This article considers readings of Aristophanes' tale of the Androgyne from Plato's Symposium in Marsilio Ficino's De amore (Commentary on Plato's Symposium) (1484), Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore (Dialogues on Love) (1535), and Pico della Mirandola's Commento sopra una canzone d'amore (Comment on a Love Song) (1487). Against the backdrop of the so-called "heterosexualization" of Platonic love in Renaissance Italy, sections 1 and 2 will examine in turn the authors' precise textual handling of gender as they sought to dissolve Aristophanes' identification of superior masculinity with male homosexuality, defending the former yet rejecting the latter. Bringing to light a close and mutually destabilizing relationship between sexual anxieties and constructed gender identities in the period, the influence of their works will be considered in section 3 through sixteenth-century trattati d'amore (treatises of love) and a new interpretation of Raphael's Portrait of Bindo Altoviti. A cross-cultural axis of deliberately constructed gender ambiguity emerges, problematizing the gendering of the erotic object of desire and thus the stability of the "heterosexual" character of reformed sixteenth-century Platonic love.
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