#obscure early modern florence blogging

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

fucking going mental over this man 

Church: ok you’re a priest now. Maybe stop being a doctor?

Ficino: how about no? how about i never stop?

Church: 

Ficino: how about I develop theological underpinnings for my continuing to be a doctor because I love being a doctor? I shall do this alongside creating new theological underpinnings to support my obsession with Plato and my deep, all consuming love for Cavalcanti, whom I call Hero because he is my hero and my most perfect friend. 

Church: 

Church: fine. i guess. ?

[skyforall]

a note on ficino

Whether or not we are acquainted with the deeper form of astrology, nearly all of us are familiar with the occasional mention (albeit superficial) of the twelve symbols in day-to-day conversation. "What sign are you?" Or someone complains about a boastful and self-centered boss..."Ugh, he's such a Leo". It might be about their serious "capricorn" friend, who wouldn't buy them an extra drink but will VERY happily throw money at an expensive brand of shoes because..."well these shoes will actually last.'' Even on the surface, these symbols are well established. And what for many starts out as a fun game of stereotypes, ends up as a much more intricate goose-chase of why we are the way we are. The rise of astro chatter on the web has made even the loudest and least-equipped ranter inch towards some detail. With the amount of astro-blogs or gram accounts dedicated to zodiac-related jokes, chart readings and natal aspects, you'd have to tape your eyes shut and put cotton buds in your ears to remain clue-free on the subject.

Now, more nuance has appeared: we see someone post a rage about how they were blanked by their gemini ex! Or your phone breaks because mercury has finally "gone into retrograde." This all seems like new talk but of course, astrology has already stood the long and strange test of time. No matter how far it may swing in or out of fashion, the angles and patterns apply:

-the joys of complaining- To those of you who enjoy a bit of a whinge about your difficult moon sign, it may come as a surprise that nearly 560 years ago, a man named Marsilio was doing just that. In a series of pretty chatty letters to his friends and colleagues across northern italy,  Marsilio Ficino makes mention of the heavy and rather depressing effect of his natal moon in capricorn, giving his temperament a most "unfortunate melancholia". He also praises the patience and spectacular achievements of his patron, Lorenzo di Medici, (Capricorn Sun) the rich benefactor of Florence at the time. Marsilio was aware of the power and ever-present nature of the transits, and he reassures one of his younger friends that Jupiter will soon bring him better luck (even noting that such a transit might lighten his own depression!). Ficino was one of the towering yet more obscure scholars behind the 15th Century Italian Renaissance that would give new life and new light to a Europe stuck in the Middle Ages.

Ficino himself located and translated a great many ancient texts from the Greco-Roman Era (including most of Plato's works). He had a particular eye for classical astrology, and seems to have plucked it from the gutter of the dark ages: he certainly rated the subject highly despite the confusion of his contemporaries. He was even accused of heresy, but the Pope acquitted him, since Ficino, a theologian himself, well defended his case for astrology as a holy and natural study on the clockwork of the sky and an elegant window into the harmonious workings of the world. This laid the precedent for others like Gallileo to later on study the heavens in a more physical and detached way, giving birth to early modern science. But Ficino himself remained very alive to the symbolic significance of the planets and their motion, which according to the ancient interpretation, weighed on everything: our moods, our opportunities, our very spirit.

Thanks to Ficino's respect for the indefinable nature of an ancient art, the integral absurdity of astrology remains a little more intact: At a crucial interval in history, he was probably one of only a few people in Europe who carried the strange torch on from antiquity to the next era. It was and still is a very ripe ground for fraud, hocus pocus and all manner of cheap variations, whereby the lazy practitioner presents the great unknown and expects to be paid for it. But there will always be prudent minds that are interested in, and retain enough humility to consider, the neat mystery of a natal chart...

-definitions- The character of time for one moment: The snapshot of the sky when we were born. Somehow, it really has an uncanny amount to say about our potential. Nothing will convince anyone of this except experience, patience and exploration of the subject. For that reason, realising its actual value happens gradually and almost despite ourselves and our intervening. This cross over from silly to serious is difficult territory, because according to the proud human mind, the sky really shouldn't carry such insights at all. But when we step back, and look at it, the natal chart resembles a unique fingerprint of degrees. These placements taken together represent the tensions and angles of the planets at the time of birth. I repeat these definitions to let a curious fact sink in: the natal chart is much more like a photograph or blueprint than anything else.

