes Augustine, in a sentence I omitted from the quote above:
"Not our feet but our moral character carries us nearer to him. Moral character is assessed not by what a man knows but what he loves" (E [Epistulae] 155.13).Yet to that extent, Augustine's continuation of Plato neglects sensual love. It is this one-sided sublimation of desire that Ficino's reading of Plato corrects. The two Venuses do not oppose each other, nor do they demand a choice between them. One quotation from Alfonso's adviser Equicola (Book VI of La redazione, 504 (261V)) is largely a reflection on Ficino's commentary, as Campbell observes (p. 214, in Google Books), while finding its emphasis on pleasure "Lucretian" (i.e. materialistic). I myself am not at all sure that Plato, or Ficino, would have disagreed with what Equicola is saying:
Non refugemo da le volupta deli sensi quanto sustentatione solo di natura et nostro bene essere rechiede; siamo in volupta del'animo per scientie, et coniugendola con operatione di virtu procuremo devenamo religiosi, che per questa via, con guida di amore, ascenderemo alla vera felicita...
(We do not flee the pleasure of the senses insofar as the sustenance of nature and our well being requires it; knowledge brings us pleasure of the mind, and in joining this with virtue we become religious, so that by this path, with the guidance of love, we ascend to true happiness.)While carefully not denying the doctrine of Augustine, Equicola indicates a process underlying the Dionysian paintings that Alfonso commissioned. Campbell says something similar about the paintings, although not referring to Plato and Ficino (Cabinet of Eros p. 256):
The effect is that Stoical and Petrarchan ideals of vita contemplativa are placed in dialogue with vivid mythological exempla of passion and sensationAnd later (pp. 262-3)
The viewer is put in the position of being acutely conscious of his or her relation to the sensational world of the images, and of the relation between tranquil contemplation and the bodily pleasures of the painted fables. ...The point is not to deny that the powers of Bacchus and Venus can find their analogy in the visual and tactile appeal of painting, but that a certain privileged beholder's enjoyment of the paintings is reconfigured and reframed as a philosophical exercise...The paintings thus encourage disengagement and contemplation of beautiful forms while giving lust its due; the intrusive male gaze is satisfied without any actual intrusion and is afforded the beginning of an upward, if non-philosophical, movement toward Apollonian heights.
There is in these Dionysian paintings a foreshadowing of higher realms, as Joseph Manca argues in "What is Ferrarese about Bellini's Feast of the Gods?" (in Titian 500, ed. Manca, pp. 301-313). He sees depictions of three levels, "bestial, terrestrial, and celestial, and it was intended to ennoble the god Bacchus, who aided love and desire in all of their various forms" (p. 307). Specifically: (p. 306)
In the Feast of the Gods the frustrated act of Priapus is the object of derision, and it differs from the satisfying fulfillment of earthly love represented elsewhere in the camerino. The paintings by Titian for the camerino contain a good deal of ribald, earthly activity, but they explicit homage to elevated forms of love. In his Worship of Venus (now Prado, Madrid), the goddess is placed high against the sky to suggest the heavenly nature of love. Raising a figure up in this way connotes a higher level of existence, whether is the Heavenly Venus in Titian's own Sacred and Profane Love (Galleria Borghese, Rome) or Mary as the Regina caeli. In Titian's Bacchanal of the Andreans, the lofty level of love is suggested, first, by the presence of married couples among the mortals, second by the reference to wine in the text as a "divine beverage", third, by the raising of the wine against the sky, and finally, by the association of gods and mortals, which reflects the blending of earthly and divine forms of marriage. Titian gives his clearest indication of celestial love in the Bacchus and Ariadne: the heroine is seized by the god, and her reward for submitting to the matrimonial union is to take her place in the heavens through metamorphosis into stars (fig. 6). Physical love occurs on earth, but it results in a heavenly, sidereal reward.The relevant details in the paintings for Alfonso are below, in Worship of Venus, Bacchanal of the Andreans, and Bacchus and Ariadne, all by Titian (Manca's fig. 6 is of this last, of which the relevant detail is at right):
I am not sure if the couples in Bacchanal of the Andreans are meant as married. But they are certainly not bestial (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Titian_Bacchanal_1523_1524.jpg).
Another consideration that Manca brings out is the lost series of frescoes in the Hall of Cupid and Psyche at Belriguardo in the 1490s, under the supervision of Ercole Roberti. We don't know their content, but it can be deduced readily enough from the countless works on that theme on marriage chests and indeed in another fresco cycle by Giulio Romano in late 1420s Mantua. As told by the 2nd century Platonist Apuleius, in his Golden Ass (printed in Latin, 1459, translated into Italian by Matteo Boiardo c. 1480), it is an allegory of the soul's progress from innocence through suffering, including a journey to Tartarus and subsequent death, to the company of the gods. Thus it embraces both the human and the celestial phases of love. With its evident analogy to the Christian path, it is also a ready model for the progress of the tarot trumps, as I shall attempt to show in an Appendix at the end this essay, after I have discussed all 22 of the individual cards.
