FICINO, MARSILIO. - Platonic philosopher and restorer of Platonism, b. at Figline in Valdarno on 19 Oct. 1433, to Ficino (an abbreviation of Diotifeci) d'Agnolo di Giusto, a physician, d. at Careggi (Florence) on 1 Oct. 1499.
He studied the humanities at Florence and Pisa. The three books De Vita, the Consiglio contro la pestilentia, written in 1479, and some Ricette contro alla peste, show that F. had pursued medical studies in his youth.
His spiritual orientation between the ages of 22 and 24 is attested by the Epistola a' fratelli (1455), the short treatise Di Dio et anima (1457), the De magnificentia (1457), the De furore divino (1457), the De voluptate (1457), the declamations De laudibus philosophiae and De laudibus medicinae, and the De quatuor sectis philosophorum. Having barely begun the study
(Ad G. Zenta, Storia della letteratura italiana, 11, Torino 1938, p. 261) FICINO, MARSILIO - Autograph of M. F. from a collection of notes he put together in 1458, preserved in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence.
of Greek, he undertook to translate the hymns attributed to Homer, the Theogony of Hesiod, the hymns and the Argonautica of Orpheus, and the hymns of Proclus. At Careggi, as soon as he was able, he began the series of great translations, from the Corpus hermeticum, or Pimander, to the Enneads of Plotinus. Of some Platonic dialogues, such as the Symposium, the Philebus and the Phaedrus, he undertook the commentary after the translation. The most notable is that on the Symposium, composed no later than 1469 and translated into the vernacular a few years later by F. himself, and in 1544 by Ercole Barbarasa.
The labor of translating and commenting nourished in him the speculative spirit. If Plato had appeared to Numenius as nothing other than a "Moses who spoke Attic," Augustine, "quo latinorum nullus platonicorum maiestatem tum sapientia tum eloquentia expressit exactius" (Theologia Platonica, XI, 6), pointed him to Plato as the guide to Christ. With this conviction F. set about gathering the fruit of his Platonic meditations in a work of great vigor, such as the Theologia Platonica de animorum immortalitate, which in its first draft was composed between 1469 and 1474. St. Thomas had made Aristotelian philosophy a propaedeutic to theology. But Averroism and Ockhamism had attacked the Thomistic interpretation of Aristotle. Cardinal Bessarion himself (In calumn. Platonis, III, ch. 22) had demonstrated that, according to the most certain principles of Aristotelian metaphysics, the human intellect either perishes with the body, as Alexander of Aphrodisias held, or is one for all men, as Averroes thought. Plato, on the other hand, gave us a solid demonstration of individual immortality and of the future life, and pointed us to the supreme end of human life in the ἐμοίωσις τῷ θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν (Theaet., 176 b). It is noteworthy that precisely while F. was striving to demonstrate the harmony between Platonic philosophy and Christian Revelation, there matured in him the resolve, now that he had turned forty, to seek priestly ordination, which was conferred on him on 18 Dec. 1473. Together with the Theologia Platonica he composed a commentary on the Gospels, now lost.
In his new state he continued to alternate his stays in Florence with those at Careggi, where the noblest spirits gathered to discuss with him the Platonic doctrine. What was later improperly and not without some confusion called the "Florentine Platonic Academy" is nothing other than this cenacle of friends gathered around F. and animated by the spirit of the Symposium.
Having developed the religious elements of Platonism, F. wrote in 1474 the De Christiana religione, as the logical complement of the Theologia Platonica. The incarnation of Christ appeared to him as the greatest work of which God, in his omnipotence, was capable (De Chr. rel., ch. 16), since only through the union of created nature with the infinite and eternal nature of God is the distance between God himself and the world bridged and the perfect unity of the finite with the infinite attained. This concept would suggest that F., like Pico della Mirandola a little later, adhered to the Scotist thesis that Christ would have become incarnate even if Adam had not sinned.
In 1475 he resumed the commentary on the Phaedrus, and between Oct. 1476 and the first months of 1477 he brought to completion several small treatises, five of which were gathered under the title Quinque claves Platonicae sapientiae; two others are the De raptu Pauli and the De luce. Although F., wholly absorbed in his philosophical world, remained aloof from the political vicissitudes of Florence after the death of Cosimo, he could not show himself insensible to the storm unleashed by the Pazzi conspiracy in Apr. 1478, especially after Sixtus IV had struck Lorenzo the Magnificent with excommunication. To this event refer the Oratio Christiani gregis and the Vaticinium ad Pontificem (Ep., VI, p. 808 ff.). The war was followed by the plague of 1478-79, during which his literary activity came to a halt. He nevertheless composed the Consiglio and the Ricette against the plague.
