The flight of the imagination: Imagination, love and reason in the Italian Renaissance (Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, Ludvico Ariosto, Marsilio Ficino, Torquato Tasso)

Imagination, love, reason: these three elements come together in a delicate balance to form the workings of the human mind. This dissertation explores these concepts and their intricate relationship as portrayed in key writings of Italian literature. I focus on authors of the Italian Renaissance because they understood the imagination to be at the foundation of all knowledge, while also recognizing how, through the nature of its interactions with reason and the passions, it can forge a dangerous path to madness and destruction. For Dante, love plays a central role in the movement of the mind and the soul, and I show how its relationship to the imagination in the Divina Commedia enables the pilgrim to move towards the divine, and the poet to speak with prophetic authority. Giovanni Boccaccio is known for his celebration of human, secular ingenuity, and in the Decameron I focus on the balance between love and reason, and how they come together through the imagination to spark destruction. The mind's ability to reach for the divine is closely related to madness, and it is a small step from the poet's divino furore, at the root of poetic creation, to the madness of a furore that can destroy the mind and life itself. Marsilio Ficino connects the madness of genius to the humors of the body and the power of the passions. I show his ideas reflected in Ariosto's great epic, Orlando furioso, which places the relationship between love and madness at its core. Ficino's linking of the body to madness also formed the idea of the melancholic genius, a figure personified by Torquato Tasso. In the Gerusalemme liberata, I show the poet's struggle to free himself from furore's passion while still reaching for the divine. I also show how, through furore, Tasso recognizes that Christians and Muslims, ideologically placed as the greatest of enemies, are at base the same. I have chosen the motif of flight to represent the movement of the imagination, and therefore often refer to scenes depicting flight as a reference point in my study.