Marsilio Ficino

Works

• 1469Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love

  A commentary in the form of a banquet dialogue that interprets love as the desire for beauty rising from bodies to God; the source of the Renaissance idea of “Platonic love”.

• 1482Platonic Theology

  Eighteen books arguing for the immortality of the soul, which stands at the centre of the hierarchy of being and links the bodily and the divine.

• 1489Three Books on Life

  A medical and astrological guide to the health of scholars, including the use of natural and celestial influences, which was widely read in early modern Europe.

Position

Ficino is on the map above all as the translator who made Plato and Plotinus available in Latin to readers across Europe; his Latin Plato remained in use for centuries. His own philosophy joins this Platonism with Christian doctrine. The soul, at the centre of the order of being, links the bodily and the divine; its restless striving for truth and goodness shows that it is immortal and destined for God, and love, the desire for beauty, leads it upwards. In a chain of “ancient theologians” from Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus to Pythagoras and Plato he saw an early form of the truth that Christianity completes. Pico della Mirandola, a member of his circle, criticised parts of his doctrine of love; according to a later report, Giordano Bruno used passages from “Three Books on Life” in his Oxford lectures of 1583. The foundations of his synthesis were also challenged: in 1614 Isaac Casaubon showed that the Hermetic writings date from the Christian era, which undermined the idea of an ancient theology, and the astrological medicine of “Three Books on Life” brought him under suspicion. Research since Paul Oskar Kristeller and the debate over Frances Yates’s thesis of a Hermetic tradition (1964) has brought out both his scholarship and his interest in magic.

Life & context

Marsilio Ficino was born on 19 October 1433 in Figline Valdarno near Florence, the son of the physician Diotifeci d’Agnolo, who also treated members of the Medici family. In Florence he studied the humanities, Aristotelian philosophy and medicine, and in the 1450s he began to learn Greek. In 1462 Cosimo de’ Medici gave him a house at Careggi and Greek manuscripts; at Cosimo’s request he first translated the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (1463), then the dialogues of Plato, which were printed in 1484. Around him gathered a circle of friends and pupils that he called his “academy”, among them Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano and, from 1484, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; how far it was an institution is disputed. He was ordained a priest in 1473 and later became a canon of Florence Cathedral. He published the “Platonic Theology” in 1482 and in 1492 his translation of Plotinus with a commentary, alongside translations of later Platonists and his collected letters. After “Three Books on Life” (1489) he had to defend himself against the suspicion of practising magic. He at first welcomed the preacher Savonarola and later turned against him. Ficino died at Careggi on 1 October 1499.

Further main works

• On the Christian Religion (De christiana religione, 1474)
• The Works of Plato in Latin (Platonis opera omnia, translation, 1484)
• Plotinus in Latin, with commentary (Plotini Enneades, 1492)