Medicamenti della Memoria e Medicamenti dell'Anima: ferita amorosa e carnalità tra Ficino e Patrizi

Marsilio Ficino, in his commentary on Plato’s Symposium (c. 1469), analyzed the amorous illness. On the other hand, Francesco Patrizi, in an unpublished youthful dialogue, Il Delfino overo del bacio (c. 1555), proposed a rewriting of the Ficinian love paradigm. The aim of this article is to show how the peculiar mixture of medicine, physiology and philosophy presented by Ficino was inverted by Patrizi, with large textual reprints from the Ficinian text. The body and carnality no longer constituted an obstacle to the correct ascent of the Platonic scala amoris but, if used wisely, they concurred towards the full realization of integral human nature.