Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and His Influence ed. by Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw, Valery Rees (review)

Scholarship on Marsilio Ficino has flourished during the last decade, thanks in large measure to the recent publication of James Hankins and Michael Allen’s definitive edition and English translation of Ficino’s magnum opus, the Platonic Theology. The increasing accessibility of Ficino’s writings has opened the way to important new scholarly work revealing with ever-greater clarity Ficino’s immense influence during his own lifetime and subsequently, not only as the first translator of Plato’s complete works, but also as an original philosopher in his own right. The present volume, a collection of scholarly essays on Ficino’s thought and influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is the latest confirmation of the vitality of this field of study.

The volume is divided into two parts. The first consists of essays that deal with Ficino’s own thought and his engagement with the earlier Platonic tradition. Particularly noteworthy contributions include James Hankins’s essay, which establishes Ficino’s importance as the first author to discuss atheism and religious despair as a problem with physiological causes. In this respect, Ficino was a major influence on Robert Burton, among other later thinkers. As Hankins explains, it is surprising that Ficino, a great admirer of Plotinus, developed such a view, given that Plotinus insisted that the soul controls the body, whereas the body exerts no influence over the soul. In his readiness to acknowledge the body’s influence on the soul, Ficino is indebted to Galen, whom he regarded as a Platonist. Hankins shows that Ficino’s De vita, with its medical and magical cures designed for scholars prone to melancholy, also aims to cure the atheism toward which scholarly minds are sometimes inclined, by alleviating the physiological imbalances that give rise to unbelief.

Valery Rees’s essay examines the relationship between praise and love in Ficino’s writings, arguing that Ficino’s creative use of praise draws on literary models including the Hermetic corpus and the Pauline epistles, as well as the writings and teachings of Antoninus Pierozzi.

Stéphane Toussaint’s essay focuses on Ficino’s ideas about levitation and heavenly rapture, highlighting the importance of Ficino’s belief that the scriptural accounts of Ezekiel and Elijah’s ascents to heaven could be explained by Neoplatonic theories of the vehicles of the soul. Toussaint provides the first solid evidence that Ficino read and drew material from the work of Jean Gerson, and argues convincingly that Ficino’s ideas about levitation were influenced by writings of Michael Psellos.

The second half of the volume is dedicated to studies of Ficino’s influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Brian Copenhaver’s essay explores the gap between the characterizations of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola offered by Marsilio Ficino and by Gianfrancesco Pico: while Ficino’s letters cast Pico as an endangered but engaged intellectual, Gianfrancesco takes pains to portray his uncle as a world-denying Christian saint. According to Copenhaver, Gianfrancesco Pico deliberately published his uncle’s letters in a sequence far removed from their temporal order, intending for the letters to be read not historically, but thematically and spiritually. Copenhaver argues that Gianfrancesco’s ordering of the letters foregrounds the theme of Pico’s repentance, which unfolds over three sequences of letters: the first proclaims Pico’s repentance, the second charts its initial failure, and the third documents its final achievement.

Letizia Panizza’s essay traces the ways in which Ficino’s version of Platonic love theory was reworked by an array of sixteenth-century authors, from Baldassare Castiglione to Alessandro Piccolomini. Of particular interest is Panizza’s new analysis of the rewriting of Book IV of Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano carried out on behalf of the Congregation of the Index by the Jesuit Antonio Ciccarelli da Foligno.

Constance Blackwell’s essay identifies the sixth-century philosopher Simplicius as...