TANJA KLEMM

Life from Within: Physiology

and Talismanic Efficacy in
Marsilio Ficino’s De vita (1498)

M A R S I L I O F I C I N O ’ S D E V I T A , P U B L I S H E D in 1489 in Florence,
is exclusively dedicated to the physical well-being of the sensible living
organism—or the corpus animatum, as it had been called since late medieval
times. In the proem to the work, Ficino makes it clear that in De vita he writes
not as a philosopher, theologian, or priest but as a doctor, a scholar of
medicine—of medicina theorica and of medicina practica.1 And indeed, with
its focus on the regimen of intellectuals, of litterati, all three books of the
treatise are deeply rooted in contemporary medical knowledge. In this
sense, in De Vita everything revolves around human physiology, which in
that period was understood as the doctrine of nature (physis) dedicated to
the understanding of natural processes in living organisms and the consti-
tution of life.2 In the third book, entitled De vita coelitus comparanda (On
Obtaining Life from the Heavens), this physiology is amplified into a cosmolog-
ical doctrine of life and living matter: throughout the text it is connected to
astrology—to the macrocosm and to the living stars and planets. To modern
eyes, Ficino in De vita coelitus comparanda leaves the realm of physiology and,
contrary to his statement in the proem, enters philosophy—or better, nat-
ural philosophy. But in premodern times philosophy was part of the medical
curriculum, and thus medicine and astrology were tightly linked.3
In the following pages, I would like to focus on the fact that within this
cosmological physiology De vita coelitus comparanda develops a consistent phe-
nomenology of imagines efficaces (efficient images). One could also call these
imagines ‘‘medical talismans,’’ because, according to Ficino, they act on the
spirit, body, and soul of a person—as does medicine, prescribed in the right

a b s t r a c t In his medical treatise De vita (1498), Marsilio Ficino describes the force of medical
talismans and their efficacy on humans against the background of a cosmological physiology. This
article focuses on the question of how—according to Ficino—the powers of medical talismans were
experienced by humans, by the living, sensible body (corpus animatum). Discussion of this question also
leads to theoretical considerations about the efficacy of artifacts in the Renaissance. Re prese ntation s
133. Winter 2016 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-
855X, pages 110–29. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article
content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI:
110 10.1525/rep.2016.133.4.110.
way. Further, they can absorb powers from the heavens—as can medicine.4
Thus, in De vita coelitus comparanda, both imagines and medicine are embed-
ded in an astrological framework—and this makes them both talismanic.5
Ficino however does not use the term ‘‘talisman’’ in his treatise. Instead,
he speaks throughout of imagines (sometimes effigies) or figurae. Imagines, per
Ficino, refer to artifacts ‘‘made out of metals or stones by astrologers,’’ that
is, to three-dimensional artifacts produced by specialists.6 He also goes on to
specify their production, this time with assistance by ‘‘ancients’’ like Ptol-
emy, Haly Abbas, Platonist thinkers, and the Egyptians. In order to be useful
(utilis), he explains, imagines can be formed according to the planetary
constellation or the ‘‘celestial aspect’’ (vultus coelestis) whose healing power
one wishes to attract.7 Figurae, on the other hand, do not designate three-
dimensional artifacts in Ficino’s terminology. They refer instead to the figures
and signs incised in imagines.8
And De vita coelitus comparanda goes even further: it tells us how the
forces of imagines—with or without figurae—are connected to both the
human organism and the realm of the heavens. Within this framework, it
provides a model of perception based on embodiment, immanent embed-
dedness, and participation rather than on visuality and observation. It
focuses on how imagines or medical talismans worked and how the efficacy
of these artifacts was conceived, perceived, and experienced. It explains the
belief that talismanic powers had to be mingled with the forces—the spiritūs
and virtutes—of the human organism in order to be felt or to lead to any
kind of psychophysical metamorphosis, be it the cure of disharmonies of the
corporeal humors or the refinement of the corporeal spiritus required to
perform intellectual work or to enhance the proper generative (that is, pro-
creative) forces. In short, De vita coelitus comparanda gives us an idea about how
efficient images were perceived in the Renaissance. It is this consistent his-
torical phenomenology of efficacy that makes Ficino’s text so original.
In order to grasp this phenomenology, I will focus first on the question
of how the model of the corpus animatum worked in the late Middle Ages and
Renaissance. In this section I will discuss in particular the theory that sen-
sibility and liveliness were provided by tiny material particles and forces, by
spiritūs and virtutes acting within and without the human organism. Second,
I will show that, according to this embodied model of sensual perception,
spiritūs and virtutes in the human organism were interconnected with a spe-
cific sense: the imagination, or imaginatio. This sense, according to Ficino’s
model of perception, was not only closely associated with the formation of
images but also conceived of in a much broader sense, that is, as responsible
for the experience of talismanic efficacy. This kind of imaginatio is key to
Ficino’s phenomenology. I will then focus on how Ficino situates the forces
of imagines efficaces, that is, talismans, in this setting and show how their forces

Life from Within 111

 were thought to be perceived. Here I will link Ficino’s concept of medical
talismans with his thoughts on ‘‘life from within,’’ which he unfolds in Theo-
logica Platonica. Some general thoughts on Renaissance aesthetics are then
offered by way of conclusion.