(In a footnote, Titian 500, p. 313, Manca gives his documentation: "
That the Cupid and Psyche cycle was a moral allegory of the journey of the soul was stated clearly by Sabadino himself; see Gunersheimer 1972, 62-65; and Gundersheimer 1976, 10-18. Niccolo Maria d'Este, in a letter of 1498 to Ercole I, also made it clear that the fresco cycle of Cupid and Psyche was an allegory of "the Soul, and the disturbances which accompany it:; see Gunersheimer 1976, 14. There is less consensus about whether there is any moralizing intent in the other great cycle of Cupid and Psyche, that by Giulio Romano in the Palazzo del Te; see Rodolfo Signorini, La "Fabella" di Psiche e altra mitologia [Mantua 1983], 14-16.)I have not made reference to Renaissance philosophical writings on Dionysus himself and his mysteries. For that, here is one passage from Ficino, quoted in Wind's Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, p. 62:
The spirit of the god Dionysus was believed by the ancient theologians and Platonists to be the ecstasy and abandon of disencumbered minds, when partly by innate love, partly at the instigation of the god, they transgress the natural limits of intelligence and are miraculously transformed into the beloved god himself: where, inebriated by a certain new draft of nectar and by an immeasurable joy, they range, as it were, in a bacchic frenzy. In the drunkenness of this Dionysiac wine our Dionysius expresses his exultation. He pours forth enigmas, he sings in dithyrambs... To penetrate the profundity of his meanings....to imitate his quasi-Orphic manner of speech, we too require the divine fury...By "our Dionysius", with "-ius", Ficino means "Dionysius the Areopogyte", the Greek Christian mystic who had put Proclus's Neoplatonic "henads" in a Christian context as choirs of angels. The "dithyramb" is a verse-form particularly associated with the god Dionysus in Greek writings; whereas the "thriambos" was a hymn of victory, the "dithyramb" was the verse of tragic drama.
In the Platonic Theology, published 1469, Ficino distinguished nine Dionysi and made them the sources of knowledge behind the nine Muses (quoted by Thomas Taylor, The Hymns of Orpheus, 1792, at http://trionfi.com/0/m/13/; this passage was drawn to my attention by "Huck" on Tarot History Forum). After enumerating Dionysus under each of nine epithets, one for each muse and each of the nine celestial spheres (leaving the tenth for Apollo), he concludes: ...
From all which the Orphic theologers infer, that the particular epithets of Bacchus are compared with those of the Muses on this account, that we may understand the powers of the Muses, as intoxicated with the nectar of divine knowledge; and may consider the nine Muses, and nine Bacchuses, as revolving round one Apollo, that is about the splendor of one invisible Sun.The same passage, in English and Latin, made be found on pp. 294f of Ficino's Platonic Theology, as translated by Michael B. J. Allen and John Warden, in Google Books at http://books.google.com/books?id=zr_XMwcvsB4C&pg=PA295&lpg=PA295&dq=Ficino+Platonic+Theology+muses+Bacchus&source=bl&ots=Th12lzkmoJ&sig=xDOB5XqpMHLGiCa1bJB5Sw635Ww&hl=en&sa=X&ei=L6aLT9j_G6mXiAKt75C1CQ&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false.
The Muses did not include painters. But it is perhaps with such a passage in mind that Bellini signed his name to the canvas of Feast of the Gods, It is on the wine vat next to Liber and Libera (or Priapus and Lotis, if you prefer). In this festival of fertility, the wine of Dionysus is his fertilizing inspiration as well.
I turn now, briefly, to Bessarion, chiefly known for his learned defense of Plato over Aristotle, Called the Calumniator and published in 1469, the same year as Ficino's Platonic Theology.. But his relationship with the mystical, Orphic Plato went back many years. In a letter to the sons of Gemistos on the occasion of their father's death, sometime between 1452 and 1454, he wrote::
Il cardinale Bessarione saluta Demetrio e Andronico, figli del sapiente Gemisto. Ho appreso che il nostro comune padre e maestro ha deposto ogni spoglia terrena e se n'è andato in cielo, al sito di ogni purità, per unirsi al coro della mistica danza di Jacco [id est il Dioniso dei Misteri di Eleusi - ndr] con gli dèi olimpici. (http://www.ritosimbolico.net/studi2/studi2_22.html)
(Cardinal Bessarion greets Andronicus and Demetrius, children of learned Gemistus. I learned that our common father and teacher has deposited everything earthly and gone to heaven, the site of every purity, to join the choir of the mystical dance of Iacco [i.e. the Dionysus of the Mysteries of Eleusis] with the Olympian gods.)People would have known "Iacco" as a name of Dionysus from various sources. For one, he is called that in Aristophanes' Frogs, by the Chorus in line 316 (Loeb edition p. 70). At this time, 1452-1454, Bessarion was serving as papal legate in Bologna.
