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

Matter as a Mirror 95
The idea that humans themselves not only look into mirrors or skilfully
manipulate them, but can also turn themselves into mirrors becomes
even more obvious in the De amore, where Ficino underscores the emotional
aspect of this exchange of images. The accomplished lover, again a sort of magus,
must first turn himself into a mirror that reflects the beloved, whereupon
the latter acknowledges his own beauty in the person opposite. Ficino maintains
that, ultimately, one falls in love with a person in whom one recognizes
one’s own image; the beloved becomes a magical, living mirror, the object
of desire to which the lover eventually falls prey, converting himself from
agent into passive subject. 148 The idea that a person could assume the form
of a mirror is also encountered later, perhaps most prominently, in Shakespeare’s
Winter’s Tale when Polixenes says: “Good Camillo, Your changed
complexions are to me a mirror, which shows me mine, too.” (I, 2, 380–2)
Ultimately, these words relate to a passage in Plato’s Phaedrus (253D–255D)
as well as to Aristotle’s concept of friendship, which is valuable because it
imparts self-consciousness by acknowledging the friend as alter ego. 149 The
idea that the friend serves as the mirror image for the self is in accordance
with the broader Aristotelian concept that “in both sensation and thought,
in different ways, knowledge involves an identity of some kind of the knower
with the object known.” 150
So why did the concept of mirrors which embody the images they
reflect become so attractive to Ficino? The idea is absent in Plotinus, who
is all too keen to ward off the idea that mirrors may have the capacity to
retain images, because to him matter is — paradoxically — “a receptacle that
148 The idea that the lover is actually transformed into the beloved object has interesting
consequences, especially if applied to God himself: does the supreme creator actually
want to be transformed into his creation? Leone Ebreo and, to a much greater extent,
Giordano Bruno would later address this question.
149 On this, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1170b 6–8; Eudemian Ethics 1244b
24–26, Magna moralia 1313a; Frontisi-Ducroix (1998) 122–123; Kenny (1978) 229; Kenny
(1992) 46–48. To my knowledge, the relationship between Ficino’s ideas about friendship
and Aristotle’s Eudemian ethics, with its Platonic undertone, has never been investigated;
the concept of the will to knowledge, which is inextricably linked to Aristotle’s theory of
friendship, is particularly fascinating. Kenny (1992) 50 summarises Aristotle’s complex
argument in the Eudemian Ethics 1245a 5–10 as follows: “We wish to go on living because
we wish to go on knowing; and that amounts to wishing that one should be in some sense
identical with the object of knowledge.”
150 Kenny (1992) 50, commenting on De anima; 418a 13–16.