Corpus Animatum

Beginning in the late eleventh century, scholars in the Latin West

became interested in both Arabic medicine and natural philosophy, and as
a result they developed a model of the living human organism that, as Thomas
Ricklin has shown, was without precedent in the complexity of its taxonomy.9
The translations of two medical texts were central: the Liber Pantegni,
based in its main parts on Haly Abbas’s Universal Art of Medicine, and
Avicenna’s Canon. Both would remain standard medical works until the
Renaissance, which means that the basic principles of the corpus animatum,
the animated, living organism described in them, had remained consistent
since the late Middle Ages, despite variations.10 To grasp the concept of the
corpus animatum it must be noted that, unlike our modern notion of the
body, the earlier concept was not based on a neat distinction between anat-
omy (bodily matter), physiology (bodily functions), and psychology (emo-
tional, perceptive, or cognitive processes).11 In fact, the seven so-called res
naturales of which the corpus animatum was thought to be composed ranged
from the qualities (hot, cold, moist, dry) and elements of the body to limbs
and even to operations carried out within the body.12 All these res were
thought to be interlinked. This is why the terms ‘‘physiology’’ and ‘‘psycho-
physiology’’ are interchangeable when speaking of this period. Visual depic-
tions of this corpus animatum began to circulate in natural philosophical and
medical treatises as early as the middle of the twelfth century and continued
to do so until at least the fifteenth. The figurative structure of these repre-
sentations, for all their significant variations, changed little over the centu-
ries, as can be seen in figures 1 and 2.13
Setting aside their visual complexity, the basic principles of the corpus
animatum may be grasped by means of these two series of body representa-
tions. A closer look at the set of drawings of full-length figures from the
beginning of the fifteenth century (fig. 2) reveals the characteristics of the
corpus animatum. First, it consists of four main organs, membra principalia.
They delineate a vertical order of the living body in the standing position,
with the sexual organs, the liver, the heart, and the brain serving as joints. In
fact, the basic reproductive, vegetative (for example, digestive), affective,
sensitive, and rational processes were thought to take place in these organs.
Second, each of the drawings in the set represents one physiological system:

112 Representations
figure 1. The venous, arterial, and nervous systems (from left to right), in Liber de humani corporis fabrica, late 13th century.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Ashmole 399, 18r, 19r, 21r. © The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
figure 2. The venous, arterial, and nervous systems (from left to right), in Apocalypsis S. Johannis cum glossis et Vita S. Johannis,
circa 1420–30 (details). Wellcome Library, London, WMS 49, 36v, 35v, 37r. © Wellcome Library, London.
the one on the left the veins, the one in the middle the arteries, and the one
on the right the nerves.14 Within these systems, the vascular and neural lines
pervade the whole body. They connect limbs and the areas where the main
organs are situated. These connecting lines are significant because spiritūs
and virtutes were thought to flow in vessels and nerves. Spiritūs (tiny material
particles) and virtutes (forces) provided the human organism with vitality
and sensibility, they facilitated sensual perception, and they could also be
sensed and felt. This last fact is not only proven by textual descriptions—for
example, by Ficino himself (the most prominent example in De vita is the
sadness and fearfulness of the human soul due to a melancholic spirit);
a closer look at the lines pervading the represented bodies in figures 1 and 2
also shows tiny ‘‘sensory fibers’’ branching off the main nerves and vessels.
Thus, these particles and forces are fundamental to an understanding of
how embodied perception was thought to take place, and actually experi-
enced, in the Renaissance.

Spiritūs and Virtutes

The concepts of virtus and spiritus differed in pre-Cartesian times

among authors and schools of thought. Yet, to simplify and name their basic
characteristics and differences: Spiritus was conceived of as a tiny material and
energetic substance that underwent refinement while ascending from the liver
to the heart and finally to the brain. That is, it remained one and the same
substance, no matter if it was spiritus naturalis produced in the liver and the
sexual organs, providing the basic life functions like generation and vegetative
processes (digestion and growth), or spiritus vitalis produced in the heart and
associated mostly with affects, or spiritus animalis floating in the chambers of
the brain and enabling higher cognitive processes like sensual perception or
thinking. Ficino is very clear here: Within his (Neoplatonic) conception of
spiritus, the material qualities of this energetic substance changes as it ascends
and descends in the human body. These transformations coincide with spe-
cific actions: in the brain where higher cognitive processes were thought to
take place, spiritus is more refined than it is in the sexual organs.
In contrast, virtutes were organized like a network system. The activities
they performed—like attraction and rejection, assimilation and transforma-
tion—were not localized in specific organs, respectively, but in different parts
of the body. For example, the virtus formativa in the body’s lower region was
thought to perform actions of perception, formation, and combination com-
parable to those performed by the virtus imaginativa situated in the brain—
the only difference being that the virtus formativa worked with bodily matter
(that could, for example, lead to the development and formation of an

Life from Within 115

 embryo and was, accordingly, central for the models of biological concep-
tion) and the virtus imaginativa with sensible forms (species sensibiles).15
As to the interrelation between virtutes and spiritūs, Ficino finds himself
in a long tradition of physiology: some authors, like Ficino himself, were
convinced that the virtutes acted through the spiritūs.16 Other thinkers, like
Leonardo da Vinci, did not attribute any specific importance to the spiritūs.
For Leonardo, all vegetative, affective, and perceptual processes were real-
ized by the virtū. Spiritūs were only responsible for providing the living
organism with natural heat.17 Despite these differences, within the Renais-
sance concept of the corpus animatum both virtutes and spiritūs were the
generators of liveliness and sensibility.
Furthermore, well-being for Ficino, as for his colleagues in theoretical
and practical medicine, meant psychophysical harmony. In De vita, this
harmony is foremost connected to the spiritus. The whole dietetics (regimen)
Ficino expounds in books 1 and 2 aims at enhancing the flow of spiritus
according to the different natures of men so that their vegetative, affective,
sensitive, and cognitive forces function properly, that is, in harmony.
Like many of his contemporaries, such as Girolamo Manfredi and
Berengario da Carpi at Bologna, where the study of astrology at university
had been introduced in close connection with medicine, Ficino was con-
vinced that psychophysical harmony of the organism was achieved not only
through medicine and regimen but also by enhancing the effects of these
medicines and practices via the forces, the virtutes of the living, moving
planets and the fixed stars. But how were these forces thought to be con-
nected to the corpus animatum?

