Maurice Scève

This spiritual love, which animated Antoine Héroet's Parfaicte Amye (1543) as well, owed much to Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine translator and commentator of Plato's works.

Scève's chief works are Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu (1544); five anatomical blazons; the elegy Arion (1536) and the eclogue La Saulsaye (1547); and Microcosme (1562), an encyclopaedic poem beginning with the fall of man.

His father was a Lyonnese lawyer and municipal officer who served as Lyon's ambassador to the court upon the accession of François I to the throne, giving the family a strong social standing in the city.

Le Sourcil ("The Eyebrow") and La Larme ("The Tear") were submitted as a part of a contest organized by Marot while in exile in Ferrara; the former was judged the winner, gaining notoriety for Scève in both France and Italy.

[5] Scève was a well versed musician as well as a poet; he cared very much for the musical value of the words he used, in this and in his erudition he forms a link between the school of Marot and the Pléiade.