NEOPLATONISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS
AT THE TIME OF MARSIUO FICINO
Francis Ames-Lewis
Over the past fifty years or so, debate on the issue of the significance
of Florentine Neoplatonic philosophy, and of Ficino's philosophical
ideas in particular, for the visual arts in his time has primarily
revolved around paintings produced for members of the Medici
family, and most particularly two of Botticelli's great panel-paintings
in the Uffizi, the Pallas and the Centaur and the Primavera. This debate
reached its height around 1960 when Edgar Wind and Erwin Panofsky
proposed variations on the classic Neoplatonic reading, Ernst Gom-
brich's celebrated article of 1945.1 Gombrich understood the Primavera
in the light of a letter from Marsilio Ficino to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco
de' Medici, second cousin to Lorenzo the Magnificent, in which
Venus is equated with the concept of humanitas. However, this does
not really help to elucidate the meaning of the Venus who stands
at the centre of the Primavera. Moreover, Gombrich's hypothesis was
further compromised by his unsatisfactory attempt to identify the
figures and their interrelationships in the light of the Golden Ass of
Apuleius, which in its somewhat coarse character does not well match
the lyrical, pastoral quality of Botticelli's pictorial treatment.
In 1958 Edgar Wind suggested, citing Ficino at frequent inter-
vals, that the two groups on either side of Venus may represent two
consecutive phases of one consistent Platonic theory of love. 2 Since
Vasari had seen the Primavera and the Birth of Venus hanging in the
villa of Castello, which then belonged to the heirs of Lorenzo di
Pierfrancesco de' Medici, Erwin Panofsky proposed in 1960 that
they were pendants (despite the fact that one is on panel and the
other on canvas), both painted for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, the first
1 E. H. Gombrich, 'Botticelli's Mythologies: A Study in the Neoplatonic Symbolism
of his Circle', Journal of tht Warbwg and Courtauld Institutes, 8 (1945), pp. 7-60; repr.
in Symbolic Images: Studies in tht Art of tht Renaissance, London, 1972, pp. 31-81.
2 E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in tht Renaissance, London and New Haven, Conn.,
1958, p. 110.
328 FRANCIS AMES-LEWIS
showing Natural Venus and the second Celestial Venus. 3 At this
point, with the authority of Gombrich, Wind and Panofsky behind
it, the theory that the two paintings were based on Neoplatonic tex-
tual programmes written for Botticelli by Ficino was widely accepted.
However, fashions in interpretation change; and such changes may
be stimulated by new evidence becoming available. In 1975 a pre-
viously unexplored inventory was published more or less simultane-
ously, but independendy, by John Shearman and Webster Smith. 4
This inventory, a list of the possessions of Lorenzo and Giovanni di
Pierfrancesco de' Medici in 1499, shows that the Pallas and the Centaur
and the Primavera hung not at Castello but in one of Lorenzo di
Pierfrancesco's rooms in their town house in Florence. Moreover,
the 1499 inventory includes no painting that can be identified as the
Birth if Venus. This then was apparendy not a pendant to the Primavera;
and since it is painted on canvas in relatively inexpensive pigments,
especially in comparison with the Primavera, it seems likely that it
was painted as villa decoration, and not necessarily for the Medici
at all. The Primavera on the other hand was set into the wainscotting
of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco's anteroom, above a fine lettuccio, or day-
bed. That this painting was made to be seen in association with a
piece of high-quality domestic furniture casts it in a rather different
light from that in which it was seen at the time when Neoplatonic
interpretations of its imagery were most enthusiastically received.
Since the publication of the inventory in 1975 there has been a ten-
dency to seek other cultural contexts in which to understand the
Primavera.
It is true that one recent interpretation of the Primavera has once
more seen it in the light of Ficinian Neoplatonism. In 1989 Joanne
Snow-Smith published a lengthy and complex analysis of the paint-
ing that takes as an initial premise that it was Marsilio Ficino who
wrote the literary programme for Botticelli to depict. 5 This pro-
gramme, Snow-Smith wrote, received its immediate impetus from
the Hermetic concept of a visionary revelation of Divine Truth. The
purpose of this 'seemingly enigmatic programme' was 'to proffer to
3 E. Panofsky, &naissance and Renascences in Western Art, Uppsala, 1960, pp. 191-200.
4 J.Shearman, 'The Collections of the Younger Branch of the Medici', Burlington
Magazine, 117 (1975), pp. 12-27; W. Smith, 'On the Original Location of the
Primavera', Art Bulletin, 57 (1975), pp. 31-39.
5 J. Snow-Smith, The Primavera qf Sandro Botticelli. A Neopllltonic InterpretatWn, New
York, 1989.
