Introduction

When in the early 1640s William Cartwright (1611–43) wrote his famous poem “No Platonic Love,” he was expressing a Baroque annoyance with the notion that true love only happens between disembodied souls.Footnote ¹ This annoyance, far from being a Baroque or an English novelty, can be traced back to Italy and to the previous century when intellectuals began to dispute the most prevalent interpretation of Plato’s (ca. 420–348 BCE) Symposium, which had been proposed by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) and popularized by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) and Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529). According to this reading, the only form of love that is conducive to a life of virtue is the one that instigates a desire in the soul to rid itself of the body and ascend to the divine. While the only two senses compatible with this type of eros are sight and hearing, the other senses, especially touch, distract the soul from its necessary voyage away from the body, weighing it down until it sinks in the ontological midden of matter where, as Pico della Mirandola’s (1463–94) Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) powerfully illustrates, humans become animals. Although Ficino and his more immediate continuators acknowledge tactility in its most intimate form as necessary for human reproduction, and even accept physical attraction as a launching point for a more elevated form of love, they never cease to stress its grave dangers and the need for the soul to subjugate it and to overcome its temptations altogether. This reading of the Symposium was pervasive and extremely influential in the sixteenth century. However, toward the second half of the 1500s a number of intellectuals began to actively contest this reading, and they did so as they revaluated the role of corporeality in general, and tactility in particular, by presenting the tactile as a key player in the dialectics of human love. Interestingly, these men make their arguments not by opposing Plato but by taking less traveled roads of Platonic exegesis. Whereas Italian mainstream love philosophy, from Ficino onward, makes Diotima’s speech in the Symposium the key to understanding Platonic eros, Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1545), Flaminio Nobili (1533–91), and Francesco Patrizi (1529–97) focus on Aristophanes’s (ca. 446–386 BCE) speech with its famous mythical account of the origins of human love and the extraordinary figure of the hermaphrodite.

This revaluation of tactility was certainly not exclusive to the trattato d’amore (love treatise) tradition; in fact, the phenomenon crosses genres as well as linguistic and disciplinary borders in the sixteenth century. One finds it in some of the most radical readings of Lucretius’s (ca. 99–55 BCE) De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) — without a doubt the most prominent classical thinker of the tactile — in the writings that set in motion the anatomical revolution with its strong epistemological and ethical vindication of the work of the hand, in the revolt against Petrarchismo initiated by Neo-Latin and vernacular poets whose verses exalt the pleasures of the flesh, and, last but not least, in the exciting developments in the study of skin that led to the birth of dermatology. After over a millennium of being accorded the last place in the hierarchy of the senses, touch acquired substantive ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic prevalence.Footnote ² It does so to the extent that it becomes foundational to a new cultural paradigm that involves an understanding of the senses not as echelons of a hierarchy but as competing and collaborating agents on a leveled playing field. Focusing on this intellectual redemption of tactility can help explain the epistemological shift from authority-based evidence to first-hand experience, the new conception of the human body and its place in the universe, and the aesthetic sensibilities that make this period exceptional in its provocative amalgam of literature, science, and religion.

Whereas the history of the lower sensorium has been the object of a number of excellent recent studies,Footnote ³ the negotiations between Renaissance authors and their classical sources have not yet received full attention. The revaluation of tactility appears in the context of an intricate dialogue between intellectuals and their classical sources, of which these competing readings of Plato’s Symposium is a particularly compelling example. Before tackling the issue in the Renaissance, however, it is best to go back to Plato’s Symposium and revisit some of its most revealing passages concerning the bodily senses.

Love and the Senses in Plato’s Symposium

It is no secret that Plato and his followers — pagan and Christian alike — preferred vision among the senses, deeming it the most akin to intelligence and thus the most conducive to contemplation. As he gives his account of the generation of mankind in the Timaeus, Plato discusses only sight and hearing, completely ignoring any other senses,Footnote ⁴ and in the celebrated beginning of book 7 of the Republic it is the dialectics of sight and light that articulate the allegory of the cave. Toward the beginning of the Symposium, Socrates even makes a joke that reveals his ideas concerning the epistemological value of touch. As soon as he arrives to the drinking party, after standing on the porch for some time in one of his notorious trances,Footnote ⁵ Agathon asks him to sit next to him “so that by contact with you perhaps I shall absorb whatever it was you were thinking about outside.”Footnote ⁶ Socrates replies: “Wouldn’t it be marvelous, Agathon, if ideas were the kind of thing which could be imparted simply by contact?”Footnote ⁷ Thus Plato’s only work dedicated exclusively to eros — the only topic on which Socrates claimed to be an expert — begins with a dismissal of tactility as a legitimate source of knowledge.

Under such an epistemological premise begins the succession of speeches, the first three of which are rather conventional encomia. Phaedrus emphasizes the antiquity of eros and its capacity to inspire courage in the lover. Pausanias, a Sophist, taxonomizes eros, which he considers as being of two kinds: heavenly and earthly.Footnote ⁸ Then comes Aristophanes’s turn, but a memorable fit of hiccups prevents him from speaking, which significantly breaks the order of the speeches,Footnote ⁹ so Eryximachus takes the stand with his scientific eulogy to a cosmic love that acts as a harmonic principle in nature. When Aristophanes finally begins his speech he does so by distancing himself from the previous speakers: “Well, Eryximachus, I do intend to make a rather different kind of speech from the kind you and Pausanias made. It’s my opinion that mankind is quite unaware of the power of Eros.”Footnote ¹⁰ Aristophanes subsequently proceeds to explain the origins of mankind.

