Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet
An interesting friendship existed also between Sidney and the well-known French Protestant, Hubert Languet—many years his senior—whose conversation and correspondence helped much in the formation of Sidney’s character. These two had shared together the perils of the massacre of S. Bartholomew, and had both escaped from France across the Rhine to Germany, where they lived in close intimacy at Frankfort for a length of time; and after this a warm friendship and steady correspondence—varied by occasional meetings—continued between the two until Languet’s death. Languet had been Professor of Civil Law at Padua, and from 1550 forwards was recognised as one of the leading political agents of the Protestant Powers.
“The elder man immediately discerned in Sidney a youth of no common quality, and the attachment he conceived for him savoured of romance. We possess a long series of Latin letters from Languet to his friend, which breathe the tenderest spirit of affection, mingled with wise counsel and ever watchful thought for the young man’s higher interests.... There must have been something inexplicably attractive in his [Sidney’s] person and his genius at this time; for the tone of Languet’s correspondence can only be matched by that of Shakespeare in the sonnets written for his unknown friend.” Sir Philip Sidney, English Men of Letters Series, pp. 27, 28.
Of this relation Fox Bourne says:—
“No love-oppressed youth can write with more earnest passion and more fond solicitude, or can be troubled with more frequent fears and more causeless jealousies, than Languet, at this time 55 years old, shows in his letters to Sidney, now 19.”
Giordano Bruno
It may be appropriate here to introduce two or three sonnets from Michel Angelo (b. 1475). Michel Angelo, one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, artist of the Italian Renaissance, was deeply imbued with the Greek spirit. His conception of Love was close along the line of Plato’s. For him the body was the symbol, the expression, the dwelling place of some divine beauty. The body may be loved, but it should only be loved as a symbol, not for itself. Diotima in the Symposium had said that in our mortal loves we first come to recognise (dimly) the divine form of beauty which is Eternal. Maximus Tyrius (Dissert. xxvi. 8) commenting on this, confirms it, saying that nowhere else but in the human form, “the loveliest and most intelligent of bodily creatures,” does the light of divine beauty shine so clear. Michel Angelo carried on the conception, gave it noble expression, and held to it firmly in the midst of a society which was certainly willing enough to love the body (or try to love it) merely for its own sake. And Giordano Bruno (b. 1550) at a later date wrote as follows:—
“All the loves—if they be heroic and not purely animal, or what is called natural, and slaves to generation as instruments in some way of nature—have for object the divinity, and tend towards divine beauty, which first is communicated to, and shines in, souls, and from them or rather through them is communicated to bodies; whence it is that well-ordered affection loves the body or corporeal beauty, insomuch as it is an indication of beauty of spirit.” Gli Eroici Furori (dial. iii. 13), trans. L. Williams.