Magic and the Supernatural - Lancaster University

10
Art, Love and Magic in Marsilio Ficino’s De amore
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beautiful because of its participation from transcendental Beauty, identified at last
with other transcendental properties such as Truth and Good.
Nevertheless, the usual Ficinian confidence in the contact with Truth-Good-
Beauty as including not only an ascensional and contemplative movement, but also
a descending and productive one, doesn’t have its roots in a Platonic soil but, at
any case, neoplatonic or even Christian. This is quite clear in the topic of the
artistic creation, because the Platonic theory of art doesn’t fare well with the
Platonic theory of Beauty. We strongly believe that Plato needs a great
modification and hermeneutical work, if not concerning the ascensional movement
to the divine (i.e., contemplation), at least regarding to the descentional and
productive movement over the world. This is why Ficino doesn’t go to Plato for
help, but to Plotinus. To see how Ficino reads Plato from Plotinus, we shall
consider now another of his formulas on what is love.
What is the love of men, you ask? What purpose does it serve? It
is the desire for procreation with a beautiful object in order to
make eternal life available to mortal things. 2
This desire of engendering beauty may apply to multiple situations. Ficino
accepts here the Plotinian notion of art as an imposition of forms onto matter. We
refer now to the Plotinian doctrine of an ontological dynamism inherent to all that
is, according to which everything suffers a double-point tendency: one upwards
and another downwards, the first as a return to the origin and the second one as a
procession over inferior hypostasis. Both movements are equally necessary and
related to the Plotinian notion of form as a principle for being and beauty, since
contemplation comes out as an ascension to forms, while procession appears as a
productive descent of forms into inferior realities. The novelty here is that the
downwards movement is a necessary consequence of the ascent, because the
perfection of being leads to generation of newer hypostasis.
The circumscription of this doctrine to the subject of artistic creation pushes
Ficino to state that contemplation of Beauty generates in the artist the necessity of
giving form to inferior realities. This in-formation is a participation of the artist’s
own contemplation of Beauty. The artistic task is then depicted as a moment in the
diffusio boni, and the artist, as a link in the chain between matter and divine
realities.
3. The Myth of Venus in the De amore
The Plotinian influx on Ficino is also patent in the Florentine’s lecture over the
myth of the two Venus. In the Ficinian interpretation, the contemplative and
ascensional movement towards the divine belongs to the Heavenly Venus, whilst
the productive function over the world is credited to the Vulgar Venus.