Of Beauty and its Partition: Plato, Petrarch, Ficino

Abstract

This article focuses its attention on the issue of the definability of beauty; the author’s approach is based on the idea of the ‘Scheidung’, i.e., of the possible partition of the notion of beauty. In particular, Haas aims to show that the partition of beauty proposed by Marsilio Ficino in his commentary to Plato’s Hippias Major – beauty as decorum , utile , or gratia – can be fruitfully applied to an analysis of the sonnet XCV of Petrarch’s Canzoniere .