Marcilio Ficino

Marsilio Ficino is the best representative of Renaissance Platonism as well as the most prominent member of the Florentine Academy that he organized at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici. After he had given to the Western world the first complete Latin translation of the works of Plato and Plotinus, he wrote numerous commentaries, dialogues, and treatises, but his major work is the Theologia Platonica in eighteen books. In this treatise Ficino portrays the universe as a harmonious system of beings (...) where man occupies a central position and serves as a bond between spiritual and material substances. The main theme of the treatise is the immortality of the soul, as the subtitle De immortalitate animorum indicates. Ficino proves this doctrine by man’s inner tendency to union with God and other arguments of scholastic philosophy. Ficino’s primary concern in this treatise, however, is to reconcile Plato’s philosophy with Christian doctrine. (shrink)

The ancient Neoplatonic doctrine that the rational soul has one or more vehicles—bodies of a semi-material nature which it acquires during its descent through the spheres—plays a crucial part in Marsilio Ficino’s philosophical system, especially in his theory of sense-perception and in his account of the afterlife. Of the soul’s three vehicles, the one made of more or less rarefied air is particularly important, according to Ficino, during the soul’s embodied existence, for he identifies it with thespiritus, the pneumatic substance (...) based in the brain which was believed to serve as an instrument for perception and imagination. He refers to the vehicles in his arguments against the theory of the transmigration of souls into the bodies of animals, claiming that the imaginative suffering experienced after death by souls in their aerial bodies are much more acute than the physical pain they might feel in bodies made of flesh and blood. Since the power of the imagination, for Ficino, is stronger than that of the four senses, the soul’s perceptive activity is more intense after death, when it has lost its earthly body and lives instead in a body made of air. The vehicles, moreover, provided Ficino with evidence for the individual immortality of souls, a doctrine that he was attempting to demonstrate philosophically against the position of Averroes and his followers. In his view, the vehicles ensured the survival after death of two faculties which were intimately connected to personal identity: the imagination and memory. By pointing out the role of the vehicles in transporting the soul’s innermost representations and memories through the universe, Ficino was able to show that the distinguishing traits of our personality are not lost with bodily death, but survive along with the vehicle that carries them. (shrink)

Is it correct to accept an anthopological dimension in Baruch Spinoza’s doctrine? Regardless of the answer we may suggest for this point, how could be this connected to the prevailing Humanism of the immediately previous period in which our author lived? Our proposal points to a positive stance in relation to the presence of an anthropological perspective in Spinoza’s thought; perspective that may be seen as a reaction to that kind of Renaissance humanism that sees the human being in Nature (...) a privileged kind. Therefore, in this paper we are going to analyse the way the concept of man evolves from this to the Spinozian formulation as a foundation in which it can be possible to accept the study of a certain Anthropology in his work. (shrink)

In 1484, humanist philosopher and theologian Marsilio Ficino published the first complete Latin translation of Plato's extant works. Students of Plato now had access to the entire range of the dialogues, which revealed to Renaissance audiences the rich ancient landscape of myths, allegories, philosophical arguments, etymologies, fragments of poetry, 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. By and large, Renaissance readers in the (...) Latin West encountered Plato's text through Ficino's translations and interpretation. -/- In Plato's Persona, Denis J.-J. Robichaud provides the first synthetic study of Ficino's interpretation of the Platonic corpus. Robichaud analyzes Plato's works in their original Greek and in Ficino's Latin translations, as well as Ficino's non-Platonic writings and correspondence, in the process uncovering new aspects of Ficino's intellectual work habits. In his letters and works, Ficino self-consciously imitated a Platonic style of prose, in effect devising a persona for himself as a Platonic philosopher. Plato's dialogues are populated with a wealth of literary characters with whom Plato interacts and against whom Plato refines his own philosophies. Reading through Ficino's translations, Robichaud finds that the Renaissance philosopher seeks an understanding of Plato's persona(e) among all the dialogues' interlocutors. In effect, Ficino assumed the role of Plato's Latin spokesperson in the Renaissance. -/- Plato's Persona is grounded in an extensive study of scholarship in Renaissance humanism, classics, philosophy, and intellectual history, and contextualizes Ficino's intellectual achievements within the contemporary Christian orthodox view of Platonism. Ficino was an influential figure in the early Italian Renaissance: the key intermediary between Greek and Latin, and between manuscript and print, giving voice to Plato and access to the ancient frameworks needed to interpret his dialogues. (shrink)

Plato's philosophy as elaborated by the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino in the second half of the Quattrocento had a penetrating influence at the Ducal court of Urbino. Although this fact is widely acknowledged, there is no thorough study on this subject. This thesis establishes the impact of Ficino's thought on both the culture and art of Urbino under the patronage of Federico da Montefeltro and his immediate successors. ;Part I considers Ficino's philosophy within the context of the syncretistic culture of (...) the Montefeltro court. Platonism, Hermeticism and Cabala, as well as astronomy and mathematics, are discussed in connection with such distinguished scholars as Ficino, Guglielmo Raimondo de Moncada and Paul of Middelburg. The relationships of the Montefeltro court with Ficino's Platonic Academy of Florence are also explored. Ficino's works, especially those dedicated to Duke Federico, together with the manuscripts of Platonic philosophy in the Ducal library, are analyzed. ;Part II investigates the iconography of the twin 'Tempietti' in the Ducal Palace, the Cappella del Perdono and Tempietto delle Muse. It argues that Ficino's philosophy provides the keys to their program. The Tempietti are seen as part of an architectural ensemble intended for Federico's private use and endowed with a spiritual significance. This discussion considers the antecedents of Federico's project, such as the Studiolo of Belfiore of Leonello d'Este in Ferrara and the Tempio Malatestiano of Sigismondo Malatesta in Rimini. It also explores the iconographic sources of the Tempietto delle Muse, which was decorated with Minerva, Apollo and the Muses. The discussion concentrates on a number of artists who were present at the court of Urbino during the evolution of this project, including Leon Battista Alberti, Piero della Francesca, Luciano Laurana, Donato Bramante, and Francesco di Giorgio. Special attention is paid to the painter and chronicler Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father, since he was acquainted with the iconographic program of Urbino's twin Tempietti may have prepared him for his later work on the Neoplatonic program in the Stanze della Segnatura. (shrink)

Marsilio Ficino was the first Renaissance philosopher to have access to the full Platonic corpus. He desired to use these ancient writings, plus faith, scripture, and reason to reunite religion and philosophy into one mutually supportive system, and was perhaps motivated to do so by circumstances arising from the era in which he worked, his life, context and writing style. His background and motivations are reviewed, followed by an examination of his philosophical arguments about God's five main attributes: existence, simplicity, (...) goodness, omniscience, and omnipotence. Finally the divine/human relationship is examined using the uniqueness of the divine's relationship with humans, divine illumination, hierarchies and love. This assessment of the Godly attributes and the divine/human relationship finds that, although Ficino did use Platonic ideas that were new to the Renaissance period, his failure to construct strong philosophical arguments made his work ultimately less enduring than that of his contemporaries. My transcription of the 1495 edition of Ficino's 'De raptu Pauli' is included an as appendix. (shrink)