The Italian Cultural Institute is pleased to present the lecture by Professor Maude Vanhaelen (University of Warwick, Inghilterra)
Thursday November 22, 2018 at 6pm
Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Montréal
1200 Avenue du Docteur-Penfield
Montréal (QC), QC H3A 1A9
The lecture will be held in Italian
The lecture explores the history of astrology in medieval and Renaissance Italy. It provides different examples of visual representations of astrology in religious and civic buildings and compares it with astrological textual sources, the most famous of which being Marsilio Ficino’s De vita.
It argues that the interest in astrology was motivated by a belief that the physical world was profoundly connected to the divine world, and that men could exploit these hidden connections to improve their health, win battles and purify their souls. It also shows how this interest in astrology motivated Renaissance princes to commission the translation of newly discovered ancient texts on astrology and magic, which played an increasingly important role in medicine, natural philosophy and theology, before become marginalised again with the rise of scepticism.
Maude Vanhaelen is Associate Professor in the Departments of Classics and Italian at the University of Warwick (UK). Her research interest includes the transmission of Classical thought in the Italian Renaissance, in particular the reception of Platonism in the 15th and 16th centuries. She has published several articles on Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Savonarola, and on the translations of Greek and Latin texts into the Italian vernacular, as well as a critical edition of Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Parmenides (Harvard University Press, 2007). Her current project studies the circulation of Plato’s dialogues in 16th-century Italy, and specifically the recovery of pagan philosophy and astrology in a Christian context.
Reservation no longer available