Shortly after sending these first missives Ficino felt the need to write another letter (dated 26 June 1487) to the cardinal to ingratiate himself, and once again to apologize for not meeting him in person.
Fathers are ever in the habit of imprinting (imprimere) their image entirely onto their son so effectively that when one sees the child one will also see the parent. Indeed, I wish that something would now be given to me from the divine so that presently in mind I may produce (procreem) a letter so similar to me that when the letter arrives it will seem as if I came to you. Otherwise, I will be without a doubt irreverent unless I confer with my patron, who is suddenly now closer to me. If ever I wished for anything, thinking that it is possible, I now most ardently long for this. For only a book (liber), among all the works of art, is called, so to speak, with the name of children (liberi) or sons, because only a book gives birth to something most resembling its author, clearly more of a resemblance than a picture, since a picture only relates the shadowy figure of our masks (personae). Accordingly, Plotinus thinks that men themselves, that is, their minds, step onto the stage of this worldly tragedy (tragoediam) masked (personatos) with bodies. A book, however, expresses a man as a whole, insofar as it explains the mind as a whole. But where am I going with this? While I complete a letter that gradually resembles me, I am also producing its dissimilitude, for it will not be similar to the humble Marsilio if it raises its head any higher. Therefore, it is as a supplicant that now I commend myself to you.25
In this second letter to Cardinal Barbo, Ficino reverses his opinion in the first letter that a written document cannot replace conversation in person. Punning once again on books and children, he plays with the myth of the origins of letters from the Phaedrus and says that books can communicate something like a family resemblance between father and son. Ignoring Socrates’ warnings that the written word, being unable to respond to criticism, needs its father to defend it, in the second letter to Cardinal Barbo Ficino says that the son, that is, the written word, can stand in and speak for the father in his absence. Books, Ficino argues with the double entendre of imprimere and procreare, have a figural relationship with their authors, just as children, it was thought, were imprinted with souls.26 His ironic humility at the end of his Platonic letter, indicating that he refuses to visit the cardinal, is a nod to the long-lasting tradition, dating as far back as Augustine’s accusations, that the Platonists are defined explicitly by their pride.27
The suspicion of his unorthodoxy and his inability to defend his written works personally in situ looms behind the Phaedrean trope of a child’s need of its authorial father to defend it, and shows how a written persona can cause troubles for its author. His writings on occasion faced exactly the kind of violent interpretation described in the Phaedrus. Roughly a decade later, in 1495, his public reputation had survived these turbulent suspicions in Rome, only to be questioned in turn closer to home by the Dominican preacher and firebrand Savonarola (1452–98) and his acolytes in Florence. Seemingly conscious of his letters’ role in defining and defending his identity for posterity, Ficino assembled them for the printer. On this occasion he continued the previous epistolary game in the dedicatory letter of his printed epistolography to the edition’s financial backer, Girolamo Rossi. Ficino addresses the preface to his letters, personified as his children: “My letters, as often as you give greetings at my command to my friends, give immortal greetings as many times to your greatest friend, Girolamo Rossi. For I gave birth to you mortals and I know not by what fate you will die before long. Girolamo, however, a man distinguished in piety, gave birth to you again not long ago as I hope that you are now immortal.”28 Ficino consistently uses his epistles to form his public persona, but was this a presentation of his true identity or a witty game of self-disguise?
In Ficino’s correspondence with Cardinal Barbo, in his argumentum to the Second Letter, and in his dedicatory letters to Lorenzo and Rossi, there is the same play of biological language as in Ficino’s commentary on the Phaedrus. “We should honor those [writers],” he says, “whose hope is to commend (commendare) the lawful offspring (fetus) of understanding, not to sheets of paper, but to souls, and to souls worthy of the mystery. These men suppose the use of writing a game (ludus).”29 Ficino’s constant use of puns in his prose emphasizes his Platonic opinion that a philosopher communicates serious matters (studium) in play (ludus). Yet, as Ficino’s allusion to Plotinus’s opinion that the world is a theater for tragedy makes clear, there is at times somber seriousness in Ficino’s play.30 If masks conceal the physical face, following Plotinus’s logic of bodily masks, the physical face itself conceals one’s true face: the mind or rational soul on which the divine is imprinted or inscribed. Masks and faces thus equally express and conceal identity, differences, and family resemblances. In Plotinus’s understanding of the Phaedrus, one can become like a god by working, like a sculptor polishing a statue, on one’s inner face (prosopon).31 Ficino, who repeatedly worked on his own image in his writings, believed that Plato similarly fashioned his own countenance in his dialogues. This Platonic understanding of self-presentation also guides Ficino’s interpretation of the dialogues.
Outline of the Book: Ficino, Plato, Humanism, and Platonic Traditions
The title of this book, Plato’s Persona, conveys three related features of my argument. First, I argue that Ficino composes his letters and many of his other writings self-consciously in imitation of a Platonic style of prose, in effect devising a humanist rhetorical persona as a Platonic philosopher. Second, I propose that Ficino reads Plato in a prosopopoeic manner, that is, he seeks to understand the Athenian philosopher’s persona(e) among all of the dialogues’ interlocutors. Third, and related to the two previous points, I show how Ficino becomes Plato’s Latin spokesperson in the Renaissance. It is a role which he cherishes and with which he fabricates his own identity.
The first chapter of this book is based on a study of the semantic fields stemming from the Greek prosopon, which means both mask and face, and is equally the term used to denote the interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues. The anthropological differences and variances in meaning that come from the fact that prosopon has been translated by the Latin persona led to important developments for philosophy and rhetoric. This chapter delineates Ficino’s understanding of Platonic personae (conceived as interlocutors in dialogues and as personal identities). It shows how the study by Ficino of Plato’s artistry as a writer of dialogues shaped his own style of prose and rhetorical persona in his humanistic letters. Studying the Platonic corpus or writing philosophical letters to his contemporaries, Ficino works with various rhetorical stratagems but most notably prosopopoeia and enargeia, the fabrication and presentation of vivid personae.
I devote the second chapter to Ficino’s interpretation of Plato’s dialogues as a coherent corpus. It is divided into four topics. First, I study how Plato’s style and dialogues posed interpretive challenges to Ficino and other Renaissance humanists.