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

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Disreputable Bodies
If we adopt Ficino’s terminology, Plotinus would be on the side of the
perspectivici, whereas, I think, Ficino was inclined to listen to the opinion of
the physici, or natural philosophers, 155 because for him the mirror functions
precisely as an image of union as well as the tool that allows for a conversion
from active into passive object. In that context, another passage from Plotinus
was conducive to the idea that mirrors catch (and hence retain) images:
And I think that the wise men of old, who made temples and
statues in the wish that the gods should be present in them,
looking to the nature of the All, had in mind that the nature
of soul is everywhere easy to attract, but that if someone were
to construct something sympathetic to it and able to receive a
part of it, it would of all things receive soul most easily. That
which is sympathetic to it is what imitates it in some way, like
a mirror to catch a form. 156
The above passage turns out to be of crucial importance to Ficino, for
it led him to write his most controversial work, the third part of the De vita,
his influential treatise on magic. 157 (See also chapter three and the epilogue
of the present study.) Amongst other things, Ficino here tried to establish
the extent to which material images of the gods (again some sort of mirror
images) actually reflect/embody the virtues of their celestial counterparts (an
idea to be found also in the Asclepius 37). In this case, the mirror functions
as a container of souls. Interestingly, the Plotinian passage cited above stands
next to that author’s only direct mention of the story mirror of Dionysius.
the second theory the things themselves are reflected. Seneca thus implies that the visual
ray is detoured. See Frontisi-Ducroux (1997) 145.
155 On the history of that term, see Keßler (2001) 82, with n. 5.
156 Trans. Plotinus (1966–1988) IV: 71; Enneads IV, 3, 11.
157 According to Kristeller, the De vita is a commentary on Enneads IV, 3 11, whereas
Walker has pointed also to Enneads IV, 4, 30–42. On this, see Copenhaver (1987) passim,
but esp. 442–443.