Marsilio Ficino

Painters & Sculptors

Poets & Philosophers

Faithful to Love  

Marsilio Diotifeci, known as Marsilio Ficino

(Figline Valdarno 1433 – Careggi 1499)

Biography

According to a tradition put about by the Scholia of the alchemist/doctor Paracelsus, the Florentine Marsilio Ficino is supposed to have died at the age of 108, his longevity gained through the miraculous means of a primordial occult knowledge. Even though it was nothing of the sort, for Ficino died in his marvellous city of Florence at the age of 66, there is nevertheless a more troubling legend surrounding his death. One of the old biographers of Marsilio, doubtless inspired by an episode found in both Pliny and Seneca, amused himself by recounting that, on the day of his death, on 1st October 1499, Ficino sent a premonitory message to his dearest friend Mercati in the form of a ghostly rider on a white horse who announced himself with this clamour: “These things are true!” — by which you should understand: the realities of survival and the other world.  

See how little it takes to evoke an atmosphere, a doctrine, and a period too — that of the Florence of the Medici where the Dialogues of Plato and those of Hermes Trismegist, the Treatises of Plotinus and the Commentaries by Proclus, translated and published by Ficino between 1463 and 1497, were the subject of such debate between Humanists as is provoked by all major discoveries. A few names spring to mind: Leon Battista Alberti, Cristoforo Landino, Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano, Ermolao Barbaro, Michele Marullo, Aldo Manutio, all associated, closely or more distantly across Italy, with the grandiose rebirth of Greek thinking orchestrated by Marsilio.

The son of a doctor from the Arno Valley — a sumptuous valley that stretches from Florence to Arezzo — very early set to studying Galen, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Averroës and Avicenna. Ficino was still very young, as he himself recounts in the prefaces to De Vita and to an edition of Plotinus, when he found a second father “in Plato’s manner” in Cosimo de’ Medici — banker, man of letters, and founder of a dynasty.  

Motivated by an almost supernatural inspiration, Cosimo had aspired during the famous Council of Florence in 1439 to seeing the ancient Academy of Athens blossom again in Tuscany. At that time, wise Byzantines like Pletho and Bessarion, artists and architects like Donatello and Brunelleschi, intellectuals like Traversari and Bruni met in the squares and cloisters of Florence, and above all in the churches, where in the course of scholarly, mystical spectacles angels could be seen turning under celestial vaults, bringing to mind the sparkling visions in Dante’s Paradise. For Cosimo, making Florence the capital of the Greco-Latin spirit was more than a dream — its was a religious and political plan that involved power calculations quite as much as the ideal of continuity, of stability between the laws of the city. And intoning the songs of Orpheus for the master of Florence gives us to understand, above and beyond all the legends, that a new harmony, present everywhere in Man’s cities and in the heavens, must be inspiring the ruling of the people.  

After the death of his adoptive father, Ficino looked to Piero de’ Medici and then Lorenzo the Magnificent for his support. A prolific author and translator, gifted with a sense of classical thinking so unusual that even today his interpretations can sometimes guide modern scholarship, Marsilio Ficino published in Latin — in other words, gave back to the West — Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Synesius, Proclus, Priscianus of Lydia, and Hermes Trismegist; he managed to give humanist studies an entirely new voice and way of thinking, in inspired works like his Platonic Theology of the Immortality of Souls (1482), or works steeped in heresy and the occult sciences, like his De vita libri tres (1489).

From within his “Accademia di Careggi” — after the location of a small estate donated by the Medici — in reality nothing but a free and unregulated cenacle, a Florentine, Italian and then European network of listeners, correspondents, and faithful “co-Platonists”, Marsilio maintained nothing less that the sacred flame of an intellectual cult, outside the norms, above the universities and dogmas, in the image of this flame that burned, it is said, with him after Plato’s image. To understand how a wave of “ficinian” infatuation was able to be born and spread amongst all the learned people in Europe, you only have to read the enthusiastic letters of Pico della Mirandola, drawn to Florence in 1485 like so many others after him by the attraction of unparalleled knowledge and by the hope of gaining access to the true knowledge of Plato, i.e. to imagine once again the source of classical wisdom, of philological intelligence that Ficino’s city might have represented to men of letters of that time, whether Hungarian like Pannonius, German like Reuchlin, or English like Colet.

One of our greatest humanists, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, translator of the Bible, French publisher of the Pimandre (translated by Marsilio) and of Nicolas de Cuse, peer and friend of Erasmus and Budé, had only one term to describe Ficino, to evoke the philosopher of Florence: “pater meus”, “my father”.

This Neoplatonist father of classical and European studies being also a brilliant prose-writer, a penetrating and melancholy thinker, an imaginative and pensive mind, as a good son of Saturn he had to add a double posterity to his profound magistery, with both the magi and the poets, with the Cornelius Agrippas and with the Ronsards. But for Ficino, there would have been no De occulta philosophia, and no Ode to the Demons either.

And perhaps no Rabelais and no Pontus de Tyard either… André-Jean Festugière, and others after him like André Chastel, have shown just what French literature and art owed to the great Florentine. Let’s add to this that if Gérard de Nerval, in the Illuminés, just like Baudelaire in the Artificial Paradises, certainly betray having read the Three Books of Life, like the Ficino Banquet, published besides in those days by this same Lefèvre d'Étaples, why keep quiet about an Apollinaire who, still in this century, would get to know the Pimandre in Ficino’s version.

Rarely has one philosopher had the genius to inspire so many scholars, artists, and mystics as Ficino did — and for so many centuries. So this form of Florentine eternity, longer-lasting even than the eight hundred years produced by Paracelsus, belongs to the mysterious cycles of wisdom and will make us all dream of the time when Europe was a civilisation of the mind more than matter.

Now Ficino, the philosopher of the Sun and of Eros, of Saturn and of inspired Fury, Ficino the doctor of the soul and priest-astrologer, remains a lasting example above all for the accuracy and precision of his philosophical choices: a “renovator of ancient things”, he anticipates the philology that underpins true knowledge and opens the way to future systems; a “Platonist interpreter”, he launches the movement of ideas that would pass via Descartes on the one hand, and via Hemsterhuis on the other, and inaugurates a way of thinking about the divine expressed for a modern, mortal subject, dangling between light and shade.

When, around 1497, very worried about his dear city of Florence, for Plato and for himself, Ficino felt threatened by Savonarola’s triumph over the Medici, and when he entrusted one of his last “Platonist” books to the Venetian printers Manutius, this imperishable message of anxiety and hope was already sealed there for us. Dead just one year before the cinquecento, he could well have remained forever a great ferryman of souls across the river of new centuries.

STÉPHANE TOUSSAINT, CNRS - Centre for higher Renaissance studies