Étiquette : Salutati
Debunking Renaissance Fakenews — Part I: Fake Platonist Marsilio Ficino
by Karel Vereycken, august 2026
This article is the first of a three-part series:
I. Fake Platonist Marsilio Ficino and his Florentine “Platonic Academy” (below)
II. The Medici dynasty and Cosimo de’ Medici’s (coming)
III. Georgios Gemistos Plethon, his life and ambitions (coming)
As it is well known, I’m a passionate researcher and admirer of what goes under the label of “Renaissance.” I’ve researched quite extensively and over many years, creative artists such as Ghiberti, Verrocchio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.
This summer, I read Alma Palmer‘s inspiring book “Inventing the Renaissance, Myths of the Golden Age.” 1 That title is in reality a wake-up call. Yes, there was a splendid unprecedented explosion of Greek and Latin studies combined with painting, sculpture and architecture invented by idealistic humanists that anybody visiting Italy, and Florence more particularly, can admire.
However there are also powerful myths invented (created out of hot air) by powerful factions of the oligarchy out to claim their own legitimacy (it was all me) and play down that of others.
As a starter, let’s examine the very common narrative about the Greek philosopher Georgios Gemistos, who added the name “Plethon” (Plato) to his own name, who traveled in 1438, at the age of at least seventy-eight, to the Council of Ferrara–Florence, the ecumenical gathering that sought to heal the schism between the Orthodox and Latin churches. Plethon, it goes, brought with him the full works of Plato and inspired Cosimo de’ Medici to set up a “Platonic Academy” and have Plato’s works made available to the West.
“This is clearly one of those stories too good to be examined closely, and it has been repeated by nearly every scholar who has written on Florentine culture or Renaissance Platonism,” writes James Hankins who spent years trying to document the case. 2
Here is a rough sketch of the various points of the official narrative followed by my remarks and interrogations:
1) In 1438-39, at the Council of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici made acquaintance with the “Neoplatonic” philosopher George Gemistos Plethon.
Conclusive proof lacking. The sole and unique source of information for this supposed encounter of 1438-39 is Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the son of Cosimo’s physician. Ficino was not an eyewitness to the event. He was born in 1433 and was 5 years old when the Council of Florence started and reports on it only twice, the first time 24 years and the second time 52 years later. Admittedly, he could have gotten the story from his father, who was Cosimo’s medical doctor.
Complicating such an encounter would have arisen from the fact that Plethon spoke nothing but Greek, while Cosimo had zero command over Greek and very poor command over Latin. Cosimo, while reportedly admiring ancient Greek knowledge, never wrote poetry, orations or treatises. The only surviving letters are in Italian.
To understand Plethon, Cosimo would have required a good translator on top of Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophy. But Bessarion, Plethon’s erudite pupil, was organizing, directing and managing on a day to day basis, together with Traversari and Cusa, the Ecumenical council.
Other than Ficino, not one single source of that period, even among the most ardent defenders and lackey’s of the Medicis, praises or even mentions Cosimo’s encounter with Plethon and his supposed plan to set up a Platonic Academy. Even Bessarion doesn’t spent a line on the subject.
The only rhetorical hints to a supposed encounter between Cosimo and Plethon, as well as his project to create a Platonic Academy appear in two writings of Ficino:
- 24 years after the Council of Florence in a letter to Cosimo de’ Medici written in September 1462;
- 52 years after the Council of Florence in Ficino’s preface to 1490 translation of the Enneads, the main work of the (evil neo-Platonic) Plotinus (who Roman Emperor Julien the Apostate tried to impose as a state religion at the end of the Roman Empire as an alternative to Christianity). The aim of that preface, was to please Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo the magnificent (1449-1492), and beg him to continue financing Ficino and his translations of Plotinus, which according to the latter, was nearly as ardently requested by Cosimo as that of the works of Plato.
Here is the critical passage of Ficino’s 1490 introduction to Plotinus’ Enneads :
“The Great Cosimo, the Father of his Country by senatorial decree, at the time when a council was being negotiated among the Greeks and Latins in Florence under Eugene IV [1438], frequently heard a Greek philosopher by the name of Gemistus Plethon disputing like another Plato on the Platonic mysteries. From his fervid lips Cosimo was straightway so inspirited, so ensouled, that from that time forth he conceived deep in his mind a kind of Academy, to give birth to it at the first opportune moment. Then, while that great Medici was intending in some sense to give birth to the great thing he had conceived, he destined me, the son of his favorite doctor Ficino, while still a boy, to [undertake] the labor, educating me from that day forth to this very thing.”
