Chapter 2 Matter as a Mirror: Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance ...

Matter as a Mirror 69
The version of the myth from the Corpus hermeticum uses a decidedly
heterosexual metaphor to account for the relationships between bodies and
souls. Male soul gets attracted by beautiful female matter and eventually falls
for her, without recognizing her as his own image in the material world. This
again marks a significant departure from the Ovidian version of the myth of
Narcissus, who consciously perceives the image in the pond as his own reflection
and eventually perishes in the activity of self-speculation. Ovid shows
unequivocally that Narcissus is in love with the reflection he perceives as
male, since it is his own image. The myth is thus set in a homoerotic context
characteristic of the social and political situation in classical Greece. 72 The
later suppression of the homoerotic context of the Narcissus myth emphasizes
the deceptive potential of the mirror. 73 Much later and closer to Ficino’s
cultural environment, Boccaccio recounts another heterosexual version of
the myth that underscores this aspect of deception through, or transformation
in, a mirror. According to Boccaccio, Narcissus misapprehends the sight of
his face as that of a beautiful female, a nymph, in which case the reflection
in the mirror implies the disfigurement of the sexual identity of the onlooker
by the reflection of a mirror. Here the mirror is understood as an instrument
that transforms the images it reflects. 74
unitas spiritus cum corpore.” The Arab original version continues, Picatrix German 22 :
“oder wie sich Gottsein und Menschsein in der Lehre der Christen vereinigen.”
72 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses III, 455, trans. Ovid (1955) 86, Narcissus cries out “Whoever
you are, come out to me! Oh boy beyond compare, why do you elude me?” According
to Hadot (1967) 93, Ovid is the only author in Classical Antiquity who suggests that
Narcissus is not entirely deceived by the reflection in the water.
73 I am conscious that the terms homoerotic and heterosexual are perhaps anachronistic;
in the present context, they are used only to denote sexual relationships between
males or between men and women and not the constitution of subjective identities (see
also chapter seven).
74 Boccaccio (1574) 131: “nel chiaro ed limpidoso fonte, del quale veggendo l’idea,
e la imagine di se stesso che prima non havea mai piu veduto, et istimando quella essere
una ninfa di quel fonte, tanto di lei si fieramente s’accese, che di se medesimo scordandosi,
dopo lunghi lamenti ivi mori di disagio, et per compassione della ninfe fu cangiato in fiore
che tiene il suo nome.” On Boccaccio’s reading of the Narcissus myth and of the role of
Echo as an allegory of fame, see Vinge (1967) 102–103. For a brilliant analysis of Pausanias’
heterosexual version of the story, which assumes that Narcissus had a twin sister who
dies and is subsequently recovered by Narcissus when looking at his own face in a pond,
in which the female becomes a “garçon manqué,” see Frontisi-Ducroux (1997) 217–219.