Neoplatonic Florence: Marsilio Ficino and the Careggi Academy

A few kilometres from the centre of Florence, on the hills north of the city, stands the Medici villa of Careggi. Here, in the second half of the fifteenth century, a group of friends, scholars and men of power gathered around Marsilio Ficino, a circle that tradition has called the Platonic Academy. From that circle came the translations of Plato and of the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, texts that would nourish European philosophy, art and esotericism for two centuries.

The dream of Cosimo the Elder

In 1439 Florence hosted the council that tried to reunite the Latin and Greek Churches. Among the Byzantine delegates was the philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon, who lectured on Plato and deeply impressed the humanists. According to Ficino's own account, Cosimo de' Medici then conceived the plan of reviving the Platonic school in Florence. Years later he chose for this task the young Marsilio, son of his personal physician.

Cosimo gave Ficino a house near Careggi and obtained Greek manuscripts for him. In 1463, when a manuscript containing the treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus reached Florence, the ruler asked that they be translated even before Plato's dialogues. The Latin version, entitled Pimander, was printed in 1471 and enjoyed enormous success. Plato's complete works in Latin appeared in print in 1484.

Ancient theology and the chain of sages

Ficino was convinced that there existed a prisca theologia, a most ancient wisdom handed down from Hermes to Orpheus, then to Pythagoras and finally to Plato, in harmony with Christian revelation. Today we know that the Hermetic texts date from the first centuries of the Christian era, as the philologist Isaac Casaubon showed in 1614. But for the Renaissance Hermes was a contemporary of Moses, and his authority seemed immense.

In the Platonic Theology, printed in 1482, Ficino defended the immortality of the soul and its central place in the cosmos. In his commentary on the Symposium, known as De amore, he described love as the force that leads the soul back to divine beauty. In 1489 he published De vita, which also dealt with the influence of the stars on the health of scholars, a subject that brought him suspicion and forced him to clarify his orthodoxy.

Banquets, friends and a European legacy

Rather than an institution with rules and premises, the Academy was probably a network of friendships and meetings, and historians still debate how organised it was. Ficino describes a banquet held on 7 November, the traditional date of Plato's birth and death, at which the guests commented on the Symposium. Members of the Medici family and Florentine intellectuals took part.

Alongside Ficino moved Lorenzo the Magnificent, who died at Careggi itself in 1492, the poet Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, author in 1486 of a famous oration on the dignity of man. Their ideas spread throughout Europe and influenced thinkers, artists, Christian Kabbalists and alchemists until the seventeenth century.

The villa of Careggi, enlarged by Michelozzo for the Medici, is today part of the UNESCO site of the Medici villas and gardens in Tuscany. Visiting it means approaching the place where a small group of friends believed that ancient philosophy could renew faith, poetry and civic life. It was a bold wager that left deep marks on Western culture.