Anima in the Renaissance

Excerpt - James Hillman

Renaissance psychology does not end in death—it only begins there. From this position comes the leap into life and the embrace of shadow and soul. The preoccupation with the shadow, the profound sense of evil, misery, and life's short wick was joined in Florentine philosophy with its ruling idea: welfare of soul. What a curious marriage, what extraordinary double truth—inhumanity and soul together! What sharper contrast between human and psyche could there be? Renaissance morality did not divide soul-making from the deep inhumanity and pathologizing processes in the soul itself.

This deeper psychology, in which the pathologized and inhuman shadow were prime movers, worshiped the images of soul with a productive passion we have since come to consider unique in history. Anima reigned in Renaissance Italy. She appears in a superb variety of personifications which both evoke the emotions of soul and present soul embodied to the imaginal eye. The images range from those familiar to us in Renaissance paintings of Mary, especially as the young Virgin, to the Goddess Flora and her counterpart, the Plague Virgin, who spread poison. Boccaccio wrote an instructive compendium of feminism using the biographies of all the legendary women of myth and history as his models. For Petrarch anima appears in Laura, for Dante in Beatrice, and there were those marvelous figures of (pagan) Armida in Tasso and Angelica (who goes off with the pagans) in Ariosto, and the delicious (pagan) divinities whom Botticelli painted “because,” as he said, “they were not real”; and the soul passion in Michelangelo’s lyrics.