Andrew Baker – Francesco Giorgi’s Harmony of the World. 08 March 2023

Andrew Baker takes us back to sixteenth-century Venice where Franciscans mingled with Orthodox Christians bringing Plato’s Dialogues from Constantinople and Jews bringing Kabbalistic texts from Spain. In a fascinating and beautifully illustrated talk on the Franciscan friar Francesco Giorgi’s De harmonia mundi (1525), he outlines the celestial, angelic and physical worlds. In a work of three cantos each comprising eight tones forming an octave, Giorgi depicts polyphonic harmony, the music of the spheres, and correlates the planets with the Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic tree. This late Renaissance vision of harmony predates the unrest of the Reformation years and presents a unity of being that would shortly be challenged as the Enlightenment heralded a more rational, scientific, and divisive approach to worldly life.

Was Shakespeare influenced by Giorgi and ideas of a potential synthesis between Christianity and Judaism in Christian Cabala, as suggested by Frances Yates? Or was the cosmic harmony between Christian Lorenzo and Jewish Jessica in The Merchant of Venice inspired by the writings of an Oxford fellow, John Case, contemporary to Shakespeare, who had read the thousand or so pages of Latin comprising De harmonia mundi?

Take your seat for a relaxing and enjoyable presentation without denying that the shadow side of harmony is discord and vice versa.

Report by Sue Lewis