The lover’s eye: image and love in medieval-renaissance Europe and late imperial China

Abstract

The case study concerns the construction of the image of the beloved and the justification of the process of falling in love in European and Chinese texts. Analogies seem to confirm the universals in the human affective field: the sight is catalyst for love, in the sequence starting from the apparition of an image to the falling in love both in European and Chinese literatures. But behind this similar phenomenon different are explanations, ideological justifications and mythical references. Late Medieval and Renaissance European poetry developed a representation of love process which became a kind of conventional motif in the rhetoric of love. This rich tradition linking love to sight as a channel for falling in love, and to the glance as a vehicle for seduction could be traced back to Plato (Phaedrus) and Aristotle’s optical theory. From Chretien de Troyes to Dolce stil novo poets and later eyes may have a double catalyst function, according to intromissional and extramissional theories. These two elements of the image and its re-construction by memory and rumination can be found in the Chinese legend of the man of letters who falls in love by contemplating a female image painted on a screen, from the story “Zhu Ao” 朱敖 to Feng Menglong’s Zhenzhen 真真 and Pu Songling’s “Wall Fresco” (Huabi 畫壁), but the image can play various roles, like in the case of Phoenix Sprite 鳳仙. Thus, in front of various analogies, the elaboration of the philosophical, cosmic and physiological explanations follow different ways: in Medieval and Renaissance Europe the phantasma plays an important role, in a dialectical tension between body and soul. In late Ming-early Qing tales, the fantasmatic process, which involves imagination and memory is rather associated with the concept of the illusory nature of passions and desires and the cultivation process within the Neo-Confucian and Buddhist doctrines.