Transforming the Maimonidean Imagination: Aesthetics in the Renaissance Thought of Judah Abravanel

HTR 97:4 (2004) 461–84

Transforming the MaimonideanImagination: Aesthetics in theRenaissance Thought ofJudah Abravanel*

Aaron W. HughesUniversity of Calgary

■ IntroductionThe life and work of Judah Abravanel (ca. 1460–after 1523) are at such odds with each other that one wonders how such an important and optimistic Renais-sance treatise could have been produced by such a tragic figure.1 Although his life was marked by peregrinations and uncertainties,2 all of which were due to his

*I would like to acknowledge the comments of Professors Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Daniel H. Frank, and Oliver N. Leaman on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to the very construc-tive reviews offered by two readers for HTR. When citing Judah Abravanel’s Dialoghi d’Amore,I give the page number of the standard Italian edition of Santino Caramella (Bari: Laterza and Figli,1929) followed by, in parentheses, the corresponding page number in the English translation ofF. Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H. Barnes, The Philosophy of Love (Dialoghi d’Amore) (London: SoncinoPress, 1937). This translation is somewhat outdated, especially in terms of its unwillingness to capture the erotic nature of Judah’s Italian. For a more recent critical edition of the Italian text, see GiacintoManuppella, Dialoghi d’amore (Lisbon: Instituto Nacional de Investigaçao Cientifica, 1983).

1For requisite biographical material, see Menachem Dorman, “Judah Abravanel: His Life and Work”(in Hebrew), in Sichot >al ha-> <Ahavah: Leone Ebreo (Giuda Abrabanel)< (ed. and trans. Menachem Dorman; Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1983) 13–95; other treatments include B. Zimmels, Leo Hebreus(Breslau: n.p., 1886); S. H. Margulies, “La famiglia Abravanel in Italia,” Rivista israelitica 3 (1906)97–107, 147–54; Heinz Pflaum, Die Idee der Liebe Leone Ebreo: Zwei Abhandlungen zur Geschichteder Philosophie in der Renaissance (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1926) 55–85; Carl Gebhardt, Leone Ebreo(Heidelberg: n.p., 1929); and A. R. Milburn, “Leone Ebreo and the Renaissance,” in Isaac Abravanel:Six Lectures (ed. J. B. Trend and H. Loewe; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937) 133–57.

2See, for example, the poem “Telunah >al ha-zeman” in Mivhar ha-Shirah ha->Ivrit be-> <Italyah<

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unwillingness to leave the fold of Judaism, Judah Abravanel’s magnum opus, theDialoghi d’amore, would become a Renaissance bestseller.3 Originally published inItalian in 1535,4 they were subsequently translated into a number of other Europeanvernaculars.5 As a result of these translations, Judah Abravanel became known tothe West as Leone Ebreo.6

In any examination of Judah’s work, a number of seemingly intractable questionspresent themselves. How and why, for example, did a work of Jewish philosophybecome so popular among a non-Jewish audience?7 The Dialoghi seem to haveresonated deeply among Christian Neoplatonists, yet they were largely ignored bycontemporaneous Jews.8 This ambiguity, in turn, suggests another set of questions:

(ed. Jefim Hayyim Schirmann; Berlin: Schocken, 1934) 216–22; for an excellent English translation,see Raymond Scheindlin, “Judah Abravanel to His Son,” Judaism 41 (1992) 190–99.

3He seems also to have written other philosophical works that, unfortunately, have not survived.For instance, there is evidence that he published a work by the name of De Coeli Harmonia (“TheHarmony of the Heavens”). Moreover, the Dialoghi themselves are incomplete: missing are theintroduction and what seems to have been a fourth dialogue. David Hariri has argued that partsof this fourth dialogue can be found in Giordano Bruno’s Eroici Furori; see his “The Traces ofthe Missing Fourth Dialogue on Love by Judah Abravanel Known as Leone Ebreo” (in Hebrew),Italia 7 (1988) 93–155.

4There is no consensus as to the original language of the Dialoghi. Some contend it was Italianor Latin, some that it was Spanish; others argue that it was Hebrew, chosen to appeal to like-mindedJewish intellectuals. For a summary of the debate, yet one that remains agnostic in its conclusions,see Dorman, Sichot >al ha-> <Ahavah< , 86–95. For a good analysis of where and how Judah’s work fitsinto the Renaissance genre of the trattati d’amore, see John Charles Nelson, Renaissance Theoryof Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno’s Eroici furori (New York: Columbia University Press,1958) 67–162.

5For the history of this translation activity, see Menachem Dorman, “The Dialoghi and TheirTranslation” (in Hebrew), also in his Sichot >al ha-> <Ahavah< (n. 1, above), 96–182; for an interestingcase study of the uses to which the Dialoghi could be put in the construction of national identity,see Doris Sommer, “At Home Abroad: El Inca Shuttles with Hebreo,” Poetics Today 17 (1996)385–415.

6On the popularity of the generic name “Leone Ebreo” in the Renaissance and the confusionsurrounding Judah Abravanel, see Dorman, Sichot >al ha-> <Ahavah< , 13–15.

7For a good articulation of the problem of the status of this work and its place in Jewish thought,see David B. Ruderman, “Italian Renaissance and Jewish Thought,” in Renaissance Humanism:Foundations, Forms, and Legacy (ed. Albert Rabil, Jr.; 3 vols.; Philadelphia: University of Penn-sylvania Press, 1988) 1:408–12. Other useful studies include Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, “JewishCulture in Renaissance Italy: A Methodological Survey,” Italia 9 (1990) 63–96; and Arthur M.Lesley, “The Place of the Dialoghi d’Amore in Contemporaneous Jewish Thought,” in EssentialPapers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (ed. David B. Ruderman; New York:New York University Press, 1992) 170–88.

8The Dialoghi, however, did make subsequent inroads in Jewish thought. For a thorough discus-sion, see Isaiah Sonne, “Traces of the Dialoghi d’amore in Hebrew Literature” (in Hebrew), Tarbiz 3(1934) 287–313. In the modern period, according to Arthur M. Lesley (“Proverbs, Figures, andRiddles: The Dialogues of Love as a Hebrew Humanist Composition,” in The Midrashic Imagina-tion: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History [ed. Michael Fishbane; Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1993] 204), “the Dialogues of Love by Yehuda Abravanel has attracted more attentionfrom historians of Jewish philosophy than its influence on later Jewish thought deserves.” ColetteSirat (A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages(( [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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Did Judah Abravanel frame his treatise in ways that would have been foreign to other Jews? Do the Dialoghi, which stress the love of God, conflict with the medievalJewish philosophical enterprise that instead emphasized the knowledge of God? Why did one of the first sustained attempts to delineate an aesthetics of Judaism apparently fall on deaf ears?

There are two possible ways to answer these questions: by considering the lan-guage in which the Dialoghi were composed, and by considering their philosophical content. Although I have no intention of wading into the philological evidence,so expertly surveyed by Dorman in the introduction to his Hebrew edition, many Jewish authors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries increasingly resorted to Ro-mance vernaculars in order to attract a Jewish audience (including conversos andex-conversos) that no longer understood Hebrew. In sixteenth-century Italy, larger trends in rhetoric and the use of language increasingly led to the creation of the ideal of a pure Italian language. In this regard, Judah was an important transitional thinker in the encounter between Judaism and the Italian Renaissance. Whereas his father, Don Isaac, could still adapt humanistic themes to his Hebrew writings, which were primarily in conversation with medieval thought,9 it was increasingly the case in Judah’s generation that the only way to engage in a full-scale examination of theuniversal tendencies associated with humanism was to write in the vernacular. As a result, Judah’s Dialoghi, if they were in fact originally composed in Italian, wouldhave found without too much diffi culty a ready non-Jewish audience.

Philosophically, Judah’s aesthetics and his theory of the imagination represent an important shift from the standard medieval Jewish philosophical paradigm. That paradigm, perhaps best articulated in the work of Maimonides (d. 1204), tended to reduce aesthetics to the realm of consensus, and imagination to that of untruth. Judah Abravanel, in contradistinction, provides an early and overwhelmingly posi-tive assessment of both aesthetics and the imagination.10 For him, beauty, that whichinspires love and desire, connects all levels of the universe in an interlocking andorganic relationship, which Judah refers to as the “universal circle” (il circulo di

1985] 408), for example, writes that this work “was written in a secular language and represent[s] a book of profane philosophy. This is not a work of Jewish philosophy, but a book of philosophywritten by a Jew.” A similar view is held by Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism: A History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig (trans. David W. Silverman; New York: Schocken, 1973) 295.

9For general background, see Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, Between Worlds: The Life and Thought of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) 85–90.For a more specific discussion of Don Isaac Abravanel, see Eric Lawee, Isaac Abarbanel’s Stance Toward Tradition: Defense, Dissent, and Dialogue (Albany: State University of New York Press,2001); and Seymour Feldman, Philosophy in a Time of Crisis: Don Isaac Abravanel, Defender ofthe Faith (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).