Once calm had returned, he was able to attend to giving the final touch to the Theologia, of which he oversaw the Florentine edition of 7 Nov. 1482; it was followed, at the beginning of the autumn of 1484, by that of the dialogues of Plato, so that he could announce to Pico della Mirandola, who had come to visit him: "Plato noster... hodie liminibus nostris est egressus" (Opp., p. 1537). And it was the "heroic mind" of the Mirandolan who urged him to begin as soon as possible the translation of the Enneads of Plotinus, which he had long had in mind and which he finished on 16 Jan. 1485. Thus Plato would no longer have wandered among the Latins without his "faithful Achates" (Opp., p. 870). Around 1478, the De mysteriis of Iamblichus was translated, together with other brief treatises or excerpta of Neoplatonic philosophers. From 1489 is the dedication of the De vita coelitus comparanda to Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary. Because of this last book, he was accused, in May 1490 before the Roman Curia, of magic and heresy. But the accusation had no sequel, and a few months later Ermolao Barbaro reassured him of the good sentiments of Innocent VIII toward him. In the same year, while preparing the edition of Plotinus (translation and argument), he set about translating and commenting on the De mystica theologia and the De divinis nominibus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in whom he seemed to discover the highest expression of Platonic no less than of Christian theology: "Dionysius Areopagita platonicae disciplinae culmen et christianae theologiae columen" (Opp., p. 1014).
After the death of the Magnificent, retirement at Careggi became more welcome to him than ever; but even there he could not remain detached from what was happening in Florence. And if at first he had seen in Savonarola a prophet sent by God to admonish the Florentines, the political turmoil that followed the first sermons, and the fanaticism of the "piagnoni" even when the friar rebelled against the Pope and the city authorities, led him to denounce in the Dominican, recently hanged and burned, the Antichrist.
Ficinian Platonism exercised the broadest influence on the thought of the Renaissance, and contributed to re-establishing the harmony between religious aspirations and the passion for resurgent classical beauty, in the light, full of arcana, of the teaching of Diotima.
Most of M. F.'s works were collected in the edition in 2 vols., made at Basel in 1501 and repeated, save for a few additions, in 1576. A third edition is the Paris one of 1641. Outside the edition of 1501 there remained the De virtutibus moralibus seu de magnificentia, the De quatuor sectis philosophorum, the Disparatio contra iudicium astrologorum, all three of which were edited by P. O. Kristeller, Supplementum Ficinianum (II, Florence 1937, pp. 1-76); the Apologia against Savonarola, already edited by Passerini in 1859, and again by Kristeller (loc. cit., pp. 76-79), certain Epistolae not included in the Epistolaria in twelve books, arranged by F. himself, and now printed by Kristeller (loc. cit., pp. 79-96), the compositions included under the title of Nugae by Kristeller (loc. cit., pp. 96-97), certain dedicatory epistles, orations and apologues edited by Kristeller (op. cit., I, pp. 10-15, 21, 37-64, 71-72, 88-91), and other minor things recorded by Kristeller (loc. cit., p. cclliii ff.) and in part edited by him (op. cit., II, p. 96 ff.). In particular there remained outside the edition of 1501 the translation of the Platonic dialogues which, after the first Florentine printing of 1484, had many editions down to the one revised under the care of R. B. Hirchig (Platonis opera graece et latine, Paris 1886), and the translation of the Enneads of Plotinus which, printed for the first time at Florence in 1492, has been several times reproduced, corrected or not, down to the edition of Creuzer and Moser (ibid. 1896). The vernacular translation of Dante's Monarchia was edited for the first time by Fraticelli, at Florence in 1839, then by Torri at Livorno in 1844, and thereafter several times. For other writings of F. that remained outside the Basel edition, as for the editions of the individual writings, such as the Theologia Plat. and the De Christ. rel., and for the manuscript tradition of all of F.'s works, Kristeller's careful work is fundamental. Also as regards the chronology of the Ficinian writings and the vicissitudes in the composition of the Epistolaria, which is so important for reconstructing the biography of F. and his relations with the learned men of the
For his chronology and his relations with the scholars of his time, Kristeller's Supplementum is indispensable. In an appendix to the study, The scholastic background of M. F. (in Traditio, Studies in ancient and medieval history, thought and religion, 2 [1944], pp. 274-318), the same Kristeller edited the Summa philosophiae and the other short treatises of cod. Palagi 199.
Bibliography19 works
Bruno Nardi