The Forces of the Heavens

Thanks to research done within the Warburgian tradition, we are

familiar with the so-called zodiac figures depicted in medical and natural
philosophical treatises, primarily in the quattrocento.18 The one we see in
figure 3 appears in the same treatise as the representations of the corpus
animatum in figure 2. A human body in full frontal posture is situated
between the seven spheres of the planets (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn) and the figures of the zodiac at the rim. Red lines indicate
the connections between the human microcosm and the heavenly macro-
cosm. They connect specific areas of the body with planetary constellations
(that is, with the aspects) as well as with the signs of the zodiac: the figurae
astronomicae as Ficino calls them, just as Albertus Magnus did before him in
his Speculum Astronomie.19 As I have already mentioned, the term figurae for
Ficino refers to signs incised in imagines. Thus, the figurae astronomicae in De

116 Representations
vita coelitus comparanda can be understood as signs incised in the heavenly
spheres. Not only does this representation show, in a complex diagrammatic
manner, that the forces, the virtutes of the heavenly bodies were directly
linked with specific bodily parts; if we consider the fact that the heavenly
spheres were thought to be in perpetual harmonic movement, it also conveys
the idea that the treatment of every body part had its right moment. Further,
it implies that this concept did not assume a neat separation between an
inside and an outside of the living organism: spiritūs and virtutes were present
not just in the body but in the immediate environment as well as in the
macrocosm—this last spiritus Ficino called spiritus mundi.

figure 3. ‘‘Zodiac man,’’ showing the

influences of zodiacs and planets on
the human body, in Apocalypsis S.
Johannis cum glossis et Vita S. Johannis,
circa 1420–30. Wellcome Library,
London, WMS 49, 41r. © Wellcome
Library, London.

To summarize: as this figure shows, the relation between macrocosm and

microcosm was conceived in terms of materiality (body parts and organs were
connected to specific planets), of figural constellations (every figura astronomica
had specific qualities with equivalents in the terrestrial elemental world), and
of temporality (every aspect had its specific moment of efficacy on Earth).
Further, Ficino not only states the connection of the human organism with
the astral realm while leaving their specific interrelation unsaid; he also
describes how heavenly forces were received and experienced by the human
organism. The whole phenomenology in De vita coelitus comparanda is based
on a systematic connection of the cosmic spirit, the spiritus mundi, with the
corporeal spiritus.20 The way imagines efficaces were thought to be perceived
and experienced by humans may be grasped within this framework.

Life from Within 117

 Perceiving the Forces
of the Heavens

As Ficino himself stresses several times, the heavenly properties, the

forces mingling with our bodily spirit and things on earth are mainly hidden
from the (outer) senses, that is, for example, from our senses of sight and
hearing:21
At the same time, we do not say that our spirit is prepared for the celestials only
through qualities of things known to the senses, but also and much more through
certain properties engrafted in things from the heavens and hidden from our
senses, and hence only with difficulty known to our reason.22

This implies that, while we can look at animal or human figurae on a magic
gem as representations of the signs of the zodiac and specific planetary
constellations at a given moment, nonetheless, in order to be psychophys-
ically effective, the forces (virtutes) and occult properties (occultae proprie-
tates) enclosed in artifacts with figural incisions were perceived and
experienced otherwise.23 This perception, according to Ficino, is enabled
by imaginatio, spiritus, and (bodily) humors. He goes on to specify the mode
of perception of these, as it were, inner senses, by comparing it directly to
the absorption of the heavenly forces with the bodily understanding of
emotions and affects: ‘‘Besides, you know how easily a mourning figure
moves many people to pity, and how much a figure of a lovable person
instantly affects and moves the eyes, imagination, spirit, and humors; no
less living and efficacious is a celestial figure.’’24 Ficino implies both that the
perception of heavenly forces is an emotional form of perception and that
emotions function like a sense rather than being closed up internally in
a subject.
But what kind of imaginatio is it that Ficino is talking about here? Why is
it linked to the humors and the spiritus rather than to the other inner senses
that, according to late medieval and Renaissance opinion, were located in
the brain? As we will see, these questions lead to two different models of
perception that were both considered valid in that period. Each model
implied a particular concept of imagination.

Two Concepts of Imagination

Scholarship in the recent years has tended to focus on one par-

ticular model of sensual perception and cognition in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance. This model is basically informed by Aristotle’s writings on
the soul, most prominently De anima.25 Visual representations of the head
such as the ones in figures 4 and 5 are often cited in order to explain a model

118 Representations
 figure 4. ‘‘Horizontal model’’ of the inner
senses: sensus communis, imaginatio, imaginativa,
estimatio, memorativa, membrorum motiva, in Pseudo-
Albertus Magnus, Philosophia pauperum (Brescia,
1490). Württembergische Landesbibliothek
Stuttgart, Inc.qt.1930. © Württembergische
Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart.

figure 5. ‘‘Horizontal model’’

of the inner senses: organum
sensus communis, organum
imaginative [sic], organum fantasie
[sic], organum cogitativa, organum
memorative [sic], in Aristotle,
Analytica priora, Analytica
posteriora, De coelo et mundo, De
anima, De sensu et sensato,
1472–74. Placed at the
beginning of De sensu et sensato.
Wellcome Library, London, MS
55, 93r. © Wellcome Library,
London.

of sensual perception in which judgment and the certainty provided by the

inner senses are central. According to this model, imaginatio, or, to be more
precise, the vis imaginativa, was only one cognitive act among others. And
indeed, as diagrams of the human head and brain found in Renaissance