“Moreover, he labored that I should not only have all the books of Plato in Greek, but also the books of Plotinus. After this, in the year 1463, in the thirtieth year of my life, he commissioned me to translate, first, Thrice-Great Hermes, and thereafter Plato. Mercury I finished in a few months while Cosimo was still alive; Plato I had also begun at that time [1463]. Although he was also eager for Plotinus, he said nothing to me about translating it, lest he should appear to be weighing me down with too great a burden all at once. Such was the great man’s clemency to his own, such was his modesty towards all. Thus, I never thought, either in the manner of an inspired poet or in my own person, to approach Plotinus. But in the meantime Cosimo at length expressed-or rather impressed from on high-that which he had kept silent about while living on the earth.”
“At the moment when I was giving Plato to the Latin world to read, Cosimo’s heroic soul incited the heroic mind of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in some unknown way-Pico himself almost did not know how-to come to Florence. Pico, born in the very year [1463] I was starting on Plato, and coming to Florence the same day-almost the same hour-I was publishing him, after greeting me asked me immediately about Plato. To him I said, ‘Our Plato has today emerged onto our thresholds.’ Then he heartily congratulated [me] on this, and straightway-and neither I nor he knows whence the words came-he led, or rather impelled me to translate Plotinus. Surely a divine cause brought it to pass that the hero Pico should be born while Plato was being, as it were, reborn-Saturn being then in the house of Aquarius as it was when I was born thirty years previously-and that he should come to Florence on the very day our Plato was published, and that he should inspire me in a marvelous fashion with Cosimo’s vow about Plotinus which had been quite hidden from me, but which was revealed by heavenly means to him.” 3
What is a proven fact is that Plethon (c. 1355-1452) did meet with Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), the chancellor of Florence at that time, who had translated himself several Greek manuscripts including Aristotle and Plato. Leonardo Bruni’s translations of the Phaedo, Apology, Crito, and Phaedrus were made only shortly before Gemistos visit. Bruni had studied Greek under the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (1350-1415) who had been invited to teach Greek in Florence by Coluccio Salutati (1341-1406), a friend and admirer of Petrarch (1304-1374) and Boccaccio (1313-1375).
Thanks to Chrysoloras’ activity a number of new Latin of Platonic writings began to appear under the name of his students, Bruni, Umberto Decembrio, and Cencio de’ Rustici, who translated between them ten Platonic dialogues, including the Gorgias, Crito, Apology, Phaedo and the Republic.
According to historian N.G. Wilson, Plethon, during his stay in Florence acquainted the Italian geographer Paolo Toscanelli (1397-1482) with the extensive travels, writings and mapping of the Greek geographer Strabo (1st century BC/AD), hitherto unknown in Italy but crucial for elaborating his famous map that later fell in the hands of Columbus. What is known is that Strabo’s works became an integral part of Bessarion’s library.
2) At the invitation of his humanist friends, including Cosimo, Plethon engaged in private lectures explaining the difference between Plato and Aristotle, arguing that Plato was far more compatible with Christian doctrine.
Conclusive proof lacking. During the Council, Gemistos found that he had free time because much of the counciliar discussion concerned theological minutiae that did not require the presence of a secular sage. Even if Ficino claims Cosimo assisted “frequently” at Plethon’s lectures, there is close to zero evidence they ever took place. What is known is that Plethon wrote a treaty on the difference between Aristotle and Plato, commonly known as De Differentiis. A decade later, Plethon described the circumstances in which he composed his book without ever mentioning it was a follow-up to his lectures:
“That work was not composed as a result of thorough research . . . but at a time when I had been indisposed at Florence and was unable for several days to go out of the house where I was staying; perhaps, too, because I was bored, and was trying at one and the same time to relieve my boredom and to do a favor to those who were interested in Plato. Thus I wrote that work in the briefest form…” 4
C. M. Woodhouse, author of the 416 pages book “George Gemistos Plethon, The Last of the Hellenes” (1986) 5 writes that most claims about this event should be considered as pure speculation. For him:
“The impact of Plethons lectures on the Italians remains hard to assess. Very few of them left any record of their impressions; none of them is more than superficial and secondhand. The case of Cosimo de’ Medici, recorded by Ficino, is the only major exception; an additional but minor one is Grigorio Tifernate. Although De Differentiis was written for the benefit of Italian humanists,‘ none can be named who read it in Plethons life-time. But there is a strong tradition that Plethon impressed many westerners by his personality and learning.” 6
3) Plethon brought with him to Florence a manuscript with all of Plato’s works
Yes. Plethon carried with him many Greek manuscripts. They included the entire works of Plato but also those of the (toxic neoplatonists) Plotinus and Porphyry as well as the Chaldean Oracles (more on that in Part III).
