I spent several hours trying to find a title for the course I am preparing for November, a title that would be anything but “Anima Mundi.” First, because I never studied Latin: I am an omo sanza lettere, a “man without letters,” as Leonardo da Vinci said of himself (modestly). And then because I always get a certain itch when someone introduces themselves with a Latin tag, usually in a WhatsApp status. But “The Soul of the World” sounded too esoteric to me, vaguely New Age or, worse, suggestive of Christian spirituality. God forbid! Not even artificial intelligence managed to help me find something truly apposite to what I wanted to express. I have clearly run out of prompts. In short, after trying all sorts of alternatives, the only title that really seemed to work was precisely that damned Latin phrase.

Why, then, “Anima Mundi” for a series of meetings about the Renaissance? Well, type those keywords into a browser and the answer appears at once: Marsilio Ficino. The hunchbacked, melancholy fellow who, in fifteenth-century Florence, thought it would be a good idea to complicate his life by writing books about the soul, where soul means something very different from that little ghost that lives, no one quite knows where, inside us and that, when our body dies, comes out in a blue fart and heads down into a circle of Hell or up there into the highest heavens, depending on how good we have been. Ficino pursued a chimera: to read, understand, translate and write books about the ancient Greek philosophy that, from Plato to the advent of Christianity, had given the peoples living around the Mediterranean a way to name certain abstract ideas. There was, however, one small problem: the Church. Which is, after all, a system and, as such, over the previous thousand years had systematised the philosophical questions Christ had left unanswered (roughly 99 percent), placing Plato inside that system while keeping all the nonsense about gods, astrology, magic and the rest of it under close surveillance.

Ficino, like most philosophers and thinkers, was obviously not some kind of messiah who arrived to reveal the truth to a flock of ignorant sheep. I prefer to think of him as a poet, an artist or a musician: someone with a particular kind of highly sensitive antennae, able to pick up the cultural climate around him and condense it in his work (a poet with a questionable sense of prose, because his writings are, at times, formidably sophisticated doorstops, editor’s note). But I have no intention of inflicting Ficino’s doorstop on anyone, not least because I lack the necessary erudition. Ficino is certainly an important figure, without whom it would be hard to talk about Botticelli’s paintings and still sleep soundly at night. More importantly, he also gives me a name for a process, a movement, that had already been under way for some time in this land where I am fortunate enough to live, roughly between Fiesole, the Arno valley and the Etruscan hills. And this movement, this return, is what I would call the return of soul to the world.

If that sounds rather New Age, I can hardly complain. But I can immediately reassure you that I am not proposing a spiritual retreat with kundalini yoga sessions designed to tap into chthonic energies on a plastic mat. What I would like to share with anyone willing to listen is the idea that, through art (that is, the most spontaneous way we have of imagining the world), we can literally see how, at a certain moment and in this particular place, artists, poets and anyone who knew how to make something staged a new imagination of the world: an animate world, in which all of nature is full of soul. Not only animals, then: plants have soul, rivers have soul, rocks have soul. Just as people once thought. It is enough to descend into an Etruscan tomb to see and feel this vitality being celebrated, the soul spread over the world like a sheet. This thing that, with very little precision, we call the Renaissance seems to want to return there, to that place where soul has not yet been separated from the world. Before this soul was torn from the world and placed inside us or somewhere up there in the highest heavens, a creature of the Creator.

With Sunday spirituality out of the way, the whole thing may now sound vaguely ecological. Certainly, with this series of meetings I would like to speak to people who, like me, live in the present and face every day what appears to be the problem of our time: the ecological crisis (although perhaps AI will make us extinct first and I am completely mistaken). For me, art is active citizenship, political in the most literal sense of the word. I would therefore like to contribute something to our own time instead of remaining suspended in April 1478. Because it seems to me that ecological thought today is rich in necessary ideas such as health, sustainability and scientific progress, but still speaks far too little about beauty. So, alongside Gaia, the green-haired Great Mother who carries us in her blue womb, I would place Aphrodite, the naked and sensual goddess who calls to us with her beauty and makes us fall in love with the beauty that runs through the world. Speaking about art could then become an aesthetic exercise: training the muscle that perceives beauty, then turning it back upon the world. Because a feeling of beauty is already enough to make the world a sacred place, full of soul. And if you wreck something sacred, you desecrate it: you profane it.

But mine is not an ecological intention. I have no desire to save the world, partly because I do not believe the world needs saving. The reason I enjoy standing before a sculpture by Donatello is that this stuff makes me feel alive, fully aware. Strange how a roughly soldered piece of bronze can make you sense that some of the soul you think you possess is actually there, inside that piece of bronze.

I will bring together ideas, thoughts and images that serious people keep apart. I will speak of Donatello and Boccaccio, Saint Francis, Giotto, the Medici and Savonarola, friars and heretics, and many others (alas, history gives me very few women to add to that sentence) who, from the thirteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth, right here in Florence, contaminated this world with their dangerous images. I will slip in a little archaeology, anthropology and, above all, psychology, because the best ideas in this course obviously do not come from me, but from authors I like to drag in by the feet, James Hillman for instance, who so deeply inspired my way of looking at art. Besides, it would be rather funny to speak about soul, psychē in Greek, without speaking about psychology. And then I will speak about plants, woods, gardens and palaces. And then myths, gods, heroes, nymphs and satyrs, and their stories of victories, betrayals, metamorphoses, rapes and deceptions. For Ficino, it is precisely soul that holds together the mud of matter and the light of the divine, in that act of love he calls Copula Mundi. A beautiful love story, in short: between soul and the world.