Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella
by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Tommaso Campanella
Chapter 1 of 11 Prefatory Note, Introduction, and Proem
- Running time
- 2 h 44 min
- Language
- English
- Read by
- Mary J
- Translated by
- John Addington Symonds
Chapters
About this recording
Michael Angelo and Campanella represent widely sundered, though almost contemporaneous, moments in the evolution of the Italian genius. Michael Angelo was essentially an artist, living in the prime of the Renaissance. Campanella was a philosopher, born when the Counter-Reformation was doing all it could to blight the free thought of the sixteenth century; and when the modern spirit of exact enquiry, in a few philosophical martyrs, was opening a new stage for European science. The one devoted all his mental energies to the realisation of beauty: the other strove to ascertain truth. The one clung to Ficino's dream of Platonising Christianity: the other constructed for himself a new theology, founded on the conception of God immanent in nature. Michael Angelo expressed the aspirations of a solitary life dedicated to the service of art, at a time when art received the suffrage and the admiration of all Italy. Campanella gave utterance to a spirit, exiled and isolated, misunderstood by those with whom he lived, at a moment when philosophy was hunted down as heresy and imprisoned as treason to the public weal.
The marks of this difference in the external and internal circumstances of…