10Even though Judah departed from Maimonides when it came to the imagination and aesthet-ics, his overall program carried on the Maimonidean tradition. For instance, Judah’s emphasis on the love of God and its relationship to knowledge of the sciences is, for all intents and purposes, a continuation of Maimonides’ thought.


tutto). The result is that everything, both sensual and intelligible, has the potentialto image and reflect God’s beauty. The imagination is crucial here because it isthe faculty responsible for decoding such images and reflections by translating theincorporeal into the corporeal and vice versa.

Since Judah stressed the importance of the imagination and aesthetics, theinitial Jewish response to the Dialoghi seems to have been primarily negative,undoubtedly contributing to the treatise’s general neglect among Jews. Some of theearliest criticisms, especially those of Saul ha-Kohen Ashkenazi, fault Judah for rationalizing kabbalistic principles. Ashkenazi, in a letter to Don Isaac Abravanel,particularly criticizes Judah for violating the Maimonidean principle of keepingphilosophical matters from the masses, and for spending too much time on linguis-tic matters, such as riddles and eloquence.11 Much of this antagonism reflects thebroader context of the Maimonidean controversies,12 in which philosophers soughtto make philosophy known to a broader Jewish public often by means of dramaticdialogues or philosophical novels. Those opposed to the Aristotelian-Maimonideanparadigm of philosophy often blamed such treatises for weakening the faith of Jewsby diminishing their commitment to halakhah and thus making them more sus-ceptible to conversion. Moreover, those committed to the philosophical enterprisecriticized such treatises for revealing the secrets of philosophy to those who wereintellectually incapable of receiving them. Criticism on both of these fronts onlyintensifi ed in the aftermath of the traumatic expulsion of 1492.13 It is also impor-tant to note that Maimonides came to occupy a particularly ambiguous position intraditional Italian-Jewish thought: philosophers read him philosophically, whereaskabbalists tended to read him mystically. So when I say that Judah “transforms” theMaimonidean imagination, I refer particularly to the “Aristotelian-Maimonidean”imagination of the philosophers.

11Lesley, “The Place of the Dialoghi d’amore in Contemporaneous Jewish Thought,” 184 –85.Despite the initial criticism, however, subsequent generations stressed the interrelationship betweenPlatonism and Kabbalah, on the one hand, and philosophy and aesthetics on the other. Notableexponents of this interrelationship include Judah Moscato and Azariah de Rossi.

12The classic study of these controversies remains Daniel J. Silver, Maimonidean Criticism andthe Maimonidean Controversy 1180–1240 (Leiden: Brill, 1965); a convenient selection of primarysources may be found in After Maimonides: An Anthology of Writings by His Critics, Defenders, andCommentators (in Hebrew) (ed. A. S. Halkin; Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 1979); morerecently, see the discussion in Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue,Knowledge, and Well-Being (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003) ch. 6.

13As Moshe Idel cautions, however, the tragedy of the Spanish exiles did not deeply affect the dynamics of Jewish culture, especially in Italy. See his “Religion, Thought, and Attitudes: The Impact of the Expulsion on the Jews,” in Spain and the Jews: The Sephardic Experience, 1492 and After (ed. Elie Kedourie; London: Thames and Hudson, 1992) 123–39; and idem, “Encoun-rters Between Spanish and Italian Kabbalists in the Generation of the Expulsion,” in Crisis andCreativity in the Sephardic World: 1391–1648 (ed. Benjamin R. Gampel; New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1997) 189–222. In support of Idel’s claim, it should be remembered that Isaac Abravanel, Judah’s father, was extremely knowledgeable when it came to contemporaneous trendsin humanistic thought.

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Although in many ways the thought of Judah Abravanel represents a continuationof medieval Jewish philosophy, a number of features mark his break with that tradition. First, the medieval philosophical tradition tended to place rhetoric among the lower forms of logic, such as those associated with Aristotle’s Rhetoric or Poetics, which the medieval tradition regarded as part of Aristotle’s Organon.14 Judah, however, elevates rhetoric to a position among the higher sciences, such as cosmology andepistemology. The beautiful and pleasing speech of the Torah is no longer a concession that Moses had to make for the masses, it is now part and parcel of the divine fabric.The goal of the philosopher / aesthete / artist is to imitate this to the best of his ability. Second, following the lead of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico dellaMirandola (1463–1494), Judah presents in the Dialoghi one of the first full-blownattempts to catalogue parallels between pagan myth and the biblical tradition, arguing that the former is ultimately a corruption of the latter. Third, the Dialoghi, in stressingthe interlocking relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual, border on the pantheistic or panentheistic,15 thereby resonating with contemporaneous Christian treatments of the incarnation in literary fiction.16

What follows, then, is an attempt to show that Judah Abravanel, in stressingthe importance of imagination and aesthetics, developed an aesthetics of Judaismthat was, in many ways, a radical departure from the mainstream Aristotelian-Maimonidean paradigm.17 Judah was a true Renaissance artist who not onlyattempted to show the ontological correspondence between the celestial and cor-poreal worlds, but who, in the very composition of his text, put this into praxis bycreating a beautiful mimetic representation of the divine.

14See, e.g., Deborah Black, Logic and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval ArabicPhilosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1990) 1–51.

15Hubert Dethier, “Love and Intellect in Leone Ebreo: The Joys and Pains of Human Passion,”in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought (ed. Lenn E. Goodman; Albany: State University of New tYork Press, 1992) 353–86.

16Yet this does not adequately account for (1) the fact that neither pantheism nor panentheism were foreign to Judaism, especially kabbalah; and (2) why the Dialoghi became a (non-Jewish) Renaissance bestseller. My assumption for (1) at this stage of research is that the pantheism or panentheism, in combination with the other factors listed in this paragraph, would have originallymet with a certain degree of hostility among contemporaneous Jewish philosophers. The Dialoghi,thus, represent an important moment in the changing attitudes towards Jewish identity in the Re-naissance. As for (2), Christian audiences were well used to the genre of the Dialoghi, the trattatid’amore, in both the vernacular and in Latin (e.g., Ficino’s commentary to Plato’s Symposium).For contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous ideas of the incarnation in Christian letters and philosophy, see Guy P. Raffa, Divine Dialectic: Dante’s Incarnational Poetry (Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 2000) 67–125; Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of Incarnation: Thomas Aquinasto Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 29–51; and Alexandre Leupin, Fictionand Incarnation: Rhetoric, Theology, and Literature in the Middle Ages (trans. David Laatsch;Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) 1–24.

17This, however, was certainly not foreign to Judaism. See, inter alia, the important studies ofDaniel Boyarin, “The Eye in the Torah: Ocular Desire in Midrashic Hermeneutic,” in Ocular Desire(ed. Aharon R. E. Agus and Jan Assmann; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994) 30–48; and Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. 13–51.


■ The Dialogue in Medieval Jewish and Renaissance PhilosophyBefore turning to specifics of Judah’s narrative, it is important to consider the genrein which he decided to give expression to his philosophical views. Even the formin which Judah offers his argument, I contend, represents a signifi cant departurefrom the standard exposition employed by medieval Jewish Aristotelians. Therethus exists an intimate connection between genre and argument in the Dialoghi.The dialogue is certainly not foreign to Jewish thought. It was a popular genre inthe apocalyptic literature of Late Antiquity; moreover, dialectic and dialogue arecentral to rabbinic texts. In terms of Jewish philosophy, some of the most importantnon-Aristotelian texts were written as dialogues (e.g., Ibn Gabirol’s Meqor Hayyim,Halevi’s Kuzari), not to mention such lesser-known works as Abraham ibn Ezra’sÓay ben MeqitzÓÓ ,18 Isaac Pulcher’s >Ezer ha-Da> >at> ,19 and Shem Tov Falquerra’sSefer ha-Mevaqqesh.20 Abravanel certainly knew well the work of Ibn Gabirol andcites him by name in the Dialoghi.21 In addition, the works of Ibn Ezra and Halevienjoyed new life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which can be attested toby the number of supercommentaries written on Ibn Ezra’s biblical commentary,22

and the various commentaries on Halevi’s Kuzari.23

The dialogue seems to have provided a convenient genre for speculating aboutideas in ways that differed from the standard Aristotelian-Maimonidean paradigm.In the dialogue, according to Lesley, “radically incompatible kinds of discourse canbe integrated into a single text, to make significant statements about the relations of the individual, God, and the world.”24 This, in turn, has philosophical consequences.For instance, the genre of the dialogue intimates that the goal of the text residesbetween the comments of the different characters, and that it is up to the reader to

18For an English translation of this work, consult Aaron W. Hughes, The Texture of the Divine:Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,t2004) 189–207.

19Isaac Pulcher, >Ezer ha-> Da>at (ed. Jacob Levinger; Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press,1984).