According to the bizarre myth that follows, humans used to originally be spherical, portly creatures with four legs and four arms, and they used to be of three, rather than two, genders: masculine, feminine, and androgynous, or hermaphrodite. One day they defied the gods and Zeus decided to diminish their power by cutting them in half. Ever since then they have spent their lives looking for their other half. This explains heterosexuality and both male and female homosexuality. It also explains, says Aristophanes, that the highest aspiration lovers have is to be molten together and made one with their other halves.Footnote ¹¹ Aristophanes’s speech is peppered with tactile images, from the description of Apollo mending with his hands the bodies of the primordial humans mutilated by Zeus,Footnote ¹² to that of the overpowering drive to embrace one another that moves the severed halves in their melancholy wanderings.Footnote ¹³ Aristophanes concludes that love’s power resides in its being a primal yearning to be physically reattached to the lost other half. If lovers had the chance to ask one thing from the gods, Aristophanes adds, they would address Hephaestus — not Zeus or Apollo — and they would ask the patron of sculpture and metallurgy to weld them back together so they can again be one.Footnote ¹⁴ The novelty that Aristophanes anticipated in the beginning of his speech is that love at its very basis has little to do with ethics, politics, or the cosmic order; instead, it is no more and no less than a constitutive human craving for physical contact.

While Aristophanes’s speech presents eros as a yearning for proximity, the main point of Socrates’s speech — which he borrows from the priestess Diotima — is that eros is an intermediary force, a daemon, who acts as a guide as one distances oneself from the world of bodies. Far from vilifying the sensitive world, this constitutes a call for ontological awareness and decorum. Bodies ought to be loved for what they are, that is, as perishable, transient entities whose opaque beauty should merely arouse the desire to leave them behind and ascend to higher, more noble realities. In this guise, Pausanias’s two kinds of eros, the earthly and the heavenly, are resignified by Socrates. Earthly love is the love of bodies for what they are in themselves; heavenly love is a gradual erotic ascent that starts with bodies, but, taking them as means, ends with the love of forms and, eventually, an epiphany. Shortly before he introduces Diotima’s speech, Socrates adopts Aristophanes’s premise: eros is the desire for something that is lacking.Footnote ¹⁵ Whereas for the comic playwright what was lacking was a long-lost half, another body, for the philosopher it is intelligible beauty. Beauty is a trace that one must follow, starting with bodies, then moving on to souls, then laws by way of contemplation, and “then suddenly he will see a beauty of a breathtaking nature . . . the beauty which is the justification of all his efforts so far.”Footnote ¹⁶ For there to be vision and contemplation there must be distance between the observer and the observed, in this case the lover and the beloved.

The last speech in the Symposium entails a descent from the peaks of the intelligible realm to the earthly world of bodies and physical attraction. It comes from the mouth of Alcibiades, who joins in and, disregarding the rules of the game, instead of praising eros as a deity, praises him as a man, as Socrates himself. Alcibiades’s passionate eulogy narrates how he and Socrates, presented by the young Athenian general as eros incarnate, became close friends. The six stages of seduction that Alcibiades traversed to “see the real Socrates”Footnote ¹⁷ comically replicate the six rungs of Diotima’s spiritual ladder that leads one to “see the divine beauty itself in its unique essence.”Footnote ¹⁸ Although Alcibiades was initially seeking tactile gratification, after spending the night together embraced under the same cloak but without engaging in sexual activity, the lesson he learns is that Socrates’s wonders lie inside, and they are visual: “look beneath the surface . . . and you’ll find . . . countless models of excellence,” says Alcibiades to the audience.Footnote ¹⁹ This realization comes after Socrates warns him about the use of the senses and reminds him that the intellectual sight becomes acute when the visual “starts to fail.”Footnote ²⁰ Sight, be it of earthly or intellectual beings, requires distance.

Alcibiades concludes his speech by emphasizing the many ways in which Socrates proves to be a master of detachment. He not only remains impervious to the passions of the lower body — as the night of chaste cuddling with Alcibiades shows — but also to hunger and extreme cold weather, as attested by anecdotes of the days spent in the army when he even managed to remain physically unscathed by discouraging others to hurt him with a simple glance, a compelling reminder that the visual always prevails over the tactile.Footnote ²¹ Making the point even clearer, Alcibiades adds that Socrates, in his trances, observes specific problems:Footnote ²² Socrates has the power to remain detached from physical reality. He stands aside, separated from everything, impermeable, and contemplates. This brings us back to the beginning, when Agathon expressed his desire to sit next to Socrates so that “by contact with him” he would enjoy some of the wisdom just acquired by the master outside of the house. Socrates had mocked Agathon then, since knowledge is not a product of physical contact,Footnote ²³ and he mocks Alcibiades now as the young man concludes his encomium, calling it a jealous ruse to initiate a fight between him and Agathon. At this point Agathon remembers that upon crashing the party Alcibiades had sat in between Socrates and himself. Agathon declares to Socrates: “His sitting between us [is meant] to keep us apart. But it won’t work. I’ll come round and sit next to you.”Footnote ²⁴ Blinded by their yearning for proximity to the beloved, neither of the two disciples succeed in learning the main lesson: true knowledge and true love are products of distance, not proximity.Footnote ²⁵ In a way, the Symposium is too, like Plato’s earliest works, an aporetic dialogue: whether eros is a god, a daemon, a cosmic force, or a primal instinct; whether its object is bodily or spiritual; and whether the way to attain it is through physical contact or detached contemplation are issues that are not resolved. These last two questions in particular accompanied Platonism in its return to the West in the fifteenth century.

