Harford, John Scandrett: The life of Michael Angelo Buonarroti: with translations of many of his poems and letters : also memoirs of Savonarola, Raphael,, and Vittoria Colonna (Band 2) (London: Longman, 1858)

124 LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO.

was the inspiring principle of his Art, so the love
of Beauty, or of the Beautiful, was the favourite
theme of his muse. In many of his sonnets he
personifies it as a mistress whose charms captivate
his heart, and whose smiles or frowns form the
felicity or the misery of his existence.
Here, again, we must follow him into the groves
of Academus. Plato defines Love to be the desire
of the Beautiful — so that the end and object of
true Love is true and perfect Beauty, which,
according to the doctrine he puts into the mouth
of Diotima in " the Banquet," is not physical but
intellectual.
Plato supposed that sensible things were fashioned
according to the patterns of Eternal ideas in the
Divine Intellect. Among these he assigned a pre-
eminent place to Beauty. Xenophon also, in the
fourth book of his " Memorabilia," carefully dwells
upon the high attributes of Intellectual as opposed
to mere Physical Beauty ; and the Greeks have
woven the whole into a fable which supposes the
existence of two Venuses, and therefore two Loves ;
one, and the elder, without a mother, the daughter
of Heaven, who is called the celestial Venus — the
other, the younger, daughter of Jupiter and Dione,
who is termed the terrestrial Venus. Hence there
are, according to them, two species of love cor-
responding to these opposite deities, the one hea-
venly, the other earthly. The heavenly Venus is
said by Plato to be prior to Japhet and Saturn;