20Shem Tov ben Joseph Falaquera, Sefer ha-Mevaqqesh (Amsterdam, 1772). Part one has beentranslated into English as Sefer Ha-Mebaqqesh: Falaquera’s Book of the Seeker (trans. M. HerschelLevine; New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976).

21See, e.g., Dialoghi III, 246 (290).22Notable commentators from the fourteenth century include Samuel ibn Zarza, Shlomo Franco,

and Samuel ibn Motot; important fifteenth-century supercommentators include Profiat Duran andAsher Crescas. For secondary literature, see Georges Vajda, “Recherches sur la synthèse philo-sophico-kabbalistique de Samuel ibn Motot,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyenâge 27 (1960) 29–63; see also Irene Lancaster, Deconstructing the Bible: Abraham ibn Ezra’sIntroduction to the Torah (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) 22–25.

23E.g., Judah Moscato (1530–ca. 1593), Kol Yehuda (Warsaw: n.p., 1880). For requisite sec-ondary literature, see I. Bettan, Studies in Jewish Preaching (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union CollegePress, 1939) 192–225.

24Lesley, “Proverbs, Figures, and Riddles,” 204–5. See also the comments in Sergius Kodera,Filone und Sofi a in Leone Ebreos Dialoghi d’amore: Platonische Liebesphilosophie der Renaissanceund Judentum (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995) 16–22.

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arrive at a meta-textual meaning by working through that which is communicatedtextually in the narrative. One must, in other words, become an active participantin the text.25 The philosophical dialogue was, I contend, a form well suited to the expression of a distinctive aesthetics and theory of the imagination.

Aesthetics was intimately connected to the “rhetorical culture” of the Renais-sance.26 Renaissance humanists envisaged rhetoric as the vehicle for “providing a comprehensive system both for creating and for evaluating works of literature, by which they meant not just poetry, drama and fi ction, but also letters, history andphilosophical treatises.”27 Language was so important to Renaissance humanismbecause proper linguistic expression was the ideal to which all gentlemen aspired.Rhetoric was at the center of humanist education, which put a premium on elegantexpression. Within this context, eloquence was not regarded as the prolegomenon to knowledge, but reflected its telos. The good orator was, thus, someone who was regarded as proficient in all branches of human knowledge. This is the opposite ofthe medieval period, where rhetoric occupied a very low position on the logicalhierarchy. In the Renaissance, however, rhetoric enabled the individual to displayhis wisdom while persuading others of his position. The perfect orator becamesynonymous with the perfect man.28 Many of these themes are also dealt withby the Jewish teacher of Pico della Mirandola, Yohanan Alemanno (1435–1503). Like Judah’s Dialoghi, Alemanno’s dialogue Óay ha-ÓÓ >olamim,> 29 composed in late-fi fteenth-century Florence, was in conversation with the neoplatonic thought ofFicino and Pico. Like Judah, Alemanno was also concerned with the relationshipbetween imagination and intellect, and the role of poetics and rhetoric as disciplines necessary for the attainment of human felicity.

On a philosophical level, this meant that allegory and other types of fi gura-tive language were not barriers to philosophical understanding. On the contrary, such language imitated the very fabric of the divine. Without beautiful and poetic

25See Hughes, Texture of the Divine, 48–81.26Here I follow the lead of Brian Vickers, “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in The Cambridge History of

Renaissance Philosophy (ed. Charles B. Schmitt, et al.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 715–45. A useful discussion can also be found in Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (trans. J. J. S. Peake; New York: Harper and Row, 1968). For an excellent discussion of rhetoric in the Jewish context, see Alexander Altmann, “Ars Rhetorica“ as Refl ected in Some Jew-ish Figures of the Italian Renaissance,” in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (n. 7, above), 63–84.

27Vickers, “Rhetoric and Poetics,” 715.28Altmann, “Ars Rhetorica“ as Reflected in Some Jewish Figures of the Italian Renaissance,”

79. A key figure in the development of the rhetorical sciences among Renaissance Italian Jewry isJudah Messer Leon. For a critical edition of Messer Leon’s treatise on rhetoric, see The Book of theHoneycomb’s Flow (Sefer Nopheth Suphim) (ed. and trans. Isaac Rabinowitz; Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity Press, 1983), as well as the discussion by Abraham Melamed, “Rhetoric and Philosophyin Nofet Sufim by R. Judah Messer Leon” (in Hebrew), Italia 1 (1978) 7–39.

29Yohanan Alemanno, Óay ha->olamim (L’immortale): Parte 1, la retorica (ed. Fabrizio Lelli;Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1995).


language, one was unable to encounter the beautiful and, by extension, God. Thetext par excellence for this, at least according to the Jewish thinkers, was the To-rah. Many of the Renaissance humanists, especially Ficino and Pico, argued thatthe central vehicles for correct philosophical expression were myth and allegory.Both of these thinkers stressed what Kristeller calls a “poetic theology,” whichclaimed that philosophical and religious thought could be found in ancient poetryand mythology if read properly.30 Importantly, the goal of the philosopher was notsimply to unpack a myth by translating it into analytical prose, but to demonstratean understanding of it by composing other myths. In other words, the humanistcomposed myths about myths and allegories of other allegories. A beautiful narrativetried to embed within itself the beauty to be found in the intelligible world.31

In the Renaissance, therefore, the dialogue provided an important medium for engaging in philosophical speculation. Many of the humanist thinkers, using Plato’sSymposium as their guide and model, composed dialogues on love and beauty, bothcelestial and terrestrial.32 Particularly popular was the trattato d’amore (“treatise onlove”) that was inaugurated as a genre by Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium.33

This genre would subsequently become popular in the sixteenth century, when itfrequently took the form of a dialogue and was often written in the vernacular as op-posed to Latin.34 Not all of the treatises associated with this genre were philosophical;several were popular treatises that reflected the courtly ideal of love. Many of thosewho wrote philosophically inspired treatises tended to stress the Platonic notion of love, thereby denigrating its sensual and physical aspects. Gradually the genre becameincreasingly stereotyped, concerned less with philosophical ideas and more with their expression in a highly stylized and polished prose. Judah Abravanel, however, wasresponsible for giving this genre one of its most sustained and important examples. Unlike the work of many who came either before or after him, his Dialoghi comprisea probing philosophical treatise, providing a sustained ontological, psychological,and metaphysical discussion of love as a cosmic principle.

30For an excellent study of this topic, see Marco Ariani, Imago Fabulosa: Mito e Allegoria nei“Dialoghi d’Amore” di Leone Ebreo (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1984). See also Chaim Wirszubski,Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1989) 121–32.

31Important in this context is Yohanan Alemanno’s Óesheq Shlomoh (“The Desire of Solomon”).In this work, a philosophical and kabbalistic commentary on the Song of Songs, Alemanno reads thebiblical narrative in the light of neoplatonic theories of love; see George Vajda, L’Amour de Dieudans la théologie juive du Moyen Age (Paris: Librarie Philosophique, 1957) 280–85.

32Important examples include Il libro del cortegiano by Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) andAsolani by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547). For requisite secondary literature, see Paul Oskar Kristeller,“Renaissance Platonism,” in his Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and HumanisticStrains (New York: Harper, 1961), esp. 60–65; Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love, 67–162; Perry,Erotic Spirituality, 1–9; and Alexander A. Parker, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature,1480–1680 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985) 1–8.

33For an English translation, see Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love(trans. Sears Jayne; Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985).

34Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love, 69.

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■ Renaissance Conceptions of Imagination and AestheticsThe idea of beauty as an incorporeal and metaphysical principle was a very common one among Renaissance humanists such as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Both of these thinkers relied on Plotinus, who regarded beauty as a cosmic principle that participated in the celestial world.35 For Ficino, physical beauty participates in a celestial prototype and, in the process, it is the former that leads to the con-templation of the latter.36 Everything in the universe desires to rise up the organichierarchy. The desire to return to one’s source is called love, and what encourages each being to make the return is the beauty in that which is above it.37 Imagina-tion is the faculty that allows this to occur. Like Judah Abravanel, as we shall see, Ficino argued that love and enjoyment of beauty can occur only through the higher faculties of the soul (i.e., seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking). The lower senses have no part in the enjoyment of beauty.38 For Ficino, beauty is not simply part ofthe corporeal world, it is a cosmic principle that is diffused throughout the entire universe. All beautiful objects in the physical world partake of the idea of beauty,which he subsequently identifies with God. The beauty of physical objects, thus,functions as a path by which the human soul loves and ascends to God, the true end of the soul.

