Abstract
Mario Equicola’s encyclopedic treatise De Natura d’amore [On the Nature of Love] may be an “arid tract,” but that did not stop it from being published in multiple editions in Italian and French for over a hundred years. The frequent reprinting of Equicola’s Natura d’amore is intriguing because it is a particularly dense and opaque scholarly text, which would seem to have little popular appeal. Equicola was a scholar at the court of Isabella d’Este, the Marchessa of Mantua, and the Natura d’amore was not originally conceived for a broad audience. The work is over four hundred pages long, and unlike most sixteenth-century philosophical texts on love, it is not written in the relatively accessible dialogue format. De Natura d’amore is encyclopedic in scope, but not in organization; it is repetitive, contradictory, and unfocused. There is no central thesis, just information—a torrent of facts, opinions, and citations. The method is not so much syncretic—like Ficino’s attempts to reconcile Classical philosophy and Christian doctrine—as accretive. Equicola loves to list things. To make matters worse, he chose to write in an odd blend of Italian and Latin, with torturous syntax and eccentric vocabulary.
The Courtier is a work of art; the Nature of Love is an arid tract, valuable only for cultural history.
—Lorenzo Savino (1915) 1
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Notes
Lorenzo Savino, Di alcuni trattati e trattatisti d’amore italiani della prima metà del secolo XVI, Studi di Letteratura Italiana IX–X (Naples: Nicola Jovene, 1915), X. 2, n. 1.
Stephen Kolsky, Mario Equicola: The Real Courtier (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991), 18–22.
Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10–16.
Conor Fahy, “Three Early Renaissance Treatises on Women,” Italian Studies, 11, no. 1 (1956): 30–55.
“Multo iova in farne amare il sapere accomodarne alli studii, actioni, et exercitii di coloro dalli quali desyderamo essere amati; laudemo in loro le parti laudabili, le vituperabili sforzemone redurle ad virtù, laudemoli nel publico, admoniamoli nel secreto, habiamo di loro bona speranza che habiano ad deventare excellenti, il che li serà urgentissimo sperone, et ad noi li farrà benivoli” MS f. 227v–228r; Laura Ricci, ed., La Redazione manoscritta del Libro de nature de amore di Mario Equicola (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999), 477; see also Kolsky, Mario Equicola, 259.
Mario Equicola, De Natura d’Amore. Libro Quarto, ed. Enrico Musacchio and Graziella Del Ciuco (Bologna: Capelli, 1989), sig. D5r. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to the Libro de natura d’amore are to the 1536 Venice edition published by Pietro di Niccolini di Sabbio, available online through Google Books. All translations from Equicola are my own.
Michelde Montaigne, Essay 3.5, “On Some Verses of Virgil,” in The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1987), 988–989.
Mario Equicola, La Natura d’amore. Primo Libro, ed. N. Bonifazi (Urbino: Argalia, 1983). Equicola, De Natura.
John Milton, “Areopagitica,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Vol II, 1643–1648, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 486–575, 549.
On Augustinian concepts of self-love, see Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-love in St. Augustine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). O’Donovan begins by noting the contradictory nature of Augustine’s statements on the subject (1).
León Hebreo, The Philosophy of Love (Dialoghi d’amore), trans. F. Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H. Barnes (London: Soncino Press, 1937), 7.
Hesiod, “Theogony,” in Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2–85, line 120.
The idea that the four classical virtues have their roots in love is attributed to an unspecified passage in Augustine by Jacques Ferrand, who drew strongly on Equicola. See Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. and trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 367, n. 2.
Leone Ebreo, Dialoghi d’amore, ed. Santino Caramella (Bari: Laterza, 1929), 45.
See also John Charles Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno’s Eroici furori (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 94–95, though he downplays the eroticism of the term “copulative” to describe the ecstasy of union with God.
On the ubiquity of homoerotic relations between men in early modern Florence, See Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
See Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, Life of Solon, trans. John Dryden (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 1.109.
See Marilyn B. Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (New York: Blackwell, 2005), 197–200.
Paul, Epistle to the Romans 1.26 –27. St. Augustine, Confessions, ed. and trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 8.6 and elsewhere.
Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, ed. and trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1985), 41. Speech 1.4.
Pietro Aretino, Aretino’s Dialogues (1971), trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Marsilio, 1994), 135–136, 256–257.
See also Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 134.
Margaret Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6, 73.
Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, 86–88. On the prosecution of love magic by the Holy Office in late sixteenth-century Venice, see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 88–129.
William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 146,
and Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 194.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Book 3 Love Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, 3.1.1.1 (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 4.
Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Geneva: Droz, 1960), 108–110.
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© 2014 Ian Frederick Moulton
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Moulton, I.F. (2014). Mario Equicola’s De Natura d’amore: Love and Knowledge. In: Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405050_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405050_3
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