Search results for ""marsilio""

Origins and future of national and international artisanal excellence. What is craftsmanship? How do you determine excellence? The answers lie in identifying and carefully analyzing the constitutive elements of fine craftsmanship to arrive at a definition of excellence that is as objective as possible. Only then can we measure the true value of the finest craftsmanship, and celebrate the outstanding work of the artisans behind it. This publication represents a significant step forward in devising a structured methodological approach to assessing excellence in the artistic crafts. The proposed assessment matrix not only serves as a new tool to aid our understanding and assessment of excellence, but also offers invaluable support to those who aspire to achieve that excellence.

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Accrochage brings together about seventy works from the Pinault Collection produced by thirty artists since the 1970s. The works-never shown before in the Venetian venues of the collection-are the outcome of minimal gestures and artistic research focused on the theme of the void. Fabio Mauri, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Sol LeWitt, Charles Ray, Roman Opalka, Bernd Lohaus, Thomas Schutte, Goshka Macuga, and Niele Toroni are only some of the artists taking part in a show that becomes a place of meeting, rela- tions, questions, and comparison between different ways of practicing art.

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Rather than one overarching theme, the 56th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale is informed by a layer of intersecting filters. These filters are a constellation of parameters that circumscribe multiple ideas which will be touched upon to imagine and realize a diversity of practices. All the World's Futures employs as a filter the historical trajectory that the Biennale itself, over the course of its one hundred and twenty years existence has run over. A filter through which to reflect on both the current 'state of things' and the 'appearance of things.' At its core is the notion of the exhibition as a stage, where historical and counter-historical projects are explored. Within this framework the main aspects of the 56th Biennale Exhibition solicit and privilege new proposals and works conceived specifically by invited artists, filmmakers, choreographers, performers, composers, and writers.

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Celebrating a century and a half of Italy’s iconic tire company This volume chronicles the history of the Milan-based tire manufacturer Pirelli, one of the most long-lived multinationals in Italian history. Drawing from the Pirelli foundation’s historical archive, it gathers photographs and written accounts that reflect the brand’s contributions to the fields of science, technology and academia.

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A layperson’s guide to one of the greatest engineering projects of our time In an effort to preserve endangered Venice, the Italian government has constructed a world wonder known as the MOSE—a vast and intricate series of gates built to protect Venice during extreme high tides. This volume lays out the complexity of this project.

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French “photograffeur” JR’s tribute to cultural institutions during COVID-19 Throughout the pandemic, cultural institutions have been forced to shut their doors to the public. Palazzo Strozzi in Florence has commissioned street artist JR (born 1983) to address this unfortunate reality. He has done so by transforming the facade of the Palazzo into a towering photographic collage installation that functions like an anamorphosis: when viewed from a particular vantage point, the distorted image reveals a courtyard, exhibition hall and library. In this volume, JR offers the public a look inside that which, for now, is inaccessible. The Wound (La Ferita) is a poignant reflection on the wound endured by cultural institutions during the pandemic. The book includes a conversation between the artist and curator Arturo Galansino, in which they delve into the genesis and realization of this singular piece.

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Damien Hirst enters into creative conversation with the many masterpieces of the Galleria Borghese In an extraordinary cultural undertaking, British artist Damien Hirst (born 1965) has launched an intense and unfiltered interaction with the works of Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian, Bernini, Canova and others in Italy’s Galleria Borghese. An unparalleled and controversial celebrity of the contemporary art world, Hirst’s work is perfectly suited to be displayed in relation to the colors and materials found in the Galleria Borghese. His sculptures, made of fine materials such as bronze, Carrara marble or seductive malachite, have been put on display in rooms of the museum that house masterpieces of the modern era such as the statuary groups of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Antonio Canova’s Paolina Borghese. The resulting effect is one of surprising harmony: the Five Grecian Nudes appear natural next to Canova’s sculpture and the primitive appearance of the Lion Women of Asit Mayor is in perfect chromatic accord with the floors of the Galleria. Hirst’s new series of Colour Space paintings offers the same sense of continuity as the flow of the works hanging in the museum’s picture gallery. This comprehensive vision of the past and the present is fostered by the proximity of antique painting and contemporary painting, without frames to separate them, and without elements of signage to interrupt this immersion.