But if Judah Abravanel drank from the stream of Renaissance humanism, hewas equally at home in the world of the Kabbalah, where beauty was also regarded as a universal principle pervading the entire cosmos. Increasingly in the fi fteenth century, Jewish thinkers began to stress the limitations of human reason and to argue that scientific knowledge was incapable of providing the key that would unlock the secrets of the universe. The knowledge of supra-rational truths became associated with revelation and, increasingly, Jewish thinkers regarded the creativehermeneutics of the Kabbalah as the means by which to apprehend such truths.Indeed, the Italian Kabbalah instituted the desire to interpret certain kabbalisticprinciples in the light of contemporaneous philosophical categories, something thatnon-Italian kabbalists were frequently critical of.39

Within this context, Beauty, hypostatized as tiferet in the kabbalistic system ofdivine emanations, the sefi rot, becomes an essential component within the divine

35On the importance of Plotinus in the thought of Ficino, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophyof Marsilio Ficino (trans. Virginia Conant; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964) 13–29.

36Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, 143–44.37E.g., ibid., 51–52.38Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, 265.39On the dissemination of kabbalistic works in Italy, see Moshe Idel, “Major Currents in Ital-

ian Kabbalah between 1560 and 1660,” in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (n. 7, above), 345–68; idem, “Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretations of the Kabbalah in the Sixteenth Century,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century (ed. Bernard DovCooperman; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) 186–242; idem, “Kabbalah and Ancient Philosophy in R. Isaac and Judah Abravanel,” in The Philosophy of Judah Abravanel: FourLectures, 73–112; and Robert Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy (trans.J. Chipman; Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Littman Library, 1990), esp. 280–98.


pleroma. Tiferet, the sixth of the ten sefi rot, occupied the center or heart of thecosmos that emanated directly from God. In Alemmano, tiferet is an importantlocus on the cosmographical map that leads to the mystical union (devequt) that theadept has with God. According to his Song of Solomon’s Ascents (Shir ha-ma>alot>li-Shlomo), tiferet represents the seventh, and highest, level of the spiritual world,tand is associated with

the four-letter, ineffable name of God, with which Moses was joined duringthe forty years in the desert, and to which he attached those among the Isra-elites who were prepared for such attachment.40

The goal of human life for Alemanno, as for the kabbalists generally, was mys-tical union with the Godhead. Following his spiritual teacher, Abraham Abulafi a,Alemanno equated this unio mystica with prophecy, a central component of whichwas the imaginative faculty. In his Song of Solomon’s Ascents, he argues thathumans receive divine guidance in at least seven ways. The sixth type of divineguidance, second only to that of the intellect, is that of the imagination. It occurswhen the imagination makes

veracious images taken from subtle, spiritual forms and substances. It thenimagines them veraciously, as when a man imitates a living thing upon a wall,or draws it upon a flat surface so that it appears to protrude. . . . Such imita-tion [i.e., that of the prophets] resembles that of artists who use the craft ofperspective, or the craft of making a symbol resemble the thing it symbolizes,or the activity of the imagination in producing veracious dreams.41

The imagination is thus an artistic faculty. It is what is responsible for true imagesin much the same way as the artist mimetically produces divine reality. This is a farcry from the Platonic mistrust of the artist as a fashioner of untruth.42 It is similar,rather, to the thought of Pico, where we witness the shift from the Platonic ideasas existing in the intelligible world to conceptions that are internal to the humanlmind.43 The artist, or, the artist’s imagination, becomes the vessel through whichGod speaks.44 Alemanno subsequently claims that the imagination, because it is ableto accurately conceive of the ideas, is able to survive the death of the body.45

40For Hebrew text and English translation, see Arthur M. Lesley, “The Song of Solomon’s Ascentsby Yohanan Alemanno: Love and Human Perfection according to a Jewish Colleague of GiovanniPico della Mirandola” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1976) 218.

41Quoted in Lesley, “The Song of Solomon’s Ascents,” 210.42Alemanno, however, does agree with Plato that desire and “divine madness” were impor-

tant constituents of the prophetic experience; see Tirosh-Samuelson, Happiness in Pre-ModernJudaism, 420.

43Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, 6.44See, e.g., Ficino, Theologica Platonica (2 vols.; Paris: Belles Lettres, 1964–1970) 2:203. 45Quoted in Lesley, “The Song of Solomon’s Ascents,” 211.

AARON W. HUGHES 471

This notion of beauty and imagination would fi nd practical expression in thegenre of allegory. The philosopher now takes on the role of an artist who creates a beautiful work of art that embodies the beauty engendered in the cosmos. It is in the genre of the trattati d’amore, according to Perry, that we encounter a “constant narrative shift between amorous language and philosophical speculation.”46 Thesefeatures all come together in Judah’s Dialoghi d’amore, considered to be one ofthe most important representatives of this genre.

■ Imagination and Aesthetics in the Dialoghi d’amoreJudah Abravanel develops a novel synergy between aesthetics and imagination thatin turn informs his speculations on cosmology, ontology, and psychology. Centralto all of these “disciplines” is the concept of beauty as a cosmic principle. In the third dialogue, for instance, Judah presents two distinct accounts of creation, one based on Islamicate neoplatonism and the other on the Plotinian triad. First, citingGhazali, Avicenna, and Maimonides, he argues that God in his complete simplicityand “by the love of His infinite beauty produces out of Himself alone, the first intel-ligence and mover of the first heaven.”47 The first intelligence, in turn, contemplatesthe beauty of its cause, thereby producing the second intellect, and its own beauty, thereby producing the fi rst heavenly sphere. This theory of emanation, based on the love of beauty,48 pervades the entire universe (both supra- and sublunar). TheActive Intellect, the lowest of the ten heavenly intellects and associated with the sphere of the moon, becomes the intellect of the corporeal world. By contemplatingits own beauty it produces the forms found in this world, and in contemplating the beauty of its cause, it produces human intellects. Following this account of creation, Judah offers a Plotinian account based on a celestial triad.49 He now distinguishes between three types of beauty that pervade the cosmos. The fi rst is God qua theSource of beauty (l’attore di bellezza), the second is beauty itself (bellezza, i.e.,intelligible beauty), and the third is the physical universe produced by this idea inthe intellect of God (il participante di bellezza).50

46Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 25.47Dialoghi III, 282 (333).48Pines argues that the hidden source of Judah’s theory is Avicenna’s Risåla f• al->ishq. See his

“Medieval Doctrines in Renaissance Garb?: Some Jewish and Arabic Sources of Leone Ebreo’s Doctrines,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century (n. 39, above), esp. 380–89. Although he makes a strong case, the fact of the matter (as Pines himself admits) is that there exists no firmproof that Judah either knew Arabic or that the Risåla f• al->ishq was ever translated into Latin or Hebrew. Another important and more direct source for Judah, however, could have been HasdaiCrescas’s <Or ha-shem.

49Dialoghi III, 349 (416). Seymour Feldman argues, correctly in my opinion, that Judah “has thus reinterpreted both the Timaeus and the Symposium in terms of the Enneads.” See his “1492: A House Divided,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World: 1391–1648 (n. 13, above),esp. 50–52.

50Dialoghi III, 349 (416–17). See the comments in Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 23.


Judah subsequently uses the latter model to interpret the first creation accountin Genesis, where the physical world is described as the offspring between God,the male principle, and intelligible beauty, now personified as a female.51 Corporealbeauty is thus the first offspring of God’s love for his female consort, Wisdom.Since this physical world is intimately connected to God, it cannot be negated.Rather, this world becomes necessary—and this is a leitmotif that runs throughoutthe work—so that humans can make physical beauty “spiritual in our intellect.”52

The faculty that invests the spiritual with, or divests it of, corporeal extension isthe imagination. Judah frequently describes this faculty as “the eyes of our soul”(occhi de l’anima nostra razionale),53 because it is able to visualize the beauty thatexists in the spiritual world (le bellezze spirituali).54 The imagination becomes thefaculty responsible not only for giving the incorporeal three-dimensional extension,but also for recognizing the formal and intelligible beauty that is embedded inmaterial objects.

Crucial here is the notion of mimesis, which, for Judah, exists on every levelof the universe. Not only are material objects mimetic representations of celestialbeauty; even our rational soul (l’anima nostra razionale) becomes the “image ofthe world soul” (per essere immagine de l’anima del mondo(( ),55 in which thereexists the imprint of all the forms, including that of beauty. The form of beauty,in particular, is realized when the imagination, as the eye of the soul, intuits thisform by abstracting it from matter. Once this occurs, the intellect takes over andis subsequently able to apprehend “the highest beauty of the first intellect and thedivine ideas” (la somma bellezza del primo intelletto e idee divine).56 Significantly,Judah argues that the individual’s encounter with celestial beauty occurs “indirectlythrough riddles (enigmate).”57 Just as our soul is an image (similimente immagine)of the world soul, so too are corporeal beautiful objects (bellezze corporee), whichare apprehended by sight and hearing, simulacra and images (simulacri e immagini)of intellectual beauty.58 In modern parlance, philosophy becomes synonymous withhermeneutics, the ability to “decode” the perceived relationship between natural andsupernatural realities. Primary to this endeavor is the imagination, which occupiesthe interface between external and internal processes. Judah’s related analysis of rhetoric and oratory, which he puts into practice in the very fabric of his Dialoghi,

51Dialoghi III, 355–57 (424–25). See Feldman, “1492: A House Divided,” 52–53.52E.g., Dialoghi III, 329–30 (393): “Sono adunque le bellezze corporee nel nostro intelletto

spirituale, e come tali conoscono da lui.”53Here Abravanel employs terminology similar to that of his medieval precursors, many of whom

also refer to the imagination as the “eye of the heart” (e.g., >eyn ha-lev). See Aaron W. Hughes,“Three Worlds of ibn Ezra’s Hay ben Meqitz,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 11 (2002),esp. 14–23; Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines, esp. 160–87.