Now let us look at Pico. His 1486 900 Theses, besides Kabbalah and many other subjects, included a section on Orpheus, i.e. the philosophical cult in Greece and Rome that utilized Dionysian themes. Likewise, Pico's Oration of 1487 says (http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/350pico.html):
...These initiates, after being purified by the arts which we might call expiatory, moral philosophy and dialectic, were granted admission to the mysteries. What could such admission mean but the interpretation of occult nature by means of philosophy? ... then, smitten by the frenzy of the Muses, we shall hear the heavenly harmony with the inward ears of the spirit. Then the leader of the Muses, Bacchus, revealing to us in our moments of philosophy, through his mysteries, that is, the visible signs of nature, the invisible things of God, will make us drunk with the richness of the house of God...In another part of his Oration he invokes Osiris and Apollo:
When we shall have been so prepared by the art of discourse or of reason, then, inspired by the spirit of the Cherubim, exercising philosophy through all the rungs of the ladder --- that is, of nature --- we shall penetrate being from its center to its surface and from its surface to its center. At one time we shall descend, dismembering with titanic force the "unity'' of the "many,'' like the members of Osiris; at another time, we shall ascend, recollecting those same members, by the power of Phoebus, into their original unity. Finally, in the bosom of the Father, who reigns above the ladder, we shall find perfection and peace in the felicity of theological knowledge.By "the ladder" he means Jacob's ladder, as is clear in sentences just before this quote; he is invoking the same ladder as in the "Holy Mountain" and other devotional texts, the series of steps that Andrea has called the "mystical staircase".
The reference to "dismembering with titanic force" is to an aspect of two myths, that of Osiris and of Dionysus; the body of each is chopped into pieces by the Titans. Here is Diodorus on the dismemberment of Osiris (Library of History IV:6):
...in ancient times the Titans formed a conspiracy against Osiris and slew him, and then, taking his body and dividing it into equal parts among themselves, they slipped them secretly out of the house...And similarly of Dionysus (Bok V: 75, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/5D*.html:)
...and Orpheus has handed down the tradition in the initiatory rites that he was torn in pieces by the Titans.I will discuss the further implications of this dismemberment in more detail when I come to the Fool and Death cards.
Pico's close companion in later years was Poliziano, who first identified Nonnus's Dionysica and also edited the relevant Catullus poems (although in an allegedly obscene way that Aldus's editors later considered inappropriate). Poliziano, with Lorenzo de' Medici himself, wrote poems in praise of Bacchus. The most well known is Poliziano's maenads-song in imitation of Euripides (http://eternalbacchus.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/fabula-di-orfeo-by-angelo-poliziano/).
After Ficino and Pico came Erasmus. There were others, but Erasmus is important both because he did not shrink from endorsing Ficino when the occasion called for it, and because he was beloved by the Estense. Humfrey and Lucco observe (p. 222):
...Erasmus was well known and widely read in Ferrara and at the Este court, even after he had been condemned and his writings began to be regarded with suspicion. It is not by chance that in 1549 Pietro Lauro of Modena dedicated his translation of Erasmus's Colloqui to Renee of France, Ercole's wife.Since so much of Erasmus's work had to do with trying to heal the split in Christendom that came about with Martin Luther, he was particularly relevant to the ruling household in Ferrara: Alfonso's son Ercole II, in marrying the daughter of the king of France, had married someone who would soon become a staunch convert to Calvinism (p. 90). Erasmus was someone they could all enjoy.
Erasmus was an Augustinian monk and as such knew and endorsed the doctrine of docta ignorantia and ascent through love as expressed by good works. For our purposes, what is important is his most popular work, Praise of Folly, first published 1511, with scores of editions in many languages after that. It is mostly a relentless series of mocking commentaries on the pretensions of the powerful, whether in the universities, the church, secular government, or business, when compared with the simple faith of the ignorant apostles. The only times his persona Folly becomes serious is when speaking of the Bible, Origen, or Ficino.
