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

Matter as a Mirror 105
induces in him a lethal affection for an object that is out of reach; the active gaze
transforms the onlooker into a passive object of his own desire.
Mirrors: Physical Creation
It is precisely this paradoxical quality of reflection and imprisonment, a form
of “embodiment without body,” that allows the mirror to become Ficino’s
most concise metaphor for the state of matter. Like matter, the mirror willingly
receives and embodies any form; hence the paradoxical condition of
matter, namely that it is supposed to remain unchanged in the process of
receiving and embodying the myriad forms, is solved. As a tool that embodies
forms without a body, Ficino’s mirror is the perfect vehicle to adapt Plotinus’
teaching that matter was the “shadow of a shadow.” In the mirror, actual
bodies seem to vanish and hence to become nothing but mere optical illusions.
The equation of mirror and matter therefore precludes the association
of matter with any sort of tactile perception. This, however, is only half of the
story, because we know that even in the higher and highest levels of being
the reflected image retains its material character, albeit in different degrees of
refinement. Towards the lower end in the hierarchy of Creation the objects
which mirrors retain and subsequently reflect become increasingly tangible.
Their relationship to, and their connection with women and physical procreation
thus becomes even more obvious. A material exchange takes place
between object and reflecting surface to such an extent that the reflected object
may even stain the mirror. Not quite unexpectedly, Ficino repeats the
Aristotelian story of the menstruating woman who looked at herself in the
mirror and the image it reflected assumed the colour of blood.
Ficino comes up with this story in his Commentary on the Symposium
when he accounts for love as a kind of infectious disease transmitted by
the visual ray emitted by the eyes:
Aristotle writes that women, when the menstrual blood flows
down, often soil a mirror with bloody drops by their own
gaze. This happens, I think, from this: that the spirit, which is
a vapour of the blood, seems to be a kind of blood so thin that
it escapes the sight of the eyes, but becoming thicker on the
surface of a mirror, it is clearly observed. If this falls on some
less dense material, such as cloth or wood, it is not seen, for