54Dialoghi III, 326 (389).55Ibid.56Ibid. Compare Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, 87–91.57Dialoghi III, 274 (324).58Ibid., 326 (389).

AARON W. HUGHES 473

mirrors this discussion. Both of these Renaissance disciplines provide spiritual form to words, which are synonymous with matter.59 Since Judah argues that languageis ultimately unable to express spiritual matters adequately,60 writing must imitate cosmology. In other words, writing itself becomes an act of creation in which an image fashioned out of beautiful language must not only be beautiful in and of itself(unlike Maimonides), but must also point beyond itself to intelligible beauty.

According to Judah’s psychology, the five external senses may be divided into those that are primarily material (materiali): touch (tatto), taste (gusto), and smell(odorato); and those that are increasingly spiritual (spirituali): hearing (per l’audito(( )and sight (per l’occhi(( ).61 It seems that only the latter are able to penetrate behind thepurely physical so as to abstract the spiritual from the corporeal. Hearing, intimatelyconnected to the Renaissance ideal of rhetoric, consists of the ability to discern “fine speeches, excellent reasoning, beautiful verses, sweet music, and beautiful and harmonious melodies.”62 Sight, ranked just above the faculty of hearing, owing to the primacy that Judah puts on vision, deals with “beautiful colors, regular patterns, and light in all its varied splendor.”63 The senses, thus, function hierarchically as a prolegomenon to any form of higher knowledge, with the imagination formingthe threshold (mezzo) between the senses and the intellect.

Central to the unfolding argument in the Dialoghi is the concept of ocular power (forza oculare(( ). In the fi rst dialogue, Judah describes two modes of apprehendingspiritual matters. The first is through the faculty of sight and the second through the intellect.64 For the eye, like the intellect, is illumined by means of light, therebyestablishing a relationship between the eye, the object seen, and the space that sepa-rates them.65 Just as the sun supplies light to the eye, the divine intellect illumines the human intellect during the act of intellection. It is light, then, that enables us to “comprehend all the beautiful shining objects of the corporeal world.”66 Sightbecomes the model by which we engage the universe: it is what makes knowledgepossible, since it is only by viewing tangible particulars that we acquire knowl-edge of intelligibles. Moreover, the internal faculty that is responsible for giving

59See, e.g., Brian Vickers, “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (n. 26, above), esp. 715–24; for the Jewish context, see Altmann, “Ars Rhetorica“ asReflected in Some Jewish Figures of the Italian Renaissance,” in Essential Papers on Jewish Culturein Renaissance and Baroque Italy (n. 7, above), 63–84.

60Dialoghi I, 43 (46).61Dialoghi III, 316 (376).62Ibid.63Ibid.64Ibid., I, 38 (41).65Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 17. For medieval precursors, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of

Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), esp. ch. 1. For other rcontemporaneous theories, see Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham:Optics, Epistemology and the Foundation of Semantics (Leiden: Brill, 1988).

66Dialoghi III, 327 (389): “sua luce . . . illumina i nostri occhi e li fa comprendere tutte le lucidebellezze corporee.”


bodily extension to the incorporeal is the imagination, frequently described by themedieval Islamicate philosophical tradition, to which Judah is an heir, as the “innereye” (al->ayn al-batiniyya> ), although Judah himself does not seem to use an Italiantranslation of this phrase.

Judah does, however, distinguish between three types of vision. The highesttype is that of God’s visual apprehension of himself; next is that associated withthe angelic world, which sees God directly, though not on equal terms; fi nally,there is human vision, which is the weakest of the three types and can only visual-ize the divine indirectly.67 The best that most humans can do in this world is toobtain knowledge of incorporeal essences through corporeal particulars. Judahdoes admit, though, that some special individuals are able to unite with the angelicworld, which he describes as the Agent Intellect (intelleto agente). When suchunifi cation (copulare) occurs, the individual “sees and desires divine beauty as ina crystal or a clear mirror, but not directly” (vede e desia la bellezza divine comein uno mezzo cristallino, o sia chiaro specchio, ma non in se stessa immediate).68

Judah refers to this act as prophecy. Like Maimonides, Judah claims that Mosesdid not prophesy through the imagination, but only through the intellect, whichhe nevertheless describes in highly visual terms as beholding “the most beautifulfi gure of God” (la bellissima fi gura di Dio).69

Just as corporeal beauty is an image (simulacro) of celestial beauty, so is a humanbeing an image (simulacro) of the universe. In our very existence, therefore, we wit-ness the intersection of the spiritual and the material. In order to apprehend beautyin increasingly elevated stages of spirituality, one must rely on those faculties of thesoul that “are most exalted above the body” (elevate dal corpo).70 These spiritualfaculties are, in ascending order, imagination (immaginazione), understanding(ragione intelletiva), and intellect (sapienzia umana). The imagination is the facultythat “arranges, distinguishes and ponders the things of the senses, and discerns inmany other sources grace and beauty, moving the soul to love and delight.”71 Thus,the imaginative faculty occupies a position between (mezzo) the external sensesand the internal faculties. In occupying the interface between the corporeal andthe spiritual, the material and the intelligible, it is able to move between them,translating them into one another.

67Dialoghi III, 277 (328).68Ibid., 275 (325). Judah, unlike Maimonides, hints that this is not a completely natural act;

rather, it occurs “through the grace of God” (per grazia di Dio( ). Significantly, Alemanno argues thatthe grace of God is also necessary for a human to attain the level of prophecy. See Fabrizio Lelli,“Yohanan Alemanno, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e la cultura ebraica italiano del XV secolo,” inGiovanni Pico della Mirandola: Convegno internazionale di studi nel cinquecentesimo anniversariodella morte (1494–1994) (ed. G. C. Garfagnini; Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1997) 303–25.

69Dialoghi III, 276 (326).70Ibid., 317 (376).71Ibid., 227 (266): “L’immaginazione e fantasia, che compone discerne e pensa le cose de’

sensi, conosce molti altri offi zi e casi particulari graziosi e belli, che muoveno l’anima a dilet-tazione amorosa.”

AARON W. HUGHES 475

Although the epitome of Judah’s system is the intellect, it is primarily a facultythat deals with forms abstracted from matter. It is the intellect that is “absorbedin the science of the Divine and of things abstracted from matter, rejoicing in and becoming enamored of the highest grace and beauty which is in the creator and artificer of all things, so that it attains its ultimate happiness.”72 The intellectmust ultimately rely on the imagination, however, to supply it with the forms that the imagination has abstracted from matter. Within this context, Judah frequently employs a well-known and well-used metaphor in his discussion of the imaginativefaculty, that of the mirror (specchio).73 In the medieval Islamicate philosophicaltradition, following Plotinus, the mirror (Arabic mir<å), is frequently used as an image for the imaginative faculty.74 Just as the mirror reflects what is placed infront of it, the soul, in a state of perfection, reflects the higher principles of the universe. Implicit in this metaphor of the mirror is an ocular or visual model for acquiring knowledge. This knowledge is not something that occurs simply on the intellectual level, but requires vision and images, both of which, in the Western philosophical tradition, are associated with the imaginative faculty.75 Early on in the Dialoghi, Philo asks Sophia, “Do you not see how the form of man is impressedon and received by a mirror, not as a complete human being, but within the limitsof the mirror’s powers and capabilities, which reflect the figure only and not theessence?”76 Later, in dialogue three, he argues that it is through our own “intel-lectual mirror” that we apprehend the divine:

It is enough for our intellectual mirror (specchio intellettuale) to receive andimage (fi gurare(( ) the infinite divine essence (l’immensa essenzia divina) ac-cording to the capacity of its intellectual nature; though there is a measureless gulf fixed between them, so far does its nature fall short of that of the objectof its understanding.77

The imagination, by corporealizing the spiritual and spiritualizing the corporeal,enables individuals to gain knowledge of the divine world. Unlike Maimonides andother medieval Aristotelians who equated the natural world with impermanenceand evil, Judah argues that this world is the natural receptacle of heavenly pow-ers: “Hence earth is the proper and regular consort of heaven, whereof the other

72Dialoghi III, 228 (267).73The application of the metaphor of the mirror to prophecy appears in Jewish sources as early

as the rabbinic tradition in, e.g., Lev. Rabba 20, a passage that would subsequently be interpreted by medieval Jewish authors.

