Tivoli Italy
The beauty of Italy has always particularly enchanted me. I have plenty of company, of course; Italy has been a focus for travelers and pilgrims for more than a thousand years. It has the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites of any country in the world, including city centers, palaces, caves, and archaeological sites.
The Roman Forum
It has a lot of other great things too: food, people, language, history, opera, romance and passion, and, of course, art.
Allegory on Water: Birth of Venus (1555)
It also has a profound philosophical tradition. We know about the great works of Renaissance art in Italy, but I, like a lot of other people, didn’t always know that many of them were inspired by the philosophy that developed in Italy at the same time.
I’ve always liked reading about religion and philosophy, particularly Eastern philosophy. In the house where I grew up, there was a room we called “The Library,” where I would spend hours browsing the section that held books on different spiritual traditions. Later, at Sarah Lawrence College, I studied comparative religion and literature. I have also been blessed in meeting great spiritual masters, and I have practiced yoga and meditation for many years.
Yet it was Italy that called me, and to Italy that I have continued to return. For years I had been having dreams with a few Italian words thrown in, although I had never studied the language. Once I even dreamed I was in a room overlooking a canal. Another time in a jewelry shop I saw a small gold charm, a winged lion holding a book, and I immediately bought it. Later I found out that it is the lion of St. Mark, patron saint of Venice, and symbol of the city.
I first went there in 1990, although the place had been on my mind for a long time before that. When I could finally afford to, I took off on an extended trip. The first stop was Venice.
Basilica of San Marco
Venice is a miraculous surprise for those arriving for the first time. My first time there, I wandered around the city, entranced, for days. My impression hasn’t changed. Every time I visit, I feel I am enveloped in something magical yet very real, something fleeting, yet eternal.
Grand Canal, Venice
Since then, I’ve returned to Italy many times, and lived and worked there as well. An interest in photography developed from my travels, because in Italy there are always images I want to capture. Then I started reading about the great minds of the Italian Renaissance. This interest grew into a passion and a desire to carry forward, humbly, some of the words and images from this period in history. The result is my forthcoming book, Outer Beauty, Inner Joy: Contemplating the Soul of the Renaissance.
I’ve never been able to feel an intrinsic part of any particular group, church, or organization, being more of a “solitary meditator.” But when I started to read about the Italian Renaissance philosophers, who studied many traditions and incorporated them into their own syncretic philosophy, I felt that they were my spiritual ancestors. They believed in a perennial wisdom, one that transcends religious boundaries. They believed in a fundamental unity behind all creation.
These philosophers followed in the footsteps of the Platonists of Alexandria, and in the philosophical system developed there in the third century A.D. by Plotinus and his successors that has now come to be called Neoplatonism. Alexandria, a multicultural metropolis and the meeting place of East and West, was once home to the greatest library in classical antiquity. Here, a variety of philosophical, spiritual, and scientific traditions combined to create new syntheses. Neoplatonism speaks of a single source from which all existence emanates and with which an individual soul can be mystically united.
A part of this philosophy deals with love and beauty as a way to experience the divine essence in the world. Renaissance Neoplatonists wrote volumes on love and beauty. They saw love as a spiritual path—love of all kinds, human and divine, could be a way to experience the greater unity of the cosmos. Many of those who were reading these books were also patrons of the arts, and therefore influenced the content of art at the time. So a book filled with beautiful images and words of wisdom from the Italian Renaissance seemed a natural idea.
Beauty is healing. Images penetrate our minds and hearts, and resonate with something deep inside each one of us ; that “something” is often called the soul. If we can appreciate beauty, then there has to be something in each of us that is beautiful as well, an essence of beauty that is within all things. Simply by seeing a beautiful image, our sense of self can be uplifted, expanded, transcended.
I hope this book will be a conduit, bringing a spark of the creative energy from the Renaissance to life here and now, and offer a bit of peace, of joy, of inspiration, to those who peruse its pages.
