Did the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) influence the art of his time? This book starts with an exploration of Ficino's views on the imagination and discusses whether, how and why ...these ideas may have been received in Italian Renaissance works of art.
Plato's Persona Robichaud, Denis J. -J
2018, 2018-01-08
eBook
In 1484, humanist philosopher and theologian Marsilio Ficino published the first complete Latin translation of Plato's extant works. Plato's Persona is the first book to undertake a synthetic study ...of Ficino's interpretation of the Platonic corpus.
In Echoes of an invisible world Jacomien Prins offers an account of the transformation of the notion of Pythagorean world harmony during the Renaissance and the role of the Italian philosophers ...Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and Francesco Patrizi (1529-1597) in redefining the relationship between cosmic order and music theory.
This article considers Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola's understanding of the history of Platonism in his Examen vanitatis. It analyzes his sources and methods for understanding the history of ...philosophy-genealogical source criticism, historiographical analysis, and comparative history-and argues that his approach is shaped by anti-Platonic Christian apologetics. It documents how Gianfrancesco Pico closely studies Marsilio Ficino's and his uncle Giovanni Pico's understandings of Platonism and its history, and how his contextualization of their work within the broader history of Platonism is part of a larger endeavour to turn the page and even close the book on this chapter of the Quattrocento. Although neither Ficino nor Gianfrancesco finds universal agreement among ancient Platonists, Ficino explains their history as one of inquiry and interpretation, in which Platonism and Christianity are inexorably united, whereas Gianfrancesco characterizes it as a history of lies and disagreements that threaten Christianity. In trying to protect sacred history, Gianfrancesco Pico helped develop the tools that would eventually critique it.
Two of Marsilio Ficino’s letters among his correspondence—the letter De officiis and the letter Veritas de institutione principis—enjoyed heightened popularity in the sixteenth century. One of the ...first translations of Ficino into the vernacular is a translation of these two letters into Czech, printed in Prague around the year 1500. Czech humanist Řehoř Hrubý of Jelení (ca. 1460–1514) seems to be a plausible candidate for the authorship. The second translation into Czech was published in 1520 by Oldřich Velenský of Mnichov (1495–1531). This article examines the Czech humanistic translations of Ficino’s letters and places them into the context of the Czech humanistic movement at the beginning of the sixteenth century, which emphasized moral topics from Italian Renaissance Platonism. It argues that these letters from Ficino supported the moral claims of Czech pre-Reformation and Reformation thought at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Scholars generally agree that Marsilio Ficino neglects the issue of original sin in his theological works and never mentions it in his Platonic writings. My work will show that not only does Ficino ...refer to the doctrine of original sin but also that some of his passages make more sense if one were to relate them to this doctrine. I will argue that although Ficino knows the ecclesiastical teachings on the subject, principally via Aquinas (II), he goes beyond his sources and strives to frame them within his own theology. More specifically, to reconstruct Ficino's position, I will look for theological questions in his Platonic works along two perspectives: First, I will search for Biblical passages on original sin (III.1); and secondly, for references to baptism, that is the sacrament reputed to wash away original sin from the human soul (III.2). Next, I will study the role of original sin in Ficino's philosophical anthropology. In particular, I will analyse the relationship Ficino establishes between the Fall of the first parents and the embodiment of the soul and show that the latter is a consequence of the former (IV).
This book presents a detailed account of Ficino's De Christiana religione and of Pico's Apologia, in the context of the evolution of a humanist theology. Focusing on the relations between humanism, ...theology, and politics, it concludes with the Savonarola affair.
In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, ...otherwise known as ‘erotic melancholy’ or ‘erotomania’, was treated in contemporary medical documents as a real, diagnosable illness, a contagious disease thought to infect the imagination through the eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation of love as a communicable disease is drawn, I suggest, from a neoplatonic tradition led by the work of Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Ficino’s construction of eros as a kind of ‘vulgar love’, distinctive from ‘heroic love’, emphatically denotes lovesickness as a kind of material contagion with the eye as its primary means of transmission, an idea that had a more significant influence in England and on the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all its lighthearted conceits, Love’s Labour’s Lost takes lovesickness and its etiology very seriously, in ways that have been almost entirely ignored by scholarship on this play.
This article analyzes new evidence from the marginalia to Ficino’s Plotinus manuscripts and offers a novel reading of Ficino’s “De Vita” 3. It settles scholarly disagreements concerning Paul O. ...Kristeller’s manuscript research and Frances Yates’s Hermetic thesis about “De Vita” 3, and reconsiders accepted conclusions regarding the centrality of Hermetic magic in Ficino’s philosophy. It demonstrates the origins and sources for “De Vita” 3 in Ficino’s reading of Plotinus’s explanations of prayer, and also reveals Iamblichus’s overlooked influence on Ficino: on the performative nature of philosophy in “De Vita” 3, and even on Ficino’s acknowledgment of the pseudonymity of the Hermetica.
This collection of essays presents new work on the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) which explores aspects of Ficino's own thought and the sources which he used, and traces his ...influence on the philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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