On Bacchus, he cannot refrain from pointing out that one of the names he was given was synonymous with foolishness in Greek, as in the saying ":more foolish than Morychus". "Nor does he take offense when given the name", Erasmus comments (sect. 15; p.83 of.of Radice translation, 1993). ("Morychus" was an epithet of Dionysus reported by Athenaeus, Radice says in a note, p. 83.) The reason he looked foolish was that country-people would smear his statues with wine-must and fresh figs, so that he looked ridiculous,. Erasmus goes on:
Then think of the insults flung at him in Old Comedy! "Stupid god", they would say, "just the sort to be born from a thigh". Yet who wouldn't choose to be this light-hearted fool who is always young and merry and brings pleasure and gaiety to all, rather than "crooked-counselled" Jupiter who is universally feared...More seriously, here is a passage (section 38, p.120f of translation) that aptly summarizes Ficino on the subject-matter of Plato's Symposium and illustrates something in Estensi art, as well as the "mystical staircase" of the tarot:
In Plato Socrates shows how a single Venus and a single Cupid are divided into two, and so these masters of dialectic should really have distinguished between two forms of insanity, if they wanted to appear sane themselves. For not every form of insanity is a disaster, or Horace would not have asked, "Or is it fond insanity deceiving me?" And Plato would not have counted the frenzy of poets, seers, and lovers amongst life's chief blessings, nor would the sibyl have called the great undertaking of Aeneas insane.
The nature of insanity is surely twofold. One kind is sent from hell by the vengeful furies whenever they let loose their snakes and assail the hearts of men with lust for war, insatiable thirst for gold, the disgrace of forbidden love, patricide, incest, sacrilege, or some other sort of evil, or when they pursue the guilty, conscience-stricken soul with their avenging spirits and flaming brands of terror. The other is quite different, desirable above all, and is known to come from me. It occurs whenever some happy mental aberration frees the soul from its axious cares and at the same time restores it by the addition of manifold delights. This is the sort of delusion Cicero longs for as a great gift of the gods in a letter to Atticus, for it would have the power to free him from awareness of his great trouble.The idea of a single Venus becoming two comes from Pausanias's speech in the Symposium:(this Pausanias is not the third century travel writer, obviously): the two Venuses are Aphrodite Pandemos and Aphrodite Urania, Popular and Celestial Venus.
It appears, in the passage just quoted from Erasmus, that he is talking abut delusion as well as diversion, as long as the delusions do not interfere with living a morally praiseworthy life.In fact, delusions can help one to lead a moral life, making one affable to to others and not vengeful against wrongs that being ignorant of haven't hurt one (e.g. an unfaithful spouse, as in Alione's frotula). But later he discusses Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and notes that someone who had come back to the cave after having seen what was outside would be declared mad. One cannot tell the symptoms of delusion from those of knowing the truth. Finally at the end of the book he refers to the mystical experience of St. Paul himself, and even life in heaven, as forms of madness: "the supreme reward for man is no other than a kind of madness" (section 67; p. 206). He argues the point from Plato in the Phaedrus (243b) and quotes from St. Paul (I Corinthians 2:9 and the beginning of 2 Cor. 12); but I won't quote from them, and instead give a condensed version of Erasmus's argument for Folly's statement just quoted (section 67, p. 206ff):.
First consider how Plato imagined something of this sort when he wrote that the madness of lovers is the highest form of happiness....Moreover, the more perfect the love, the greater the madness--and the happier...What, then, will life in heaven be like, to which all pious minds so eagerly aspire? Then the spirit will itself be absorbed by the supreme Mind...So those who are granted a foretaste of this - and very few have the good fortune - experience something which is very like madness. They speak incoherently and unnaturally, utter sound without sense, and their faces suddenly change expression...Then when they come to,...all they know is that they were happiest when they were out of their senses in this way, and they lament their return to reason, for all they want is to be mad for ever with this kind of madness. And this is only the merest taste of the happiness to come.With that the book ends, except for a few jokes, such as "I hate a fellow-drinker with a memory", the ironic hope that the audience will forget what she, Folly, has said. The book ends
Clap your hands, live well, and drink, distinguished initiates of FOLLY. The End.When Folly says "drink", we must bear in mind that in section 66 she had just been discussing the sacrament of the Eucharist, which for the pious "represents the extinction of their bodily passions, laying them in the tomb, as it were, in order to rise again to a new life" (p. 205). If the goal of the "mystical staircase" is such a state, the road to it is a Dionysian one, through death-defying folly todivine ecstasy and madness, one that is as compelling as it is absurd, as self-indulgent as it is self-denying. In such circumstance, what can one do but play a friendly game of cards? But perhaps, if one chooses a certain deck, the game of the Fool, the paradoxes will follow one even there.
This is an excellent article, thank you
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