his scholarly and philosophical sights on religion and theology. His titanic efforts produced an eighteen-volume Platonic Theology that attempts to reorient theology by aligning it with Platonic traditions. The arguments that Ficino advances in that work might have influenced the Fifth Lateran Council’s adoption of the soul’s immortality as church dogma in 1512.3 He wrote other religious works: De Christiana religione, numerous other tracts, sermons, and homilies, and the beginnings of a commentary on St. Paul’s Epistles. An inquiry into the nature of the divine also frames his De vita libri tres (Three Books on Life, or simply De vita), which are nothing less than the cornerstone of Renaissance theories of melancholy, Saturnine genius, and astral influences.
The twelve books of correspondence by Ficino (to humanists, philosophers, theologians, artists, poets, statesmen, princes, kings, clergymen, cardinals, and popes) bear witness to his recognition and influence during his lifetime. The presence of his writings in the libraries of later humanists, scholars, theologians, and philosophers demonstrates his reception in subsequent generations. As his writings show, during his life Ficino was cast in various roles: philosopher, commentator, translator, philologist, theologian, priest, friend, client, doctor, and humanist—each part always played with a Platonic accent. Almost any single composition from Ficino’s oeuvre would have been enough to ensure his fame, but the present book is concerned with the central nucleus of his intellectual work as a whole: his understanding of the Platonic corpus.
Given the fact that the learned world of the medieval Latin West did not have access to the Platonic dialogues save for the Phaedo, the Meno, parts of the Timaeus (and indeed there was a flourishing of work on the Timaeus in twelfth-century Chartres), and the Republic—and even the manuscripts of these works were not widely obtainable—the availability of Plato’s dialogues in the quattrocento in Ficino’s 1484 printed edition can in no way be overestimated. The rediscovery of the Platonic corpus had an impact over the course of the following centuries in all intellectual and cultural spheres. Not merely confined to a doxographical knowledge of a series of set doctrines (metempsychosis, palingenesis, anamnesis, the immortality of the soul, theory of forms, and so forth), students of Plato now had access to the dialogues themselves, which revealed to Renaissance audiences the rich ancient landscape of myths, allegories, philosophical arguments, etymologies, fragments of poetry and other works of philosophy, aspects of ancient pagan religious practices, concepts of mathematics and natural philosophy, and the dialogic nature of the Platonic corpus’s interlocutors (prosopa/personae).4
With the exception of a very small but ever-growing group of Renaissance scholars who not only could read ancient Greek but also had access to the manuscripts of Plato’s dialogues, most readers in the Latin West encountered Plato’s text through Ficino’s translations. Today there are only three extant manuscripts that contain the complete Platonic corpus. The astounding fact that Ficino had two of them at his disposal, as well as another complete manuscript that is now lost to us, and that he was in correspondence with the Greek émigré Cardinal Bessarion (1403–72), who possessed the third complete text that still exists, underscores that even if other philosophers and scholars made vital contributions to our knowledge of Plato, Ficino was the key intermediary between Greek and Latin, as well as between manuscript and print. As Ficino likes to say, he gave voice to Plato as well as various ancient traditions and frameworks to interpret his dialogues.5
In the first epigraph quoted at the outset of this introduction, from the first biography of Ficino, written seven years after his death, Giovanni Corsi (1472–1547) describes the philosopher’s face. Is Corsi’s portrait Ficino’s true likeness? Paul Oskar Kristeller argued that Corsi did not know Ficino and that this first literary portrayal of him, although containing a few pieces of valuable information, is but a persona of a Medicean philosopher composed by a biographer to praise his Medici patrons.6 Raymond Marcel objected that Corsi would have seen and heard the elder philosopher before his death. At the very least he would have known of Ficino, since he studied under Ficino’s Platonic disciple Francesco Cattani da Diacceto (1466–1522). Corsi also frequented the circle of intellectuals who gathered for discussion at the Rucellai gardens, the Orti Oricellari, many of whom knew Ficino personally. In fact, Corsi writes that he composed his Life of Marsilio Ficino to console Bindaccio da Ricasoli (1444–1524) because Ricasoli and Ficino’s close friend Bernardo Rucellai (1448–1514) departed from Florence to France in a self-imposed exile.7 It is safe to conclude that Corsi composed the Life of Marsilio Ficino primarily from remembrances that he would have heard in conversation with older Florentines, and most important, as I will argue, from Ficino’s own self-portrayal drawn from his epistolography and writings. Corsi outlines the contours of his subject’s life and character in the biography’s first sentence: Ficino is the first guide to the divine Plato’s inner sanctum, helping reveal its mysteries to others. Corsi’s Ficino is, above all, Plato’s interpreter.8
Ficino’s identity as a philosopher, it is clear, began and ended with his relationship to Plato and Platonism. Throughout his career the writings of Ficino untiringly constructed his identity as a philosopher in the Platonic family. In the second epigraph quoted above—a passage from his De vita Platonis that was originally composed as a public oration and later served as the introduction to his printed translation of Plato—Ficino describes his attempt to paint the idea of the philosopher, which he claims resulted in the living image of Plato himself.9 In explicitly stating that he is composing a philosophical picture through Platonic colors, Ficino deploys rhetorical techniques common to his Ciceronian humanist brethren, describing particular compositional styles through such visual metaphors as color, figura, lineamenta, and so on, and employing rhetorical enargeia to paint, as it were, a vivid portrait of Plato.10 Thus in describing his own style as Platonic, Ficino makes his form fit with the content of his subject matter, inscribing himself into the very Platonic portrait that he is painting. His figural relationship with Plato would later become reified in a bronze medal produced circa 1499 in the style of Niccolò Fiorentino (1418–1506) that has the profile of Ficino on one face and the name Platone on the other (Figure 1). The medal suggests Ficino’s identity as “another Plato” or “alter Plato” as the Neo-Latin poet Naldo Naldi (c. 1436–1513) called him in the versed preface to Ficino’s 1484 edition of the Platonic corpus.11
Withdrawn from the public stage in Florence where he first delivered his speech on the De vita Platonis, Ficino, in his private study, illuminated in his own hand the portrait of Plato’s face in the capital initial of Plato’s name at the beginning of Apuleius’s (c. 125–c. 170 CE) De Platone et eius dogmate in his personal manuscript containing various works of philosophy and theology (Figure 2). There is an analogous representation of Ficino in the dedicatory copy of Ficino’s Platonic Theology for Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92). Ficino’s own resemblance is there inscribed in the illuminated capital of Plato’s name (Figure 3). In the first illumination Ficino draws Plato’s expression facing the reader (Ficino himself) with a round ink dot representing the philosopher in the act of speech. That Ficino took the time to illuminate Plato’s face in his private manuscript reveals the playful and close personal intimacy that he believed he shared with Plato. In the second image Ficino is in profile, hands clasping a book, staring at or reading, so to speak, the first line of text “Plato, the father of philosophers.” It communicates Ficino’s private motivations to a larger circle of acquaintances, once more associating Ficino’s public identity with Plato. At the end of the Phaedrus, Plato had written that philosophers plant their seeds not only in their written works but also in the minds or souls of their students, converting them to the philosophical life. Circumscribed by Plato’s name, the illumination of Ficino identifies him as one of Plato’s philosophical children and heirs.
FIGURE 1. Medal of Marsilio Ficino (c. 1499) in the style of Niccolò Fiorentino (1430–1514). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Samuel H. Kress Collection. 1957.14.862.a.
Ficino’s