Life from Within 119

 editions of the Philosophia pauperum (fig. 4) or of Aristotle’s De sensu et sensato
(fig. 5) suggest, this imaginative force received and recombined the sensible
forms (species sensibiles) that arrived from the outer senses in sensus communis
and was further controlled by rational forces like (vis, virtus) aestimativa or
(vis, virtus) cogitativa. Most important, in the Renaissance, control implied
judgment leading to certainty about the accuracy of these perceived sensible
forms. It is this ‘‘judgment of sense’’ that David Summers has investigated in
Renaissance literature on art, and it is the reference model in Stuart Clark’s
study Vanities of the Eye.26 According to this model, only after this judgment
were sensible forms stored in memoria, situated in the last chamber of the
brain. Within this horizontal cognitive process, imaginatio was located
between senses and ratio, between the reception of species sensibiles by the
outer senses and their judgment. In quattrocento Italy, thinkers interested
in an epistemology of sensual perception promoted this model.
Ficino, stressing the fact that the hidden powers of imagines efficaces are
not primarily received by the (outer) senses, does not take up this under-
standing of imaginatio. And indeed, not all Renaissance thinkers promoted
a model of perception that led to sensual certainty. Instead they used a model
that was intimately connected with the dynamics of the corpus animatum.
It comes as no surprise that the incongruity of these two models in the
quattrocento became strikingly evident in reflections on the human sense of
imaginatio. Figures 6 and 7 both articulate a conception of this inner sense,
which differs from the one mentioned earlier. In both, imaginatio (here,
phantasia) holds a central position: in figure 6, a drawing placed at the end
of an early thirteenth-century copy of Pseudo-Augustine’s De spiritu et anima,
it presides over all other inner senses and is furthermore separated from
them by framing lines.27 In Albrecht Dürer’s representation of a human
head, the letter ‘‘D’’ relating to phantasia is inverted—and is thus also cate-
gorically separated from the other senses (fig. 7). The texts in which these
images are situated also tell us that imaginatio/phantasia, according to this
model of perception, is conceived as an overall sense: First, it enables the
soul to sensibly perceive. Second, it is not subordinated to rational judg-
ment but is, rather, linked with the spiritus, the humors and—again—the
affects of the human body. And this makes it the sense par excellence within
a model of perception based on embodiment. For all this, some authors like
Ficino himself call it spiritus phantasticus, assuming the term and the concept
from Neoplatonist Synesius of Cyrene (about 370–412 CE).28
Consequently, this second notion of imaginatio/phantasia marked a ver-
tical order in the living human organism. It was connected to spiritus, which,
as mentioned earlier, underwent refinement while rising within the body and
became less refined as it descended. Accordingly, this imaginatio/phantasia
formed specific imagines depending on material quality. In short, to use the

120 Representations
 figure 6. ‘‘Vertical model’’ of the
inner senses: sensus communis,
ymaginativa, estimativa, memoria
sensualitatis vel retentiva, and fantasia
as all-embracing inner sense, in
Pseudo-Augustine, Libellus de anima et
spiritu, early thirteenth century.
Trinity College, Cambridge, MS
0.7.16, 47r. © The Master and Fellows
of Trinity College, Cambridge.

figure 7. Albrecht Dürer,

‘‘Horizontal’’ and ‘‘vertical model’’ of
the inner senses: sensus communis,
imaginatio, fantasia, estimativa,
memorativa, in Ludovicus de Prussia
(Pruthenus), Trilogium animae
(Nuremberg, 1498). Staatsbibliothek
zu Berlin, 4 Inc 1776b [Wgdr. 95].
© Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—
Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

words of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola in his treatise De imaginatione

(1501): imagination is a ‘‘forming’’ power, it is able to ‘‘assimilate’’ and ‘‘con-
ceive’’ everything, it ‘‘generates forms out of itself,’’ and, contrary to the other
model, it is ‘‘connected with all forces’’; it ‘‘transmutes all likenesses and
impressions of the other forces.’’29 The usage of the term conception (con-
ceptio) instead of perception is significant in this context: conceptio in that

Life from Within 121

 period ranged from biological conception to sensitive, emotive, and intellec-
tual perception.30 That is, this second understanding of imaginatio was not
reduced to perceptions by the outer senses, but it enabled (bodily, affective,
sensual) experiences in a more extensive way.
Moreover, Ficino drew a parallel between the idea of this self-forming
imagination and the idea of life, or the capacity of being alive. Artificial
objects, according to his Theologia Platonica, are formed from without, hav-
ing no capacity to create themselves, and hence they do not live. Nature,
instead, forms from within, makes trees grow by themselves—and in this it
resembles the living imaginatio:
For just as the geometer’s mind, when it ponders in itself the rational principles of
figures, forms the phantasy from within with the figures’ images, and through this
phantasy forms too the phantastic spirit, and does so without toil or deliberation, so
in nature’s art a certain divine wisdom by way of the intellectual rational principles
fills with natural seeds the life-giving and motive force linked to it; and through this
force it forms with utmost ease the matter too from within.31

Artifacts, being reproduced from without, according to this conception,

cannot participate in life.
It comes as no surprise that for thinkers like Pico or Ficino, the forming
and living power of imagination—which is closely related to (disharmonic)
psychophysical processes and connected with all forces within the body—
became the sense par excellence for situating magical phenomena in the
natural realm, as Hannah Baader has shown.32 For other philosophers who
were more interested in visual certainty via sensual experience of the empir-
ical world, it was just this relation to potentially disharmonic psychophysical
processes, on the one hand, and the connection with invisible forces—of
the heavens as well as of talismans—on the other, that made this kind of
participatory imaginatio so delicate.

