Outer Beauty Inner Joy: Contemplating the Soul of the Renaissance [Hardcover]

Outer Beauty Inner Joyis a spiritual book. It seeks to give the reader space in which to contemplate and strengthen values that reason alone cannot reach. The Renaissance was an age of spiritual rediscovery of the art and wisdom of the ancients. Today in an age as fully dysfunctional and violent as the Renaissance itself we need to go on the same quest in our own time. We honor and revere the art of the Italian Renaissance, but not all of us are familiar with the philosophy that inspired it. The Renaissance was an explosion of beauty and art in Western history. It was also a time when writers and scholars like Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, and artists such as Leonardo, Boticelli, Tintoretto and Michaelangelo, were seeking a common thread among the world's ancient spiritual traditions. It was the beginning of a freer and more ecumenical way of looking at spirituality and at life. For Renaissance thinkers, the role of the artist and the making of art held an important place in society. Artists could contact unseen forces, bringing the beauty of higher realms into their earthly creations. Through contemplating this beauty, viewers too could touch its divine essence. Renaissance philosophers placed a new emphasis on the value of life: personal experiences with nature, art, and love could be ways of communing with the Divine here and now.Outer Beauty Inner Joyseeks through this selection of passages and images from some of the great writers and artists of the Italian Renaissance, to express the classic Renaissance ideal of beauty, and reveal an ecumenical wisdom; one that reaches across boundaries of different belief systems. Mixing contemporary values with the teachings of the ancients, Italian philosophers forged an inclusive, holistic philosophy. They spoke of a new way to experience life and a new understanding of the individual's place in the cosmos. What in the Renaissance was seen as the Anima Mundi, the divine essence which embraces and l3