FLYING LIKE EARTHLY MERCURIES: RENAISSANCE PLATONISM IN RAPHAEL’S STANZA DELLA SEGNATURA _____________________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University Dominguez Hills ______________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Humanities _______________________ by Jeff Brinkman Summer 2019 TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE TABLE OF CONTENTS.....................................................................................................ii LIST OF FIGURES............................................................................................................iii ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................iv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................1 2. PLATO’S PREDECESSORS: THE MYSTERY CULTS AND ORPHISM....................7 3. PLATO AND THE SOUL..............................................................................................17 4. PLATO’S ANTECEDENTS..........................................................................................31 The Chaldean Oracles ...........................................................................................32 The Corpus Hermeticum........................................................................................37 Iamblichus..............................................................................................................41 5. FICINO, MIRANDOLA, AND RENAISSANCE PLATONISM..................................47 6. PLATO IN PLASTER: THE STANZA DELLA SEGNATURA...................................60 The School of Athens..............................................................................................63 The Disputa............................................................................................................69 The Parnassus........................................................................................................77 Jurisprudence.........................................................................................................84 7. CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................90 WORKS CITED.................................................................................................................95 ii LIST OF FIGURES PAGE 1. School of Athens.............................................................................................................64 2. School of Athens (detail).................................................................................................65 3. Disputa...........................................................................................................................70 4. Parnassus.......................................................................................................................77 5. Jurisprudence.................................................................................................................85 iii ABSTRACT Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura, painted between 1508 and 1511 CE, is considered one of the greatest works of Renaissance painting. The frescoes themselves ostensibly represent the disciplines of philosophy, theology, poetry, and the law, however, further inspection reveals a deeper synthesis. A different perspective from which to view the frescoes in the stanza considers the philosophic underpinning of the room, where the symbolism evoked points to a system of thought that developed in Renaissance Italy during the half century preceding Raphael’s masterpiece: Renaissance Platonism. Two key thinkers, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, created a humanistic Platonism that syncretized elements of Christianity, Neoplatonism, Orphism, Pythagoreanism, Ciceronian, and Hermetic thought into a philosophic theology steeped in initiation, mystery and symbolism. Through analysis of the Stanza della Segnatura, especially the relationships between the individual frescoes and the gestures used within each, the elements of Renaissance Platonism can be found. 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Above all the Sun is most able to signify to you God himself. The Sun offers you signs, and who would dare to call the Sun false? Marsilio Ficino In his famous The Lives of the Artists, Georgio Vasari (1511-1574 CE) describes the frescoes in Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura as being so beautiful that they “cannot be described.” It is this beauty and originality that has determined the course of scholarship on the room for the last five hundred years. Raphael’s iconography was of such originality, his painted figures so lifelike, his use of color so dramatic and perspective so accurate that the majority of attention devoted to the work has been in studying the programmatic layout of the room’s four wall frescoes and ceiling, and especially in the identification of Raphael’s painted figures.1 There is a small subset of scholars who have attempted to look at the room as a whole, identifying relationships between the frescoes in a thematic way, but there is a surprising lack of scholarship concentrated on the relationship between the interconnected themes of the frescoes and how they relate to the larger ideas concerning philosophy and Christianity prevalent at the time. During the last half of the fifteenth century, the writings of Plato were translated into Latin and became the basis for a new metaphysics, one whose hermeneutical 1 See especially the introduction to Joost-Gaugier, Christiane L, Raphael’s Stanze della Segnatura, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. For a modern example of the emphasis on figural identification see Bell, Daniel Orth, “New Identifications in Raphael’s School of Athens”, The Art Bulletin, 77.4 (1995): 57-76. 2 approach focused on the spiritual aspects of Plato.2 The reasons for this new fascination with Plato are complex, but the influx of “lost” books of antiquity into the west coupled with the translations of these documents from Greek into Latin by Renaissance humanists, facilitated by the arrival of Greek speakers, is of paramount importance. The work of these humanists would pave the way for the introduction of Greek instruction in western Universities as well as the distribution of Greek texts virtually unknown in Europe.3 Within this humanist movement there arose a novel attempt to combine the wisdom of the ancient pagans with Christianity. The incorrect dating of the Corpus Hermeticum (second to third century CE) as a pre-Mosaic text and the misattribution of the Neoplatonic writings of Pseudo-Dionysius (ca. 500 CE) to the convert of the Apostle Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, contributed to the notion that Platonic ideas could be compatible with Christianity.4 To the Renaissance Platonist, there existed a chronological passing of knowledge from Hermes Trismegistus through Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato, and through a careful melding of the various currents of thought, one could arrive at new vision of the Divine. 2 See Hankins, James, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991. Hankins observes “…Renaissance interpretations of Plato can to a great extent be read as the results of rational attempts to introduce or expel Plato from the contemporary Christian culture” (17). 3 See Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Renaissance Thought and its Sources, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, 20-32. 4 For more on the dating of the Hermetic Texts, see Faivre, Antoine, The Eternal Hermes, Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1985. For the confusion surrounding Dionysius the Areopagite see Pelikan’s Introduction in Luibheid, Colm, Pseudo-Dionysus—The Complete Works, New York: Paulist Press, 1987. 3 Marsilio Ficino encouraged this wedding of ideas, advocating a new breed of philosopher priests when he exclaimed, “I therefore exhort and implore all philosophers to reach out and embrace religion firmly, and all priests to devote themselves to the study of legitimate wisdom.”5 What Ficino envisioned was a path to a higher level of revelation, one arrived at through a combination of right living and intellect. While the Christian God was the one true God, the road to him was complex, winding its way through arenas comprised of both Christian and pagan ideas. Ficino believed the Christian God was the ultimate goal, but the ascent to Heaven necessitated a path through the levels of the universe as initially proposed by Plato in the Timaeus.6 This is the manner in which Ficino sought to align Christianity with Platonic thought, a goal he made quite clear in his commentary on the Timaeus: “They call this other world the divine intellect, not the Good Itself, but the noblest child of the Good. If we understand this to be of one substance with the First, we shall unite Plato more closely with Christian theology” (All Things Natural 16). Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494 CE) was a younger contemporary and a close friend of Ficino. He espoused a similar goal of uniting Platonic thought with Christianity, even though he and Ficino differed on their approach to particular details.7 5 Quoted in Hankins 289 6 “Therefore let the truth, Christian and Mosaic, persist. But in the meantime, as most expositors agree, it was possibly the view of Plato or Pythagoras that the intelligible world is intermediate between the visible world and the Good Itself, an image of the Good and the model for the physical world.” Ficino, Marsilio, All Things Natural,