ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the rise of the Idea from Plato to Italian art theory of the Cinquecento, its circulation in early modern England, and the light it may cast on Desdemona and Othello. The Italian emphasis on the Idea as a creative process of painstaking rarefaction inside the artist's mind, so eloquently present in these contemporaries of Shakespeare's, may underlie the handling of the Neoplatonic theme of beauty in Othello, albeit with a distinctive application to the religious notion of inward refinement and especially to the characters of Desdemona and Othello. The chapter then compares Michelangelo's non finito with the unfinished according to Iago. Michelangelo will instead serve as a foil to enhance the revolutionary quality of the unfinished in Iago. In his hagiographic interpretation of Michelangelo's non finito, Alessandro Vasari proposes the disegno as a clear expression and declaration of the concept inside the artist's mind.
