Once more a comparison to later Renaissance depictions of Socratic philosophy is appropriate. In a painting by Pietro della Vecchia (1603–78) Socrates and a pupil, likely Theaetetus, study the similarities and differences in each other’s faces (Figure 9).120 There are differences between della Vecchia’s painting and Plato’s Theaetetus. Unlike the figures in the painting, Socrates and Theaetetus have snub-nosed faces. In the dialogue, Theaetetus has just oiled himself in a gymnasium, while in the canvas he is fully clothed—and not in ancient Greek garb. The painting is therefore not an exact realistic representation of the dialogue’s dramatic setting. Still, even if della Vecchia does not depict Socrates and Theaetetus’s physical likenesses, he (like Ficino’s letters) depicts their philosophic and dialogic roles. Their glances meet in the mirror, showing that a shared attention and dialogue with one another unites them in their self-knowledge.121 A third figure meets the gaze of the viewers of the canvas, inviting them into the same discursive process of self-knowledge. His hand holds a book in one version and a paper, perhaps a letter, in the other. Their exact contents are unclear, but philosophical elements are visible: geometric shapes, perhaps squares of opposition, or schematizations of arguments and concepts, as was fairly common in manuscripts and early modern books. These texts in the paintings are analogous to the canvases and face the readers/viewers as mirrors for their selves—mirrors that not only reflect external objects as though they were different images but also unify the reflected selves in the same way that the intellect ought to be identified with what it intelligizes when it self-reflects. Ficino’s intimate letters to friends are of course intended for a wider audience. One imagines that Ficino would like his letters to attract the gaze of all readers who, when confronted with the reflections of Cavalcanti and Ficino, would also be faced with their own as though in a hall of mirrors.
FIGURE 9. Socrates and Two Students (Know Thyself), by Pietro della Vecchia, c. 1650–60. Prado Museum, Madrid.
CHAPTER 2
Ficino and the Platonic Corpus
Moreover, one can certainly conjecture that the titles of these dialogues proceed in an ordered mode of succession from this reason, because the desire for the Good is inborn in all.
Therefore in the Phaedo and the Theaetetus Plato says the soul’s highest good is to be like God.
—Ficino, The Philebus Commentary
Plato’s Words: Divine or Confused?
Paul O. Kristeller’s pioneering work on Marsilio Ficino characterized Ficino as both a philosopher and a humanist. Yet Kristeller also differentiated Ficino from his humanist contemporaries insofar as he thought Ficino was primarily a systematic metaphysician, whereas other humanists were only thinkers of moral philosophy, one of the five disciplines in his definition of the studia humanitatis. His approach—sometimes mischaracterized and misinterpreted—is still very much present in the study of Renaissance humanism and philosophy in general, and Ficino and Plato in particular. In the hands of others, Kristeller’s categories have sometimes had the net effect of classifying humanists only as rhetoricians and of isolating Ficino.1 On the one hand, researchers of humanist rhetoric and dialogue are often too quick to cast aside Ficino the philosopher, and on the other hand, scholars of Ficino all too often neglect the rhetorical facets of Ficino’s work.2 Yet Ficino is very much invested in rhetoric, primarily in studying Plato’s own artistry and in forming his own oratorical and epistolary persona. In both cases, Ficino works with various rhetorical stratagems, but notably prosopopoeia and enargeia—in other words, the fabrication and vivid presentation of personae. If one looks exclusively for narrowly defined elegantia in humanist rhetoric, one runs the risk of being blind to the sophisticated and philosophical aspects of Ficino’s style.
These rhetorical stratagems also influenced Ficino’s hermeneutical approach to Plato’s style and corpus. Plato’s style was not only the subject of ancient interpretation; his first translators in the Renaissance also discussed his prose, often in prefaces to their Latin translations of his works. As humanists honed their skills in Greek many soon began studying Plato, whose own prose seemed to evoke equal parts admiration and confusion in his first quattrocento readers. Many humanists would pick out scattered images, sentences, or small morsels of wisdom from Plato’s dialogues for their florilegia, saving them to adorn their own writings or to support their future arguments with the weight of his authority. Others undertook a more sustained study of Plato. Leonardo Bruni, the brilliant humanist and translator of the Phaedo, Crito, Apology, Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Letters, remarked to Niccolò Niccoli (1364–1437) that Plato conveys divine opinions with a pleasant style, that nothing in his prose is forced, and that he expresses all with ease and grace.3 This kind of praise for his style was common among many translators of Plato. After all, by lauding their chosen subject they in turn basked in his reflected glow. Along similar lines, Pier Candido Decembrio (1399–1477) wrote a few lines of praise in his preface to his translation of the fifth book of the Republic while employing the trope of inviting his reader to speak with Socrates: “His eloquence is brilliant to such an extent that he is held first among the Greeks no less for the charm of his style than the weight of his thinking. But more is said about this elsewhere, let us now hear Socrates speak.”4 Antonio da Rho (c. 1398–after 1450) might have been inspired by Pier Candido’s actual opinions, since in his Dialogorum in lactantium the interlocutor Pier Candido, repeating Cicero and Quintilian’s opinions, continues to admire Plato’s prose: “Who would doubt that Plato himself was exceptional either in his sharpness of argument or in his ease of eloquence, which is a certain divine and Homeric style. For he greatly rises above the prose and style that the Greeks call pedestrian, as it seems to me that it does not come from a human ingenium, but yet from a certain Delphic oracle of God.”5 The stylistic considerations of Plato’s prose by Latin humanists largely emerged either from the practice of doing their own Greek to Latin translations of some of Plato’s compositions or from their readings of ancient opinions on Plato—for example, from Latin authors, such as Cicero and Quintilian, and Greek ones, such as Plutarch (c. 46–120 CE), Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–c. 115 CE), and other second sophistic authors—many of whom compared Plato’s abilities to Homer’s.6
Two of Ficino’s closest interlocutors, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano, also made similar comparisons between the stylistic qualities of Homer and Plato. Pico wrote to Ermolao Barbaro that Plato and Aristotle