Word: ficino
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...Anderson. Getting tumbled in a wave of neo-Platonic fantasizing about how outer shape mirrors inner essence--"For Soule is Forme, and doth the Bodie make," wrote the poet Spenser in 1596--may be great for the figure and complexion when court painters like Botticelli and writers like Marsilio Ficino or Angelo Poliziano are watching, but it's not so good for documentary truth. As faithful records of human appearance, these 15th and 16th century portraits of women are unreliable. But they are also dream images, illustrating a semiphilosophic proposition that we have altogether abandoned today: the idea that great...
...beat the theologians to that one-but that the search for God's immanence could lead to His entrapment. Once He got in He might be trapped in (remember Vietnam?). Or, and this is the other possibility which hurt Protestantism badly, pushing Him outside the domed-in-world (as Ficino did in Renaissance Italy) to work things out for ourselves would leave little room for Transcendental values. The alternatives were apparent to many in "academe" either we trapped Christ in our secular, technopolitan would, effectively cutting Him, and us, off from the Ascension (the element of transcendence); or we pushed...
...which attracted them. But gradually they found that what they cared for most in the ancient masterpieces was the perfection of their form. Henceforth they studied them for their form alone. Not for their matter. There were exceptions, of course, such as Laurentius Valla, Polilian, Pontanus, Marullus, Ficino, and his fellow Platonists, "amiable browsers in the Medicean park," as George Eliot calls them; but, on the whole, the great aim of Italian scholars was to emulate the form of the ancients to write elegant Latin and Greek." Ciceronianism, the clothing of trifles-often filthy trifles in the purest Latinity...
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