74Compare Plotinus, Enneads 1.4.10. For requisite secondary literature, see Annick Charles, “L’imagination, miroir de l’âme selon Proclus,” in Le néoplatonisme (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1971) 241–51; and Manfred Ullmann, Das Motiv des Spiegels in der ara-bischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), esp. 62–120.

75See Hughes, Texture of the Divine, ch. 3.76Dialoghi I, 33 (35): “Non vedi tu che s’imprime e comprende la forma de l’uomo nel specchio,

non secondo il perfetto essere umano, ma secondo la capacitá e forza de la perfezione del specchio?il quale è solamente figurativo e non essenziale.”

77Ibid., 254 (300).


elements are but paramours. For it is upon the earth that heaven begets all or thegreater part of its progeny.”78 In an interesting passage, Judah, like Maimonidesbefore him, compares matter to a harlot.79 Yet, unlike Maimonides, he reaches aradically different conclusion. For Judah, “it is this adulterous love that beautifi esthe lower world with such wondrous variety of the fair-formed things.”80 In keepingwith Judah’s claim that “the lower can be found in the higher,”81 this world becomesone gigantic mirror that reflects spiritual beauty, and in which one can grasp divineintelligibles.82 Just as Philo is enthralled by Sophia’s beauty, the imagination, uponcontemplating physical objects that are beautiful, apprehends the divine:

God has implanted His image and likeness (l’immagine e similitudine) in Hiscreatures through the fi nite beauty (bellezza finita) imparted to them from Hissurpassing beauty (l’immenso bello). And the image of the infinite must befi nite, otherwise it would not be a copy, but that of which it is the image. Theinfinite beauty of the Creator is depicted and reflected (depinge e immagine)in fi nite created beauty like a beautiful face in a mirror (come una bella figurain uno specchio); and although the image is not commensurate with its divinepattern, nonetheless it will be its copy, portrait, and true likeness (similacrosimilitudine e immagine).83

In the third dialogue, Abravanel further divides the human into a tripartitestructure consisting of the body (il corpo), the soul (l’anima), and the intellect(l’intelletto).84 The soul, which I here interpret as the imaginative faculty becauseof the properties assigned to it, is once again the intermediary (mezzo) betweenthe body and the intellect.85 Although he does not come right out and define the

78Dialoghi II, 73 (81–82): “Sí che questa è la propria e ordinaria moglie del corpo celeste; egli altri elementi son sue concubine. Per ciò che in lei genera il cielo tutta o ver la maggior partede la sua generazione.”

79See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, introduction and 3.8; in the translation of Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), see 13–14 and 430–36, respectively. On thesomewhat ambiguous approach of Maimonides to matter, see Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Maimonides andSt. Thomas on the Limits of Reason (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) 90–102.

80Dialoghi II, 76 (84–85): “Pur con quest’adultero amore s’adorna il mondo inferiore di tantae cose cosi bellamente formate.”

81Ibid., 68 (75). I therefore disagree with Herbert Davidson (“Medieval Jewish Philosophy in theSixteenth Century,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century [n. 39, above], 127), who claimsthat “Leone happens to be interpolating a philosophic discussion into a dialogue on love and con-sequently feels called upon to pay obeisance to the concepts of love and beauty.”

82On this point, see the important discussion by Abraham Melamed, “The Transformation of the Love-of-the-Noble Motif in Albo, Alemanno, Judah Abravanel, and Moscato” (in Hebrew), inThe Philosophy of Leone Ebreo: Four Lectures (ed. Menachem Dorman and Ze<ev Levy; Haifa:Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1985) 62–66.

83Dialoghi III, 269 (318).84This tripartite structure was also extensively used by Pico in his Heptaplus, where the interme-

diate world, that of the angels, corresponds to the domain of the human imagination. According toWirszubski (Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism, appendix 17), an importantsource for Pico was probably Bachya ben Asher’s Commentary on the Pentateuch.

85Dialoghi III, 331 (394).

AARON W. HUGHES 477

function of the soul in any detail, he does claim that it is indispensable to the proper working of the body and the intellect. Moreover, it is this faculty that is in constant danger of being corrupted by unhealthy corporeal desire and, most importantly for the present discussion, it is ultimately responsible for translating the corporeal into the incorporeal and vice versa. This soul, in turn,

has two faces, like those of the moon turned towards the sun and the earthrespectively, the one being turned towards the intellect above it, and the other toward the body below. The first face looking towards the intellectis the understanding with which the soul reasons of universals and spiritualknowledge, extracting the forms and intellectual essences from particularand sensible bodies . . . the second face turned towards the body is sense,which is particular knowledge of corporeal things known. . . . These two faces have contrary or opposed notions; and as our soul with its upper face orunderstanding makes the corporeal incorporeal, so the lower face, or sensiblecognition, approaching the objects of sense and mingling with them, drawsthe incorporeal to the corporeal.86

The imagination now becomes the essential link in Abravanel’s psychology, since it is the faculty responsible for translating the corporeal into the incorporeal and theincorporeal into the corporeal. Without the imagination, therefore, the intellect isunable to move between the celestial and the material worlds. Unlike Maimonides,then, Judah Abravanel does not regard the imagination as a hindrance to knowl-edge; on the contrary, imagination is the faculty that is primarily responsible for apprehending the image of intellectual beauty. The imagination now becomes an important philosophical faculty and not just a prophetic or pedagogical one. For Judah, the imagination ceases to be utilitarian, as it was for Maimonides; it now becomes the faculty that enables the individual to recognize the beauty in both theworld and the word.

This positive valorization of the imagination will, in turn, play an essential rolein Abravanel’s aesthetics. One of the themes woven throughout the Dialoghi is theintimate connection between the sensual and the intelligible. This connection is where we witness the synergy between imagination and aesthetics, in which both become responsible for apprehending the nature of the relationship between the divine and the mundane. Indeed, for Judah, philosophical activity is ultimately the reconciliation of such antitheses.87 This means that, for him, everything physical possesses within itself the seeds for grasping the metaphysical.

In his initial discussion of beauty (la bellezza) in the third dialogue, Abravanelprovides, at the outset, the following defi nition: “beauty is grace, which delightsthe mind that recognizes it and moves it to love.”88 Beauty, therefore, becomesinseparable from both love and knowledge. This beauty, not grasped by the lower

86Dialoghi III, 331 (394–95).87Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 3.88Dialoghi III, 226 (264): “La bellezza è grazia, che, dilettando l’animo col suo conoscimento,

il muove ad amare.”


senses (i.e., taste, smell, or touch), is apprehended only by the higher senses (i.e.,sight and hearing), in addition to the imagination and the intellect.89 As a result, itis only by means of the beauty of created things that the individual is able to makethe corporeal spiritual. The former is what ultimately allows access to the latter, andthe imaginative faculty, as the link, or mezzo, between body and intellect, corporealand incorporeal reality, facilitates this process.

Aesthetics and imagination, occupying the interface between the corporealand the incorporeal, are central to a proper understanding of the Dialoghi.90 Thepurview of both is beauty, and it is ultimately the love of beauty in the soul of theindividual, combined with the cognizance that one lacks it in its entirety, that movesnot only the soul of the individual, but also the entire cosmos. Virtuous love is thehighest form of love and, significantly, it can be directed toward either corporealor spiritual things. Indeed, Philo intimates that such virtuous love can only emergefrom sensible phenomena:91

When [the soul] perceives a beautiful person whose beauty is in harmonywith itself, it recognizes in and through this beauty, divine beauty, in the im-age of which this person is also made.92

The goal of Judah’s system is to ascend through this hierarchy, the gateway towhich is the sensual enjoyment that one derives from physical objects. Only after thiscan one appreciate spiritual beauty, an appreciation of which culminates in baskingin the divine presence. Judah discusses this process in the following manner:

We ought principally to love the higher forms of beauty separated fromformless matter and gross corporeality, such as the virtues and the sciences,which are ever beautiful and devoid of all ugliness and defect. Here againwe may ascend through a hierarchy of beauty, from the lesser to the greaterand from the pure to the purest leading to the knowledge and love, not onlyof the most beautiful intelligences, souls and motors of the heavenly bodies,but also of the highest beauty and of the supremely beautiful, the giver of allbeauty, life, intelligence and being. We may scale this ladder only when weput away earthly garments and material affection.93

Even though the corporeal was, at the outset of this journey, indispensable,the higher one moves up the hierarchy, the less important the material becomes.Yet—and this will have important repercussions on his theory of aesthetics—Judah does not regard this hierarchy to be one simply of ascent. In this respect,near the end of the third dialogue he introduces the circle of love, il circulo degli

89Dialoghi III, 226 (265).90This paragraph relies on the discussion by Perry, Erotic Spirituality, 22.91See the discussion in Suzanne Damiens, Amour et intellect chez Léon l’Hébreu (Toulouse:

Édouard Privat, 1971) 168–73.92Dialoghi III, 389 (465): “per il quale, quando vede una persona in sé bella di bellezza a se

stessa conveniente, conosce in quella e per quella la bellezza divina, però che ancor quella personaè immagine de la divina bellezza.”