Talismans

Against this background, one passage in De vita coelitus comparanda

becomes clear:
The Arabs say that when we fashion images [imagines] rightly [rite], our spirit, if it
has been intent upon the work and upon the stars through imagination [imaginatio]
and emotion [affectus], is joined [coniunctum] together with the very spirit of the
world [spiritus mundi] and with the rays of the stars through which the world-spirit
acts. And when our spirit has been so joined, it too becomes a cause why (from the
world-spirit by way of the rays) a particular spirit of any given star, that is, a certain
vital power [virtus vivida], is poured into the image—especially a power which is
consistent with the spirit of the operator.33

122 Representations
On a conceptual level, this passage provides us with an understanding of the
complex interplay in which images (imagines) unfold their efficacy. The key
term is vital power—virtus vivida. Only when ‘‘our spirit,’’ that is, the corporeal
spiritus, is joined with the spiritus mundi via imaginatio and affect does this vital
power pour into an image, which thus becomes an artifact ‘‘full of force.’’ It is
just that force that can mingle with the virtutes and spiritūs of the corpus anima-
tum. This commingling can even be experienced. As we have seen, the spiritūs
and virtutes are the principles of vitality and sensibility of the corpus animatum.
One of the key references to the concept of spiritus in De vita coelitus
comparanda is from the Picatrix—a manual of magic. But as Carol Kaske and
John Clark have shown, in Ficino the spiritus of men is not merely juxta-
posed with the pneumata of the planets and the macrocosm, as it is in the
Picatrix; instead the spiritus corporalis and the spiritus mundi are thought of as
being in direct contact, that is, explicitly related to each other. They become
the same. This relationship also becomes apparent on a structural level: just
as in the corpus animatum the spiritus acts through the different virtutes, the
macrocosmic spiritus mundi acts through the virtutes of the planets and stars.
Another key reference for De vita coelitus comparanda is provided by Al-
Kindi in De radiis. Al-Kindi stresses the psychology of recipient and operator
required for images to unfold their efficacy by emphasizing their ‘‘desider-
ium,’’ ‘‘fides,’’ and ‘‘ymago in mente concepta,’’ that is, imaginatio.34 Ficino,
however, by connecting imaginatio and affectus to the corporeal spiritus, speaks
from a decisively physiological perspective, and from this perspective it is not
imagines ‘‘in mente conceptas,’’ but ‘‘imagines in spiritu conceptas’’—so to
speak—that he is concerned with.
To sum up: In De vita coelitus comparanda, it is in a relational setting of
virtus vivida, spiritus, imaginatio, and affectus that an artifact becomes an
efficient image. Imaginatio in this context is not a sense that forms, projects,
or constructs, for example, a ‘‘mental image.’’ Rather, it is decisively under-
stood as a sense in which sensibility and emotions coincide.
But what about the artifact within this relational setting? Here, Ficino’s
statement that the imagines have to be produced in the right way is central. He
uses the term rite, with its double sense of doing something both properly
and according to religious ceremony, to ritual. This means, first of all, that
the material of the artifact may determine whether it can share the virtus
vivida with a certain planet. Gems have a special significance in the relation-
ship of the material to the planets. If, for example, a person desires to adapt
his or her spiritus naturalis to Jupiter in order to enhance generative and
digestive forces, he or she should wear a sapphire, which is similar in quality
and effect to this planet.35 If one wishes to activate the spiritus animalis
situated in the brain and the sense organs, it is better for this person to
choose an agate, as it shares analogous qualities with Mercury, the planet

Life from Within 123

 associated with perception and cognition.36 And Ficino gets even more
explicit. He says that the very consistency of materials disposes them for specific
capacities to conserve and emit the virtutes of the planets. The softer materials
more easily and quickly receive and release celestial influences. Wood for this
reason has very little potential to receive and retain forces, while gems and
metal, even though they are hard, retain the forces much longer.37 Further,
Ficino also tells us concretely how these forces mingle with the organism. It
comes as no surprise that, again, spiritus is central: If one rubs the imago on the
skin, and thus warms it, the virtus of the image easily connects with the warm
corporeal spiritus vitalis. Phenomenologically speaking, this passage tells us
how imagines efficaces are sensually perceived: bodily and emotionally, that is,
via spiritus vitalis—via the spiritus that is most closely associated with human
affects and emotions and that distributes heat throughout the body. As seen in
figures 1 and 2, spiritus, by floating through the vascular system, forms a kind of
‘‘second sensible body.’’ This embodied experience of the image’s virtus in
Ficino is enabled via the skin, by warmth and touch. This is significant because,
first, warmth within the Aristotelian tradition is the first manifestation of life,
and, second, in his treatise De anima Aristotle states that touch is the only outer
sense that is entirely experienced in an embodied way.38
All what has been said here about the efficacy of talismans, then, leads
directly to the question of the efficacy of figurae, that is, the efficacy of con-
crete figures or stellar constellations engraved into material. Usually, these
figural or diagrammatic incisions are the first thing we think about when it
comes to talismans. But in this Ficino, at least in the realm of medicine, is very
clear: only if one has chosen the right material and the right moment can one
enhance the healing effects of medical talismans by imprinting (imprimere)
figures in them.39 This assertion tells us something important about the
mimetic status of these figurae. They become efficient only if they share in
the forms—the numerical proportions, relations, qualities, movements, and
virtutes—of the planets.40 In this sense, they are nonrepresentational. As Jan
Söffner has shown, the concept of imitation involves not only (empathetic)
imitation of the other but also the sharing of an interactive and emotional
event. Mimesis therefore concerns not discrete subjects or objects but what
they share as a situation.41 It is in the context of this sharedness that I consider
the Platonic and Neoplatonic concept of participation (methexis) helpful for
understanding talismanic efficacy. This nonrepresentational setting also
holds for the perception, or better, conception, of astronomical constella-
tions. Just as in figurae, participation here means assimilating ourselves—our
spiritus—to the constellations, forming our spiritus according to their har-
monic movements, and this in turn means embodying them.42 This embod-
ied process of adaptation and assimilation can take place only if, as we have
already seen, ‘‘our spiritus has been intent upon the work and upon the stars