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Tour the city of Venice through the panoramic paintings of one of its most celebrated chroniclers The lagoon city of Venice was home to some of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance. Among them was Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1465–1525), whose body of work largely remains to this day in the city in which he lived and died. Influenced by Early Netherlandish art and resistant to Humanist trends, Carpaccio is today known for having developed a style that set him apart from his peers. He worked primarily under the patronage of various scuole, or confraternities, to illustrate Christian anecdotes. Replete with illustrative detail and an earthy color palette, Carpaccio’s paintings are uniquely emotive in their depictions of saintly miracles. This new publication invites readers from around the world to tour Venice through Carpaccio’s masterpieces and discover the artist who was exceptionally adept at fusing the real Venice and the myth of Venice into a single vision. Carpaccio in Venice: A Guide presents all of the artist’s works conserved in the city, providing updated scholarship for both the paintings and their original locations in light of recent restoration efforts. Sites include the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the Doge’s Palace, the Museo Correr, the Gallerie dell’Accademia, along with many other locations.

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A behind-the-scenes history of Pitti Uomo and the creative development of men’s fashion over the past 40 years Since the 1980s, men’s fashion has left behind the staid predictability of earlier years and undergone a fundamental mutation. Men are now acknowledged to have the same desires as women in deriving pleasure from appearance and ornament. The time when a wife would choose her husband’s clothes for him is long over. Fashion marketed to men, presented at Fashion Week shows and distributed in specialized stores, has gotten more and more exciting, and men’s fashion has accordingly enjoyed a growing critical recognition of its creative nature. Since 1972 Pitti Uomo, the trade show for men’s fashion held twice a year in Florence, has been the principal protagonist of these developments. Registering minimal variations in trends as well as great changes, Pitti Uomo has become the most influential show of menswear and continues to attract the most creative designers. A Short Novel on Men’s Fashion uses Pitti Uomo as the lens through which to consider the exhilarating recent progress of men’s fashion. Bringing together personal perspectives by journalists and key figures on how menswear has changed over the last 40 years, alongside illustrations of designs by brands such as Armani, Fred Perry, Church’s, Marni, Aspesi and Brunello Cuccinelli, A Short Novel on Men’s Fashion offers an engaging insider history of recent developments in menswear.

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On the Baroque painter's early years in Rome and the origins of his vision of landscape paintingThe impetus behind this volume was the Italian state's 2020 acquisition of the painting Landscape with a Country Dance (160102) by the Italian Baroque painter Guido Reni (15751642). The artwork's return to its native land at the Galleria Borghese marked a prime opportunity to rediscover the artist and his oeuvre, particularly the landscapes and rural scenes he created during his early years in Rome.Nature and Devotion tracks the new vision of naturea fusion of science and poetrythat Reni developed alongside his contemporaries (who included Niccolò dell'Abate, Annibale Carracci, Domenichino and Giovanni Battista Viola). Following the artist's course up until his breakthrough fresco for the Casino of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Aurora (161314), the volume conveys how the impressions he gathered during his early years in Rome established a rob

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Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. Ficino’s commentaries on Plato remained the standard guide to the Greek philosopher’s works for centuries. Vanhaelen’s new translation of Ficino’s vast commentary on the Parmenides makes this monument of Renaissance metaphysics accessible to the modern student of philosophy.The volume contains the first critical edition of the Latin text, an ample introduction, and extensive notes.

