Marsilio Ficino Simulacrum

The Life

Marsilio Ficino was born in Figline Valdarno in 1433, the son of Cosimo de' Medici's personal physician. Cosimo took the young man under his patronage and, around 1462, installed him at the villa of Careggi with a library, a salary, and the commission to translate the complete works of Plato into Latin. Ficino was ordained priest in 1473 and remained in orders for the rest of his life. He completed the Plato translation in 1484, and then — commissioned again by Lorenzo de' Medici — produced the first Latin translations of the *Enneads* of Plotinus, the Hermetic corpus, Iamblichus on the Egyptian mysteries, and other late-antique Platonic works. He continued to write his own philosophical and theological treatises until his death in 1499.

The Thought

Ficino's programme was the integration of Platonic philosophy, Christian theology, and Hermetic wisdom into a single concordant tradition. His major theological work, the *Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animorum* (1482), argues for the immortality of the soul using arguments drawn from the Platonic tradition, and presents the *prisca theologia* — the ancient theology — as a continuous wisdom transmitted through a chain of inspired teachers (Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, the Neoplatonists) to which Christian revelation was the fulfilment, not the contradiction.

His *De vita libri tres* (1489) — *On Life in Three Books* — applied this metaphysics to practical matters of health, scholarly melancholy, and the use of music, diet, and planetary correspondences to maintain a good constitution. It is among the most widely read works of the late fifteenth century and the most important single document of Renaissance magical practice, though Ficino himself was careful to distinguish his natural magic from the demonic magic the Church condemned.

The Legacy

Ficino's translations made Plato available to Latin Europe for the first time since antiquity. Every subsequent engagement with Plato in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — by Erasmus, by the Cambridge Platonists, by Leibniz — proceeded from editions that ultimately descended from his. His Plotinus translation similarly reintroduced the *Enneads* to the West. The Hermetic corpus he translated influenced Bruno, Campanella, and the whole Renaissance esoteric tradition. Through the *De vita*, he shaped the Renaissance idea of the melancholic genius and of a practical magic compatible with Christian piety.