ABSTRACT
The late-fifteenth century was a period of considerable ferment in Florentine art. In fact, it becomes a good deal easier to understand the artistic complexities once it is recognized that all artists were in the position of having to choose between two competing outlooks which had become increasingly incompatible with each other. The other, itself a perfectly respectable aesthetic position, was based on the premise that art should concern itself with metaphysical concepts such as beauty. The chief significance of Marsilio Ficino’s aesthetic theories for the art of the period is perhaps that they provided a sound basis upon which the recently emerged doctrine of ‘scientific’ imitation could be effectively challenged. Ficino very much re-enhanced the general concept of beauty by identifying its pursuit as a prime spiritual and aesthetic objective, and indeed as a prime artistic objective, while at the same time linking it explicitly with the formal properties of line and also colour.
