The Contra-Amorem Tradition in the Renaissance

Texts that warn of the dangers of passionate or excessive love have a history in Western culture going back to antiquity. Writings in this contra-amorem tradition typically characterize obsessive love or lovesickness as a disease and then offer remedies for the sufferer. When interest in Marsilio Ficino’s doctrine of Platonic love began to spread from Florentine philosophical circles to aristocratic courts throughout Italy in the late fifteenth century, some authors writing in the contra-amorem tradition responded directly to the new enthusiasm for Ficino’s ideas. A comparison of two contra-amorem texts – Bartolomeo Platina’s ‘pre-Ficinian’ On Love (c. 1466) and Battista Fregoso’s ‘post-Ficinian’ Anteros (1496) – will illustrate the ways in which the later text directed its arguments against Ficino’s doctrine, and did so with an audience of aristocratic young men particularly in mind. It is noteworthy that Anteros predates the first vernacular popularizations of Platonic love in Pietro Bembo’s Asolans (1505) and Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), and also that Castiglione’s Courtier responds, in turn, to Anteros by assimilating some elements from that work into its own treatment of Platonic love.