Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/98

76 vehement sentiments there were two great traditional types, either of which an Italian of the sixteenth century might have followed. There was Dante, whose little book of the 'Vita Nuova' had early become a pattern of imaginative love, maintained somewhat feebly by the later Petrarchists; and since Plato had become something more than a name in Italy by the publication of the Latin translation of his works by Marsilio Ficino, there was the Platonic tradition also. Dante's belief in the resurrection of the body, through which even in heaven Beatrice loses for him no tinge of flesh-colour or fold of raiment even, and the Platonic dream of the passage of the soul through one form of life after another, with its passionate haste to escape from the burden of bodily form altogether, are, for all effects of art or poetry, principles diametrically opposite. And it is the Platonic tradition rather than Dante's that has moulded Michelangelo's verse. In many ways no sentiment could have been less like Dante's love for Beatrice than Michelangelo's for Vittoria Colonna. Dante's comes in early youth; Beatrice is a child, with the wistful ambiguous vision of a child, with a character still unaccentuated by the influence of outward circumstances, almost expressionless. Vittoria is a woman already weary, in advanced age, of grave intellectual qualities. Dante's story is a piece of