Marsilio Ficino

Marsilio Ficino is the Florentine priest-philosopher whose translations, commentaries, and original treatises effected the Renaissance recovery of Plato, Plotinus, and the Hermetic corpus, and who in the process became the figure through whom the Neoplatonic tradition reached the early modern imagination in a form the Seba lineage inherits.

Under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, Ficino produced the first complete Latin translation of Plato, the first translation of Plotinus’s [[enneads|Enneads]], and the translation of the [[corpus-hermeticum|Corpus Hermeticum]] that made Hermes Trismegistus a household name in Renaissance Europe. His Theologia Platonica (1482) synthesized Platonic, Christian, and Hermetic materials into a single philosophical-theological vision, and his De Amore — the commentary on Plato’s [[plato-symposium|Symposium]] — is the text through which Renaissance love poetry, from Petrarch’s heirs through the English metaphysicals, learned to speak of eros as a cosmic-psychological principle. His teaching on the world-soul is the direct precursor of Jung’s recovery of the same concept in the twentieth century.

Relationships

• plato
• plotinus
• corpus-hermeticum
• anima-mundi