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

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Disreputable Bodies
Even more generally speaking, all creative processes may be explained
in terms of a debased reflection in a mirror — for example, the way in
which the form of a statue in the sculptor’s mind is subsequently impressed
onto the marble. 187 The blood-stained mirror is one of the few instances
where women enter Ficino’s discursive universe; significantly, the context
of the female appearance is associated with the demonic, with action at a
distance — infection through the evil eye. 188
Contrary to Thomas Aquinas and other medieval authorities, Ficino
maintains that the material exchange in the mirror is not restricted to the
terrestrial realm, that it is not limited to the specific sociological problem
of potentially contagious menstruating women. According to Ficino’s metaphysics,
the bloody mirror embodies one of the lowest manifestations of
the sinister agency of the female aspect of Creation. The bloody mirror thus
becomes a powerful metaphor that accounts for the deceptive and potentially
rebellious “shadow” that is intrinsic to all created beings. Once inserted into
this cosmological context, the reduction of matter to a shadow of the divine
form, to a “body without a body,” 189 inherently carries with it an unwanted
consequence: the corporeal, embodied world returns in the guise of the
demonic, uncontrollable entities that may potentially threaten the domination
of form. Because the shadow is part of, or even a creation of, the form
it represents, it may, to a limited extent, retain the power of that form. We
need only remember that it was such a parthenogenetic scheme of birth that
187 For a concise overview that brings mirrors, statues, echoes, and magic together see
Ficino’s Epitome in Apologiam Socratis, OO 1388/384.
188 Let me emphasize that the female presence here is not a kind of allegory for positive
abstract ideas such as Love, Truth, Philosophy, or divine and quasi divine beings such
as Athena, Venus, the Muses, or the Graces, but an embodied woman, a person in flesh
and blood.
189 See the ambiguous ontological status of images in Ficino’s Sophist commentary, ed.
Allen 275 and of spiritus in De vita, III, 3: 257. Such paradoxical beings appear to fulfill a
key function as mediators, tying the world together. Ficino is here influenced by Michael
Psellus De daemonibus, who defines the demonic nature precisely in terms of such a paradoxical
quality of disembodied embodiment: “Natura daemonum non est absque corpore,
sed habet corpus, et versatur circa corpora.” (Ficino’s translation, OO 1939.) As Stephens
(2002) 62, emphasizes, Aquinas (Summa theologiae I, 51, 2) ascribes the same ambiguous
status to the bodies of angels and demons: “Aquinas argues that angels and devils have
bodies that both are and are not real. This in-between state of reality in accompanied by
the creation of a virtual body.”