page_title: Marsilio Ficino
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Marsilio Ficino / Work
caption_attribution_description: English: Domenico Ghirlandaio: Zachariah in the Temple (detail): Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano and Demetrios Chalkondyles. Fresco. Santa Maria Novella, Cappella Tornabuoni, Florence, Italy. 1486-1490.
context_page_description: Marsilio Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin. His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy, influenced the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European philosophy.
context_section_description: In 1474 Ficino completed his treatise on the immortality of the soul, Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae (Platonic Theology). In the rush of enthusiasm for every rediscovery from Antiquity, he exhibited a great interest in the arts of astrology, which landed him in trouble with the Catholic Church. In 1489 he was accused of heresy before Pope Innocent VIII and needed strong defense to preserve him from condemnation.
  Writing in 1492 Ficino proclaimed: "This century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music ... this century appears to have perfected astrology."
  Ficino's letters, extending over the years 1474–1494, survive and have been published. He wrote De amore (1484). De vita libri tres (Three books on life), or De triplici vita, published in 1489, provides a great deal of medical and astrological advice for maintaining health and vigor, as well as espousing the Neoplatonist view of the world's ensoulment and its integration with the human soul:
  There will be some men or other, superstitious and blind, who see life plain in even the lowest animals and the meanest plants, but do not see life in the heavens or the world ... Now if those little men grant life to the smallest particles of the world, what folly! what envy! neither to know that the Whole, in which 'we live and move and have our being,' is itself alive, nor to wish this to be so.
  One metaphor for this integrated "aliveness" is Ficino's astrology. In the Book of Life, he details the interlinks between behavior and consequence. It talks about a list of things that hold sway over a man's destiny.
  Probably due to early influences from his father Diotifeci, who was a doctor to Cosimo de' Medici, Ficino published Latin and Italian treatises on medical subjects such as Consiglio contro la pestilenza (Recommendations for the treatment of the plague) and De vita libri tres (Three books on life). His medical works exerted considerable influence on Renaissance physicians such as Paracelsus, with whom he shared the perception on the unity of the micro- and macrocosmos, and their interactions, through somatic and psychological manifestations, with the aim to investigate their signatures to cure diseases. Those works, which were very popular at the time, dealt with astrological and alchemical concepts.  Thus Ficino came under the suspicion of heresy; especially after the publication of the third book in 1489, which contained specific instructions on healthful living.
  Notably, Ficino coined the term Platonic love, which first appeared in his letter to Alamanno Donati in 1476. In 1492, Ficino published Epistulae (Epistles), which contained Platonic love letters, written in Latin, to his academic colleague and life-long friend Giovanni Cavalcanti concerning the nature of Platonic love. Importantly, Ficino's letters to Cavalcanti resulted in the popularization of the term Platonic love in Western Europe. Clement Salaman, a modern translator of Ficino’s letters, notes that, “Platonic Love has passed into common parlance as a love independent of physical attraction, a love central to Ficino’s concept of friendship.” Salaman also remarks that the love to which Finico referred in his letters is "purely spiritual; it was not a polite form of words, still less a reference to homosexual love. It was a love that was all-embracing." Despite the claims of modern revisionist historians, there is no evidence that Ficino was erotically attracted to men. Consistent with his life's task of reconciling Platonism with Catholicism, Ficino rejected physical expressions of love between two men as a “wicked crime.” “Love and the desire for physical union,” Ficino wrote, are “not identical impulses, but…opposite ones.” Further, Ficino condemned sodomy in Convivium  and faithfully adhered to the precepts of Catholic moral teaching regarding sexuality.
caption: Zachariah in the Temple (detail), a fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1486–1490) in the Tornabuoni Chapel, Florence, showing (L-R): Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano and Gentile de' Becchi or Demetrios Chalkondyles
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