will soon travel with Valori in the Florentine countryside from Careggi to Maiano. Although Ficino could have followed Valori to his destination it is clear that the “Ficino” going to Maiano is in fact the letter itself being carried by Francesco Berlinghieri (1440–1500), another Florentine nobleman: “But since there is change in all things, I shall soon go to Maiano with you as my guide, but lest something hides from you, when you read ‘I’ you ought to understand Berlinghieri also as though under a greater ‘I.’ ”108 The letter’s conjoining of persons, Carducci and Valori on the one hand and Ficino and Berlinghieri on the other, demonstrates how Ficino employed the rhetorical devices of his Platonic letters to build social communities and networks. Ficino ends the letter by asking Valori to send his greetings to the members of their Academy, to their compatres Giovanni Battista Buoninsegni (1453–1512) and Jacopo Guicciardini (1422–90), as well to their confratres. The very short letter reveals two stages of rhetorical play. First, Ficino plays with his authorial persona (the writer) and his epistolary or public persona (the written letter itself). Second, he plays with the letter’s written and oral natures. One can easily recognize how, on the one hand, Valori’s reading is visual insofar as he needs to see the scribal error in the recipient’s name to conflate the persons of Valori and Carducci, but on the other hand his reading is also aural to the extent that it is understood that Berlinghieri is intended to read the letter aloud in order to join the two persons into one, that is Ficino’s written “I” and the “greater I” (ubi legis ego quasi sub grandiori quodam egone Berlingherium subintellige) that emerges from Berlinghieri’s oral delivery of the letter. Berlinghieri is thus tasked to speak the letter in the persona of Ficino, or ex persona Ficini, as Ficino would have expressed the technique. In the letter’s performance before Valori, Ficino’s authorial persona and Berlinghieri’s oratorical persona harmonize together in a manner similar to when Valori and Carducci sing and play the lyre with Ficino, which is a direct allusion to Plato’s juxtaposition of Theodorus’s ability to compare Socrates’ and Theaetetus’s faces to a musician judging whether two lyres are in harmony (Tht. 144d–e).
Ficino also restages similar synesthetic mixings of oral and visual performances for other epistles by his letter’s carriers, as he did with Berlinghieri, to solidify his Platonic persona with other addressees. In fact, Filippo Valori, formerly the recipient, played the part to deliver a letter to Giovanni Pico in 1488:
Lest you ever say that Marsilio, who is your first friend, came to you last, behold he has come. Contemplate (if you wish) the face (vultus) and gestures (gestus) of he who at present salutes you. But meanwhile closely inspect what hides under the mask (sub persona lateat). You will say, am I not contemplating youthful features instead of Marsilio’s face? But Pico (if you are unaware) the suppliant Ficino was recently rejuvanated just like an eagle. Yes, indeed this prayer has been granted. What about his gestures (gestus), however? According to what reason has he now been made younger but also heavier (gravior)? O my friend, as with such serious (gravibus) prayers it has been just now finally granted that he exchanges youth for old age, so it is not so strange that this man praying so seriously thence turned out both younger and heavier at the same time. Indeed, this has come about, but why is he wearing especially the face (vultus) of Filippo Valori? I pass over for the moment what exact form was chosen by Love.109
Other than Ficino’s characteristic use of “Platonic” puns (Valori, valore, vale/gravior, and iunior for light-hearted seriousness, as well as jokes about Valori’s age and weight), Ficino’s letter reveals further tropes of serioludere that depend on the letter’s oratorical delivery (gestus)—a technical rhetorical term used by Cicero, Quintilian, and other ancient rhetoricians.110 Ficino plays on the identification of his letter’s authorial persona with Valori’s oratorical persona, and even with Valori’s very face/mask. The letter exists for us as a written document, but in order for the rhetorical device to work one needs to imagine the letter’s oral delivery: Valori reciting the letter face to face with Pico. Ficino invokes Eros as the god responsible for the transformation of external appearances, like a spiritello hiding behind a mask (see Figure 7 above). Pico’s response in turn appeals to his union with Ficino, whom he addresses as the father of the Platonic family, due to their participating in a common Saturnine intellect (νοῦς). Beneath the exterior persona one finds a Saturnine ingenium. Far from a correction of Ficino’s invocation of love, Pico’s turn toward Saturn would have greatly pleased Ficino, the Renaissance’s greatest orchestrator of the notion of a melancholic and Saturnine genius.111
Ficino’s rhetorical strategies are especially evident in letters that he writes to recipients who share a certain enthusiasm for Platonism. In these, he examines the various personae of the author, the letter, the messenger, and the recipient, and often postulates a divine principle of unification for the different personae (the One, Eros, Saturn, intellect, spiritus, soul). We can look at a final excellent example in this regard from his correspondence with Pierleone Leoni (also known as Pier Leone da Spoleto, c. 1445–92), the court physician of Lorenzo de’ Medici, whom Ficino calls his “alter ego,” along with his German humanist friend Martin Prenninger (1450–1501), known in Latin circles as Martinus Uranius. Lest Cavalcanti, whom Ficino designates as his unique friend (amicus unicus), think that he is the philosopher’s sole beloved, Ficino also repeats this rhetorical stratagem with other close correspondents. In fact, by 1491 he would also refer to Prenninger with the same epithet, “amicus unicus.”112 Thus Cavalcanti, Pierleone, and Prenninger had to share the roles of being Ficino’s “alter egos” and/or “unique friends.” On 12 May 1491 Ficino wrote to Pierleone a letter entitled “How someone thinking under another persona can encounter himself”:
In [your letters] you clearly write that when at first something Platonic occurs to you, Marsilio immediately comes to mind. But beware perhaps that you are not deceived by an exterior image. Indeed, I think that Pierleone himself is there lurking underneath the persona of Marsilio. For if any human species presents itself to you while contemplating Platonic matters, it is probable that it is the greatest Platonic species above all that presents itself. But what is more Platonic among human matters than Leo the great abode of the Platonic sun. Perchance, therefore, just like Narcissus, you are admiring yourself, when you think that you are admiring another. But Love clothes you especially in the image of Marsilio. But since we have happened upon the image, you surely know that reason is between the imagination and the intellect, and that natural images flow into it from the source of the imagination, and that divine species flow into it from the intellect. On account of this does it not often happen that a certain divine species assumes the form of a certain natural image when it emanates to human reason, and so does not what is divine on the inside often appear as natural to the eyes of reason? What if a similar reason does not explain why Pierleone often meets himself under the mask (persona) of Marsilio?113
The Platonic, or Neoplatonic, emanative metaphysics is evident in the letter. It acts as a philosophical grounding for the imitative practices of Ficino’s rhetoric and as a principle of unification for the identities of Ficino’s and Perleone’s persons. It further reveals how Ficino understood self-knowledge discursively on the one hand as an encounter with others, and on the other as a contact with the divine.
Ficino’s epistolography plays with central epistemological problems concerning the intellect and its unity with what it thinks. The thesis of the unity of the intellect and its thinking has its clearest origins in Aristotle’s De anima.114 The fortune of this theory has a long and manifold history among Aristotle’s many interpreters, much of which turns on the twofold nature of Aristotle’s identity thesis, that the intellect somehow becomes like what it intelligizes so that, on the one hand, when it intelligizes something, a tree for instance, it takes on the form of the tree but, on the other hand, when it intelligizes itself, the intellect and its thinking are identical. Aristotle’s thesis that the intellect becomes like and even identical to its thoughts becomes in Plotinus a core tenet of his epistemological and metaphysical theory that the hypostasis Intellect is identical to the intelligibles (one and many). In its Platonic appropriations,
