 Eros in the Flesh: Petrarchan Desire, the Embodied Eros, and Male Beauty in Italian Art, 1500–1540 Stephen J. Campbell Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland So, he loves, yet he is at a loss as to what he loves. He neither knows what has happened to him nor can he explain it. He is like someone who has caught an eye infection from someone else and cannot account for it. He does not realize that he is seeing himself in his lover as in a mirror. When his lover is present, he feels the same cessation of pain that his lover does, and when his lover is away he again shares his lover’s longing and being longed for in the same way. He possesses an anteros, that is, the reflection of love, but he supposes it to be friendship rather than love and calls it that.  —Plato Over the past thirty years, art historical and literary scholarship has pro- ductively explored the relationship between the reading and imitation of Petrarch’s Italian poetry and the emergence of what has been called a ver- nacular aesthetic in Renaissance art.  The identification of canons of beauty common to poetry and painting has transformed the discussion of the Renaissance portrait, especially in the case of the portrayal of women. A large class of female portraits, especially (but not exclusively) of now anony- mous sitters, inhabits an ambiguous territory between resemblance to a his- torical individual and stylization toward an ideal of beauty, depicted accord- ing to the conventions of describing the beloved in Petrarchan poetry.  The poetic representation of woman as beloved object, whose extrinsic perfec- tions are the index of an interior manifestation of moral virtue, gave rise to a new kind of poetical painting, typified by Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci (ca. ) in Washington or Piero di Cosimo’s Simonetta Vespucci () in Chantilly, or Raphael’s so-called La Fornarina (ca. ) in Rome (see fig. ). A model of subjectivity elaborated by Petrarch, in which the subject Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35:3, Fall 2005. Copyright © by Duke University Press / 2005 / $2.00.