The Symposium according to Ficino

In 1484 Marsilio Ficino published the first Latin translation of Plato’s complete dialogues. Twelve years later he would complete the endeavor with a collection of commentaries on several Platonic dialogues. The commentary on the Symposium, known as De amore, was written earlier, however, in 1469, and translated into Italian by Ficino himself in 1474. It is a commentary unlike any other mainly because it is, in the words of Diskin Clay, a “reenactment.”Footnote ²⁶ De amore is staged as a dinner party attended by some of the most prominent figures of the late fifteenth-century Florentine intelligentsia. The purpose for its composition, in Ficino’s own words, was “to summon the lost lovers of earthly beauty to return to the love of immortal beauty.”Footnote ²⁷ The distinction between earthly love and heavenly love, the latter one what human beings should ultimately aspire to, comes from Plato himself, especially from Pausanias’s and Socrates’s speeches, though also, to some extent, from Alcibiades’s, and even more explicitly from Plotinus, an author on whom Ficino relied heavily in his interpretation of Plato. Ficino’s reading of Plato’s Symposium, however, insistingly emphasized this aspect of the dialogue and crystallized it in an interpretation of Platonic love philosophy that became immensely influential in the following century. The divulgation and impact that Ficino’s treatise had in Italy, France, and England between its publication and the mid-seventeenth century is attested by its numerous editions, translations, and by the astonishing number of trattati d’amore that imitate it, paraphrase it, and cite it.Footnote ²⁸

Ficino’s De amore is of particular importance in a debate concerning the role and value of the senses that intensifies over the sixteenth century because it constitutes a reading of Plato’s philosophy that openly endorses oculocentrism and dismisses the lower senses, especially touch. Giovanni Cavalcanti, the first speaker and one of Ficino’s closest and dearest disciples, begins his commentary on Phaedrus’s speech, arguing that love is love of beauty, and beauty is threefold: “of souls, of bodies, and of sounds. That of souls is known through the intellect, that of bodies through the eyes, that of sounds through the ears, so what need is there for taste or touch?”Footnote ²⁹ The lower sensoria are not vehicles for appreciating beauty, but for what Ficino calls “appetite” and “madness.”Footnote ³⁰ The drive for physical contact in general and sexual intercourse in particular, and the drive for love are not just different, they are contradictory to one another: “The desire for coitus and love are shown to be not only not the same motions but opposite.”Footnote ³¹ Of all the bodily senses, sight is the only one that can awaken true love in the soul. Agli, the second speaker, commenting on Pausanias’s speech, concludes along the same lines: “beauty of the body is nothing other than splendor . . . [which] not the ears, not smell, not taste, not touch but only the eye perceives.”Footnote ³² However, when dealing with the two Venuses — a matter more Plotinian than Platonic — Agli does endorse “generation and coition within the bounds prescribed by natural law and civil laws drawn up by men of wisdom.”Footnote ³³ Human beings need to procreate and procreation involves coitus, the lowest form of eros. The acceptance of a socially domesticated expression of physical love, presumably within marriage, is a necessity. However, although sexual intercourse is a necessity and can even act as the launching point of the lover for the more noble forms of beauty, it is, for Ficino, much closer to vice and degradation than it is to virtue, and it is imperative to underscore its dangers.Footnote ³⁴

Furthermore, that the first two guests read Phaedrus’s and Pausanias’s speeches in such a similar vein is not coincidental. In fact, Ficino’s De amore offers a homogenous exegesis of the Symposium, radically different from Plato’s polyphonic dialogue. All of the interlocutors in Ficino’s De amore agree with the basic distinction between earthly, depraved appetite and spiritual, anabatic love. De amore is monochord; in a way, all the speeches are commentaries on Diotima’s speech. Ficino accomplishes this through allegorical exegesis, something he had learned from the Neoplatonists.Footnote ³⁵ Perhaps the clearest example of this ancient form of hermeneutics in De amore is Cristoforo Landino’s commentary on Aristophanes’s speech. Landino begins by establishing that since it is “wrapped in very obscure language,” then the speech “must be an allegory”Footnote ³⁶ in which, when Aristophanes refers to “man” being cut in half on account of his hubris, he is actually referring to “souls.”Footnote ³⁷ The soul can exist independently of the body and remain immutable and untouched, whereas the body is in a constant state of change and decay. The soul, however, has two lights, one of which directs it to the divine and the other to the bodily. Being cut in half means losing the divine light, and searching for the other half is the goal of a life dedicated to philosophy. No bodies yearning for bodies, no lovers begging Hephaistus to weld them together: in Ficino’s De amore, Aristophanes agrees with Diotima (and Pausanias, Phaedrus, et al.) that eros is the sacred impulse to abandon the world and indulge in the vision of the divine.Footnote ³⁸

