Plato’s Persona
Plato’s Persona
Marsilio Ficino,
Renaissance Humanism,
and Platonic Traditions
Denis J.-J. Robichaud
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
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Published by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Robichaud, Denis J.-J.
Title: Plato’s persona : Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance
humanism, and Platonic traditions / Denis J.-J. Robichaud.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of
Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017033924 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4985-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Ficino, Marsilio, 1433–1499. | Plato. | Philosophy, Renaissance. | Humanism—Italy. | Platonists—Italy.
Classification: LCC B785.F434 R63 2018 | DDC 186/.4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033924
For Viveca
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Prosopon/Persona: Philosophy and Rhetoric
Chapter 2. Ficino and the Platonic Corpus
Chapter 4. Pythagoras and Pythagoreans
Appendix. Heuristic Prosopography of Ficino’s Pythagoreans
Introduction
His face was covered with a sanguine complexion and would present a graceful and placid countenance. His golden and curly hair would extend over his forehead.
—Giovanni Corsi, Life of Marsilio Ficino
I attempted during the previous days to paint the idea of the philosopher with Platonic colors. But if I had brought Plato himself before the public, certainly I would have pointed not to a certain picture of that idea of the true philosopher but rather to the idea of the true philosopher itself. Let us contemplate our Plato to see philosopher, philosophy and the idea itself together at the same time.
—Marsilio Ficino, from a public lecture that he gave in Florence,
which he later published as the De vita Platonis
Ficinus Personatus
Anyone with a passing acquaintance with Renaissance humanism and philosophy will know the name of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) and associate him with Platonism or Neoplatonism, the august Medici family, and the Platonic Academy of Florence, long thought to have been the central philosophical institution of the Renaissance city. Those who are a little more familiar with him will undoubtedly think of his achievement of completing the first full Latin translations, along with copious commentaries, of Plato’s dialogues and of Plotinus’s Enneads, of translating numerous other Platonists, such as Alcinous, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Synesius, Priscianus Lydus, and Michael Psellus, or perhaps of translating Dante’s Monarchia. They will certainly think of Ficino’s celebrated and influential commentary on the Symposium, the De amore—a work that inspired the learned community of Europe during the Renaissance, as well as volumes of modern scholarship on the arts from the period. Some may know that Ficino also published a number of translations of and commentaries on works that are now considered pseudonymous, including the Corpus Hermeticum, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and the Pythagorean Symbola and Aurea verba (as well as works attributed to Speusippus and Xenocrates). His translation of the largest corpus of Neopythagorean philosophy, Iamblichus’s De secta Pythagorica, was formerly thought to be lost but survives in manuscripts, as do his translations of Theon of Smyrna’s Mathematica and Hermias’s commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus.1 His translations of the Orphic Hymns are now lost, and only highly fragmentary evidence survives for his Latin renditions of Proclus’s Elements of Theology and Elements of Physics.2
It