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Platonic Theology is the visionary and philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. This work, translated into English for the first time, is a key to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

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Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was the leading Platonic philosopher of the Renaissance and is generally recognized as the greatest authority on ancient Platonism before modern times. Among his finest accomplishments as a scholar was his 1492 Latin translation of the complete works of Plotinus (204-270 CE), the founder of Neoplatonism. The 1492 edition also contained an immense commentary that remained for centuries the principle introduction to Plotinus's works for Western scholars. At the same time, it constitutes a major statement of Ficino's own late metaphysics. The I Tatti edition, planned in six volumes, contains the first modern edition of the Latin text and the first translation into any modern language. The present volume also includes a substantial analytical study of Ficino's interpretation of Plotinus' Fourth Ennead.

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In 1490/92 Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato, made new translations of, with running commentaries on, two treatises he believed were the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, the disciple of St. Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. His aim was to show how these two treatises (in fact the achievement of a sixth-century Christian follower of the Neoplatonist Proclus) had inspired pagan thinkers in the later Platonic tradition like Plotinus and Iamblichus. These major products of fifteenth-century Christian Platonism are here presented in new critical editions accompanied by English translations, the first into any modern language.

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Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was the leading Platonic philosopher of the Renaissance and is generally recognized as the greatest authority on ancient Platonism before modern times. Among his greatest accomplishments as a scholar was his 1492 Latin translation of the complete works of Plotinus (204–270 CE), the founder of Neoplatonism. The 1492 edition also contained an immense commentary that remained for centuries the principle introduction to Plotinus’s works for Western scholars. At the same time, it constitutes a major statement of Ficino’s own late metaphysics. The I Tatti edition, planned in six volumes, contains the first modern edition of the Latin text and the first translation into any modern language. The present volume also contains an extensive analytical study of Ficino’s interpretation of Plotinus’s Third Ennead.

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The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

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The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

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Marsilio Ficino (Figline Valdarno 1443- Florencia, 1499) fue el principal ideólogo de la Florencia de Lorenzo el Magnífico. Médico, filósofo, astrólogo, sacerdote y músico, creó un nuevo pensamiento: el neoplatonismo florentino, transformando la historia de las ideas en el paso de la cultura medieval al pensamiento moderno. Sintetizador de la Antigüedad y del cristianismo del Medievo y figura central del Humanismo, anticipa algunos de los rasgos de esta nueva cosmovisión, como la libertad y las metáforas sobre la luz del sol que darán lugar al heliocentrismo. Su personal interpretación de Platón, a través de las traducciones de su obra, llegará hasta el siglo XVIII.El De Amore marcó también el inicio del género de los tratados sobre el amor y la belleza, que se desarrollará durante el siglo XVI y se proyectará sobre la literatura del Siglo de Oro y más allá de España, en Latinoamérica. En el campo de las artes plásticas, sirvió de inspiración y base iconográfica para las obras de a

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Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. The publication of his Latin translations of the dialogues in 1484 was an intellectual event of the first magnitude, making the Platonic canon accessible to western Europe after the passing of a millennium and establishing Plato as an authority for Renaissance thought.This volume contains Ficino’s extended analysis and commentary on the Phaedrus, which he explicates as a meditation on “beauty in all its forms” and a sublime work of theology. In the commentary on the Ion, Ficino explores a poetics of divine inspiration that leads to the Neoplatonist portrayal of the soul as a rhapsode whose song is an ascent into the mind of God. Both works bear witness to Ficino’s attempt to revive a Christian Platonism and what might be called an Orphic Christianity.

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The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.This is the fifth of a projected six volumes.

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The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance. This is the fourth of a projected six volumes.

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El Defensor Pacis es ante todo, por su intención inmediata, una requisitoria a Luis de Baviera, elegido emperador, para que se oponga a las pretensiones de los Papas en el terreno político, que Marsilio cree desbordadas y contrarias al espíritu y la letra del evangelio, y que presentan una iglesia poderosa y rica cuando su fundador la quiso pobre y humilde, sumisa a los poderes civiles en lo exterior. Con esta ocasión Marsilio desarrolla una doble teoría, de la sociedad civil y de la eclesiástica, que, en muchos aspectos, suscitará hoy, junto con el interés histórico, motivo de reflexión.

