Reading group: Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium, where “Platonic love” began

Several of the panels I restore were painted in Florence a generation after Marsilio Ficino, in houses where his ideas were talked about at dinner. So for today I'd like to propose a reading group on his De amore, the commentary on Plato's Symposium.

Ficino translated Plato into Latin for the Medici. In the De amore he imagines a banquet at the Medici villa at Careggi on 7 November, the day Plato was said to have been born and to have died, at which the guests each take one of the speeches of the Symposium and expound it. The phrase "Platonic love" goes back to Ficino and his circle, and it meant something richer than our "love without sex": a love between souls that rises, through the beauty of a particular person, towards the divine beauty that shines in them.

Plan: three weeks. Speeches 1–2, then 3–5, then 6–7, the long one on Diotima. Sears Jayne's English translation is the easiest to find. Have Plato beside it: Symposium.

Question for today's theme: for Ficino, the lover loves the divine beauty shining through the beloved. Does that make the beloved a window, loved only for what passes through her? Or is a soul, for Ficino, itself a ray of that beauty, so that loving it is loving her?