The Crystal Heart

Love, Poetry, and Portraiture in Renaissance Italy

Bolzoni, Lina

In his Canzoniere, Petrarch evokes the image of the “crystal heart” as a metaphor for a correspondence between the inner self and external appearance. Expanding on the classical theme of the soul’s open window, the metaphor of the crystal heart embodies the utopia of amorous transparency, conveying the desire to cast aside the barriers between interior and exterior, between emotion and expression, rendering love perfectly visible from the outside. Using this image as a heuristic tool, Lina Bolzoni takes us into an original investigation of Renaissance literature and portraiture. Focusing on and taking as a departure point Pietro Bembo’s famous dialogue on love, the Asolani (first published in 1505), Bolzoni guides us into a meaningful exploration of love poetry and prose, letters, paintings, mirrors, and medals. Barriers fixed by the critical tradition fall along the way, for words, images, and objects, far from being relegated to their own spheres, refer constantly back and forth to one another, their interconnections woven together into refined and secret rituals that disclose the centrality of love in Italian Renaissance culture and society. Bolzoni’s magistral book reveals not only the pivotal role played by a reflection on love in the creation of a new court society, and of the early-modern courtier, but also love’s inextricable bond with friendship and the pleasures of interpretation.