Human and animal in the Renaissance eye

AbstractAlthough the Venetian senator and horse enthusiast Marino Garzoni (fl. 1688–92) was motivated in part to write his L'arte di ben conoscere e distinguere le qualità de’ cavalli, d'introdurre, e conservare una razza nobile, e di resanare il cavallo da mali… [The Art of Knowing and Distinguishing the Qualities of Horses Well, and Establishing and Preserving a Noble Race, and of Healing the Horse of Sicknesses . . .] (1692) as a memorial to his beloved Turkish horse, which Garzoni had prematurely lost, Garzoni vehemently asserted that animals and humans could not form the bond of friendship. Yet Garzoni argued in his description of the physical characteristics of the ideal horse that its eyes ought to be ‘black, large, clear, jovial, placid and human’. This article examines Garzoni's arguments in relation to discourses about eyes and eye colour in contemporary hippological literature as well as texts on human diversity, aesthetics and physiognomy, considering conceptions of the geohumoral conditioning responsible for specific eye colours and the perceptions of associated character traits. The physical variety found in both horses and humans was perceived to be an indication of the nobility and subjectivity of these species. Garzoni's physical specifications for the ideal horse attest to the fact that for the horse, as for the human, the eyes are the windows to the soul, the avenue by which horses and humans communicate and form emotive bonds, which Garzoni conceived of in terms that largely map onto relations between the sexes. Nevertheless, Garzoni's notion of the ideal horse's eyes reveals the degree to which this species conjoins masculine and feminine traits, characteristics suggesting that it accepts and also always partially resists human government.