The obsession with vision and the contempt for touch become even more evident in Cristoforo Marsuppini’s commentary on Alcibiades’s praise of Socrates. Marsuppini says that love is born “from the form of a body seen through the eyes,”Footnote ³⁹ and, later in the text, he explains it in the language of fifteenth-century medicine: “A ray extends as far as the person opposite and that . . . emanates a vapor of corrupt blood, by the contagion of which the eye of the observer is infected. . . . The eye, wide open and fixed upon someone, shoots the darts of its own rays into the eyes of the by-stander [which] wound the heart.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Earthly love, presented as a disease,Footnote ⁴¹ like divine love, also enters through vision, but this is a type of vision contaminated by tactility. Ficino’s language here abounds in verbs that allude to forms of touch: the vapor “impacts” the eye like a “contagion” and “penetrates” all the way into the heart.Footnote ⁴² Interestingly, Marsuppini’s speech also includes several references to the infamous ending of book 4 of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, where the mechanism of lust is explained in graphic detail.Footnote ⁴³

One should not overlook that Ficino’s De amore starts and ends with a Cavalcanti. Giovanni is the first speaker, and Marsuppini, the last, begins his speech with a congratulatory praise to the Cavalcanti family for being masters of “Socratic love.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Young Cavalcanti not only allegedly exhorted Ficino to write the De amore — a treatise that would “summon the lost lovers of earthly beauty to return to the love of immortal beauty”Footnote ⁴⁵ — but he also became the model for this kind of chaste love. Perhaps Ficino saw the young Cavalcanti as an Alcibiades, who, unlike the Athenian general, understood the main lesson concerning love without ever needing to woo, let alone touch, the beloved. And if he understood, it was also thanks to Ficino’s vigilant tutelage, as this passage from a letter the master sent the pupil in 1468 shows: “The lover is not content with the sight or touch of the beloved. . . . Then must a man be considered mad as well as miserable, who whilst thus called to the sublime through vision, plunges himself into the mire through touch.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Far from being an eccentricity of youth, this opinion on the sense of touch accompanied Ficino throughout his life. In De vita (1489) he says: “The first monster is the venereal act,” and “among the senses, Nature placed the sense of touch the farthest from the intellect.”Footnote ⁴⁷ As an older and more experienced physician and philosopher, Ficino was more convinced than ever that human love too easily degenerates into appetite, and that tactility, albeit natural and necessary, carries the gravest dangers for the soul. His notion of “Platonic love”Footnote ⁴⁸ is meant as an antidote to the erotic disease, as it avoids the lower senses and inspires the soul to rid itself of the body. It is also Ficino’s way of dismissing the strong elements of homoeroticism in Plato that had scandalized intellectuals such as George of Trebizond (1395–1472).Footnote ⁴⁹ The three most important immediate successors of Ficino continue the task of heterosexualizing earthly eros and reminding their readers that the lower senses are the main gateways for vice.Footnote ⁵⁰

In Commento sopra una canzone d’amore (Commentary on a Love Song, composed in 1486, published in 1519) Pico della Mirandola argues that “vulgar love, sponsored by the lower Venus, is appetite for earthly beauty through the sense of sight.”Footnote ⁵¹ Vulgar love is dominated by sight, but this is not yet at the level of tactility, which makes its appearance when this vulgar love degenerates into beastly love as it becomes lust and appetite for coitus. For Pico, true love is not a yearning for proximity but for detachment. When the craving for physical contact is indulged, Pico repines, there is a “desecration of the chaste love mysteries of Plato.”Footnote ⁵² Another highly influential work was Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505), probably the first dialogue on love in the vernacular. Gli Asolani comprises three conversations that proceed in dialectical progression, beginning with Perottino’s hyperbolic love complaints in book 1, followed by Gismondo’s fanatic apology of the goodness of love in book 2,Footnote ⁵³ both positions that are eventually overcome by Lavinello’s theory of Platonic love in book 3. Lavinello — Bembo’s Socrates, who learned all he knows about love from a male hermit — negotiates between Perottino’s pessimism and Gismondo’s optimism by establishing that love inspired by the eyes, the ears, and the intellect is good, whereas love inspired by “the other senses” is “evil.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Finally, this position is revisited in Baldassare Castiglione’s immensely influential Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528). In book 4, the character of Pietro Bembo lectures a group of notable men and women on his Ficinian views concerning love. The pleasure produced by the bodily senses, argues Bembo, is “false and mendacious,” since the body is not an end in itself, but a mere springboard to the spirit.Footnote ⁵⁵ Castiglione, like Ficino and Bembo, opposes love and appetite, the cause of the latter being “il senso” (“sensitivity”),Footnote ⁵⁶ meaning the lower senses and, in particular, touch. Castiglione concludes: “Beauty is the true trophy of the soul’s victory, when it defeats matter with its divine virtue and with its light overcomes the shadows of the body.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In a famous passage, the author reminds his audience that beauty’s radiance is enjoyed through vision, not touch: “Just like you can neither hear with your palate, nor smell with your ears, it is absolutely impossible to enjoy this Beauty and to satisfy the desire that it produces in the soul through touch, instead of through the sense of which she is the true object: the virtue of sight.”Footnote ⁵⁸