93Ibid., 357 (426).

AARON W. HUGHES 479

amari.94 This circle begins with the divine, whose love creates and sustains theuniverse: “Each degree of being with paternal love procreates its immediateinferior, imparting its being or paternal beauty to it, although in a lesser degreeas is only fitting.”95 This emanative framework, the love of that which is more beautiful for that which is less beautiful, comprises the first half of the circle. Everything in the universe has its place in a hierarchical chain of being, from the pure actuality of the divine to the pure potentiality of prime matter. Just as the superior desires the perfection of the inferior, the inferior desires to unite with the superior. One side of the circle leads downward from God to utter chaos, whilethe other side of the circle leads from chaos to God. It is the love of the inferiorfor the superior, predicated on the former’s privation and subsequent desire to unite with the superior. As far as the individual is concerned, the highest felicityresides in the union with God, which the Italian describes erotically as coppulativa(“union” in the sensual, erotic sense):

Because the love of the human soul is twofold, it is directed not only towards the beauty of the intellect, but also towards the image of that beauty in thebody. It happens that at times the love of intellectual beauty is so strong that itdraws the soul to cast off all affection for the body; thus the body and soul inman fall apart, and there follows the joyful death in union with the divine.96

What is responsible for this union with the divine is the imagination and aes-thetics. Although the ultimate union is one that transcends the body, it nonethelessrequires the beauty and love that the physical makes possible. Not surprisingly, Judah chooses to describe this summum bonum in highly visual terms: “It is enoughthat you should understand that our happiness consists in the knowledge and vision of God, in Whom we behold all things most perfectly.”97

■ Judah’s Transformation of the Maimonidean ImaginationFor those familiar with Maimonides’ discussion of the imagination, the differenttreatment this faculty receives at the hands of Judah should be readily apparent. In

94Dialoghi III, 377 (450). The source of this concept has been the subject of some debate. Ac-cording to Damiens, Abravanel would have derived this from Ficino by way of the Alexandrianmystics, especially Pseudo-Dionysius. See her Amour et intellect chez Léon l’Hébreu, esp. 162–64.B. Zimmels sees in it a kabbalistic influence. See in particular his Leone Hebreo. Neue Studien(Wien: n.p., 1892) 39. Joseph Klausner (“Don Yehudah Abravanel and His Philosophy of Love” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 3 [1933] 94) argues that it comes from Ibn Gabirol. Moshe Idel, however, faults the last two for offering no sources. In contrast, he claims (“The Source of the Circle of Love in the Dialoghi d’amore” [in Hebrew], >Iyyun> 28 [1978] 156), quite plausibly, that Judah Abravanel’s source is al-Batalyawsi, perhaps as mediated by his father’s commentary on Genesis or by YohananAlemanno.

95Dialoghi III, 378 (451): “Che ognuno con caritá paterna causa la produzione del suo succedente inferiore, participandoli il suo essere o bellezza paterna, ben che in minor grado secondo conviene.”

96Ibid., II, 196 (227).97Ibid., I, 43 (46): “Basta che sappi che la nostra felicitá consiste nel conoscimento e visione

divina, ne la quale tutte le cosa perfettissimamente si veggono.”


this final section, however, I would like to show, by way of juxtaposition, how Judahdeparted from the medieval peripatetic discussion, transforming the imaginationfrom a deceptive and chimerical faculty into the locus where one encounters thedivine presence. I begin by presenting the major themes of Maimonides’ theory of the imagination and aesthetics.

For medieval Aristotelians, the imagination (al-q¥wa al-mutakhayyila) wasregarded as one of the lower faculties of the soul, responsible for combining andrecombining sensible imprints stored within it.98 Thus, the imagination was regardedas a productive faculty, one that was the inverse of the immediacy and permanenceprovided by the intellect.99 Occupying an ambiguous position between the intellectand the senses, the imagination’s main function, which could have either positive or negative repercussions, was to recombine various images that were either not im-mediately present to the senses or that did not exist in reality. When the imaginationwas kept in its proper place—that is, subservient to the intellect—it could be of someuse, especially when it came to pedagogical issues. For this reason, medieval philoso-phers often claimed that the imagination was ultimately responsible for the creationof myths, fables, and fictions, all of which were indispensable to the prophet’s abilityto present abstract truths to those lacking the proper intellectual preparation.100

We witness this model in the work of Maimonides, who offers one of the clear-est paradigms of the imagination in medieval Jewish philosophy.101 Following thelead of Muslim thinkers such as Alfarabi and Avicenna, Maimonides argued thatthe imagination was primarily a creative faculty responsible for the formation of images no longer present.102 Imagination was, thus, often regarded as the antithesis

98E.g., Alfarabi, Mabådi< årå< ahl al-mad•na al-få∂ila (ed. and trans. Richard Walzer; Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1981) 211–28. For Greek precedents, see Fazlur Rahman, Prophecy inIslam: Philosophy and Orthodoxy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 29–91.

99See Aaron W. Hughes, “Imaging the Divine: Ghazali on Imagination, Dreams, and Dreaming,”JAAR 70 (2002) 33–53, esp. 38–41.

100Among Jewish philosophers, the only prophet who did not fit neatly into this paradigm wasMoses, who was able to prophesy without the mediation of the imaginative faculty. On Maimonides’taxonomy of the various levels of prophecy, see Guide 2.45 (trans. Pines, 395–403).

101Although I here treat Maimonides’ discussion as normative, it is necessary to mention that hisparadigm of the imagination represented but one type, the Aristotelian, among several competingparadigms. Other thinkers, most notably those influenced by neoplatonism, tended to emphasizedifferent aspects of the imagination. Such individuals included Ibn Gabirol and Abraham ibn Ezra.See Hughes, The Texture of the Divine, esp. 82–114. Particularly relevant to my argument, how-ever, are Ze<ev Levy’s comments stressing that many of the Jewish Platonists and neoplatonists,unlike Jewish Aristotelians, tended to have a bigger impact on non-Jewish thought; see his “Onthe Concept of Beauty in the Philosophy of Judah Abravanel” (in Hebrew), in The Philosophy of Judah Abravanel: Four Lectures (n. 82, above), 28.

102E.g., Maimonides, Guide 2.36 (trans. Pines, 369–70). See also Alfarabi, Mabådi< årå< ahlal-mad•na al-få∂ila, 211–28. For requisite secondary literature, see Miriam Galston, Politics andExcellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990);and Jeffrey Macy, “Prophecy in al-Farabi and Maimonides: The Imaginative and Rational Faculties,”in Maimonides and Philosophy: Papers Presented at the Sixth Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter,May 1985 (ed. Shlomo Pines and Yirmiyahu Yovel; Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986) 185–201.

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of the intellect, something that got in the way of the intellect’s proper functioning.On the whole, Maimonides was quite critical of the imagination. For example, heequates it with the evil impulse, the source of all error: “For every deficiency ofreason or character is due to the action of the imagination or consequent upon its action.”103

Despite this negative assessment,104 the imaginative faculty becomes an essential component of prophecy, which Maimonides regarded as the highest human perfec-tion105 In his main discussion of prophecy in the Guide,106 Maimonides contends that it is the Active Intellect that is the immediate cause of prophecy, which essentiallyconsists of an overfl ow into the prophet’s intellect and then into his imagination.107

The prophet, in order to receive the overfl ow, has to be perfect in every respect: physically, physiognomically, morally, intellectually, and imaginatively. Since he dhas no need of the body and is not swayed by corporeal desires, the non-Mosaic prophet’s imagination is free to work in the service of the higher faculties.108 Insuch an individual, because the

imaginative faculty[,] which is as perfect as possible, acts and receives fromthe intellect an overflow corresponding to his speculative perfection, this in-dividual will only apprehend divine and most extraordinary matters, will see only God and his angels, and will only be aware and achieve knowledge ofmatters that constitute true opinions and general directives for the well-beingof men in their relations with one another.109

The imagination is central to non-Mosaic prophecy. It is the faculty that enablesthe prophet to invent images and similitudes in order to teach intelligibles to themasses, who are unable to attain intellectual perfection on their own.110 The imagi-native faculty, as it emerges from the Guide, is primarily a political faculty. It is the faculty that differentiates the prophet from the philosopher, because the former, unlike the latter, feels a moral obligation to help perfect those around him.111 In

103Guide 2.12 (trans. Pines, 280). 104For an analysis of the various paradigms of the imagination that Maimonides seems to work

with, see Macy, “Prophecy in al-Farabi and Maimonides,” 192–97; and Oliver Leaman, “Maimonides,Imagination and the Objectivity of Prophecy,” Religion (1988) 69–80, esp. 72–73.

