Ficino also finds sources for inspired and intoxicated Bacchic style in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Because Pseudo-Dionysius adopted the terminology of late ancient Platonists, notably from Proclus, scholars now date his writings to a later period. Ficino does not realize that Dionysius is a pseudonym and still thinks that the author is Paul’s convert (from Acts 17:34), yet Ficino is nonetheless acutely aware of the similarities between Pseudo-Dionysius’s and the Neoplatonists’ philosophical style and terminology. In his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology, dedicated in 1492 to Lorenzo’s son, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, the future Pope Leo X, Ficino introduces the work with a discussion of style and love’s intoxication:
The ancient theologians and the Platonists believe that the spirit of the god Dionysus dwells in the ecstasy, the ecstatic departure, of separated minds, when partly out of inborn love and partly with the god prompting them, they have surpassed the natural limits of understanding, and are wondrously transformed into the beloved god. Then with a new draft of nectar and with unconscionable joy they reel as though they were intoxicated bacchantes. With this Dionysian wine, therefore, our inebriated Dionysius runs riot everywhere: he pours forth enigmas, he sings in dithyrambs.103
Ficino characteristically puns on the names Dionysus and Dionysius, claiming that Pseudo-Dionysius’s drunken and inspired state transforms him into the god Dionysus. The transfiguration of Dionysius, as it were, into Dionysus transforms his style so that he becomes a reveler singing in dithyrambs in the god’s thiasus, not unlike the ispired Socrates in the Phaedrus, who also sings in vatic dithyrambs.104 Immediately afterward in the commentary, Ficino expresses the difficulty of imitating Pseudo-Dionysius’s vatic, even Orphic, style in his own Latin translation, and prays that God might illuminate his commentaries and translation just as he did for Pseudo-Dionysius when he interpreted the prophets and apostles.
Ficino reflects once more on his own Platonic style in another letter to Bernardo Bembo, on 3 November 1480: “When I wished in the preceding days to exhort my friends to the ardent love of true virtue while being as brief as possible in my discourse, I attempted to paint with certain Platonic colors—as I am often wont to do—the image of a beautiful mind from a certain resemblance befitting a beautiful body. But when I attempt to express the same image of a beautiful body and mind, while painting, on account of my inexperience and ignorance of painting, I express not so much the image itself, which I aimed at depicting, than its resounding shadow.”105 Ficino makes it clear through his employment of a synaesthetic auditory/visual figure of a resounding shadow that the painted shadow in this case is both the letter itself and Ermolao Barbaro conveying the letter to Bembo in Venice. Ficino tells Bembo that if he inspects the shadow he will begin to see himself in this other person. If Ficino’s skiagraphia is not Platonic enough, he tells us that this technique of painting the human figure with shadows is in fact employing Platonic colors (Platonicis quibusdam, ut soleo saepe, coloribus pingere). Ficino is therefore employing the same common rhetorical terminology for features and colors that his humanist contemporaries were using to describe various styles in their Ciceronian debates.106
Ficino capitalizes on a scribal mistake in a letter to one of his most important patrons, Filippo Valori (1456–94) to make a similar point. Having accidentally begun to write the name of another prominent Florentine, Filippo Carducci, instead of Filippo Valori, Ficino or his scribe merely crossed out the mistaken last name, writing: “Marsilio Ficino sends his greetings to Filippo Cardu Valori. Look Filippo! As I was about to write ‘to Valori,’ I almost wrote ‘to Carducci.’ Is this any wonder? The truth is, both of you are one to each other and you are both one to me. So it even happens that when I play the lyre or sing, one of you plays with me and the other sings.”107 Although the most commonly cited printed edition of Ficino’s Opera omnia no longer preserves the canceled name, the manuscripts of Ficino’s letter make it clear that he wished the letter to be copied and circulated with the erased name “Cardu.” Adding to the image of the three friends in musical harmony, Ficino ends the letter by relating that he will soon travel with Valori in the Florentine countryside from Careggi to Maiano. Although Ficino could have followed Valori to his destination it is clear that the “Ficino” going to Maiano is in fact the letter itself being carried by Francesco Berlinghieri (1440–1500), another Florentine nobleman: “But since there is change in all things, I shall soon go to Maiano with you as my guide, but lest something hides from you, when you read ‘I’ you ought to understand Berlinghieri also as though under a greater ‘I.’ ”108 The letter’s conjoining of persons, Carducci and Valori on the one hand and Ficino and Berlinghieri on the other, demonstrates how Ficino employed the rhetorical devices of his Platonic letters to build social communities and networks. Ficino ends the letter by asking Valori to send his greetings to the members of their Academy, to their compatres Giovanni Battista Buoninsegni (1453–1512) and Jacopo Guicciardini (1422–90), as well to their confratres. The very short letter reveals two stages of rhetorical play. First, Ficino plays with his authorial persona (the writer) and his epistolary or public persona (the written letter itself). Second, he plays with the letter’s written and oral natures. One can easily recognize how, on the one hand, Valori’s reading is visual insofar as he needs to see the scribal error in the recipient’s name to conflate the persons of Valori and Carducci, but on the other hand his reading is also aural to the extent that it is understood that Berlinghieri is intended to read the letter aloud in order to join the two persons into one, that is Ficino’s written “I” and the “greater I” (ubi legis ego quasi sub grandiori quodam egone Berlingherium subintellige) that emerges from Berlinghieri’s oral delivery of the letter. Berlinghieri is thus tasked to speak the letter in the persona of Ficino, or ex persona Ficini, as Ficino would have expressed the technique. In the letter’s performance before Valori, Ficino’s authorial persona and Berlinghieri’s oratorical persona harmonize together in a manner similar to when Valori and Carducci sing and play the lyre with Ficino, which is a direct allusion to Plato’s juxtaposition of Theodorus’s ability to compare Socrates’ and Theaetetus’s faces to a musician judging whether two lyres are in harmony (Tht. 144d–e).
Ficino also restages similar synesthetic mixings of oral and visual performances for other epistles by his letter’s carriers, as he did with Berlinghieri, to solidify his Platonic persona with other addressees. In fact, Filippo Valori, formerly the recipient, played the part to deliver a letter to Giovanni Pico in 1488:
Lest you ever say that Marsilio, who is your first friend, came to you last, behold he has come. Contemplate (if you wish) the face (vultus) and gestures (gestus) of he who at present salutes you. But meanwhile closely inspect what hides under the mask (sub persona lateat). You will say, am I not contemplating youthful features instead of Marsilio’s face? But Pico (if you are unaware) the suppliant Ficino was recently rejuvanated just like an eagle. Yes, indeed this prayer has been granted. What about his gestures (gestus), however? According to what reason has he now been made younger but also heavier (gravior)? O my friend, as with such serious (gravibus) prayers it has been just now finally granted that he exchanges youth for old age, so it is not so strange that this man praying so seriously thence turned out both younger and heavier at the same time. Indeed, this has come about, but why is he wearing especially the face (vultus) of Filippo Valori? I pass over for the moment what exact form was chosen by Love.109
Other than Ficino’s characteristic use of “Platonic” puns (Valori, valore, vale/gravior, and iunior for light-hearted seriousness, as well as jokes about Valori’s age and weight), Ficino’s letter reveals further tropes of serioludere that depend on the letter’s oratorical