On the surface Bembo suggests that he is generally in agreement with Cortesi for arguing that one ought to imitate Cicero in prose (as well as Virgil in poetry) and claims that Gianfrancesco Pico is in Poliziano’s camp for defending eclecticism. Despite protesting that their disagreement is different from Poliziano and Cortesi’s, Gianfrancesco Pico picks up where Poliziano left off by discussing Ciceronian liniamenta. The fact that he employs the term liniamenta on seven occasions further underscores that their debate is also centred on the notion of the rhetorical persona. Gianfrancesco Pico, moreover, argues in more explicit terms than the two previous groups of letters for the existence of a prediscursive persona. Given that he was one of the first close readers of Sextus Empiricus, Giovanni Pico is usually described as a skeptic or fideist dogmatist rather than a Platonist. Nevertheless, he articulates at the outset of the controversy’s first letter the importance of Plato (whose position he compares broadly to that of Cicero and Horace) for their debate.
One finds out from Gianfrancesco Pico’s letters that a Platonic approach to rhetoric entails two related positions: an epistemological theory of innatism, according to which one naturally possesses inborn reasons or forms of ideas in one’s ingenium, and a metaphysical theory that persons have interior souls and minds. The younger Pico says, “Perhaps some will say that we should concentrate on imitating those who please us the most. I would not disagree with this advice. Plato may please you more than others; so may Cicero who is Platonic not only in his views but also in style. We should follow them. For although the features (face; facies animi) of each person’s soul, like those of his body, are so proper to him that it is difficult to find two that are completely alike, our souls are still less dissimilar to some than to others, and it will therefore be easier for us to become like them.”59 In his first letter, arguing that one ought to emulate all good writers, the younger Pico also stresses the reliance on one’s singular innate conception of beauty and eloquence over multiple models. With this in mind he values the free discovery of ingenium in rhetoric, and accordingly prioritizes inventio over dispositio, elocutio, memoria, or pronuntiatio in the stages of rhetorical composition: “I don’t think there is any need to talk about memory or pronunciation, since neither of these is set down on paper.”60
Both authors seek to delineate the method of rhetorical composition (scribendi ratio, to use Bembo’s terminology), but contrary to Gianfrancesco Pico’s Platonic appeal to one’s natural ingenium, Bembo puts forward the case that to become eloquent one needs ars and imitative exercises:
But it’s your business if you see in your soul an idea and form of writing planted there and handed down by nature. I can speak to you only of my soul. I saw no form of style in it, no pattern of discourse before I developed myself in mind and thought by reading the books of the ancients over the course of many years, by long labor, practice and exercise. Since something should be said about this, I now turn to that topic. I see by thought, as though with my eyes, from what source to take the highest example which I need to compose some piece of writing. Yet, before I engaged in the thoughts I mention, I too used to look no less into my soul and to seek, as in a mirror, some likeness I might use to compose what I wanted. But there was no likeness in my soul, nothing presented itself to me; I saw nothing.61
Instead of looking into the interior mirror of his soul, Bembo self-fashions his rhetorical persona on Cicero’s likeness, which he sees externally before his eyes (ante oculos).62 To put it succinctly, for Bembo there seems to be no prediscursive persona.
These epistolary exchanges illustrate how much humanist Latin imitative practices are also dominated by prosopopoeia. The debates over Ciceronianism and the question de genere dicendi philosophorum investigate what it means to fabricate one’s own persona. Continuing Poliziano’s discussion of Cicero’s liniamenta, and Giovanni Pico and Barbaro’s examination of decorum, Gianfrancesco Pico and Bembo consciously draw on the correspondence between text, clothes, and body, but more importantly on the correspondence between a rhetorical persona and a human face, to make their case. For instance, Gianfrancesco Pico describes Ciceronians who base their style on one sole model as wishing to copy all aspects of a human face, including scars, warts, and the like.63 With such a method, he reasons, they attempt to raise Cicero from the dead and give his texts a voice. Yet Gianfrancesco Pico’s philological sensitivity also leads him to believe that some of Cicero’s texts, like decaying corpses, may have been corrupted in the great span of time that separates him from Cicero’s age. “If Cicero were revived from the dead, he would deny that they had taken these words from him. Or they pay careful regard even to what booksellers have published, who corrupt the integrity of the text throughout in the process.”64
Bembo’s reply to Gianfrancesco Pico’s criticism instead argues that Pico’s eclecticism corrupts Cicero’s body. It takes some of his facial features and some from others, and grafts together their skin, bones, eyes, mouth into a grisly human mask-something like Victor Frankenstein’s creation, which is certainly far from elegant. For Bembo, each part ought to fit into a harmonious whole: “What is good and excellent in any writer flows together and coalesces from all the parts of his work. All his virtues, but also his faults (if he has any) go together to make up his style. If we consider the faces of men, one reflects a kind of character; another, a lively nature; another, courage; another, a fertile intelligence; another, grandeur; another, charm. Yet individual characteristics come not only from the shape of one’s eyes, eyebrows, mouth, cheeks or the quality of any other part, but each is constituted of all the parts and members of its own face.”65 To do otherwise would create a polycephalic monster, like Homer’s deceitful Proteus.66
In his second letter to Bembo, Gianfrancesco Pico cedes him neither the point nor even the imagery. Once more he compares strict Ciceronian imitators to false necromancers who try to resurrect Cicero:
But go on and imagine that you are Apelles or have raised Zeuxis, Phidias, Praxiteles, Lysippus and Pyrgoteles from the underworld to reproduce for you not the garments but the body of Cicero. For when these great artists have used brush, chisel or the art of metal-casting and have set the image of Cicero himself before your eyes (sub oculos), they will have performed their duty. Yet this Cicero will be painted or marble or bronze, not flesh. I’ll even grant something more: that they equal Cicero’s flesh through imitation. But shouldn’t we think that the only true Cicero was his soul and spirit which informed his flesh—the Cicero who envisioned the form of oratory in his soul, added living strength and grace to it and then expressed all these spiritual motions through the medium of his tongue? So whoever supposes that they have acquired the living tongue of Cicero should bear in their mind Cicero’s conceptions; they should have experience and knowledge, moreover, of a great many important affairs. Otherwise, if they lack the Tullian spirit, Cato may call them “Glossaries of the Dead” (mortuaria glossaria).67
Cicero is dead, his soul is extinguished, and his voice silenced. Ciceronians who wish to resuscitate him, employing rhetorical enargeia by placing his persona before our eyes (sub oculos), or who wish to give him his voice again, trying to revive a lost orality from his surviving writings, do nothing more than become mortuaria glossaria.68 The death masks of Cicero that they fabricate with texts are really “larvae, phantoms or vanishing shades, rather than men, for they lack the strength and spirit of living beings.”69 Like Socrates wishing to dispel the fear of the mormolukeion by turning the mask upside down to show that there is nothing on its reverse, so Gianfrancesco Pico wishes to do the same by flipping the Ciceronian mask to reveal that it is in fact a larva, an empty horror mask. Yet, one should remember that this is also Bembo’s point: when he looks inside himself for a prediscursive persona he claims to find none. Much of their debate hinges on a specific passage from Cicero’s Orator: “In fashioning the best orator I shall construct such a one as perhaps has never existed.”70 Gianfrancesco Pico interprets this passage to mean that Cicero denies that the best orator ever existed in history; he therefore points to an interior Platonic ideal. Bembo understands this passage to say that no such ideal orator ever existed or ever will exist (in history or in the mind), and so one can only look outside oneself for imitative models.
For