His advocacy for rational love follows the conventional lines drawn by Ficino, but with one fundamental difference: among young people, in whom il senso is particularly overpowering, Castiglione opines that physical love is harmless because it is fueled by honest feelings and virtually impossible to control.Footnote ⁵⁹ This is highly relevant because it anticipates a question that would prove to be pervasive in the trattati d’amore of the following decades: whether touch is legitimate as a means to pursue a love that is physical and sacred at the same time.Footnote ⁶⁰

The Taming of the Lower Senses

Whereas the Ficinian tradition focused mostly on celestial eros and warned time and again against the dangers of carnality, in the first half of the sixteenth century the intellectual debate on the nature of love started gravitating toward the problem of the mediation between celestial and terrestrial love. In one of the most influential early philosophical works on love, Mario Equicola’s (1470–1525) encyclopedic Di natura d’amore (Book on the Nature of Love, published in 1525, but begun in 1495), the author argues that true lovers love both body and soul.Footnote ⁶¹ Although this is not something that Ficino and his followers would have denied, it is certainly not something that they would have stressed, as the body and its touch are to them uncomfortable realities against whose danger one should always be alert. In Equicola’s work, however, the debate around the importance of touch makes an unusually powerful appearance. The author says: “while the other senses were given to us as ornaments of our essence, touch is the condition of our being.”Footnote ⁶² Since without touch there is no life, touch is much closer to the spiritual realm than tradition has thought, and it actually operates in the very border between the material and the spiritual. As he moves on to discuss sexual intercourse, Equicola concludes: “Coitus is the son of touch and Nature hid pleasure in it so that love would force us to procreate, and so that in producing genital semen all animals would feel joyous sweetness.”Footnote ⁶³ The first step in the taming of the lower senses proves to be their ontological redemption; as fundamentally constitutive of human nature, they might not be as dangerous and menacing as earlier thinkers though them to be.Footnote ⁶⁴

One of the most interesting examples of this new attitude toward the lower senses can be found in Sperone Speroni (1500–88). His Dialogo d’amore (Dialogue of Love, 1542) includes a vivid description of erotic passion in terms of a never-ending struggle between the senses to enjoy the beloved, reminiscent of Lucretius.Footnote ⁶⁵ Love between humans, Speroni says, is imperfect and subject to excesses due to the powerful protagonism of the senses; however, such love is also the only kind that one can truly experience, and one must do so exercising measure rather than zealous asceticism. Interestingly, Speroni’s dialogue includes numerous references to Aristophanes’s hermaphrodite from the Symposium. Toward the beginning of the dialogue, Nicolo Grazia establishes that perfect love is that which “ties the lovers together perfectly in such a way that, losing their own countenance, they become a third of sorts, as it is told in the myth of the hermaphrodite.”Footnote ⁶⁶ From then on, Grazia simply calls the perfect couple “l’Ermafrodito amoroso” (“the erotic hermaphrodite”),Footnote ⁶⁷ an almost indistinguishable union of man and woman that is both physical and spiritual. In this way, through the figure of the hermaphrodite, heterosexual love becomes the paradigm of true mediation between terrestrial and celestial eros.Footnote ⁶⁸

Speroni’s dialogue appears at a time when women were becoming key figures in love philosophy, both as fictional characters but also as authors; the most famous example is Tullia D’Aragona (1510–56) and her Dialogo dell’infinità d’amore (Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, 1547).Footnote ⁶⁹ In fact, one of the main interlocutors in Speroni’s dialogue is Tullia, a Venetian courtesan, whom Grazia explicitly compares to Diotima.Footnote ⁷⁰ The case of Sperone Speroni’s Tullia is a clear sign of the return of women to the spotlight; but there are many more. By the 1540s women had become key interlocutors in the arena of love philosophy. Within the context of Platonic love philosophy, this can be understood as a continuation of attempts by Ficino, Pico, Bembo, and Castiglione to heterosexualize eros. The Ficinian tradition, however, was male dominated and found a way out of Platonic homoeroticism in the chaste practice of Platonic or Socratic love. Therefore, the return of the female philosopher must also be read against the backdrop of a larger debate on the dignity of women that had as some of its most vocal participants Mario Equicola, who wrote one of the first defenses of women, as well as Flavio Capra, Agostino Strozzi, Cornelius Agrippa, and Sperone Speroni himself.Footnote ⁷¹ These works, undoubtedly influenced by Boccaccio’s Lives of Illustrious Women, revalidate the role of women in society and as spiritual role models. In the work of Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) this revaluation is directly associated with Platonic love philosophy as well as with the figure of the hermaphrodite.

