The Anatomy of Melancholy

For it is not the eye itself that incites lust, but an “adulterous eye,” as Peter calls it in his second epistle, 2:14: a wanton, roving, lustful eye, the wandering eye Isaiah condemns in 3:16. Christ himself and the Virgin Mary had most beautiful eyes—as lovely, Barradius says, as those of anyone who ever lived—but also so modest and chaste that whoever looked at them was freed from burning lust, if we may believe Gerson and Bonaventure. There was no antidote like the Virgin Mary’s face. It is not the eye, but how it is used, that causes such effects.

When Pallas, Juno and Venus sought Paris’s favour and the golden apple, as elegantly described in Apuleius’s delightful interlude, Juno came majestically onto the stage and Minerva gravely. But Venus “stood charmingly, smiling sweetly, while the most gracious Graces attended upon the goddess,” and so on. She entered smiling, with her gracious Graces and exquisite music, as though dancing, “and sometimes dancing with her eyes alone.” That was the chief thing: she danced with her roving eyes, the brokers and heralds of her suit. So she boasts in a modern poet:

Soon I could make my brow rule tyrannically, And force the world to pay homage to my eyes.

The eye is a secret orator, the first go-between, “love’s gateway.” Secret looks, winks, glances and smiles serve as dialogues: often lovers arrange the match and understand each other before speaking a word. Euryalus and Lucretia were thus mutually captivated through the eyes and ready to welcome one another before they had ever spoken together. He asked for her favour with his eyes; she “assented,” giving consent with a pleasing look.

That Thracian Rhodope was so skilful in this silent rhetoric that, Calasiris says, if she so much as looked at almost anyone, she would bewitch him and he could not possibly escape. For, as Salvian observes, “the eyes are the windows of our souls, through which, as through so many channels, all unchaste desire enters our hearts.” They reveal our thoughts and, as the saying goes, “the face is the index of the mind”: but the eye is the index of the face.

Why do you look with such shameless eyes? And so on.

I may say the same of smiling, gait, exposed parts of the body, appealing gestures and so on. Laughter is an attribute peculiar to human beings, and smiling is ordinary; but those feigned, composed, affected, artful, exchanged smiles—those answering smiles—are silent displays and foretastes of greater things, mostly used to entice and deceive. Yet many foolish lovers are repeatedly mistaken and led into a fool’s paradise.

For if they merely see a pretty young woman laugh, look pleasant, or use gracious words or gestures, they take it all personally, as done in their favour: surely she loves them; she is willing, yielding, and so on.

When a fool sees a pretty young woman smile, The simpleton thinks that she wants to love him.

When a fool sees a pretty young woman smile, He thinks she loves him; it is only a lure.

They make an art of it, as the poet tells us,

Who would believe it? Girls even learn to laugh, And seek attractiveness in this too.