4) Captivated, Cosimo bought the Plato manuscripts from Plethon
No. There is no proof Cosimo was given or bought these manuscripts from Plethon. The latter took many books back with him to Mystras, Greece, after having allowed scribes in Florence to copy them. His most famous student, Cardinal Bessarion, later collected Plethon’s original autographs and manuscripts. Bessarion, not trusting Medici rule over Florence and demanding very precise conditions for conservation, donated his vast collection to the Republic of Venice, forming the foundation of the famous Biblioteca Marciana.
5) Cosimo gave manuscripts of Plato’s works to Marsilio Ficino to have them translated into Latin
Yes, but. 24 years after the Council of Florence, in 1462, Cosimo, seeing his life coming to an end, supplied the 29 years old Ficino with various Greek manuscripts of Plato’s work, whereupon Ficino started translating the entire corpus into Latin. The draft translation of the entire set of dialogues was finished six to seven years later, around 1468–69. In December 1473, Ficino, age 40, is ordained a priest and gave priority to writing and getting printed his own writings, among which the Platonic Theology and On the Christian Religion.
Plato had to wait and Ficino’s translation of the Complete Works of Plato (Platonis Opera Omnia), thirty-six in all, will only be printed in Florence in 1484 –46 years after the Council of Florence– by the press of the Dominican monastery of San Jacopo di Ripoli, the first printshop to employ women (Dominican nuns) as typesetters. The cost of printing 1,025 copies was not financed by Lorenzo de’ Medici (who passed away in 1492) to whom the translation was dedicated, but by two prominent Florentine patrons and humanists: Filippe Valori and Francesco Berlinghieri. Once produced, Lorenzo did circulate the books in which he appeared prominently. A much-improved second edition was printed in Venice in 1491 by Bernardinus de Choris de Cremona and Simon de Luere for Andreas Torresanus de Asula.
Since the Medici’s wanted to keep the spread of ideas under their control. Therefore they favored handmade codices crafted by professional scribes over mass-produced print. At that time, the price of a manuscript varied wildly—from a few florins for a simple, unadorned text to hundreds of florins or the equivalent of several months to years of wages for an elaborately illuminated luxury volume. With that Medici policy, Florence, the epicenter of the Renaissance, ended up as being one of the last ones in Italy to have modern printing shops !
Paul Oskar Kristeller, who spend years researching on Ficino, gives the following account about why the entire process took so many years:
“Marsilio Ficino, born in 1433, did not begin to learn Greek until 1456 (at age 23 years) and we have no specific information on the content and progress of his studies during the following years. We have a number of Greek manuscripts owned and annotated by Ficino, and a number of translations from the Greek surely or probably made by him, and some of them may belong to this early period, but none of them is dated. At the time when Cosimo de’ Medici gave Ficino a house in Careggi which the latter chose to call his Academy, in September, 1462, he celebrated the event with the translation of an Orphic hymn.” 7
Kristeller confirms that Cosimo asked Ficino to put on hold his translations of Plato, and translate first the writings of Hermes Trismegistus:
“In April, 1463, Ficino completed his translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, after having spent only a few months on it. We know from Ficino’s own words that he began his translation of Plato at that time, after having finished the version of the Hermetica, that he did so at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici, and that he had at his disposal, since 1462, two Greek manuscripts of Plato, a complete one which belonged to Cosimo, and a partial one owned by Amerigo Benci. » 8
As suggested by Kristeller in this paragraph, at the demand of Cosimo, Ficino translated first a collection of Hellenistic Greek documents brought to Pistoia in 1460 by Leonardo da Pistoia later called Hermetica (texts attributed to the legendary Hellenistic figure Hermes Trismegistus). Later, Ficino will also translate the writings of many of the (toxic) Neoplatonists, including Porphyry, Iamblichus, and especially Plotinus.
When Cosimo died on August 1, 1464, Ficino had translated ten Platonic dialogues, nine of them before January 11, and by April 1, 1466, twenty-three dialogues were ready.
After that date, we have no specific information on the progress of the translation, but it is probable that Ficino had completed the first draft of the entire work by 1468 or 1469. However, he wanted to subject the translation to a thorough revision, and hence refused to have it circulate.