Firenzuola’s Ragionamenti d’Amore (Love Stories, 1524), a collection of bawdy stories in the vein of Boccaccio, was inspired by a woman, Costanza Amaretta, with whom the author was enraptured. In fact, Amaretta is the main character of the work, the queen of the coterie, and she is also the Diotima who holds the key to the mysteries of love. In the introduction, which constitutes a brief trattato d’amore, Costanza Amaretta reminds everyone of the old Platonic distinction between celestial and terrestrial love, but with an important difference: terrestrial love, she says, is “an inner fire” that performs a double operation. It can be libidinous fury that turns humans into animals — the origin of a myriad of evils including adultery, sacrilege, and even murder — or “it can ignite us in a more temperate manner” as the natural instinct of multiplication, which brings man and woman together to produce offspring.Footnote ⁷² The way to regulate this second kind of terrestrial love and to keep it within the bounds of decency and reason is marriage.Footnote ⁷³ The ardor that in Ficino was an awkward physiological necessity and in Castiglione an unfortunate flaw that could only be forgiven among young people is here not only a constitutive part of the mechanism of terrestrial love and reproduction of the species, but something that can be made sacred by matrimony. Two decades later, Firenzuola returns to this idea in his most influential work, Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (On the Beauty of Women, 1548), when one of the characters, Mona Lampiada, asks Celso, the main interlocutor, whether beauty is the same for men and women. Celso bases his answer on Aristophanes’s myth of the origins of mankind, as he discusses the three original genders and claims that the majority of humans were of the androgynous kind.Footnote ⁷⁴ Among those who were all male and all women, there are some who admire beauty in a chaste manner and some who do so in a vicious manner by giving in to lust.Footnote ⁷⁵ The first two genders, Celso insists, are not worthy of discussion as they behave in ways that are either saintly or degenerate,Footnote ⁷⁶ but the hermaphrodite is at the same time more common and more complex, and the reason for this is that men and women can indulge in the tactile pleasures without becoming degenerates, as long as they are bound by marriage.Footnote ⁷⁷ An emblem in Barthélemy Aneau’s popular Picta Poesis (Poetic Imagination, 1552) shows the perfect marriage as a two-headed hermaphrodite (fig. 1).

Figure 1. “Matrimonii Typus.” In Barthélemy Aneau. Picta Poesis, page 11, Lyon, 1552.

A more explicit and self-aware twist to the matter comes in 1556 from a close friend of Torquato Tasso’s (1544–95), Flaminio Nobili. Nobili’s Trattato dell’amore humano (Treatise on Human Love, 1567) argues that love is “a vigorous bending of our appetite and our will inspired by a known beauty, that suddenly becomes a desire to generate something beautiful, or to gain the favor of the beloved.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Will, sensitive appetite, and the desire to generate are all instances of the phenomenon known as love. And there is nothing reprehensible about physical contact, argues Nobili, “as one can see in the natural instinct to touch and embrace our children, our siblings, our friends. This is why, according to Plato, Aristophanes is certain that lovers are keen on finding a certain Vulcan who might melt them together with their beloved so that from two they can become one. And also Lucretius when talking about love says that the lover would like to penetrate the body of the beloved with his whole body. I see that these superstitious men who wrote about love approve of the kiss, which, in the end, is also a merger of bodies . . . such a merger is compatible with human love as long as it is reasonable and honest, it does not go against any laws, and it is ruled by temperance.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Nobili here is referring tongue in cheek to Castiglione’s timid admission of the kiss. For Nobili, not only the kiss, but the general yearning to touch and be touched, to be molten together by Vulcan, is acceptable, but neither as a means to ascend on the road of spirituality, nor as a symbol of the merger of souls: it is acceptable because it is a “natural instinct”; and it is innocent, since even children kiss and desire to touch. When Nobili clarifies that it must be a love that is “reasonable, honest, temperate and law-abiding,” he is referring, as Firenzuola before him, to marriage. Like Firenzuola and Speroni, Nobili’s novelty is that he directly associates a more pragmatic approach to physical (heterosexual) love — a naturalistic approach — with Aristophanes’s notion of the hermaphrodite. In what constitutes a strong reaction to Ficino’s reading of Plato, these intellectuals move away from allegorical exegesis: the union of the lovers is essentially psychosomatic, and the carnal union of man and woman, the ermafrodito amoroso, is the model for terrestrial love. This position finds its most accomplished expression in one of the least read love treatises of the sixteenth-century: Francesco Patrizi’s L’amorosa filosofia (The Philosophy of Love).

L’amorosa Filosofia

A utopian, a historian, a sailor, a philologist, a mercenary, a manuscript dealer, a literary critic, a natural philosopher, and a trattatista d’amore, Francesco Patrizi is better known today for having been one of the most vitriolic critics of Aristotelianism in the sixteenth century, as well as the first person ever to be appointed professor of Platonic philosophy — first at the University of Ferrara (1577), later at La Sapienza in Rome (1592).Footnote ⁸⁰ L’amorosa filosofia, written some time between 1577 and 1578, was never published during Patrizi’s lifetime. It survived in one codex, handwritten and incomplete, published for the very first time by John Charles Nelson in 1963. The structure is that of Plato’s Symposium and Ficino’s De amore: there is a banquet and there is a posse of luminaries, whose members take turns discussing eros. Only in this case, eros is actually present in the flesh, sitting there among the guests. In Patrizi’s rendition of the Symposium, eros is Tarquinia Molza.

