Cristoforo Landino's First Lectures on Dante*

1986 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Field
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Systematic Training ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Like many humanists of the late fifteenth century, Cristoforo Landino (1425-1498) came to consider himself not only a rhetorician but a speculative philosopher as well. Like many of these same humanists, Landino would not allow himself to peddle the merely fashionable: he pretended that he had been drinking from philosophical founts since his youth. In his dialogue De anima, completed about 1471, Landino suggested that from the early 1450s he not only was receiving systematic training in natural philosophy from Carlo Marsuppini but also was learning some Plato from the teenager Marsilio Ficino.

Pythagoras in the Renaissance: The Case of Marsilio Ficino*

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 667-711 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

AbstractThis article discusses the manner in which Ficino employs the figure of Pythagoras and various aspects of the Pythagorean tradition in the philosophical areas of psychology, moral philosophy, and ontology. It also argues that the figure of Pythagoras as prophet was particularly appealing to a Ficino situated in the cultural environment of late fifteenth-century Florence. Text, culture, and ideology interacted in a complex way: spurred on by his early appreciation of Iamblichus's soteriological presentation of Pythagoras, Ficino helped create an ideology in Florence which was receptive to a prophetic figure. The piece thus suggests that Ficino viewed a certain segment of the history of thought through late ancient, Iamblichean eyes.

Vernia, Nicoletto (d. 1499)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward P. Mahoney
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Special Interests ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Albert The Great ◽  
Agostino Nifo

Nicoletto Vernia was a celebrated Aristotelian philosopher during the second half of the fifteenth century. His acquaintances included such personalities as Ermolao Barbaro, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo. His special interests were in natural philosophy and psychology, but he also revealed interests in logic. Although usually characterized as a rigid Averroist, he moved from a clear commitment to Averroes as the true interpreter of Aristotle to a preference for the Greek commentators, especially Themistius and Simplicius. Nonetheless, throughout his career he also maintained a noteworthy interest in Albert the Great. After first attempting to conciliate Albert with Averroes as much as possible, he later attempted to conciliate Albert with the Greek commentators. He was one of the first Renaissance Aristotelians to use the commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul that is attributed to Simplicius, and also to cite Plato, Plotinus and their translator and expositor, Marsilio Ficino.

scholarly journals Some Remarks on Renaissance Mythophilia. The Medical Poetics of Wonder: Girolamo Fracastoro and His Thought World (Appendix Galeotto Marzio, De doctrina promiscua [ante 1490, princeps 1548])

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-214
Author(s):  
Jorge Ledo
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Greek Text ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Renaissance Poetics ◽  
Aristotle's Metaphysics

The following pages make a case for the important role played by Aristotle’s Metaphysics α 2 982b11–21 in Renaissance poetics and especially in that of Girolamo Fracastoro. As this passage, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics in general, have traditionally been denied a major role in the poetics of the Renaissance, I have been obliged to develop my argument in three sections. [1.] The first focuses on Thomas Aquinas’s roundbreaking reading of the quotation in psychological and epistemological terms, and on how he and his contemporaries were able to harmonize it both with the corpus Aristotelicum and with the development of a place for poetry in the system of the arts. [2.] The second section illustrates how the first humanists used Aristotle’s authority to invert the meaning of the passage, transforming it into an argument in defense of the primacy of poetry over the rest of the arts. This appropriation had two undesiderable effects: either depriving the passage of its theoretical implications or, worse, assimilating Aristotle’s words into a Platonizing vision of poetry. Only with the recovery of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics in the late fifteenth century did the passage escape its new status as a commonplace in humanist defense of poetry, and was briefly again considered as a point of departure for the analysis of concepts such as fabula (fiction) and admiratio (wonder), based on philosophical, poetic, and medical premises. [3] The last section introduces Galeotto Marzio’s and Giovanni Pontano’s pioneering works on these two concepts—fabula and admiratio—, as an introduction to the subsequent synthesis done by Girolamo Fracastoro, who, from the positions held by Marzio and Pontano as well as Aquinas’s original intuition, was able to harmonize natural philosophy and poetry by means of their psychological implications. This is what I have called here the ‘medical poetics of wonder’ or, more simply, mythotherapy. 

Platonism, Renaissance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Hankins
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
School Philosophy ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

Though it never successfully challenged the dominance of Aristotelian school philosophy, the revival of Plato and Platonism was an important phenomenon in the philosophical life of the Renaissance and contributed much to the new, more pluralistic philosophical climate of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Medieval philosophers had had access only to a few works by Plato himself, and, while the indirect influence of the Platonic tradition was pervasive, few if any Western medieval philosophers identified themselves as Platonists. In the Renaissance, by contrast, Western thinkers had access to the complete corpus of Plato’s works as well as to the works of Plotinus and many late ancient Platonists; there was also a small but influential group of thinkers who identified themselves as Christian Platonists. In the fifteenth century, the most important of these were to be found in the circles of Cardinal Bessarion (1403–72) in Rome and of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) in Florence. Platonic themes were also central to the philosophies of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), the two most powerful and original thinkers of the Quattrocento. While the dominant interpretation of the Platonic dialogues throughout the Renaissance remained Neoplatonic, there was also a minority tradition that revived the sceptical interpretation of the dialogues that had been characteristic of the early Hellenistic Academy. In the sixteenth century Platonism became a kind of ‘countercultural’ phenomenon, and Plato came to be an important authority for scientists and cosmologists who wished to challenge the Aristotelian mainstream: men like Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Francesco Patrizi and Galileo. Nevertheless, the Platonic dialogues were rarely taught in the humanistic schools of fifteenth-century Italy. Plato was first established as an important school author in the sixteenth century, first at the University of Paris and later in German universities. In Italy chairs of Platonic philosophy began to be established for the first time in the 1570s. Though the hegemony of Aristotelianism was in the end broken by the new philosophy of the seventeenth century, Plato’s authority did much to loosen the grip of Aristotle on the teaching of natural philosophy in the universities of late Renaissance Europe.

Contextualizing Josquin’s Ave Maria…virgo serena

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-240
Author(s):  
Clare Bokulich
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Moment

Notwithstanding the reputation of Josquin’s Ave Maria…virgo serena as a touchstone of late–fifteenth-century musical style, little is known about the context in which the piece emerged. Just over a decade ago, Joshua Rifkin placed the motet in Milan ca. 1484; more recently, Theodor Dumitrescu has uncovered stylistic affinities with Johannes Regis’s Ave Maria that reopen the debate about the provenance of Josquin's setting. Stipulating that the issues of provenance and dating are for the moment unsolvable, I argue that the most promising way forward is to contextualize this work to the fullest extent possible. Using the twin lenses of genre and musical style, I investigate the motet’s apparently innovative procedures (e.g., paired duos, periodic entries, and block chords) in order to refine our understanding of how Josquin’s setting relates to that of Regis and to the Milanese motet cycles (motetti missales). I also uncover connections between Josquin’s motet and the music of earlier generations, above all the cantilena and the forme fixe chanson, that offer new insights into the development of musical style in the fifteenth century. The essay concludes by positioning the types of analyses explored here within a growing body of research that enables a revitalized approach to longstanding questions about compositional development and musical style.

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