Eighteen essays reexamine Ficino's life and work focusing on three essential aspects: his significance in his own times, his spreading influence throughout Europe and over subsequent centuries in ...many areas of thought and creativity, and his enduring relevance today. Translation of his major works from Latin enables a new generation to rediscover and share Ficino's vision of human potential.
Marsilio Ficino, a leading scholar of the Italian Renaissance who translated all the works of Plato into Latin, examines Plato's Timaeus, the most widely influential and hotly debated of the Platonic ...writings. Offering a probable account of the creation and nature of the cosmos, the discussion incorporates such questions as What is the function of arithmetic and geometry in the design of creation? What is the nature of mind, soul, matter, and time? and What is our place in the universe? To his main commentary Ficino adds an appendix, which amplifies and elucidates Plato's meanings and reveals fascinating details about Ficino himself.
Throughout many of Marsilio Ficino's writings of the 1460s, 70s, and 80s recurs the theme of the architect and the creation of a building's form in his mind. In the same period, Italian artists ...developed a new type of architectural drawing to suggest both the internal and external form of a centralized building in a single image. Wolfgang Lotz had used the phrase 'bird's-eye view' to refer to these drawings, found in the works of Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio, and Leonardo da Vinci. He excluded from consideration the related woodcut of the fictional Temple of Venus Physizoa in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). An analysis of the accompanying text suggests that this type of drawing relates to Ficino's concept of intuiting an architect's original design of a building – the total Idea, or 'mind's-eye view'.
This second part of the paper studies the repercussions of the use of honestum to translate the Greek term ... in two of the most important translators of Aristotle and Plato in the 15th Century, ...Leonardo Bruni and Marsilio Ficino: the different criterion applied by Bruni to translate the same word in Aristotle or Plato and the hard controversy with Alonso de Cartagena, as well as the important impact of Ficino's translation of platonic Symposion in the new understanding of 'honest love'. The paper also studies the controversy about the ethical value of honestum, especially as represented in Valla's work. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Honestum represents one of the most important moral and esthetic terms in the whole latin literature. Starting with its Cicero's use to traduce to latin the complex greek concept ..., present in ...Plato, Aristotle and the stoical philosophers, this paper studies its use by the main christian medieval authors, and, especially, its presence in two of the biggest Aristotle and Plato's translators, Leonardo Bruni and Marsilio Ficino, and also the impact of both's works in the diferent values that the term «honesto» took inside the castilian literature. The first part of the paper covers from the Antiquity till the Middle Ages. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Marsilio Ficino's Latin writings contain within them a program of clerical, social, and political reform. The agent of such reform was a disciplinary apparatus called know thyself. Through know ...thyself, an ideal philosopher would emerge. This philosopher had the potential to become, in time, a prophet. Ficino built his apparatus out of parts borrowed from the writings of the Platonists, early Christian monastics, and Ciceronians. It amounted to a process of daemonic combat, fasting and prayer. Citizens, under the Ficinian prophet, would be made to practice these arts in order to convert themselves to the truth contained in God's light. The prophet would reform society and the church in order to eliminate heresy and ward off the influence of evil daemons. Ficino, looking at an Italian intellectual culture that denied the immortality of the soul and encouraged children to seek the praise of glory, wished to return society to its humble, devoted roots. There had once been a Golden Age of man, a reign of Saturn prior to the Flood. Know thyself would return man to that age and that kingdom.
Rigolot reconstructs the original conception behind writer Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Tracing his debt to Platonic love, Rigolot reveals why Montaigne had planned to place his dead friends' ...political treatise, Etienne de la Boetie's Discours de la servitude volontaire, at the center of his own work.
Jurdjevic addresses the political context of a troubled Renaissance moment in the reception of classical philosophy and Christian teaching. He focuses on the first major Renaissance breakdown of ...Christian and classical harmony in late 15th-century Florence.
This article discusses the manner in which Ficino employs the figure of Pythagoras and various aspects of the Pythagorean tradition in the philosophical areas of psychology, moral philosophy, and ...ontology. It also argues that the figure of Pythagoras as prophet was particularly appealing to a Ficino situated in the cultural environment of late fifteenth-century Florence. Text, culture, and ideology interacted in a complex way: spurred on by his early appreciation of Iamblichus's soteriological presentation of Pythagoras, Ficino helped create an ideology in Florence which was receptive to a prophetic figure. The piece thus suggests that Ficino viewed a certain segment of the history of thought through late ancient, Iamblichean eyes.
PDF