To be fair to bad astrologers everywhere, it takes an enormous time to learn how to read a chart well. Some people say it takes over half a lifetime to become a veteran astrologer. This makes more sense when you consider the size of the language, angles, aspects that all have to be interpeted to give someone a decent reading on their potential and their pitfalls.

Back to Ficino... However miserable his low moods, Marsilio was a remarkably erudite and broad-minded personality for his time. Although of course literacy was low in 15th century Italy, It is not common, in my view, to read any texts from this era that are as sharp and self-aware as his letters are. He worshipped the idea of developing one's personal wisdom and good character, stressing the importance of friendship despite, and especially during, the hardships of life. In his letters you can often sense his use of genuine gratitude and  of praising the good in others in order to encourage even himself out of long held sorrows. Later, The 17th century English astrologer, William Lilly, set down major works that are still read today. He also had the moon in Capricorn. (It is worth noting he was respected enough to be consulted by Lords and members of parliament). These were some serious and careful personalities and their toils are not to be dismissed. A large part of the western astrological tradition has rested on their painstaking work, which no doubt many of the more mercenary astrologers and fortune tellers of the day had neither the time nor the patience to do. Cap moons tend to be builders like that.

A passing mention on moons: Whereas the rest of us would build a house and be proud of it, a cap moon will build a house, rent it out and then write a manual on how to build houses. For our music, on the other hand, we usually depend on the opposite approach, (that of the opposite sign) The crab moons, who savour and feel every joy and every pain to the fullest extent. For this reason they make successful musicians: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Page, Tom Waits, Kurt Cobain and Taylor Swift. Actors must also feel the moment (for example, the expressive faces of Sean Penn and Miranda Kerr). For new ground, the sign of the restless wanderer, Sagittarius, crops up. Renown for never taking anything for an answer. (Composers Mozart and Rameau were Sagittarius Moons for example, as well as the tireless inventor Edison and the near unstoppable Einstein). All explored with fire and flair things that had not been done before.

Of course such generalizing is usually a no-no, because the whole chart is necessary for anything like a judgement: but the symbol-based patterns above do hold sway, remarkably often, and i think a simple study of the moon signs is always very instructive.

Many feel boxed or labelled by such language. "I'm a this. Oh He's a that." But really, it's up to your maturity not to hold the badge so tightly. Consider what it is saying about you. The signs and symbols only describe tendencies: nobody's soul identity is under attack - and once we understand the language, we don't get so attached or so threatened by what the chart might spell out to us: oftentimes it's humorous. The chart is almost like a list of the clothes we wear.

In my fairly long study of such madness, having misread charts and then recorrected them, and then relearnt entire concepts, I can certainly affirm the old saying: getting it wrong taught me the most. I maintain at this point, that the enigma of astrology, (older than the lighthouse of alexandria) is best understood as an affectionate sketch, and best used as a tool to understand one's own potential. The natal chart becomes less abstract when you notice that you too, are a walking mystery.

[micaramel]

Artist: Bea Schlingelhoff

Venue: Cherish, Geneva

Exhibition Title: soft mime win

Date: June 12 – August 31, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Cherish, Geneva

Press Release:

In an informative blog post, London’s Courtauld Institute of Art speculates that one of the earliest examples of an artist’s signature, in its own collection at least, is Bernardo Daddi’s Polyptych: The Crucifixion and Saints (1348 AD). At the bottom of this multi-panel altarpiece is a line that translates to: “In the year of our Lord 1348, Bernardus, whom Florence made, painted me.”1

There are numerous examples of artists signing artworks in Ancient Greece and Rome. The classicist Jeffrey M. Hurwit writes of a very early handwritten artist’s autograph inscribed on the base of a kouros (650–600 BC) by the sculptor Euthykartides. It reads: “Euthykartides the Naxian dedicated me, having made [me].”2

