If Most Literary Conventions Go Back to Classical Antiquity, It Is No Surprise to Hear

Woman as Celestial Beautyfrom Dante to the 16th Century

Robert Baldwin

Associate Professor of Art History

ConnecticutCollege

New London, CT06320

(This essay was written in 2008 and draws heavily on Lisle John, The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences, NY, 1938)

If most literary conventions go back to classical antiquity, it is no surprise that ancient Greek poets like Sappho, Theocritus and Meleager compared beautiful women to the sun, moon, and stars. [1]In using celestial imagery to exalt female comeliness and in seeing beauty as the terrestrial image of divine beauty, ancient poetry drew on Platonic ideas of a unified, hierarchical cosmos where divine mind ruled earthly body.

Although taken up by Roman poets and passed on to the Latin court poetry of the Middle Ages, the celebration of earthly beauty was largely eclipsed by medievalChristian values which focused on the next world and devalued physical beauty and the material world as false or sinful. The Platonic tradition of celestial female beauty returned to prominence only in the latethirteenth and fourteenth century with the rise of a more secular, urban culture and new Christian ideals stressing feminine love and beauty in the widespread cult of the Virgin Mary. By Christianizing Platonic ideas of beauty, love and desire, Italian poets (Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and Guinicelli) gave amorous poetry a new legitimacy in the late medieval poetic movement known as dolce stil nuovo. That these poets wrote in Italian indicates the broad new taste for love lyrics among educated urban elites both noble and burgher.

The celestial beloved first took center stage in the verse of Dante (d. 1321) and, to a lesser extent, Petrarch (d. 1375).Dante’s Paradiso, in particular, was one long hymn to the celestial, luminous beauty of Beatrice which led his soul upward from Hell in the Inferno to dark, earthly matter in the Purgatorioto immaterial heavenly perfection in the final celestial ascent of the Paradiso. The epic concludes with a vision ofthe glowingBeatrice sitting just below the blinding light of the enthroned Madonna.

Fifty years later, celestial imagery for the beloved appeared repeatedly in the sonnets of Petrarch, The ideal lady was now a heavenly creature or an angel to which the spiritual lover ascended on the “wings” of Platonic love. For the next three hundred years, poets wrote sonnets elaborating Petrarchan conceits of the celestial beloved in every European language. Philip Sidney even used the theme of the stellar lady as the title for his book of sonnets: Astrophel and Stella (1591). The beloved is Stella (star) and the poet-lover is Astrophel (star-lover).

With the rise of Renaissance humanism and the revival of classical love lyrics, sixteenth-century sonneteers also drew on a growing Platonic humanist literature exploring beauty and love. At times homoerotic, as in Ficino’s On Love (1469), this tradition expanded in largely heterosexual texts such as Benivieni’s Ode to Love(Canzona dello Amore, c. 1488), Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505), Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier(1528), Firenzuola’s On Beauty in Women (1548), the poems of Maurice Scève and the Lyon school, Spenser’s Fowre Hymns, and d’Urfé, L’Astrée (1610), to cite only a few of the most widely read. Although largely secular after 1500, the celestial lady retained Christian values in part because the writers and readers were largely Christian but also because Catholic officials, patrons, and writers invested heavily in the cult of the Virgin,especially after the Reformation (1518-), when the triumphant Virgin as Queen of Heaven, the Madonna of the Immaculate Conception, and the Woman of the Apocalypse emerged as major themes in grand altarpieces.

This poetic tradition of the celestial beloved continued long after the later sixteenth-century sonneteers. Imbedded in a wide range of literature and art, these clichés of amorous poetry and feminine beauty were revived by the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelites such as the painter and sonneteer, Rossetti (who translated Dante) and by the later Symbolists such as Redon and Denis.