Tarquinia Molza (1542–1617) was a poet, musician, and philosopher who lived in Modena at the time. Even though she plays a role in Torquato Tasso’s dialogue on love, which is named after her — La Molza overo del amore (Molza, or On Love, 1583) — as well as in Annibale Romei’s Discorsi (1585), most of what is known of her life comes from L’amorosa filosofia. In the pages of the first, and longest, of the four remaining dialogues, Tarquinia is described as having complete mastery of Latin — she understood the licentious poetry of Tibullus and Catullus better than any of her contemporariesFootnote ⁸¹ — and Greek, which she learned in only three months, reading the Phaedrus with Patrizi.Footnote ⁸² Her admirers also insist that she was the best soprano of her time, wrote sonnets and madrigals, played the viola and the basso, and was witty, ingenious, and simply brilliant at the age of thirty-three.Footnote ⁸³ The praises in dialogue 1 also describe with vivid precision Tarquinia Molza’s eyes, which were neither blue nor black, but mixed perfectly in color; they were big, happy, radiant, luminous eyes, always humid, almost lacrimous: the most beautiful eyes one has ever seen.Footnote ⁸⁴ Her neck was white and smooth like snow, no veins or muscles to be seen,Footnote ⁸⁵ and her lips were pure honey and ambrosia.Footnote ⁸⁶ Contemplating Tarquinia, says one of the guests, is coming a step closer to God.Footnote ⁸⁷ Every gesture, every movement, every action, every laugh, every word, every wink of her eyes “is an explosion formed by all the Minervas, all the Venuses, all the Graces, all the Muses, and all the Loves in infinite space.”Footnote ⁸⁸

The most unique characteristic of Tarquinia Molza, however, was something else, notices Monsignor Quarengo, a friend of Patrizi who introduces the speeches. Tarquinia’s beauty is somewhat “contradictory,” he points out: mysteriously, no painters — more than ten had tried in vain — were ever capable of properly representing her features on the canvas (fig. 2). Finding Tarquinia something of a “marvel,” an overwhelming oddity, none of them knew where to start the portrait because of that “strange mixture” of Lady Molza. “What mixture?” someone asks. And Quarengo replies: “They say that Lady Tarquinia’s beauty consists of a very subtle mixture of female and male; two elements that are perfectly mixed together in her, so much so that it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.”Footnote ⁸⁹ With her androgynous beauty and her superior intellect, Lady Molza is there to teach about love matters. Patrizi adds that, as they read the Phaedrus together, he learned all he knows about love from Tarquinia, “like Socrates learned it from Diotima.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The comparison should not be misinterpreted.Footnote ⁹¹ Tarquinia’s only resemblance to Diotima has to do with her introducing a philosopher to the mysteries of love. But Tarquinia’s ideas about love have nothing to do with Diotima’s. In fact, Tarquinia Molza’s love philosophy can be read as a philosophical exegesis of Aristophanes’s speech in the Symposium, and it is laid out in the second dialogue of L’amorosa filosofia.

Figure 2. “Tarquinia Molza.” In Francesco Maria Molza. Delle poesie volgari e latine, unnumbered page following frontispiece. Vol. 2 of 3. Bergamo, 1747–54.

When Tarquinia finally takes the stand she conducts a careful dissection of amore, a phenomenon that includes benevolence, charity, friendship, predilection, affection, inclination, hunger, avidity, will, concupiscence, desire, yearning, appetite, lust, and wish. But love can either be love of oneself, or love of something or someone else,Footnote ⁹² and Tarquinia’s conclusion is that all of these different kinds of love, and, therefore, love itself, begins in oneself and is for oneself.Footnote ⁹³ All love is philautía.Footnote ⁹⁴ Tarquinia Molza’s views on philautía (self-love) are the subject of the third dialogue.Footnote ⁹⁵ Love for oneself, she argues, is the beginning of every single feeling of affection in every living being. In other words, the affective intentio (strain) is always the product of a feeling of affection for oneself that ricochets within ourselves and goes out into the world. Before she can even be accused of heterodoxy, Tarquinia adds that God’s love, which lies at the basis of creation, is originally a form of philautía simply because before the creation of the world there was nothing outside of God at which he could direct his love.Footnote ⁹⁶ So too is charity, as a way to serve God and come closer to him, done “for our own sake,” says Tarquinia.Footnote ⁹⁷ If for no better reason, this is clear because of the Platonic principle that establishes that “it is not granted to what is impure to touch what is pure.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Tarquinia clarifies that if the goal is to become one with God — and in order for two things to become one they have to touch — one must become pure before one may even aspire to touch God. If the highest form of love is the love of God, which inspires the desire to become one with God, and every kind of love stems from the love for oneself, then both at the very beginning and at the end love is a unity, a unity that is the product of the most intimate touch. As one becomes pure one can aspire to touch God and become one with him, and in order to perpetuate the species — yet another instance of self-love — lovers strive to physically become one with one another. In order to understand what sort of touch, if any, is involved in self-love one must turn to the figure of the hermaphrodite.

The intensity of eros, according to Aristophanes’s speech, comes from a nostalgic yearning to go back to what humans once were; to the comic playwright, eros, a powerful longing for physical contact, is ultimately an expression of philautía. Tarquinia Molza’s views on love thus constitute a commentary on the myth of the severed halves. Therefore, L’amorosa filosofia is not, as Nelson claims, a “surprisingly un-Platonic”Footnote ⁹⁹ work by a self-proclaimed Platonist; it is, instead, a heterodox reading of the Symposium. All kinds of love come not from a yearning to detach oneself from the world of bodies and ascend to contemplate God, but from a primal feeling of self-love, and from an overpowering need for contact and proximity. Even divine love is described in tactile terms when Molza claims that the ultimate goal is to touch God. As the instantiation of the Aristophanic hermaphrodite, the origin of all heterosexual love, and the incarnation of what Speroni called “l’Ermafrodito amoroso,” there is no one better qualified to teach love matters than Tarquinia Molza. Remarkably, Patrizi manages to combine the three main speakers of Plato’s Symposium in the figure of Tarquinia Molza, who simultaneously represents Aristophanes’s hermaphrodite, Diotima, and Socrates himself, since the first dialogue is a long praise of Molza comparable to Alcibiades’s praise of the master.