Signatures play an operative role in Bea Schlingelhoff’s softmimewin series, documentation of which is on view in the exhibition soft mime win at Cherish, Geneva.3 While early signatures were assertions of origin or devotional gestures, the form has, in the modern period, acquired the status of currency in the international art market. It is this market that soft mime win addresses as its object of critique. Each photographic print in the display depicts a framed document that was included in a prior exhibition by Schlingelhoff, beginning with her solo exhibition Auftrag: No Offence (2017) at Istituto Svizzero, Milan. The two-page text represents a negotiation between artist and gallery director (and occasionally other parties such as curator) over the terms upon which artworks are to be shown. The director is invited to make modifications, largely represented as handwritten notes, to produce a final edit that is signed by all collaborating persons if consensus is met.4

The signatures on each document do not only index the authorship of an aesthetic object (though this function is performed) but confront the conditions within which objects and ideas circulate. Women and gender-non-confirming artists have long known this circulation to be restrictive. The experience of seventeenth century Dutch genre painter Judith Leyster, whose signature was obscured so that her portraits could be attributed to Frans Hals, a male contemporary with a higher market value, is one among countless others of the nefarious misogyny of the art market, which Schlingelhoff’s series joyfully and proactively negates.

Yet these are not petitions to grant non-male artists access to the Ruinart Lounge at Art Basel, or other of the so-called privileges of oppression. The negotiations can be read as sensitive deconstructions of the historical relation between gender and subjectivity. Jamaican essayist Sylvia Wynter describes this nexus eloquently when she asserts: “This issue is that of the genre of the human, the issue whose target of abolition is the ongoing collective production of our present ethnoclass mode of being human, Man: above all, its overrepresentation of its well-being as that of the human species as a whole, rather than as it is veridically: that of the Western and westernized (or conversely) global middle classes.” 5 In her writing, Wynter powerfully criticizes modes of economic production that are tied to definitions of the individual human subject. Within the art field, it has been shown that the value of objects is defined by the social relations that are reproduced through its institutional structures. Ambitiously delinking subjectivity from representation, soft mime win attempts to provisionally design—or de-sign—a cultural discourse in which the feminist ethic of interpersonal care is practiced as institutional critique.

– Harry Burke

Cherish and the artist would like to thank Harry Burke & Benjamin Eliott With the support of Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art and FPLCE.

1 “Signed, Sealed, Delivered: A Look at Artists’ Signatures in the Courtauld Gallery.” The Courtauld Institute of Art Blog. September 25, 2014. Accessed June 8, 2020. http://blog.courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/2014/09/25/signed-sealed-delivered/.

2 Jeffrey M. Hurwit. Artists and Signatures in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 33.

3 The series was formerly known as the wimminfesto series. The new title, softmimewin, reflects Schlingelhoff’s interest in the subversive qualities of anagrammatic poetry.

4 Michelle Cotton, director of Bonner Kunstverien in Bonn, Germany; Susanne Mierzwiak, curator of Bonner Kunstverien in Bonn, Germany; Joëlle Comé, Director of Istituto Svizzero in Rome, Italy; Laura Becchio; and Martin Hatebur, President of Kunsthalle Basel in Basel, Switzerland each declined the opportunity to ratify the document.

5 Sylvia Wynter. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2003. 313.

Link: Bea Schlingelhoff at Cherish

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/2NGUim0

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Every time I read anything Marsilio Ficino wrote, i look at my imagined version of him, often sitting just to the left of me, and I ask of him: “Ficino. What are you doing? How did you make it to your fifties before being charged with heresy?”

And he does his prim smile and replies, “carefully hedging everything I ever wrote until De Vita. Let that be a lesson.”

Wine is a curative, as we all well know.

There is so much happening in this one section I’m not sure where to begin. But I love all of it.

Ficino. Never stop being the weirdest man in late 15th century Florence.

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

I love what a drama queen Ficino is sometimes. His sense of humour is also quite delightful

"shall we say that Saturn tests me, and me alone??"

"Honey. Babe. you're fine."

'"sssssh. I'm being ~~~dramatic, Giovanni. No one has suffered how I suffer."

"Nephew Sebastiano wrote you the same thing last week and you were like: calm down, Sebastiano, have patience. Shall I send the letter you wrote him back to you?"