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Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) was one of the most influential thinkers of the Renaissance. He put before society a new ideal of human nature, emphasizing its divine potential. This title features his principles which have formed the basis of good government and inspired statesmen down the ages.

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Starting with an essay on the Renaissance as the concluding phase of the Middle Ages and ending with appreciations of Paul Oskar Kristeller, the great twentieth-century scholar of the Renaissance, this new volume by John Monfasani brings together seventeen articles that focus both on individuals, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, and Niccolò Perotti, and on large-scale movements, such as the spread of Italian humanism, Ciceronianism, Biblical criticism, and the Plato-Aristotle Controversy. In addition to entering into the persistent debate on the nature of the Renaissance, the articles in the volume also engage what of late have become controversial topics, namely, the shape and significance of Renaissance humanism and the character of the Platonic Academy in Florence.

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"Las artes son un modo de producción en cuyo interior se efectúan relaciones específicas, que son relaciones sociales determinadas por ideologías concretas. Cómo se entienden estas relaciones específicas de producción del arte considerando su desarrollo paralelo al modo capitalista de producción? Ésta es la pregunta fundamental que Hacia una crítica de la economía política del arte busca problematizar. Se analizan en el texto algunos de los discursos teóricos fundamentales que han reflexionado acerca de estas relaciones sociales del arte, es decir, se ha examinado la reflexión teórica y filosófica respecto a las prácticas artísticas con el objeto de llegar a comprender cómo ésta ha sido una reflexión en torno a la autonomía de lo artístico que ha estado modelando ideológicamente las prácticas para determinarlas en el interior de relaciones sociales concretas. Esta reconstrucción del modo de producción artístico occidental, desde Marsilio Ficino en la Florencia del siglo XV hasta Rosali

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Bartolomeo Fonzio (1447–1513) was a leading literary figure in Florence during the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Machiavelli. A professor of poetry and rhetoric at the University of Florence, he included among his friends and colleagues leading figures such as Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, John Argyropoulos, Cristoforo Landino, and Pietro Soderini. He was one of the principal collaborators in creating the famous humanist library of King Mattyas Corvinus of Hungary. As a scholar and teacher, he devoted himself to the study of classical authors, particularly Valerius Flaccus, Livy, Persius and Juvenal; his studies of Juvenal led to bitter polemics with Poliziano. Fonzio’s letters, translated here for the first time into English, are a window into the world of Renaissance humanism and classical scholarship, and include the famous letter about the discovery in 1485 on the Via Appia of the perfectly preserved body of a Roman girl.

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Los jardines renacentistas ?aquellos vergeles de las villas florentinas de los Medicis, que personajes como Cosme el Viejo o Lorenzo el Magnífico mandaron construir en lugares de ensueño como Fiesole, Careggi, Poggio, Castello o Boboli?, son los protagonistas de este original ensayo de María del Carmen Molina Barea. Entre sus avenidas y parterres, los filósofos humanistas neoplatónicos, liderados por Marsilio Ficino y Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, encuentran el lugar privilegiado para que el alma pulule, se expanda y deleite, y el individuo, al recorrerlos, como si se internase en un laberinto, se pierda a sí mismo, se extravíe como sujeto y se metamorfosee. El modelo de jardín del humanismo florentino logra su máxima expresión plástica, literaria y filosófica en el libro El sueño de Polifilo ?narrado como un relato en clave, editado en Venecia por Aldo Manuzio, atribuido a Francesco Colonna, y considerado por los bibliófilos como el más hermoso libro impreso de todos los tiempos?, do

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First published by the Warburg Institute in 1958, this book is considered a landmark in Renaissance studies. Whereas most scholars had tended to view magic as a marginal subject, Walker showed that magic was one of the most typical creations of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Walker takes readers through the magical concerns of some of the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, from Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples to Jean Bodin, Francis Bacon, and Tommaso Campanella. Ultimately he demonstrates that magic was interconnected with religion, music, and medicine, all of which were central to the Renaissance notion of spiritus. Remarkable for its clarity of writing, this book is still considered essential reading for students seeking to understand the assumptions, beliefs, and convictions that informed the thinking of the Renaissance. This edition features a new introduction by Brian Copenhaver, one of our leading experts on the place of magic in intellectual history.

