The Gertrude Stein of 15th Century Florence was the Fabulous Marsilio Ficino
Ficino's Platonic Academy
The Platonic Academy of Florence and The Literary Salon of Paris
History reinvents itself; sometimes for better; sometimes for worse.
In this case, it’s factually better to realize that our early understanding of Renaissance Florence’s Neoplatonic Academy was overly romanticized and mythologized—but in the correction, I lost something important to me and didn’t know how to re-contextualize it. That ultimately changed when I saw a context for understanding Ficino’s Academy in Gertrude Stein’s Literary Salon.
The Gertrude Stein of 15th Century Florence was the Fabulous Marsilio Ficino
The American writer and art collector, Gertrude Stein, moved to Paris in 1903 and was hosting salons even before the first world war. Her most famous work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, is an interesting spin on the memoir genre, as it’s about her Paris days but written as if the author were her life partner, Alice.
Famous painters and writers gathered at Stein’s home every Saturday. She was an early collector of Picasso and Matisse. Hemingway attended the salon from 1921 to 1924, and she was a guiding figure in his early days as he transitioned from journalist to novelist. Other important figures included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Man Ray, and James Joyce.
As Ficino championed the transition from Aristotelianism to Neoplatonism, so Stein championed the move from Romanticism to Modernism. For me, the importance of the comparison is the informal nature of the gatherings and the fact that its members benefited and often learned from her but were not her students. This aspect of the Platonic Academy is what history lost in our original visions of a formal college—but the romance need not be lost due this inconvenience of facts. A philosophical salon attended by some of the greatest minds of the Renaissance is a particularly beautiful truth.
Intermission:
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Marsilio Ficino was born in 1433 in Figline Valdorno. His father was a physician to Cosimo de Medici who recognized Marsilio’s brilliance and commissioned his early translations—perhaps having been influenced to do so by Plethon’s stay in Florence in 1439 as part of the ecumenical council.
Ficino was trained as a physician and ordained as a priest in 1473. His writings dipped into what may be thought of as the occult, but he kept his focus on natural magic and never suffered attempts of excommunication, unlike Pico della Mirandola, another famous participant in the Platonic Academy. Natural magic avoided dealing with spirits and focused on what was believed to be the magic inherent in creation, this included sympathetic and imitative magic as well as astrology.
His platonic salon included Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola, and Lorenzo (the Magnificent) Medici, as well as others. As with Stein’s Paris academy, I list the names most meaningful to me.
Stein influenced the direction of modernist literature and art. Ficino influenced the direction of the Italian Renaissance as well as the melding of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism with Christian theology.
Like Stein, Ficino was most likely homosexual—but here the comparisons I see are more akin to Shakespeare. That isn’t merely because of the bisexual nature of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it’s his invisible influence that I see foreshadowed in Ficino. Ficino coined the phrase, “platonic love,” and historian Rictor Norton has suggested that Ficino may have invented the concept of love letters.
For Ficino, the letters in question were written for Giovannie Cavalcanti, the man he lived with for many years in Ficino’s villa in Careggio, the one given to him by Cosimo Medici—the same villa where the academy met and of which the beloved poet Cavalacanti was a member.
If only Ficino had written The Autobiography of Giovannie di L. Cavalcanti, the comparison would be complete.
“I was impressed by the coral brooch she wore and her voice. I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them.”
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
May 5, 1473
Unique Friend,
The hand could not guide the pen, if it were not moved by the soul; similarly Marsilio could not write to a heroic and divine man if he had not first received an invitation from him. But the thing that troubles me most, is that you write to me as a result of your promise, so I cannot attribute your letter to love but to a bargain, whereas I wish for letters of love, and not done for payment. Or perhaps you really are obligated to me by contract? Since I am bound to you by love, I wish you to be mine, but not by just a contract.
Farewell,
M. Ficino
In What is Remembered, Toklas shares Gertrude Stein’s final words to her before being wheeled away to surgery for stomach cancer, a surgery Stein would not survive:
“What is the answer?”
When Toklas could offer no response, Stein added her own.
“In that case, what is the question?”
It is said that the ancient theologians, whose memory we revere, entered into sacred bonds of love and friendship with one another. Among the Persians it is said that Zoroaster, under the divine mystery of religious philosophy, chose Arimaspis as his companion. Hermes Trismegistus among the Egyptians similarly chose Aesculapius. In Thrace, Orpheus chose Museus as his companion, and for such a union Pythagorus chose Aglaophemus as his companion. Plato in Athens first chose Dion of Syracuse, and after his death Xenocrates was dearest to him. Thus wise men have always felt it necessary to have God as their guide, with a man as their companion on their journey. Although I am not confident that I can follow in the footsteps of such men in their heavenly journey, there is nevertheless one thing I have acquired in full measure from the study of sacred philosophy, virtue and truth: the joyful company of the man most dear to me. For I think that the friendship of Giovan Cavalcanti and Marsilio Ficino as worthy of being numbered among those I have just named, and I do not doubt but that, with the guidance of God, who has so happily established and quickened our bond, this friendship will provide everything necessary to us for a life of tranquillity and our investigation of the divine.
Marsilio Ficino
Love is when two people who are perfectly imperfect find each other.
The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Gertrude Stein
—Thaddeus Thomas
A Post Script regarding the Sibyl. (The promised afterward is farther down.)
God Himself communicates, at night through dreams, and more frequently during the day through omens, birds, entrails, and even the Sibyl, by which it is truly said that humans gain knowledge.
—Marsilio Ficino, Corpus Hermeticum*
*The mention of the Sibyl is a mistranslation—originally thought to be proof that the supposedly Hermetic texts were written at a later date as Hermes Trismegistus is meant to have been an Egyptian philosopher, predating the tradition of the Sibyls. The passage should read “and even the trees,” but here it is demonstrated that the error began with a 1471 printing and not with Ficino or the texts from which he was working.
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The Sibyliad, Book One: The Hell Jar
The Sibyliad is an epic series of novellas, beginning with The Hell Jar, which you can pick up at no cost. The Greek underworld comes to Renaissance Italy!
Plethon:
My dear Daphnis, you think yourself ready to die. Most do, secure in the one belief that’s meant to ease their passage from this world to the next. I could teach them all to fear, if they were ready for anything but comfort and grace.
Stand in the grass outside the Basilica of the Holy Cross or idle curiously along the road; hear me teach; see the thinkers of Florence discover greater illumination outside the church than in. Too bold a claim? Before today, you’d have thought that idea a grave danger, but now, we present Florence the skeletons of freshly dead monks, stripped of skin and muscle, immaculate in their bloodless display.
My words are not the threat.