"First, Giovanni, I came here for a good time and I'm feeling very attacked right now. Second, I did say I wrote that letter as much to myself as it was to him. So. There's some self awareness happening here, dear heart."

I feel like Marsilio was someone who you couldn't tell when he was joking or not and Giovanni was just the grounded rock to Ficino's flights of madness and they were just the world's weirdest couple

Lorenzo de' Medici: was that a joke? was that...was Marsilio in jest?

Poliziano: let me find Cavalcanti, our local Ficino-Interpreter.

Giovanni: It was a joke. I'm 92% sure it was a joke.

Lorenzo: I can NEVER tell. I have NO idea how my grandfather always seemed to know.

Giovanni: to be fair, they were besties and Cosimo's ghost hangs out in our backyard.

Lorenzo: which is VERY weird. You know that right?

Giovanni: you get used to it after a while. this is, of course, when my Marsilio isn't summoning daemons to help him heal people like the weirdo he is. I love him.

Lorenzo: adding him to the list of people I'm going to have to tell the Church to back off from and leave alone. Next to Pico Della Mirandola. Poliziano, you're not allowed to be heretical.

Poliziano: too busy being gay and poetic to commit heresy.

Lorenzo: I know. I have to tell the Church to cool its heels about that too.

Meanwhile, Clarice is like "can my husband Lorenzo not have one (1) friend who isn't a heretic, sodomite, flakey artist, mad poet, and/or weird freak? Just. One?"

Lorenzo: shan't.

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

This is a “luigi pulci, fucking leave Ficino alone already” household

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Marsilio Ficino to Giovanni Cavalcanti, his unique friend/most perfect friend*: greetings

I cannot let your people return to you from the Fighini market without any of our produce, for I think it very wrong that, whilst bringing you other men’s goods, they do not return with your own. So they bear three of our letters: one amends what I dictated hastily to my boy when our brother came, the others are copies of what I wrote long ago to Antonio degli Agli and Piero del Nero. I did not have anything of today to present, so I have given what is external. 

You are a simpleton, Corydon! You send tasteless little fruits to a most discriminating palate. But have confidence; Alexis should savour these things at least a little;**

 [...]

*I have seen both terms used in translation of Ficino’s pet-term for Giovanni. 

**Ficino is quoting from Virgil’s Eclogues (or, Bucolics) where the shepherd boy Corydon is in (unrequired) love with another shepherd boy Alexis, framing himself as Corydon and Giovanni as Alexis. Though that Corydon was a good musician and wins a singing competition in the story is a fun parallel to Marsilio, who was known to be a very good musician himself. Cosimo had Ficino sing to him on his death bed (and read aloud what he had translated of Plato). 

Marsilio Ficino to Giovanni Cavalcanti, his unique friend/most perfect friend: greetings

Because I am now forced to spend long periods in bed, I have been considering a remedy against the tedium of a continuing confinement. The first, indeed the only one who could relieve the tedium threatening me, came to mind; my Cavalcanti, my especial doctor. And so welcome again, my health giver, expeller of my evils, preserver of my goods. 

You, my Giovanni, assuredly make many other things clear to me every day, but primarily this, the saying of Aristotle: nothing is more full of grace in the human condition than the presence of a most excellent friend. I learnt from you the meanings and the truth of this saying long ago, and I learnt the underlying principle. Behold, he who bore be inwardly away from myself, formerly as much by my desire for him as recently through his physical absence, that same one, in return, through a certain mutual disposing of mind and through his mental presence, restores me to myself. 

[...]

Therefore you will receive a letter, perhaps more of necessity than of choice, for, as I have said, it seems that I have been compelled to compose it for the sake of dispelling tedium. But, Oh! I have just transgressed, I do not know how, my Giovanni, but I have transgressed seriously against the divine spirit and authority of Plato. Listen to Plato on high, sharply rebuking me, as he thunders: O Marsilio! what free choice or what necessity do you observe in a lover? A lover’s letter is as much of choice as of necessity. No necessity is more freely chosen than a loving necessity; no free choice is more necessary than the free choice of love. 

[...]

And the lover already experiences the full-grown flame before he perceives the ray and the radiating point. He needs must burn, if he burn by heavenly decree. He needs must burn, for in seeking relief he always feeds the flame with the very drink with which vainly he hopes to quench it. 