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Rasgo definitorio de la cultura del Renacimiento europeo, el humanismo es una corriente de pensamiento y de sensibilidad que no se presta a definiciones sencillas o indiscutibles. En cualquier caso, el ideal educativo de los humanistas, dominante hasta el siglo xviii, ha perdurado ?aunque sea parcialmente? hasta nuestros días, en los que aún resiste los embates de una sociedad cada vez más trivializada. Por lo demás, la busca de nuevos modelos y de nuevas formas de sociedad e interpretaciones del mundo, de la naturaleza y del hombre no haría mal en volver una vez más la mirada a una época que asumió como propios y formuló de manera creadora los valores de la Antigüedad clásica. HUMANISMO Y RENACIMIENTO ?antología prologada, traducida y anotada por Pedro R. Santidrián? selecciona los textos más representativos de siete eminentes representantes de ese espíritu, que irradió su influencia desde Florencia al resto de Italia y de Europa durante los siglos xv y xvi: LORENZO VALLA, MARSILIO FI

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Descripcion: 15,0 x 10,5 cms.Encuadernacion:Rustica.El esoterismo musical gira en torno al hecho de que no toda la música se escucha solamente con los oídos. Hay otra música del alma y de las esferas, que da su razón de ser a la música audible, aquella que es cantada por voces o interpretada con instrumentos. Sobre esta premisa, en el primero de los dos textos de esta edición, Joscelyn Godwin, uno de los grandes conocedores de la tradición pitagórica y de su influencia en la música occidental, desgrana a través de distintos periodos dicho poder: de los míticos Apolo y Orfeo a la música renacentista, barroca o romántica. Filósofos, historiadores y teóricos de la música, desde Escoto Erígena, Macrobio y Boecio hasta Goethe, Steiner o Gurdjieff, pasando por Marsilio Ficino y Robert Fludd, son algunos de los nombres que se cruzan en estas páginas en las que la inspiración poética y filosófica se alía al estudio de la música de las esferas y de su influencia en el ser humano a lo lar

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From humble beginnings, Bartolomeo Scala (1430–1497) trained in the law and rose to prominence as a leading citizen of Florence, serving as secretary and treasurer to the Medicis and chancellor of the Guelf party before becoming first chancellor of Florence, a post he held for fifteen years. His palace in Borgo Pinti, modeled on classical designs, was emblematic of his achievements as a humanist as well as a public official. Along with his professional writings as chancellor, Scala’s personal treatises, fables, and dialogues—widely read and admired by his contemporaries—were deeply indebted to classical sources. This volume collects works from throughout his career that show his acquaintance with recently rediscovered ancient writers, whose works he had access to through the Medici libraries, and the influence of fellow humanists such as Marsilio Ficino, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Perhaps the most significant is the Defense against the Detractors of Florence, a key document in the development of modern republicanism.This volume presents fresh translations by Renée Neu Watkins of five of the texts based on Latin editions by Alison Brown, who also contributes an introduction to Scala’s life and works.

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A revelatory new account of the magus - the learned magician - and his place in the world of Renaissance EuropeAt the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure: the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist and fraud, the magus ushered in modern physics and chemistry while also working on everything from secret codes to siege engines to magic tricks.Anthony Grafton's wonderfully original book discusses the careers of men who somehow managed to be both figures of startling genius and - by some measures - credulous or worse. The historical Faust, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa are all fascinating characters, closely linked to monarchs, artists and soldiers and sitting at the heart of any definition of why the Renaissance was a time of such restless innovation. The study of the stars, architecture, warfare, even medicine: all of these and more were revolutionized in some way by the experiments and tricks of these extraordinary individuals.No book does a better job of allowing us to understand the ways that magic, religion and science were once so intertwined and often so hard to tell apart.