As the works of Firenzuola, Speroni, and Nobili show, Patrizi’s heterodox approach to the Symposium, and especially to Aristophanes’s speech, was no novelty.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ L’amorosa filosofia, however, constitutes perhaps the most compelling response to Ficino’s De amore produced in the sixteenth century, as it is centered on the notion of love as philautía based upon a sacralized understanding of tactility. Patrizi affirms that love, from its beginnings in the inner self to its end, which is to touch the divine, cannot but be a phenomenon that engages the tactile. Undoubtedly, this need to redeem tactility stems in Patrizi both from a naturalistic attitude toward the body and an interest in the mediation between matter and spirit. Among many other things, Patrizi was also a physician who had experienced firsthand the anatomical revolution of the mid-sixteenth century. He enrolled at the University of Padua in 1547, four years after the publication of De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1543), which opens with a famous appeal to Emperor Charles V (1500–58) where Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) vigorously calls for a new epistemology based on the collaboration between the eye and the hand.Footnote ¹⁰¹ A growing concern with firsthand evidence, typical of sixteenth-century anatomy, is combined in Patrizi with a philosophical obsession that would make its way all the way to Descartes: locating the exact border between body and soul.Footnote ¹⁰²

Conclusion: To Touch a Hermaphrodite

At some point in the early 1440s, when Marsilio Ficino was hardly ten years old and the Platonic manuscripts he would later translate and comment upon were still slowly arriving to the stacks of Cosimo de’ Medici’s library, the accomplished sculptor and art critic Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) was witness in Rome to an awe-inspiring event: the exhumation of a headless hermaphrodite. The statue, “the size of a thirteen-year-old girl and made with admirable genius,”Footnote ¹⁰³ was found buried in an ancient sewer completely covered in dirt, and was carried to the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere to be cleaned and restored. Ghiberti remembers the occurrence in the third book of his Commentarii (ca. 1447), which is dedicated to anatomy and to the theory of vision: “It is not possible to express in words the perfection of this statue . . . which, covered in a subtle cloth, showed the male and the female nature. . . . Many pleasant attributes did the statue possess, and none of them could be grasped by sight, unless the hand found it through touch.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As a renowned master of relief, who was especially drawn to the tactile sensibility of late Roman art,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Ghiberti introduces here a notion of “aesthetic touch.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Anticipating arguments that would reappear in the paragone of the sixteenth century, Ghiberti affirms the crucial importance of tactility not only for the production but also for the appreciation of sculpture. Like Vesalius in his address to Charles V a hundred years later, Ghiberti calls for a collaboration between touch and vision.

In those first decades of the fifteenth century, as piles of manuscripts were making their way back to Italy and ancient artifacts were starting to be unearthed all over the peninsula, there is no doubt that the discovery of the Roman hermaphrodite must have been an exhilarating event. But the image of Ghiberti almost in ecstasy caressing the androgynous statue is much more than a postcard of that love for classical antiquity that defines the Renaissance. It also prefigures some of the main characteristics of an intellectual sensibility that would dominate the following two centuries and beyond: a renewed interest in corporeality, a more nuanced and self-aware approach to issues of gender, a revaluation of the role of the senses, a reaction against long-established dualisms, an exaltation of curiosity, and a fascination with the eccentric, the paradoxical, and the ambiguous. Across disciplines, languages, and time the hermaphrodite would bespeak all of these characteristics like few other figures did. In literature, this starts not long before Ghiberti’s epiphany, with Antonio Beccadelli’s L’ermafrodito, a collection of pornographic poetry equally divided in songs about male and female genitalia. It follows with the many translations and imitations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which in book 4 includes the myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ and continues in two seventeenth-century novels, Thomas Artus’s Description de l’île des hermaphrodites (Description of the Island of the Hermaphrodites, 1605) and Ferrante Pallavicino’s Il principe ermafrodito (The Hermaphrodite Prince, 1640), satirical commentaries on the hypocrisy of gender politics. In turn, a scientific interest in hermaphrodites arises in the second half of the sixteenth century with the work of Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses (Extraordinary Stories, 1560), and of Ambroise Paré, Des monstres et prodiges (On Monsters and Marvels, 1573),Footnote ¹⁰⁸ which anticipate three important treatises on the topic: Caspar Bauhin’s De hermaphroditorum monstrosorumque partuum (On the Parts of Hermaphrodites and Monsters, 1600), Jacques Duval’s Des hermaphrodites (On Hermaphrodites, 1612), and Jean Riolan’s Discours sur les hermaphrodites (Discourse of the Hermaphrodites, 1614). As liminal beings who dwell in the border between genders, between the human and the monstrous, between science and mythology, hermaphrodites represented for the early modern mentality the daunting mystery of mediation. It should not surprise anyone that love philosophers evoked them to better understand the complex relation between the spiritual and the sensual; after all, for the Greeks, Eros himself was a mediator.