[...]

This is totally a very normal thing to write the man you love while sick in bed, Marsilio. 

Marsilio Ficino to Giovanni Cavalcanti, his unique friend/most perfect friend: greetings

Yesterday at Novoli we celebrated the holy day of Saint Cristopher and Saint James. I said 'holy', Giovanni, and I would certainly have added 'feast', if you had been there. Without you nothing whatever is a feast for me. See how dear you are to your Marsilio, for whom, if one may say so, not even heavenly things have any value without you. This is just, for he who has joined Christopher and James in one holy festival, has likewise joined Marsilio and Giovanni in life. And the same spirit or a very similar one guides us both. God has ordained, I believe, that we should live on earth with a single will and similar way of life and in heaven under the same principle and in an equal degree of happiness. 

Farewell, Achates of our voyage and our delight when we reach port.

these men are very straight. 

Marsilio Ficino to Giovanni Cavalcanti, his unique friend/most perfect friend: greetings

The care of my own sick body and that of my father is one burden for me. Your absence is another. Both must be born with equanimity, lest they become more burdensome through impatience. But if you have any humanity, do not add to my double burden yet a third, too great a burden if you do not return my books. It is the loss of time that makes me ask for them so often. No loss is more serious than that. Alas that I ask so boldly for things I do not really want to receive; but for what I do want I dare not ask. 

It is right that I should have the former, while at present it is necessary for me to be without the latter. It is prudent to do what is right and, as far as one can, to make what is necessary voluntary. The first is for you to do, and the second is for me to attempt. 

Farewell, and while you are looking after other people’s affairs for their sake, take care of yourself for your own sake. 

We don’t have a that for this letter, so we don’t know which books it is that Ficino sent him, but given this line: “Alas that I ask so boldly for things I do not really want to receive [his books]; but for what I do want I dare not ask [Giovanni himself]” I choose to believe he had sent along the latest version of his commentary on Plato’s Symposium (known at the time as his Book on Love), which he began at the behest of Giovanni who was trying to lever Marsilio out of a deep depressive episode by dangling Plato in front of him. (Dear readers, it worked. For a time, at least.)

Marsilio Ficino to Giovanni Cavalcanti, his unique friend/most perfect friend: greetings

The hand could not guide the pen were it not itself moved by the soul. Marsilio could not now write to his hero [Giovanni] were he not first so invited by his hero. But one thing that troubles me more than anything else is that you write to me because you promised; and that I attribute to a bargain, not to love. 

I desire letters of love, not of barter; or are you really mine by contract just because I am yours? I wish you to be mine through love. 

Marsilio being totally normal about Giovanni. 

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

What is this? you ask.

Could it be? More letters from Marsilio to his most perfect unique friend, Giovanni?

Perhaps. Perhaps it is.

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

So I’ve been calling Ficino a wee magician and I’ve got it wrong—he was what we would now probably call a witch

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

My latest Ficino letter collections arrived today and I am just

feral about this idiot

I am so so so excited to read them

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

putting together that pdf on Ficino to make accessing certain information a lot fast than flipping through five hundred books I have on him and as part of it I'm pulling together a rough chronology of his life

and there are people out here being like "yeah, he had a boring life, the only important dates are the publications of his work" and it's like.

how are people so wrong? all the time?

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Is the amount of books on and/or by Ficino I am purchasing a silly amount?

Possibly.

Will that stop me?

No.

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

I continue to fucking be feral about this man 

also - I want a Preaching Competition between Ficino and Savonarola. Would pay good money to see that. 

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Plato and Socrates as unordained high-priests - Ficino, I am once again asking how it is you were not done for heresy until the very end of your life. 

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

iiii this man

at times it’s a wonder he didn’t end up on the pyre

more as it relates to his dabbling with astrology, daemons, celebrating Plato as if he were a literal saint, and other dubious things he got up to 

but ugh

this man

i love him your honour

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Love is a daemon … philosophizing all of his life, a sorcerer, an enchanter, powerful, a magician and a sophist.

[...]

But why do we think that love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.

- Marsilio Ficino, De amore