Silva, mater, foemina. La materia y su simbología entre filosofía clásica y cristianismo

Abstract

This essay examines some of the symbolic meanings attributed to the concept of matter and how they are embodied in works of art such as Michelangelo’s Day and Night, Gherardo delle Notti’s Adoration of the Christ Child, and Guido Reni’s Saint Joseph and the Christ Child, among others. Following an introduction that analyzes the iconographical significance of matter and form in Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel sculptures (§ 1), the second chapter explores the etymological association of matter (hýle) with forest (silva), a motif that, beginning with Calcidius, remained a constant in Latin philosophy. This discussion centers on Cristoforo Landino’s commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy – a work reflecting the cultural milieu in which Michelangelo created the Medici Chapel group – which compellingly and poetically restates this identification of matter with the forest (§ 2). The third chapter turns to the identification – first Platonic but further developed in the Aristotelian tradition – of matter with motherhood and the feminine. In this context, we examine the metaphysical constitution of man and woman and the way philosophy employed the family as a symbol of the basic ontological structure of reality. The family triad was interpreted as an image not only of form, matter, and composite, but also of eternity (father), the locus of time (mother), and the object of becoming (child). The chapter shows how Christianity adopted and reconfigured this structure, integrating it both into Trinitarian theology and into the symbolism of the Holy Family (§ 3). The essay concludes with some general reflections (§ 4).