105Macy, “Prophecy in al-Farabi and Maimonides,” 192.106Guide 2.36 (trans. Pines, 369).107For a detailed discussion of this passage and others, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History

of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001) 221–89.108For an important and detailed treatment of these higher faculties or internal senses, see the two

studies by Harry Austryn Wolfson, “The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophical Texts,” HTR 28 (1935) 69–133; and “Maimonides on the Internal Senses,” JQR 25 (1934) 441–67.

109Guide 2.36 (trans. Pines, 372). This discussion of the imaginative faculty seems to be missing in his discussion of prophecy in both Hilkhot yesodei ha-torah 7.1 and Introduction to Pereq Óeleq.

110See the discussion in Macy, “Prophecy in al-Farabi and Maimonides,” 193–96; and Howard Kreisel, Maimonides’ Political Thought: Studies in Ethics, Law, and the Human Ideal (Albany:State University of New York Press, 1999) 63–92.

111Guide 2.37 (trans. Pines, 374 –75).


this regard, it is also a pedagogical faculty, because the prophet employs it to helpthe intellectually defi cient to gain, at the very least, a semblance of the truths thatthe philosopher can apprehend through the rational faculty.112

Since not all humans are capable of the same degree of understanding, differentaudiences require different presentations. So even though Moses, in his role as thesupreme lawgiver, did not rely on the imaginative faculty, he did use his imagina-tion in the communication of the divine message to the masses.113 According toTirosh-Rothschild, “the figurative speech of the philosophic Torah was a concessionto the intellectual imperfection of the multitude.”114 Since philosophical conceptswere encoded into the very fabric of the Torah, it was the role of the philosopherto decode such concepts. The truth of the text resided not in its literal level, but inits deeper, more profound levels.115 The philosopher was responsible for getting atthe “real” (i.e., philosophical) message that lay just behind the Torah’s surface.

Within this context, beauty occupies a rather circumscribed position. Beautyis essentially a synonym for God, an entity that is completely other and, thus, un-knowable.116 For Maimonides, then, aesthetics is essentially utilitarian.117 Althoughhe acknowledges the existence of physical beauty, it is but superfi cially linked tothe divine world. It calms the soul, but does little when it comes to intellectualactivity.118 In Guide 1.2, a chapter providing a philosophical reading of Adam’sfall, Maimonides now argues that it is the intellect that distinguishes truth fromfalsehood, yet that which is perceived as beautiful or ugly belongs to the realm

112This treatment of the imaginative faculty would have much staying power over the comingcenturies. Indeed, for Gersonides (1288–1344), the imagination is also the faculty responsible forthe prophetic moment. As such, the relationship between the imagination and the intellect is a majorconcern to him in the Wars of the Lord. Following the lead of Averroes, Gersonides claims that itis the imagination that provides the link between veridical dreams, divination, and prophecy. LikeMaimonides before him, Gersonides argues that the imagination, if properly tamed, is the locus of prophetic or prophet-like knowledge; if it succumbs to the desires of the body, however, it is the source of error. For both Maimonides and Gersonides, then, the prophet is someone who must possessa perfect intellect and a perfect imagination. Despite this, however, the imagination is ultimately dsecondary to the intellectual faculty, the perfection of which is the sine qua non of human felicity.

113Alfred Ivry, “Neoplatonic Currents in Maimonides’ Thought,” in Perspectives on Maimonides(ed. Joel L. Kraemer; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 135.

114Hava Tirosh-Rothschild, “Jewish Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity,” in History of JewishPhilosophy (ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman; London: Routledge, 1997) 523.

115An excellent survey of this motif in Jewish thought may be found in Frank Ephraim Talmage,“Apples of Gold: The Inner Meaning of the Sacred Texts in Medieval Judaism,” in Jewish Spiritu-ality: From the Bible to the Middle Ages (ed. Arthur Green; New York: Crossroad, 1986) 313–35.

116For an eloquent account of this relationship, see Kenneth Seeskin, Searching for an Unknow-able God: The Legacy of Maimonides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 23–39.

117Warren Zev Harvey, “Ethics and Meta-Ethics, Aesthetics and Meta-Aesthetics in Maimonides,”in Maimonides and Philosophy (n. 102, above), 135. See also the comments in Kalman P. Bland,The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affi rmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2000) 105.

118See, e.g., Shemonah Peraqim, in Ha-qedamot ha-Rambam la-Mishnah (ed. and trans. M. D.Rabinowitz; Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, n.d.) 184–90.

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of opinion.119 The imagination, here associated with common opinion, gets inthe way of intellection. Indeed, Maimonides argues that beauty, generated by theimagination, is what was ultimately responsible for Adam’s fall from grace.

Even though Maimonides acknowledges the existence of aesthetics and the imagination, both were ultimately marginalized in favor of the intellect and the act of intellection. The intellect’s purview is not this world of impermanence but the world of transcendence that exists above the sphere of the moon. As a result, sensual objects, even beautiful ones, are not to be appreciated in and of themselves,but only insofar as they point beyond themselves to something else. Beauty andimagination are thus subordinated to truth and intellect, respectively; at best, theyare regarded as their prolegomena.

As we have seen with Judah, however, aesthetics and imagination take on consid-erably new significance. First and foremost, both are endowed with overwhelminglypositive, not just utilitarian, functions. Whereas the Maimonidean imagination was primarily a political faculty, in Judah’s thought it becomes the locus for apprehend-ing the image of intellectual beauty. Both Judah and Maimonides concur that the imagination is intimately connected to the intellect. They part company, however, on what precisely defines this connection: Maimonides focuses on the propheticimagination and its ability to devise parables and allegories for the unlearned; Judahis interested in how this faculty translates the corporeal into the spiritual and viceversa. According to Maimonides, the prophetic imagination is concerned solely with harnessing the downward motion of the intellectual overflow, but for Judah the dimagination is not solely concerned with such an overflow and, most importantly,moves in both directions. For Maimonides, imagination is central to the political well-being of a people; for Judah, on the contrary, it is essential to understanding, at the most basic levels, what it means to be human.

In like manner, Judah argues that aesthetics can no longer be circumscribed bythe consensual; it now becomes an integral part of intuiting the spiritual within thecorporeal and vice versa. Judah celebrates beauty by refusing to restrict it to thatwhich is physical, and thus he opens up the concept of beauty in ways that are at odds with medieval Jewish Aristotelianism: beauty now becomes tantamount to God himself. As a corollary of this position, Judah envisages beauty as a cosmic principle that connects everything in the universe into an organic relationship. Physical objects are no longer superficially beautiful; they now become the prime locus for apprehending the divine presence. At a fundamental level, then, imagina-tion and aesthetics are inseparable, since both are responsible for discerning theinterconnection between the physical and the metaphysical.

119Guide 1.2 (trans. Pines, 24). Within this context, see Pines’s n. 6. I here follow Bland (TheArtless Jew, 96) and translate al-hasan as “beautiful,” as opposed to Pines’s “fine.”


■ ConclusionsIn the Dialoghi, Judah has adopted certain trajectories of medieval cosmology andpsychology, combined them with Renaissance notions of beauty, and thereby cre-ated a full-blown aesthetics of Judaism.120 He conceives of the cosmos as a living,dynamic structure, in which all levels share in a symbiotic and organic relation-ship. This world of form and matter is not defined by its privation or distance fromthe divine; rather, it becomes the arena wherein embodied individuals encounter,visually and imaginatively, the beauty and love of the divine. It is this emphasison imagination, aesthetics, and the phenomenal world that would eventually be-come such an important dimension of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century naturalphilosophy.121

I have argued that the crucial feature of Judah’s system is the imagination. It isthe faculty that is ultimately responsible for delineating the relationship betweenthe corporeal and the spiritual, and subsequently translating them into one another.Whereas Maimonides had confined the imagination—not to mention aesthetics—tothe realm of opinion, for Judah, this faculty becomes the primary locus wherebythe individual divests the corporeal from the spiritual in order that the intellect canengage in its activity of contemplation. Even though Judah’s system culminatesin the intellectual love of God, such love is only possible with the aid of both theimagination and aesthetics.

120Pflaum, Die Idee der Liebe, 52.121This combination, of course, would receive its most sustained treatment in Spinoza’s identifi -

cation of God with nature (Deus, sive Natura). On the relationship between Judah and Spinoza, seeEdmondo Solmi, Benedetto Spinoza e Leone Ebreo: Studio su una fonte italiana dimenticata dellospinozismo (Modena: G. T. Vincenzi e Nipoti, 1903), esp. 34–53; and Ze<ev Levy, Baruch or Benedict:On Some Jewish Aspects of Spinoza’s Philosophy (New York: Peter Lang, 1989) 22–25.

Transforming the Maimonidean Imagination: Aesthetics in the Renaissance Thought of Judah Abravanel

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