Queer Places:
Villa medicea di Careggi, Viale Gaetano Pieraccini, 17, 50134 Firenze FI
Villa Le Fontanelle, Via di Careggi, 26, 50139 Firenze FI
Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore
Florence, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Toscana, Italy
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Marsilio Ficino (October 19, 1433 – October 1, 1499) was an Italian
humanist and philosopher. The son of a medical doctor, Ficino was a student of
philosophy. The flight to Italy of Byzantine scholars after the fall of
Byzantium in 1453 provided Italian humanists with the opportunity to discover
Greek works which were then unknown in the West; thus, young Ficino discovered
and developed a passion for Plato, learning Greek in order to study his works.
Ficino earned the patronage of the Médicis, who protected and aided him
throughout his life, and who gave him precious Greek manuscripts (which Ficino
translated). In short, Ficino became a well known and respected cultural
figure, gathering around himself a number of students at his Platonic Academy.
In 1473 Ficino was ordained a priest; he continued his philosophical work
and undertook the onerous task of proving that Plato's philosophy was in
harmony with Christian doctrine, just as Thomas aquinas had done in the case
of Aristotle. Among his most important works are Theologia platonica
(published in 1482), as well as strictly religious works (Commentarius in
Epistolas D. Pauli), philosophical commentaries (Commentarius in Platonis
Convivium, published in the Platonic form of a dialogue in 1469) and an
impressive number of translations of the works of Plato and other Greek
philosophers. These translations made such works accessible to Western readers
for the first time. Ficino is thus one of the most important figures in the
Renaissance. His fame is linked to his loving and meticulous work in
rediscovering, translating, commenting on and disseminating the works of
Plato.
Of particular interest here is Ficino's restatement of Plato's ideal of
love (as appears in the Phaedrus and the Symposium); in Ficino's wake, this
would be taken up in countless sixteenth-century treatises on love to become
the model of ‘courtly love’ par excellence. Under the name of amor socraticus
(Socratic, or Platonic, love) or verus amor (true love), Ficino described a
model of profound but highly spiritualised love between men who were linked by
a common love for knowledge. According to Ficino's formulation in the
Commentarius in Platonis Convivium, this love is illuminated by a vision of
the beauty of the soul of the other person, a beauty which is itself a mirror
of the Beauty of God. Through the physical beauty of a young man – women are
unfit to inspire this sort of passion, and more apt to stimulate coition for
the reproduction of the species – the wise man attains to the absolute Beauty
which is an idea (in the Platonic sense) of the beauty which is God himself.
Thus, the contemplation through love of the physical and spiritual beauty of a
youth is a means of contemplating at least a fragment of the Beauty of God,
the model for all earthly beauty.
Ficino practised his theory of love with the young and very handsome
Giovanni Cavalcanti, whom he
made the principal character in his commentary in the Convivium, and to whom
he wrote passionate love letters in Latin (published in 1492 in his Epistulæ).
It is ironic that Ficino's beloved, as the philosopher himself lamented,
responded with some embarrassment as if he had reservations about the true
purety of amor socraticus.
There are numerous indications – not least these letters – which suggest
that Ficino's erotic desire was directed towards men. Biographers had to begin
soon after Ficino's death to rebuke those who alluded to his homosexual
tendencies. However, during his life, the universal respect which Ficino
enjoyed, his deeply felt and sincerely religious feelings and, also, his
status in the Catholic clergy, sheltered him from the gossip and suspicions of
sodomy which afflicted his later followers (such as
Benedetto Varchi).
Furthermore, several men whose homosexuality is now a subject of debate formed
part of Ficino's circle, among them
Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola and Angelo
Poliziano.
Ficino himself camouflaged his homosexual preferences by taking advantage
of the general misogyny of his time, as witnessed by Poliziano in his Detti
piacevoli: ‘Sir Marsilio says that women are to be used just as chamber pots:
after man uses them, they shold be hidden and removed. … Sir Marsilio says
that priests are worse than secular people, friars are worse than priests,
monks are worse than friars, hermits are worse than monks and women are worse
than hermits.’
After Ficino's death, the ideal of amor socraticus showed itself to be a
powerful argument for justifying love between persons of the same sex, a
screen which served numerous homosexual figures in the late fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries, among them
Leonardo da Vinci and
Michelangelo Buonarrotti. This helped to discredit such an ideal in the
eyes of the public, and it was viewed with ever-increasing discomfort with the
passing of time, until, around 1550, amor socraticus was identified solely
with sodomy. In consequence, in the mid-sixteenth century, the ideal of
Platonic love was carefully heterosexualised, and in this form it survived in
treatises on love and in Italian and European letters in general.
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- Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon. Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian
History Vol.1: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century: From Antiquity
to the Mid-twentieth Century Vol 1 (p.159). Taylor and Francis. Edizione
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