6. The Artist as Second God. The Renaissance con-
cept of the divino artista (“the divine artist”) had a
double root. On the one hand, it was derived from
Plato's theory of the furores, the inspired madness of
which seers and poets are possessed; on the other hand,
it looked back to the medieval idea of God the Father
as artist, as architect of the universe. When, as early
as 1436, Leon Battista Alberti suggested in his treatise
On Painting that the artist may well consider himself,
as it were, another god, an alter deus, he was probably
prompted by the medieval deus artifex. Whatever his
source, the simile suggested that the artist was divorced
from the rank and file of “normal” people.
The tertium comparationis between God and the
poet or artist is the act of creation. This was often
expressed (for examples, Zilsel, 1926). Leonardo called
the artist signore e Dio (Ludwig, 1888; Panofsky, 1962),
while Scaliger (Poetics, 1561) returned to Alberti's
dictum: the poet was “as it were a second god” (velut
alter deus). Similarly, the influential Lomazzo in an-
other work, Trattato... (1584), regarded the fare e
creare of the painter as a lower form of divine activity.
The epithet “divine” (divus, divino) for living poets
or artists appears rarely before the sixteenth century
(Zilsel [1926], p. 276); it becomes more common with
the diffusion of Renaissance Neo-Platonism. The su-
preme example is, of course, Michelangelo, whom
Aretino addressed as “divine” and to whose name
Ariosto gave a fashionable meaning in the punning
verse
Michael più che mortal>
Angel divino
(“Michael more than mortal/ Angel Divine”)that was in every one's mouth and is still a standard
quotation. Francisco de Hollanda poignantly charac-
terized the new position by saying: “In Italy one does
not care for the renown of great princes, it's a painter
only that they call divine.”
The concept of the divinity of artistic creation lives
on (Kris and Kurz, 1934) and reappears imaginatively
and forcefully in Shaftesbury's Platonic vision of ar-
tistic inspiration as “divine enthusiasm.” Shaftesbury,
who according to Ernst Cassirer (1932; 1955) rescued
the term “genius” “from the confusion and ambiguity
that had previously attached to it,” goes on to charac-
terize the inspired poet, the real Master, as “a second
Maker; a just Prometheus under Jove.” The idea of
the divine metaphysical power of genius became an
inalienable part of English and also Continental con-
siderations—“Genius has ever been supposed to par-
take of something Divine,” “Genius is from Heaven,
Learning from man” (Young, 1759). Meanwhile, the
Prometheus motif as presented by Shaftesbury influ-
enced German thought with archetypal power. This
story was fully explored in a classic paper by Oskar
F. Walzel (1910).
