Published in The Medieval Aesthetics

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Of the multiple influences that Plato’s philosophy has had on Renaissance thought, in this paper we are interested in focusing on a specific and even minimal question, namely, that reference to the silens that appears in Sympsium (215b-c). In our work we propose, then, to trace the presence of the concept of Silenus in three authors: Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467-1436) and Giordano Bruno (1542-1600). We will stop, in this way, in the famous Epistle that Pico sent to Ermolao Barbaro in 1485 and that is part of the De Genere dicendi philosophorum, in the monumental Adagia of Erasmus, especially in the adage 2201, Sileni Albibiadis, and in the dialogues Spaccio de la bestia trionfante and Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo by Giordano Bruno. The Silens, as is well known, are hollow figurines, horrible looking, disgusting and despicable, inside which are full of gems, exotic jewels and precious. Our research aims to show that, according to the selected authors, this is the philosopher’s own way of seeing himself, his aesthetics –whose most finished and original example is Socrates– and, by extension, the way of being proper to philosophy.