| Description: | "Love" is a fundamental concept in our culture. A glance into contemporary literature, poetry and cinema will demonstrate the centrality of this notion still in modern days. During the Renaissance, the concept of "love", which draws its basic tenets from Marsilio Ficino's interpretation of Platonic love, was even more central and predominant. This course will begin with the study of the Neoplatonic metaphysical theory, the basis of the Renaissance theory of love, as interpreted by Ficino in the fifteenth century, and will follow its development to more encompassing theories, such as that of Leone Ebreo, and especially to the manifestation of these theories in art and literature (at times very light courtly literature), which became very fashionable in the sixteenth century and known to a very large and varied public. The course will consist of the study of various types of fifteenth and sixteenth primary sources (philosophical and literary) and of the study of the works of art, especially of Titian and Michelangelo, backed with the reading of up-to-date secondary sources. |