124 Representations
through imagination and affect,’’ or in other words: it can only happen in
a relational setting in which one shares in the virtus vivida from within.
To put it simply, the artifact has two sides. There is an outside, involving
mainly its production, its poiesis, and its representational aspects. In this
sense, the formations engraved in a gem refer to a specific planetary con-
stellation. But there is also an inside involving the participation in the virtus
vivida of the artifact that forms its matter from within. The figurae on a tal-
isman share and participate in the figurae astronomicae. Ficino himself
addresses these two sides in terms of ars and natura—asking the question:
‘‘For what after all is human art? It is a sort of nature handling matter from
the outside. And what is nature? It is art molding matter from within, as
though the carpenter were in the wood.’’43

Images at Work

What do these observations tell us about the status of working

images? First, it is not the semantics of these imagines, their iconography,
that is, their functioning as signs that leads us to a full understanding of
their agency. Nor is it a question of performing, of staging their efficacy.
Second, and more important, it is not the image in itself, its specific form
and aspect that stands at the center of Ficino’s concept but the fact that the
image is thought of and felt as being animated, as one part within a broader
relational setting.
It follows, then, that the function of these images cannot be fully
grasped by exclusively analyzing their visual aspects. As we have seen, visual-
ity is not Ficino’s central concern. What is central is the fact that the images
are part of a phenomenal setting of living bodies provided with specific
forms of sensing and embedded in an ideally harmonic cosmic order of
nature. Even on a more general level, apart from the examples shown here,
it could be productive, in order to investigate the functional, social, cultural,
and historical differences between working images, to examine the different
phenomenal settings in which they were and are situated.
Looking at works of art, at how artifacts work and especially at how they
become animated from this point of view, also means developing an alter-
native theory of Renaissance aesthetics. On the one hand, there is a tradition
within Renaissance studies that claims that art, and particularly painting,
begins to find its aesthetic autonomy in the Renaissance. In this view, working
like nature (the imitatio naturae) meant being productive like nature, using
imagination for personal creation. According to this line of interpretation,
artworks come into life as aesthetic experiences for the observer’s as well as
the creator’s imagination, into a life that stems primarily from the effects of

Life from Within 125

 vision—and personal projections of vividness based on these effects. Giving
life to an image, according to this kind of aesthetics, therefore leads to
a personalized concept of liveliness: an image lives because it is experienced
as such by the beholder; an artifact has only a kind of ‘‘as-if’’ life.
But there is another tradition in the theory and practice of images
developed in the Renaissance for which life is something cosmologically
shared, something working from within both the talismanlike artifact and
the beholder. The aesthetic experience does not stem from an as-if; it comes
from sharing the same world and the same living virtutes and spiritūs. Hence,
according to this concept, the works discussed here were ‘‘really’’ animated.
For artists aiming at this animation, however, it would have been insufficient
simply to produce visual effects or to give aesthetic shapes from without. They
could not just work upon natural objects, nor could they produce works
merely depicting or describing nature. Like magicians, they had to work with
nature and—in a way—assist its actions from within. For these artists, the
imitatio naturae meant not creating artworks by analogy to life processes
(which would have been in the Aristotelian tradition), but sharing in nature’s
work, lending new forms to already living nature.

Notes

I thank all participants of the ‘‘Images at Work’’ conference in Florence,

September–October 2010, for lively discussions and crucial pointers, as well
as Hannah Baader, Ittai Weinryb, and Gerhard Wolf for their invaluable read-
ings of the article. Further, I am grateful for the spirited discussions with the
participants of the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)-funded scientific
network ‘‘Ästhetik der Geister.’’
1. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life (a bilingual Latin-English edition with intro-
duction and notes), trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton,
1989), Proemium/Proem, 102–5.
2. E. M. Tansey, ‘‘The Physiological Tradition,’’ in Companion Encyclopedia of the
History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (New York, 1993), 1:121.
3. See Charles Singer, ‘‘A Study in Early Renaissance Anatomy, with a New Text:
The Anothomia of Hieronymo Manfred (1490),’’ Studies in the History and
Method of Science 1 (1917): 79–164; Christoph Weißer, ‘‘Iatromathematik,’’ in
Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte (Berlin, 2005), 652–55; Nicolas Weill-Parot, Les
‘‘Images Astrologiques’’ au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance. Spéculations intellectuelles et
pratiques magiques XIIe–XIVe siècle (Paris, 2002); Jean-Patrice Boudet, Entre science et
nigromance: Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident médiéval (XIIe—XVe siècle)
(Paris, 2006); for the connection between medicine and astrology in Ficino, see
Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, introduction to Ficino, Three Books on Life, 31–38.
4. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.13: ‘‘De virtute imaginum secundum antiquos atque
medicinarum coelitus acquisita’’/‘‘On the Power Acquired from the Heavens
Both in Images, According to the Ancients, and in Medicines.’’