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A new history of one of the foremost printers of the Renaissance explores how the Age of Print came to Italy.Lorenz Böninger offers a fresh history of the birth of print in Italy through the story of one of its most important figures, Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna. After having worked for several years for a judicial court in Florence, Niccolò established his business there and published a number of influential books. Among these were Marsilio Ficino’s De christiana religione, Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, Cristoforo Landino’s commentaries on Dante’s Commedia, and Francesco Berlinghieri’s Septe giornate della geographia. Many of these books were printed in vernacular Italian.Despite his prominence, Niccolò has remained an enigma. A meticulous historical detective, Böninger pieces together the thorough portrait that scholars have been missing. In doing so, he illuminates not only Niccolò’s life but also the Italian printing revolution generally. Combining Renaissance studies’ traditional attention to bibliographic and textual concerns with a broader social and economic history of printing in Renaissance Italy, Böninger provides an unparalleled view of the business of printing in its earliest years. The story of Niccolò di Lorenzo furnishes a host of new insights into the legal issues that printers confronted, the working conditions in printshops, and the political forces that both encouraged and constrained the publication and dissemination of texts.

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In Spenser's Supreme Fiction, Jon A. Quitslund offers a rich analysis of The Faerie Queene and of several texts contributing to the revival of Platonism stimulated by Marsilio Ficino's labours as a translator and interpreter of Plato and the ancient Neoplatonists. To the old issue of the scope and character of Spenser's Platonism, Quitslund brings fresh insights from contemporary views on gender and identity, intertextuality, and the centrality of fiction within all aspects of Renaissance culture. He argues that Spenser sought authority for his poem by grounding its narrative in a divinely ordained natural order, intelligible in terms derived from the ancient sources of poetry and philosophy. Passages central to the poet's world-making project are shown to be intertextually linked to Book VI of the Aeneid and to Plato's Symposium, regarded in the commentaries of Landino and Ficino as explanations of the gentile prisca theologia, a cosmology parallel to the tenets of Christianity. The first half of the book examines Spenser's representation of the macrocosm and its replication in human nature's lesser world in the light of divergent tendencies within humanism. The legacy of Plato is shown to be especially important in the esoteric tradition, which made the province of natural philosophy part of the soul's itinerary back to its otherworldly origins. In the second half, The Faerie Queene is interpreted as an unfolding pattern: the dynamic order of nature is flawed but not fallen, and seen against that background, human culture contains in its myths and images both corruptions of natural impulses and aspirations to transcend the limits imposed by mortality.

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Philosophers of the Renaissance introduces readers to philosophical thinking from the end of the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century. International specialists portray the thought of twenty-one individual philosophers, illustrating their life and work and highlighting the importance of their thinking. Best known among the personalities discussed are Nicholas of Cusa, who combined mathematics with theology; Pico della Mirandola, the first to introduce Hebrew wisdom: Marsilio Ficino, who made the works of Plato accessible to his contemporaries; Pietro Pomponazzi, who challenged the Church with unorthodox teachings; and, Tommaso Campanella, who revolutionized philosophy and science while imprisoned. Philosophers of this period explored a great variety of human knowledge: Greek scholars who had emigrated from Byzantium spread ancient and patristic learning; humanists applied their skills to art, architecture, and the text of the Bible (Leon Battista Alberti and Lorenzo Valla); some debated about methods of scientific research - always with religion in their mind (Raymond Lull, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Philipp Melanchthon, Petrus Ramus, Bernardino Telesio, Jacopo Zabarella); others pondered the ethical implications (Michel de Montaigne, Luis Vives); or they confronted a radical overturn of the traditional worldview (Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, Francisco Suarez). The book weaves together the stories of these thinkers by emphasizing the unity of Renaissance philosophy. Originally published in German in 1998, the chapters have been thoroughly revised and updated. There is a chapter on Luis Vives that was written specifically for this English edition. This is a rich and accessible introduction to the philosophical thought that shaped modernity.

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