claiming that all of the authors cited are Platonic. Rather, he is marshaling a series of ancient authorities who either praised Plato’s style or mixed poetic rhythm into prose, as a way of building a consensus to defend Plato’s style, and in turn his own. More specifically, he addresses the very question of the appropriate stylistic decorum for writing philosophy. In his case, he shapes his rhetorical style to correspond to Platonic philosophy. In his mind, it is only appropriate that he imitate a Platonic stylistic form to suit his Platonic content.
FIGURE 8. Philosopher with Mirror, copy after Jusepe de Ribera. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
The union with Cavalcanti also characterizes Ficino’s bonds with other intimates. Playing on the physical distance between himself and his letters’ recipients, Ficino often conveys the message that the material letter serves the role of one’s body or face, bridging the distance with mixed results, as, for instance, when he writes to Carlo Marsuppini on 1 March 1473: “Marsuppini, I saw a more beautiful Marsilio in the pupil of your eye than the present Marsilio. But let us go on. Indeed, your letter is so persuasive that it compels me to respond with my feet instead of my hands, and with my voice instead of my letters.”99 Ficino is once more playing an epistolary game. The “beautiful Marsilio in the pupil of your eye” to which he refers in the letter is none other than Marsuppini’s previous letter.100 Similarly, to Giuliano de’ Medici, younger than Ficino by twenty-one years, he writes: “ ‘But why did you not send for me,’ you say, ‘when you were able to?’ Even if I were to think that you are absent there, I would not have sent for you, lest I would become a greater nuisance to you. In fact, for some time now my great love for you has impressed your figure into my mind (figuram tuam animo impressit meo), and in the same way that I see myself in the mirror (speculo) sometimes, I see (speculor) you most often in me in my heart. Moreover, your brother Lorenzo, your other self, your other nature, and your other will, was also present then; and thus, when I saw clearly (perspicerem; perspicue) my Giuliano equally within me and outside me, I was not able to think that he was absent from me.”101 The letters—filled with self-reflective puns—convey the persistent philosophical trope that the presence of Ficino’s companions, whether in person or in text, are means for self-knowledge and communion of souls. Ficino’s letter defines Lorenzo as his brother Giuliano’s “alter ego,” just as Ficino at times characterized some of his correspondents, and just as some of Ficino’s contemporaries portrayed him as “alter Plato.”
Therefore, more than joining together merely two individuals, Ficino’s Platonic love letters aim at uniting communities. In a response to Cavalcanti’s complaint that Ficino is sacrilegiously breaking their sacred friendship by not writing to him while he worked on his Platonic Theology in his country residence, Ficino first personifies Plato to reproach himself for not writing and concludes: “But if you do not want to respond to me, at least respond to Plato. But behold, while I see you speaking—as it were—I soon find myself staring at twin faces—a wonderful sight—where I had only seen one. If I duly recognize friendly faces (vultus) I seem to see (speculari videor)—as in a mirror (speculo)—Lorenzo de’ Medici’s countenance (ora) in yours, and I seem to be rebuked by him similarly as by you. Therefore, once these twin faces have been doubled for you, salute them once again for me, that is the two whom just now I addressed as one, and whom I now address as two.”102 One immediately recognizes the same self-reflective rhetorical devices as in the previous letters to Cavalcanti; the person that Ficino sees is Cavalcanti’s letter, and conversely he depicts his own person as his reply. Yet he includes another face in the mirrored reflections, Lorenzo’s, which may be a simple way to greet and commend his two friends at once. After all, Ficino makes it clear that he was too busy working on his Platonic Theology, which he dedicates to Lorenzo, to be distracted with letters. But the letter nevertheless also further reveals how Ficino’s Platonic style tries to convey how the madness of love blurs the distinctions between individuals, forcing Ficino to see double as Pentheus sees Dionysus in the Bacchae: two Giovannis or two Lorenzos, but one person.
Ficino also finds sources for inspired and intoxicated Bacchic style in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Because Pseudo-Dionysius adopted the terminology of late ancient Platonists, notably from Proclus, scholars now date his writings to a later period. Ficino does not realize that Dionysius is a pseudonym and still thinks that the author is Paul’s convert (from Acts 17:34), yet Ficino is nonetheless acutely aware of the similarities between Pseudo-Dionysius’s and the Neoplatonists’ philosophical style and terminology. In his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology, dedicated in 1492 to Lorenzo’s son, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, the future Pope Leo X, Ficino introduces the work with a discussion of style and love’s intoxication:
The ancient theologians and the Platonists believe that the spirit of the god Dionysus dwells in the ecstasy, the ecstatic departure, of separated minds, when partly out of inborn love and partly with the god prompting them, they have surpassed the natural limits of understanding, and are wondrously transformed into the beloved god. Then with a new draft of nectar and with unconscionable joy they reel as though they were intoxicated bacchantes. With this Dionysian wine, therefore, our inebriated Dionysius runs riot everywhere: he pours forth enigmas, he sings in dithyrambs.103
Ficino characteristically puns on the names Dionysus and Dionysius, claiming that Pseudo-Dionysius’s drunken and inspired state transforms him into the god Dionysus. The transfiguration of Dionysius, as it were, into Dionysus transforms his style so that he becomes a reveler singing in dithyrambs in the god’s thiasus, not unlike the ispired Socrates in the Phaedrus, who also sings in vatic dithyrambs.104 Immediately afterward in the commentary, Ficino expresses the difficulty of imitating Pseudo-Dionysius’s vatic, even Orphic, style in his own Latin translation, and prays that God might illuminate his commentaries and translation just as he did for Pseudo-Dionysius when he interpreted the prophets and apostles.
Ficino reflects once more on his own Platonic style in another letter to Bernardo Bembo, on 3 November 1480: “When I wished in the preceding days to exhort my friends to the ardent love of true virtue while being as brief as possible in my discourse, I attempted to paint with certain Platonic colors—as I am often wont to do—the image of a beautiful mind from a certain resemblance befitting a beautiful body. But when I attempt to express the same image of a beautiful body and mind, while painting, on account of my inexperience and ignorance of painting, I express not so much the image itself, which I aimed at depicting, than its resounding shadow.”105 Ficino makes it clear through his employment of a synaesthetic auditory/visual figure of a resounding shadow that the painted shadow in this case is both the letter itself and Ermolao Barbaro conveying the letter to Bembo in Venice. Ficino tells Bembo that if he inspects the shadow he will begin to see himself in this other person. If Ficino’s skiagraphia is not Platonic enough, he tells us that this technique of painting the human figure with shadows is in fact employing Platonic colors (Platonicis quibusdam, ut soleo saepe, coloribus pingere). Ficino is therefore employing the same common rhetorical terminology for features and colors that his humanist contemporaries were using to describe various styles in their Ciceronian debates.106
Ficino capitalizes on a scribal mistake in a letter to one of his most important patrons, Filippo Valori (1456–94) to make a similar point. Having accidentally begun to write the name of another prominent Florentine, Filippo Carducci, instead of Filippo Valori, Ficino or his scribe merely crossed out the mistaken last name, writing: “Marsilio Ficino sends his greetings to Filippo Cardu Valori. Look Filippo! As I was about to write ‘to Valori,’ I almost wrote ‘to Carducci.’ Is this any wonder? The truth is, both of you are one to each other and you are both one to me. So it even happens that when I play the lyre or sing, one of you plays with me and the other sings.”107 Although the most commonly cited printed edition of Ficino’s Opera omnia no longer preserves the canceled name, the manuscripts of Ficino’s letter make it clear that he wished the letter to be copied and
