“Tout cela qui vit dessous la nue…” The Cloud as a Structuring Element of Ronsard’s Cosmologic Space

The scientific ambition of the Œuvres finds in the clouds a pattern with a fecund plasticity. Both a knowledge instrument and a science object, they put structure into the ronsardian space establishing a perceptible, almsot tangible, line in the aerial space, and in between the sublunary world and the supralunary world. They fit in the meteorological operation of the cosmos, of which they reveal the balance and unity.