TEXTS ON WOMAN AS CELESTIAL BEAUTY FROM DANTE TO THE 16th CENTURY

14TH CENTURY / LATE MEDIEVAL

Dante, Vita nuova [2]

Beyond the sphere which spreads to widest space

Now soars the sigh that my heart sens above:

A new perception born of grieving Love

Guideth it upward the untrodden ways.

When it hath reached unto the end, and stays,

It sees a lady round whom splendours move

In homage; till, by the great light thereof

Abashed, the pilgrim spirit stands at gaze.

It sees her such, that when it tells me this

Which it hath seen, I understand it not,

It hath a speech so subtle and so fine.

And yet I know its voice within my thought

Often remembereth me of Beatrice:

So that I understand it, ladies mine.

Dante, Paradiso XXX.13-27

“… I turned my eyes from the lost vision [of divine light]

To Beatrice, as love commanded me.

If all that I have said of her below

Were gathered now into a single paean,

That would be scant praise of her beauty now.

The beauty I saw there transcends all measure

Of mortal minds. I think only her Maker

Can wholly comprehend so great a treasure.

Here I concede defeat. No poet known,

. . . was ever more outdone.

As feeblest eyes struck by the sun, go blind,

So the remembrance of my lady’s smile

Strikes every recognition from my mind.

Dante, Paradiso XXXI.67-

[Approaching the final vision, Dante is directed by a heavenly elder, St. Bernard, to look up to Beatrice.]

“And if you raise your eyes you still may find her

in the third circle down from the highest rank

upon the throne her merit has assigned her.”

Without reply I looked up to that height

and saw her draw an aureole round herself

as she reflected the Eternal Light.

No mortal eye, though plunged to the last bounds

of the deepest sea, has even been so far

from the topmost heaven to which the thunder sounds

As I was then from Beatrice; but there

the distance did not matter, for her image

reached me unblurred by any atmosphere.

“O lady in whom my hope shall ever soar

and who for my salvation suffered even

to set your feet upon Hell’s broken floor;

Through your power and your excellence alone

have I recognized the goodness and the grace

inherent in the things I have been shown.

You have led me from my bondage and set me free

by all those roads, by all those loving means

that lay within your power and your charity.

Grant me your magnificence that my soul

which you have healed, may please you when it slips

the bonds of flesh and rises to its goal.”

Such was my prayer, and she – far up a mountain,

as it appeared to me – looked down and smiled.

15TH CENTURY / EARLY RENAISSANCE

Boiardo, Sonnets VII (d. 1494)

The sky shines not more sweetly to our eyes,

when fair with splendors that the night brings down,

nor the enchanted trembling of the sea

lustrous and tranquil in the rising sun;

nor that star dripping from the space above

with dewy freshness in the morning prime,

nor a sun's beam that, scattered, sparkles back

on gleaming ice or whiteness of hoar-frost;

nor does in heaven anything more gentle

and lovable burn bright, or breathe on earth,

that to itself alone allures our gaze,

as does the graceful and enamored sight

of those fair eyes which Love makes move and turn:

who doubts all this, he dares not face their light. [3]

Boiardo, Madrigal (d. 1494)

As in the clear liquidity of night

the star of Love before daybreak appears,

so full of splendor and of golden rays

as to adorn the horizon with its light;

and out it comes, ahead

of other lesser stars

which soon around it spread

and yield part of the sky, and bow to it;

then, from its dewy tresses raining down

a liquid luster bathing

the green new grass and every colored bloom,

it makes the countryside one thing of dew:

so does this lady, going out with Love,

outshine all other women's merit bright

and blot all other beauty from man's sight. [4]

16TH CENTURY / HIGH RENAISSANCE

Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women, 1541; pub. 1548 [1]

