All his virtues, but also his faults (if he has any) go together to make up his style. If we consider the faces of men, one reflects a kind of character; another, a lively nature; another, courage; another, a fertile intelligence; another, grandeur; another, charm. Yet individual characteristics come not only from the shape of one’s eyes, eyebrows, mouth, cheeks or the quality of any other part, but each is constituted of all the parts and members of its own face.”65 To do otherwise would create a polycephalic monster, like Homer’s deceitful Proteus.66
In his second letter to Bembo, Gianfrancesco Pico cedes him neither the point nor even the imagery. Once more he compares strict Ciceronian imitators to false necromancers who try to resurrect Cicero:
But go on and imagine that you are Apelles or have raised Zeuxis, Phidias, Praxiteles, Lysippus and Pyrgoteles from the underworld to reproduce for you not the garments but the body of Cicero. For when these great artists have used brush, chisel or the art of metal-casting and have set the image of Cicero himself before your eyes (sub oculos), they will have performed their duty. Yet this Cicero will be painted or marble or bronze, not flesh. I’ll even grant something more: that they equal Cicero’s flesh through imitation. But shouldn’t we think that the only true Cicero was his soul and spirit which informed his flesh—the Cicero who envisioned the form of oratory in his soul, added living strength and grace to it and then expressed all these spiritual motions through the medium of his tongue? So whoever supposes that they have acquired the living tongue of Cicero should bear in their mind Cicero’s conceptions; they should have experience and knowledge, moreover, of a great many important affairs. Otherwise, if they lack the Tullian spirit, Cato may call them “Glossaries of the Dead” (mortuaria glossaria).67
Cicero is dead, his soul is extinguished, and his voice silenced. Ciceronians who wish to resuscitate him, employing rhetorical enargeia by placing his persona before our eyes (sub oculos), or who wish to give him his voice again, trying to revive a lost orality from his surviving writings, do nothing more than become mortuaria glossaria.68 The death masks of Cicero that they fabricate with texts are really “larvae, phantoms or vanishing shades, rather than men, for they lack the strength and spirit of living beings.”69 Like Socrates wishing to dispel the fear of the mormolukeion by turning the mask upside down to show that there is nothing on its reverse, so Gianfrancesco Pico wishes to do the same by flipping the Ciceronian mask to reveal that it is in fact a larva, an empty horror mask. Yet, one should remember that this is also Bembo’s point: when he looks inside himself for a prediscursive persona he claims to find none. Much of their debate hinges on a specific passage from Cicero’s Orator: “In fashioning the best orator I shall construct such a one as perhaps has never existed.”70 Gianfrancesco Pico interprets this passage to mean that Cicero denies that the best orator ever existed in history; he therefore points to an interior Platonic ideal. Bembo understands this passage to say that no such ideal orator ever existed or ever will exist (in history or in the mind), and so one can only look outside oneself for imitative models.
For Bembo, the adoption of a rhetorical persona is not simply a question of donning a ready-made mask, one first needs to fabricate it by imitation. Before placing something over one’s face, one needs to set texts before one’s eyes (ante oculos) as though entering into a dialogue with an author. Therefore, even Bembo’s critique of Gianfrancesco Pico’s Platonic theory of style retains an element of Platonism. When Bembo turns inward to his soul to see his own rhetorical persona, as Gianfrancesco Pico prescribes, he admits that he finds nothing. Instead he needs to participate in a discursive process of dialogue and imitation in order to know himself.
There is therefore, I believe, a close correspondence for these humanists between the dialogue and the epistolary form. Christopher Celenza has singled out the term disputatio from Cortesi’s description of his correspondence with Poliziano, explaining how rules of public epistles would allow for disagreement on good terms.71 Given Poliziano’s variegated style, responding to his call for debate would have been a particularly difficult task, especially since the short length of his letter reveals one of his strongest arguments: that he has little time for rehearsing Ciceronian routines.72 Giovanni Pico and Barbaro stage their letters as two courtroom orators, Pico’s eloquent barbarian philosopher and Barbaro’s Paduan ape, argue similarly over the defense of scholastic argumentation, almost self-consciously testing the limits of compatibility between humanist and scholastic disputatio. One can also easily imagine how the letters between Poliziano and Cortesi, and even Pico and Barbaro, could resemble oral conversations that might have occurred in person. Their letters could in fact include reworked versions of oral arguments that they transcribed onto paper for a larger public. Indeed, the letters between Gianfrancesco Pico and Bembo make it explicitly clear that they were restaging in writing what originally took place face to face. There certainly are, as Bembo remarks in his letter, differences between their oral conversations and their letters. Nevertheless, their epistles mark an attempt at transferring this oral debate into writing. They describe their own exchange as a disputatio and a controversia (a term they also apply to Poliziano and Cortesi’s letters), but also importantly as sermones, colloquia, and orationes.73 The language introducing Bembo’s response places it firmly within the field of rhetoric, and the humanists in whose circle it circulated would immediately have recognized it as such. It reveals the performative nature of their epistles and sets the stage for the written debate. Bembo carefully documents the resemblances as well as the differences, even noting improvements, carried over from their previous oral conversations and speeches into letters. Despite the effects of time and memory on writing, in Bembo’s opinion, the previously spoken words are not completely separated from their transposition into a literary form. These humanist epistolary forms are thus fabrications of discursive rhetorical personae that anchor themselves more firmly into the memory of their readers. In short, whether it is through Ciceronians reanimating only the single corpse of Cicero or eclectic imitators stitching together various body parts to form a creature of their own design, examinations of past languages are akin to necromantic desires to raise dead voices by evoking fragmentary bursts from various otherwise silent prosopa. Prosopopoeia and enargeia are thus key ways in which Renaissance humanists investigated and related to the past.
Ficino’s Persona: A Platonic Republic of Letters
Ficino is absent from these famous epistolary conversations of friends and at times amicable competitors. He is also almost completely absent in scholarly studies on Ciceronianism, rhetoric, and Renaissance dialogue.74 Nevertheless, Ficino’s epistolography is directly relevant to these topics. The eldest of the aforementioned humanists by at least twenty-one years, Ficino corresponded with many of them, often expressing a common bond of friendship. Cortesi and Bembo are two exceptions, but Bembo’s father, the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo (1433–1519), was one of Ficino’s favorite correspondents. When surveying these controversies a generation later in his Ciceronianus (1528), Erasmus claimed that only Pietro Bembo could be considered Ciceronian, explaining that Barbaro’s style is overworked like that of Quintilian and Pliny, the styles of Giovanni and Gianfrancesco Pico are harmed by their zeal for philosophy and theology, and Poliziano’s great talent for all kinds of writings does not compare to Cicero. He groups Ficino in their company, but the philosopher fares only slightly better than Cortesi, whom Erasmus ignores altogether, since Erasmus simply says that he would not dare to speak about Ficino’s style.75 Why would Erasmus hesitatingly write of Ficino’s style as being on the periphery of Ciceronian debates?
Like his contemporaries, and like the generation of humanists before him, Ficino continued the Petrarchan project of collecting his epistles for publication. Like other humanists of his day, Ficino sent his letters to individual addressees, had scribes prepare second versions of some meant for transmission to other recipients in his network, and circulated collections in manuscript copies dedicated to important patrons. He was, however, also one the first humanists, and certainly one the first philosophers, to make use of the printing press to publish his collected letters, bringing out twelve volumes of his epistolography in Venice in 1495. In writing these epistles Ficino