126 Representations
 5. I am following the broad definition of talismans put forward by Persis Berle-
kamp, who writes that ‘‘a ‘talisman’ was not a class of objects held together by
their formal characteristics, nor even by their functions and desired effects but
rather by the theoretical frameworks in which their characteristics were
expected to have efficacy. These frameworks were astrological’’; Persis Berle-
kamp, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam (New Haven, 2011), 120.
6. ‘‘Quae sane [coelestium] harmonia tantam habere potestatem existimatur, ut
non solum agricolarum laboribus atque medicorum artificiis per herbas aro-
mataque conflatis, sed etiam imaginibus quae apud astrologos ex metallis lapidibus-
que fiunt, virtutem saepe mirificam largiatur’’/‘‘This [celestial] harmony is
thought to have such great power that it oftentimes bestows a wonderful power
not only on the works of farmers and on artificial things composed by doctors
from herbs and spices, but even on images which are made out of metal and stones by
astrologers’’; Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.12.
7. Ibid., 3.13.
8. Ibid.
9. Thomas Ricklin, Der Traum der Philosophie im 12. Jahrhundert. Traumtheorien
zwischen Constantinus Africanus und Aristoteles (Leiden, 1998), 9–10.
10. Concerning the textual and visual tradition of the concept of the corpus anima-
tum from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, see Tanja Klemm, Bildphysiologie.
Wahrnehmung und Körper in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Berlin, 2013).
11. Katharine Park and Eckhard Kessler, ‘‘The Concept of Psychology,’’ in The
Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skin-
ner, and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge, 1988), 455–63; Katharine Park, ‘‘The
Organic Soul,’’ in ibid., 464–84.
12. Wolfram Schmitt, ‘‘Res naturales,’’ ‘‘Res non naturales,’’ and ‘‘Res praeter
naturam,’’ in Lexikon des Mittelalters (Munich, 2002), 7:750–52.
13. Concerning the tradition, function, and meaning of the so-called Fünfbilderserie,
see Karl Sudhoff, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Anatomie im Mittelalter speziell der
anatomischen Graphik nach Handschriften des 9. bis 15. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1908);
Ernst Seidel and Karl Sudhoff, ‘‘Drei weitere anatomische Fünfbilderserien aus
Abendland und Morgenland,’’ Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 3 (1910): 169–80;
Ynez Violé O’Neill, ‘‘The Fünfbilderserie Reconsidered,’’ Bulletin of the History of
Medicine 43 (1969): 236–45; Ynez Violé O’Neill, ‘‘The Fünfbilderserie—A Bridge to
the Unknown,’’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 51, no. 4 (1977): 538–49.
14. The systems of the muscles and the bones are not shown here, as they are not
central to the argument.
15. As to these concepts of virtutes and spiritūs, see Klemm, Bildphysiologie.
16. See Ricklin, Der Traum der Philosophie; Charles Burnett, ‘‘The Chapter on the
Spirits in the Pantegni of Constantine the African,’’ in Constantine the African
and ‘Alı̄ ibn al-‘Abbās al-Majūsı̄: The Pantegni and Related Texts, ed. Charles Burnett
and Danielle Jacquart (Leiden, 1994), 99–120; Gerald J. Grudzen, Medical The-
ory About the Body and the Soul in the Middle Ages: The First Western Medical Curric-
ulum at Monte Cassino (New York, 2007).
17. See Frank Fehrenbach, Licht und Wasser. Zur Dynamik naturphilosophischer Leit-
bilder im Werk Leonardo da Vincis (Tübingen, 1997), 181–92; Fabio Frosini, ‘‘Pit-
tura come filosofia. Note su ‘spirito’ e ‘spirituale’ in Leonardo,’’ Achademia
Leonardi Vinci 10 (1997): 25–59.
18. To name just a few: Fritz Saxl, ‘‘A Spiritual Encyclopaedia of the Later Middle
Ages,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 82–134; Otto Kurz,
‘‘The Medical Illustrations of the Wellcome Ms.,’’ appendix 2 of ibid., 137–42;

Life from Within 127

 Dieter Blume, Regenten des Himmels. Astrologische Bilder im Mittelalter und in der
Renaissance (Berlin, 2000); Hannah Baader, ‘‘Frühneuzeitliche Magie als The-
orie der Ansteckung und die Kraft der Imagination,’’ in Ansteckung. Zur Körper-
lichkeit eines ästhetischen Prinzips, ed. Mirjam Schaub, Nicola Suthor, and Erika
Fischer-Lichte (Munich, 2005), 133–51.
19. Weill-Parot, Les ‘‘Images Astrologiques.’’
20. Christoph J. Steppich, Numine afflatur. Die Inspiration des Dichters im Denken der
Renaissance (Wiesbaden, 2002), 169; Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, com-
mentary notes to Ficino, Three Books on Life, 452n5. See also Steffen Schneider,
Kosmos, Seele, Text. Formen der Partizipation und ihre literarische Vermittlung. Marsilio
Ficino, Pierre de Ronsard, Giordano Bruno (Heidelberg, 2012).
21. In medieval and Renaissance times, a distinction was made between the five
outer senses (sensūs exteriores) of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, and the
inner senses (sensūs interiores), located in the body, generally situated in the
chambers of the brain and varying in number and name from author to author.
See, paradigmatically, Ruth E. Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1975); Carl Nordenfalk, ‘‘The Five
Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Cour-
tauld Institutes 48 (1985): 1–22.
22. ‘‘Neque tamen dicimus spiritum nostrum coelestibus duntaxat per qualitates
rerum notas sensibus praeparari, sed etiam multoque magis per proprietates
quasdam rebus coelitus insitas et sensibus nostris occultas, rationi vix denique
notas’’; Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.12.
23. Numerous examples of these ‘‘magic gems’’ are found in Simone Michel, Die
magischen Gemmen: Zu Bildern und Zauberformeln auf geschnittenen Steinen der Antike
und Neuzeit (Berlin, 2004).
24. ‘‘Nosti praeterea quam facile multis misericordiam moveat figura lugentis, et
quantum oculos imaginationemque et spiritum et humores afficiat statim atque
moveat amabilis personae figura. Nec minus viva est et efficax figura coelestis’’;
Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.17.
25. Some of the most prominent studies are, Harvey, The Inward Wits; David Sum-
mers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cam-
bridge, 1987); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval
Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1990); Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early
Modern European Culture (Oxford, 2007).
26. See Clark, Vanities of the Eye.
27. Concerning the difference between imaginatio and phantasia, see Klemm, Bild-
physiologie, chaps. 3.3, 3.4, 6.6.
28. Marsilio Ficino, ‘‘Synesius de somniis translatus à Marsilio Ficino Florentino ad
Petrum Medicem,’’ in Marsilio Ficino, Opera omnia, vol. 2.2, ed. Mario Sancipriano
(Turin, 1968–1978). Ficino translates the treatise in the late fifteenth century.
29. ‘‘Intellectui convenit [imaginatio] utpote quae libera, vaga, nullique rei pecu-
lariter addicta. Praecellitur autem quoniam sensilia [sic] particulariaque tan-
tum concipit et effingit; . . . Hoc etenim loco satisfactum fore putaverim, si ex iis
quae in medium attulimus, descriptiones definitionesque eius asciverimus; ut
sit imaginatio motus is animae quem sensus, in actu positus, parit; sit animae vis
quae formas promat ex sese; sit omnibus viribus potestas agnata; effingat omnes
rerum similitudines impressionesque virium aliarum transmutet in alias; sit potentia
assimilandi cetera ad se ipsum’’; Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Über die
Vorstellung—De imaginatione, ed. Eckhard Kessler (Munich, 1997), 78–81.

