Timaeus in Paradise

Tracing the influence and impact of Plato's Timaeusand its major themes, creation and beautythrough the centuriesMore than two thousand years after it was written, Plato's Timaeus continues to fascinate and intrigue its readers. In Timaeus in Paradise, Piero Boitani traces the abiding legacy of the Timaeus, mapping an intellectual journey that begins with Plato and extends to Dante and beyond. In a series of short, lyrical chapters, Boitani sketches a lineage that includes Proclus, Boethius, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, John Scotus Eriugena and Thomas Aquinas. Focusing on Plato's metaphorical languagewhich Dante considered comparable to that of the Bibleand the beauty of its images, Boitani shows that these images penetrate deep into European culture, inspiring the anonymous author of the treatise on the Sublime as well as the mystical writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.Plato's account of the creation of the cosmos in the Timaeus supplants Hesiod's myths and Parmenides's theoriesand was described by Johannes Kepler as the best gloss ever on the first chapter of Genesis. Boitani finds its echoes everywhere, from the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral and the frescoes of the Anagni Crypt to the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo. He connects the beauty defined in the Timaeus to the beauties of the Hebrew Bible and to the lilies of the field invoked by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Bringing together philosophy, theology, mysticism, poetry, sculpture and painting, Boitani charts Europe's intellectual historya history of ideas and imagesby capturing the enduring reverberations of Plato's summa. Illustrations accompanying the text cover more than two thousand years of iconography.