[19]...we must say that it is appropriate for a lady to contemplate the beauty of a man, and for a man that of a lady. And so, when we speak of beauty in general, we mean both yours and ours. Nevertheless, since a more delicate and particular beauty resides more in you, diffuses itself more in you, and in you is more discernible on account of your complexion, which is more delicate and softer than ours, and, as many sages rightly claim, it has been made by Nature so gentle, so soft, so sweet, so lovable, so desirable, so admirable and so delightful, so that it would be a rest, a refreshment, even a harbor and a destination and a refuge in the course of all human labors, for this reason, leaving behind today all talk of male beauty, my entire discussion, my entire discourse, all my thoughts will be devoted to the beauty of you ladies. And if anyone wants to reproach me for it, let him do so, for I profess, not on my own, but in line with the conclusions not only of natural philosophers, but also of some theologians, that your beauty is evidence of heavenly things, an image and a semblance of the treasures of Heaven. How could earthly man ever be satisfied with the idea that our blessedness, which ought to consist above all in always contemplating the omnipotent essence of God and to rejoice in our vision of His divinity, could be continual blessedness without any hint of satiety, if he could not see that to contemplate the gracefulness of a beautiful woman, to rejoice in her elegance, to feast his eyes on her pleasant beauty, is an incomprehensible pleasure, an indescribable blessedness, a sweetness which, when it is over, would like to begin again, a happiness [20] that makes him forget himself and transcend himself.

Spenser, Amoretti, III (1595)

THE souerayne beauty which I doo admyre,
witnesse the world how worthy to be prayzed:
the light wherof hath kindled heauenly fyre,
in my fraile spirit by her from basenesse raysed.
That being now with her huge brightnesse dazed,
base thing I can no more endure to view:
but looking still on her I stand amazed,
at wondrous sight of so celestiall hew.
So when my toung would speak her praises dew,
it stopped is with thoughts astonishment:
and when my pen would write her titles true,
it rauisht is with fancies wonderment:
Yet in my hart I then both speake and write,
the wonder that my wit cannot endite.

Spenser, Amoretti, IX (1595)

LONG-WHILE I sought to what I might compare
those powrefull eies, which lighten my dark spright,
yet find I nought on earth to which I dare
resemble th' ymage of their goodly light.
Not to the Sun: for they doo shine by night;
nor to the Moone: for they are changed neuer;
nor to the Starres: for they haue purer sight;
nor to the fire: for they consume not euer;
Nor to the lightning: for they still perseuer;
nor to the Diamond: for they are more tender;
nor vnto Christall: for nought may them seuer;
nor vnto glasse: such basenesse mought offend her;
Then to the Maker selfe they likest be,
whose light doth lighten all that here we see.

Spenser, Amoretti, LXI (1595)

The glorious image of the Makers beautie,

My soverayne saynt, the idoll of my thought,

Dare not henceforth, above the bounds of dewtie,

T'accuse of pride, or rashly blame for ought.

For being, as she is, divinely wrought,

And of the brood of angels heavenly born,

And with the crew of blessed saynts upbrought,

Each of which did her with theyr guifts adorne,

The bud of ioy, the blossome of the morne,

The beame of light, whom mortal eyes admyre,

What reason is it then but she should scorne

Base things, that to her love too bold aspire!

Such heavenly formes ought rather worshipt be,

Then dare be lov'd by men of meane degree.

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Also see:

Petrarch,

Guido Cavalcanti, Veggio ne gli occhi

Girolamo Benivieni, Canzona dello Amore, c. 1488

Michelangelo, Sonnets

Griffin, Fidessa (1596 cycle), sonnets no. 10, 14,

Spenser, Fowre Hymns, ed. Lilian Winstanley, Cambridge, 1907 (esp. Hymn in Honor of Love; Hymn in Honor of Beautie)

[1] Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women, trans. and ed. by Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray, Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992

[1]Lisle John, The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences, NY, 1938, p. 151

[2] Translation of Rossetti, cited in John, op. cit.,p. 138

[3] From Italian Poets of the Renaissance, trans. Joseph Tusiani, Long IslandCity: Baroque Press, 1971, p. 57

[4] From Italian Poets of the Renaissance, trans. Joseph Tusiani, Long IslandCity: Baroque Press, 1971, p. 57