Barbaro’s initial accusation forces Pico’s philosopher to give a public defense for his office on his own terms without an advocate, which is exactly what Socrates repeatedly claimed the philosopher would never be able to do, stressing the uselessness of philosophy for the public life.55 Through these layers and inversions of personifications Pico and Barbaro debate central questions regarding philosophical writing, asking in what style philosophy should be written, does philosophy’s formalized, even artificial language clarify or obscure its content, and, simply, what counts as philosophical language?
Pico’s philosopher defines these questions by contrasting philosophical and rhetorical language. What is a rhetorician’s duty, he asks, if not to lie, deceive, trick, turn things upside down? The orator changes white into black, black into white, and magically changes his face and appearance. “Does he not mislead just as larvae and simulacra projected onto the mind of the audience to mislead them? Will this person have something in common with the philosopher, whose zeal is completely turned towards the knowledge and demonstration of truth to others?”56 The rhetorician’s art is better suited to forensic questions than to the Academy. Pico’s barbarian continues, “Do you not know that not all things made in the same fabric are appropriate to all? I’ll admit that eloquence is filled with lures and delight is indeed elegant, but it is neither acceptable nor fit for the decorum of a philosopher. Who does not esteem a soft step, graceful hands, and playful eyes in an actor or a dancer? But in a citizen, a philosopher, who does not disapprove, complain, and loathe the same features?”57 What one says and how one says it must suit the situation, time, place, and audience. If the rhetorician is to retain and present a prediscursive persona in his speech (instead of being nothing but a deceitful magician), his discourse must conform to his natural character. Playing with the imagery of fabric as the textus of speech, Pico’s letter conveys the idea that one’s style of speech must suit one’s style of life, just as one ought to wear clothes appropriate to the occasion. In this case, it is a philosopher’s style of life that is at stake. In the end, Pico’s performance as a scholastic philosopher orating in beautiful Latin to make his case destabilizes any fully defined notion of decorum.
Glossaries of the Dead: Gianfrancesco Pico and Bembo
Before turning to Ficino’s own epistolography I think it important to examine a final exchange of letters, dated 1512–13—one of the most famous exhanges on the issue of Ciceronianism—between Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1470–1533), the nephew of Giovanni Pico, and Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) on the question of imitation.58 Their correspondence serves as a capstone to the previous debates, not so much because they have the final say on the question of Ciceronianism—in fact Erasmus reignited the question among a wider European audience—but because they recapitulate Poliziano’s and Cortesi’s as well as Giovanni Pico’s and Barbaro’s epistles while adding their own arguments. Most important, they bring some of the Platonic preoccupations latent in the two previous exchanges to light.
On the surface Bembo suggests that he is generally in agreement with Cortesi for arguing that one ought to imitate Cicero in prose (as well as Virgil in poetry) and claims that Gianfrancesco Pico is in Poliziano’s camp for defending eclecticism. Despite protesting that their disagreement is different from Poliziano and Cortesi’s, Gianfrancesco Pico picks up where Poliziano left off by discussing Ciceronian liniamenta. The fact that he employs the term liniamenta on seven occasions further underscores that their debate is also centred on the notion of the rhetorical persona. Gianfrancesco Pico, moreover, argues in more explicit terms than the two previous groups of letters for the existence of a prediscursive persona. Given that he was one of the first close readers of Sextus Empiricus, Giovanni Pico is usually described as a skeptic or fideist dogmatist rather than a Platonist. Nevertheless, he articulates at the outset of the controversy’s first letter the importance of Plato (whose position he compares broadly to that of Cicero and Horace) for their debate.
One finds out from Gianfrancesco Pico’s letters that a Platonic approach to rhetoric entails two related positions: an epistemological theory of innatism, according to which one naturally possesses inborn reasons or forms of ideas in one’s ingenium, and a metaphysical theory that persons have interior souls and minds. The younger Pico says, “Perhaps some will say that we should concentrate on imitating those who please us the most. I would not disagree with this advice. Plato may please you more than others; so may Cicero who is Platonic not only in his views but also in style. We should follow them. For although the features (face; facies animi) of each person’s soul, like those of his body, are so proper to him that it is difficult to find two that are completely alike, our souls are still less dissimilar to some than to others, and it will therefore be easier for us to become like them.”59 In his first letter, arguing that one ought to emulate all good writers, the younger Pico also stresses the reliance on one’s singular innate conception of beauty and eloquence over multiple models. With this in mind he values the free discovery of ingenium in rhetoric, and accordingly prioritizes inventio over dispositio, elocutio, memoria, or pronuntiatio in the stages of rhetorical composition: “I don’t think there is any need to talk about memory or pronunciation, since neither of these is set down on paper.”60
Both authors seek to delineate the method of rhetorical composition (scribendi ratio, to use Bembo’s terminology), but contrary to Gianfrancesco Pico’s Platonic appeal to one’s natural ingenium, Bembo puts forward the case that to become eloquent one needs ars and imitative exercises:
But it’s your business if you see in your soul an idea and form of writing planted there and handed down by nature. I can speak to you only of my soul. I saw no form of style in it, no pattern of discourse before I developed myself in mind and thought by reading the books of the ancients over the course of many years, by long labor, practice and exercise. Since something should be said about this, I now turn to that topic. I see by thought, as though with my eyes, from what source to take the highest example which I need to compose some piece of writing. Yet, before I engaged in the thoughts I mention, I too used to look no less into my soul and to seek, as in a mirror, some likeness I might use to compose what I wanted. But there was no likeness in my soul, nothing presented itself to me; I saw nothing.61
Instead of looking into the interior mirror of his soul, Bembo self-fashions his rhetorical persona on Cicero’s likeness, which he sees externally before his eyes (ante oculos).62 To put it succinctly, for Bembo there seems to be no prediscursive persona.
These epistolary exchanges illustrate how much humanist Latin imitative practices are also dominated by prosopopoeia. The debates over Ciceronianism and the question de genere dicendi philosophorum investigate what it means to fabricate one’s own persona. Continuing Poliziano’s discussion of Cicero’s liniamenta, and Giovanni Pico and Barbaro’s examination of decorum, Gianfrancesco Pico and Bembo consciously draw on the correspondence between text, clothes, and body, but more importantly on the correspondence between a rhetorical persona and a human face, to make their case. For instance, Gianfrancesco Pico describes Ciceronians who base their style on one sole model as wishing to copy all aspects of a human face, including scars, warts, and the like.63 With such a method, he reasons, they attempt to raise Cicero from the dead and give his texts a voice. Yet Gianfrancesco Pico’s philological sensitivity also leads him to believe that some of Cicero’s texts, like decaying corpses, may have been corrupted in the great span of time that separates him from Cicero’s age. “If Cicero were revived from the dead, he would deny that they had taken these words from him. Or they pay careful regard even to what booksellers have published, who corrupt the integrity of the text throughout in the process.”64
Bembo’s reply to Gianfrancesco Pico’s criticism instead argues that Pico’s eclecticism corrupts Cicero’s body. It takes some of his facial features and some from others, and grafts together their skin, bones, eyes, mouth into a grisly human mask-something like Victor Frankenstein’s creation, which is certainly far from elegant. For Bembo, each part ought to fit into a harmonious whole: “What is good and excellent
