More than two thousand years after it was written, Plato’s Timaeus continues to fascinate and intrigue its readers. In Timaeus in Paradise, Piero Boitani traces the abiding legacy of the Timaeus, mapping an intellectual journey that begins with Plato and extends to Dante and beyond. In a series of short, lyrical chapters, Boitani sketches a lineage that includes Proclus, Boethius, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, John Scotus Eriugena and Thomas Aquinas. Focusing on Plato’s metaphorical language—which Dante considered comparable to that of the Bible—and the beauty of its images, Boitani shows that these images penetrate deep into European culture, inspiring the anonymous author of the treatise on the Sublime as well as the mystical writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.
Plato’s account of the creation of the cosmos in the Timaeus supplants Hesiod’s myths and Parmenides’s theories—and was described by Johannes Kepler as the best gloss ever on the first chapter of Genesis. Boitani finds its echoes everywhere, from the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral and the frescoes of the Anagni Crypt to the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo. He connects the beauty defined in the Timaeus to the beauties of the Hebrew Bible and to the lilies of the field invoked by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Bringing together philosophy, theology, mysticism, poetry, sculpture and painting, Boitani charts Europe’s intellectual history—a history of ideas and images—by capturing the enduring reverberations of Plato’s summa. Illustrations accompanying the text cover more than two thousand years of iconography.
Piero Boitani is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome. A Fellow of the British Academy, of the Accademia dei Lincei and of the Medieval Academy of America, he received the Balzan Prize for Comparative Literature in 2016. General Editor of the Greek and Latin Writers series of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, he is the author of Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes of Recognition and Revelation in Western Literature, Il grande racconto dei classici, Plato’s Poem and other books of criticism and poetry.
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“Boitani is one of the last great European humanists—he seems to possess in his mind (and, as important, his spirit) virtually the whole of European literary, artistic, and philosophical culture, from ancient times through the Middle Ages and Renaissance and into the present. In Timaeus in Paradise, Boitani explores the crucial impact of Plato’s great dialogue—one of the only of his works to survive without a break from the ancient world through the Middle Ages—on European thought and visionary poetry, and above all Dante. More generally, Boitani returns the Timaeus to its just place in our own understanding of the past.”—Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
“This book brims with enthusiasm and originality. Works of literature, philosophy, theology, cosmology, psychology, biology and musical theory seamlessly merge to create an undefinable compound that is both as well argued as a literary essay and as intense as a work of poetry.”—Lino Pertile, Harvard University
“Modest in size, this book is nevertheless impressively vast in scope, tracing a path from Plato to Dante. The density of detail does not, however, make the book difficult to read: it is clearly organised, and broken up into short sections which are usually no more than three or four pages long. This is a book from which one can learn a lot.”—Jill Mann, University of Cambridge
“Piero Boitani is our premier bard of the longue durée, our chronicler of the transmission of the great myths and ideas and texts of the past as they make their way to us through the byways and crevices of time. Here the bard pens a love song to Plato’s Timaeus with its themes of beauty and creation: themes whose itinerary Boitani lovingly traces in this lyrical and erudite book, bringing them to safe harbor in Dante’s Paradiso.”—Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia University
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