Ficino’s love letters to Cavalcanti are occasions, as letters often are, to reflect on the distance between sender and recipient. In this case, Ficino plays with the distance of longing as a demonstration of the Meno’s paradox (80d–e) that one cannot search for what one already has, but that one will also not know what to search for if one does not already have it. Yet Ficino’s letters also evoke the proximity of the closest intimacy. In his letters, Ficino engages in a discursive process of self-knowledge whereby before one turns inward toward one’s own spirit or inner self, one seeks oneself in another person, just as though one were to look at one’s face in the mirror; that is, he enacts Socrates’ claim in the Phaedrus (255d) that the lover sees himself in his beloved. Ficino’s letter to Cavalcanti evokes similar aesthetics to later Renaissance depictions of Socratic philosophy in the visual arts. Ficino’s description of Cavalcanti holding his letter as though it were a mirror reflecting Ficino and Cavalcanti’s countenance uniting two persons in a single gaze is analogous to the later canvas by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) of a philosopher seeing his Socratic reflection in a mirror (Figure 8). In turn, like Socrates and Theaetetus studying each other’s faces, Ficino’s letters reveal Cavalcanti’s own countenance to himself and are meant to serve as mirrors for Cavalcanti’s own interiorization of discursive self-knowledge. Ficino proclaims to his friend: “The same, or at least the most similar, spirit (genius) directs both of us.”95 In asking Cavalcanti to return himself, Ficino playfully requests a reply to his letter.
The theme of friendship is also central to the Petrarchan revival of the Ciceronian form of letters to friends. Thus, on the one hand, in his letters to Cavalcanti Ficino rehearses what was becoming a standard mode of humanistic expression. Yet, on the other, Ficino demarcates himself from his company by framing the letters to friends in the mos Platonicus of Socratic love. In the same group of letters Ficino reveals some of the mechanisms of his artifice to Cavalcanti: “I wrote a few letters to you, my greatest friend, in which I tried my hand in a certain way at the style of lovers, which indeed seems to be appropriate to our intimacy, and is not far from that honest free speech of Socrates and Plato. However, in the manner of the Platonists, now after the lovers’ game (for this is the Platonic manner of introduction) we come to serious matters. Now hear what was said with Bernardo Giugni and Bartolomeo Fortini, excellent citizens in justice, when we discussed the intellect.”96 The ludus now over (at least temporarily), what follows in this other letter is Ficino’s serious and quite sober transcription of questions concerning the mind and soul, which he claims to have discussed with two learned Florentine statesmen. In this second exposition of questions concerning the mind and soul Ficino considers it important to argue against the so-called Averroist opinion on the unity of the intellect, that is, that all men share a single intellect. This is all the more significant for Ficino because in writing to Cavalcanti that the real self is an interior person, he wishes to maintain its individuality while also explaining how it unites with others. Ficino is therefore carefully avoiding the risk of being interpreted as advocating the so-called Averroist position on the unity of the intellect.
In response to an inquiry by the humanist Bartolomeo della Fonte (1445–1513) about his own style of prose, Ficino took the opportunity to explain how the best writers—Plato chief of all—mixed poetry into prose: “You recognize that Plato’s style surges high above pedestrian style and prose, as Quintilian says, so much that our Plato seems not to have a human ingenium, but is instead inspired by a certain Delphic oracle. In fact, Plato’s mixing and combination of poetry and prose pleased Cicero to such an extent that he claimed that if Jupiter wished to speak with a human tongue he would use no other tongue than the one with which Plato speaks.”97 Plato’s style takes on universal proportions for Ficino. He compares what he takes to be similar infusions of poetic rhythms into prose in the Old Testament, in the Egyptian works of Hermes (that is, the Corpus Hermeticum), among eloquent Greeks (Gorgias, Isocrates, Herodotus, Aristides), among Latin authors of the golden age (Livy and Cicero), and later (Apuleius, Jerome, and Boethius). Following further reflection on the nature of prose, poetry, and music, Ficino returns to his own imitative style to drive his point home.98 He is not claiming that all of the authors cited are Platonic. Rather, he is marshaling a series of ancient authorities who either praised Plato’s style or mixed poetic rhythm into prose, as a way of building a consensus to defend Plato’s style, and in turn his own. More specifically, he addresses the very question of the appropriate stylistic decorum for writing philosophy. In his case, he shapes his rhetorical style to correspond to Platonic philosophy. In his mind, it is only appropriate that he imitate a Platonic stylistic form to suit his Platonic content.
FIGURE 8. Philosopher with Mirror, copy after Jusepe de Ribera. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
The union with Cavalcanti also characterizes Ficino’s bonds with other intimates. Playing on the physical distance between himself and his letters’ recipients, Ficino often conveys the message that the material letter serves the role of one’s body or face, bridging the distance with mixed results, as, for instance, when he writes to Carlo Marsuppini on 1 March 1473: “Marsuppini, I saw a more beautiful Marsilio in the pupil of your eye than the present Marsilio. But let us go on. Indeed, your letter is so persuasive that it compels me to respond with my feet instead of my hands, and with my voice instead of my letters.”99 Ficino is once more playing an epistolary game. The “beautiful Marsilio in the pupil of your eye” to which he refers in the letter is none other than Marsuppini’s previous letter.100 Similarly, to Giuliano de’ Medici, younger than Ficino by twenty-one years, he writes: “ ‘But why did you not send for me,’ you say, ‘when you were able to?’ Even if I were to think that you are absent there, I would not have sent for you, lest I would become a greater nuisance to you. In fact, for some time now my great love for you has impressed your figure into my mind (figuram tuam animo impressit meo), and in the same way that I see myself in the mirror (speculo) sometimes, I see (speculor) you most often in me in my heart. Moreover, your brother Lorenzo, your other self, your other nature, and your other will, was also present then; and thus, when I saw clearly (perspicerem; perspicue) my Giuliano equally within me and outside me, I was not able to think that he was absent from me.”101 The letters—filled with self-reflective puns—convey the persistent philosophical trope that the presence of Ficino’s companions, whether in person or in text, are means for self-knowledge and communion of souls. Ficino’s letter defines Lorenzo as his brother Giuliano’s “alter ego,” just as Ficino at times characterized some of his correspondents, and just as some of Ficino’s contemporaries portrayed him as “alter Plato.”
Therefore, more than joining together merely two individuals, Ficino’s Platonic love letters aim at uniting communities. In a response to Cavalcanti’s complaint that Ficino is sacrilegiously breaking their sacred friendship by not writing to him while he worked on his Platonic Theology in his country residence, Ficino first personifies Plato to reproach himself for not writing and concludes: “But if you do not want to respond to me, at least respond to Plato. But behold, while I see you speaking—as it were—I soon find myself staring at twin faces—a wonderful sight—where I had only seen one. If I duly recognize friendly faces (vultus) I seem to see (speculari videor)—as in a mirror (speculo)—Lorenzo de’ Medici’s countenance (ora) in yours, and I seem to be rebuked by him similarly as by you. Therefore, once these twin faces have been doubled for you, salute them once again for me, that is the two whom just now I addressed as one, and whom I now address