Most people wouldn’t think of the pagan goddess of love as a symbol of concord and balance. Certainly not the Romans, who saw only her frankly carnal nature, let alone Augustine or Neoplatonists of the Middle Ages. But in the 1400s, the poets and scholars at the Florentine Academy did—just as she and her allegorical entourage in Botticelli’s painting symbolized the concord between ancient and modern thought. What Ficino had proved (or at least seemed to prove) was that there was no real clash between Christian and pagan systems of theology. In the end, they arose from the same source: the
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