128 Representations
30. See Beate Fricke and Tanja Klemm, ‘‘Conceptio und perceptio. Zum ‘Weimarer
Blatt’ von Leonardo da Vinci,’’ in Modernisierung des Sehens, ed. Matthias Bruhn
and Kai-Uwe Hemken (Bielefeld, 2008), 82–99; Tanja Klemm, ‘‘Corpus anima-
tum—Imago animata. Shared Image Practices in SS. Annunziata in the Renais-
sance,’’ in Feelings of Being Alive, ed. Jörg Fingerhut and Sabine Marienberg
(Berlin, 2012), 259–91, and Klemm, Bildphysiologie, 165–200.
31. ‘‘Sicut enim geometrae mens, dum figurarum rationes secum ipsa volutat, for-
mat imaginibus figurarum intrinsecus phantasiam perque hanc spiritum quo-
que phantasticum absque labore aliquo vel consilio, ita in naturali arte divina
quaedam sapientia per rationes intellectuales vim ipsam vivificam et motricem
ipsi coniunctam naturalibus seminibus imbuit, perque hanc materiam quoque
facillime format intrinsecus’’; Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology (a bilingual
Latin-English edition), 1.4.1, trans. Michael J. B. Allen with John Warden, ed.
James Hankins with William Bowen (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
32. Baader, ‘‘Frühneuzeitliche Magie als Theorie der Ansteckung.’’
33. ‘‘Tradunt Arabes spiritum nostrum quando rite fabricamus imagines, si per
imaginationem et affectum ad opus attentissimus fuerit et ad stellas, coniungi
cum ipso mundi spiritu atque cum stellarum radiis, per quos mundi spiritus
agit; atque ita coniunctum esse ipsum quoque in causa, ut a spiritu mundi per
radios quidam stellae alicuius spiritus, id est vivida quaedam virtus, infundatur
imagini, potissimum hominis tunc operantis spiritui consentanea’’; Ficino,
Three Books on Life, 3.20.
34. Marie-Thérèse D’Alverny and Françoise Hudry, ‘‘Al-Kindi. De radiis,’’ Archives
d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 49 (1974): 247–48.
35. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.6.
36. Ibid., 3.12.
37. Ibid., 3.13.
38. On the calor innatus as first principle of life and the relevance of this concept for
theories of enlivenment within the literature of art of the Renaissance, see
Frank Fehrenbach, ‘‘Calor nativus—Color vitale. Prolegomena zu einer Ästhe-
tik des ‘Lebendigen Bildes’ in der frühen Neuzeit,’’ in Visuelle Topoi. Erfindung
und tradiertes Wissen in den Künsten der italienischen Renaissance, ed. Ulrich Pfis-
terer and Max Seidel (Munich, 2003), 151–70. On touch as basic sense, see
Aristotle, De anima 2.2.413b.4–2.2.423b.26; Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner
Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York, 2007), 21–30.
39. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.16.
40. Ibid., 3.17.
41. Jan Söffner, Partizipation. Metapher, Mimesis, Musik—und die Kunst, Texte bewohn-
bar zu machen (Paderborn, 2014); Jan Söffner, ‘‘Non-Representational Mimesis
(Grönemeyer with Plato),’’ Etnofoor 22 (2010): 91–102.
42. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 3.11 and 3.21.
43. ‘‘Quid est ars humana? Natura quaedam materiam tractans extrinsecus. Quid
natura? Ars intrinsecus materiam temperans, ac si faber lignarius esset in
ligno’’; Ficino, Platonic Theology, 1.4.1. From this perspective, it could be pro-
ductive to reconsider the manifold practices of casting in wax, clay, and plaster
in Renaissance workshops, mostly in Florence. See Jeanette Kohl, ‘‘Casting
Renaissance Florence: The Bust of Giovanni de’ Medici and Indexical Portrai-
ture,’’ in Carving, Casts, and Collectors: The Art of Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Peta
Motture, Emma Jones, and Dimitrios Zikos (London, 2013), 58–71.

Life from Within 129