Occupied with his Platonic Theology and several other writings, Ficino did not attend to the revision of his Plato translation for several years. He probably began to revise it around 1477, and had finished the revision in 1482 when he allowed it to be copied for others.
In 1483, Ficino sent the entire translation to the printer, apparently after having revised it once more, and finally the first printed edition of Plato appeared in October 1484. Although it had been carefully seen through the press by Ficino, it was necessary to append to it a long list of corrections.
The second edition, printed in Venice 1491, was not supervised by Ficino, but inserted the corrections in the text and hence is considered more accurate. From these two early editions all later ones are derived, although they may have been altered by some of the editors.” 9
The story goes that while other companions at Cosimo’s sickbed read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (with humanist commentaries) during his prolonged illness, Ficino read some of his newly made Latin translations of Plato’s works to comfort and entertain Cosimo in his final hours. But Cosimo’s Latin, as said before, was poor.
6) Plato’s works were largely unknown till then in the West.
Yes and No. Ficino was far from being the first translator of Platonic dialogues, he rather represents the culminating point of translation activity during the fifteenth century. The Greek text has come down to us in a number of manuscripts, and it was printed for the first time by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1513.
Before the Renaissance, the Western world was very limited in its access to Plato’s writings. It inherited from Roman antiquity only two partial renderings of the Timaeus made by Cicero and Calcidius, and a number of shorter testimonia in Cicero’s philosophical writings, St. Augustine, and other works of Latin philosophy. During the 12th and 13th centuries, when most works of Aristotle were translated into Latin, the reader acquired only the nearly unintelligible versions of the Phaedo and the Meno, translated by Henricus Aristippus, and a partial version of the Parmenides, translated with Proclus’ commentary by William of Moerbeke. This was all that a Latin student was able to read of Plato up to about 1400, including Petrarch, who owned sixteen Greek manuscripts of Plato that reached the West in modern times, but who was not able to read them.
7) Cosimo asked Ficino to set up a “Platonic Academy”
Conclusive proof lacking. Historian James Hankins is very skeptical about that:
“We may begin by pointing out the general implausibility of the thesis that Cosimo ever founded or wanted to found a new Platonic Academy. It is striking, in the first place, that in none of the numerous works in laudem Cosmi written by humanists during the last decade of his life and after his death is Cosimo ever praised for having re-founded the Platonic Academy in Florence. A volume of ricordanze about Cosimo put together by his son Piero, for instance, though it includes dozens of consolatory letters from various princes, prelates, humanists and fellow citizens praising Cosimo’s magnificence, does not mention even once his project to re-found the Platonic Academy or his collations with Pletho.
Even the letter of Cardinal Bessarion, Plethons student, does not mention the creation of the new Academy. At least four of the poets commonly identified as members of the Florentine Academy wrote poems in praise of Cosimo-indeed, Amerigo Corsini wrote an epic poem in three books of which the third was devoted to praising Cosimo’s cultural patronage-but none of these poets mentions his founding of a Florentine Academy.” 10
Another way to understand Ficino and his « academy » is to examine the various ways he uses the word “academy” and its variants. What one finds is that Plato’s dialogues themselves could be referred to as an “academy,” rich with precious teachings as they were. An “academy” could be a private school organized to teach youths, though not necessarily located in one specific place or devoted to one doctrinal tradition. And the word “academy” could refer to regular meetings of literary men. Ficino’s “academy” seems to have been more associated with the first two meanings of the word. Rather than leading a regular gathering in a specific place, Ficino preferred to teach Florence’s elite youth when he could and, as a Socratic, philosophical friend, to try to draw out of his associates the better part of their natures in conversation.
8) For that purpose, Cosimo offered funding and a part of his private villa in Carregi close to Florence
Unclear. Cosimo in 1463 gave Ficino a small property in Careggi with a domicile (“cum domo pro laboratore et hoste et terris laboratis,”) as the document in the State Archive of Florence puts it. There is also a letter from Ficino to Cosimo from September of 1462, in which Ficino writes: “spiritedly do I devote myself to the Academy you arranged for us on the estate in Careggi, as if I worship rightly at a kind of shrine of contemplation”
These two sources allow the inference that, while the specific gift of property did not occur until 1463, Ficino and his cohort met at least once on Medici property in the hills outside Florence. There is another document, again from 1462, which shows that he received a house in the city of Florence as a gift from Cosimo, which was then rented out, so that Ficino received the income from the rent.
9) The activities of Ficino’s “Platonic Academy” promoted Platonism in the West and kicked of the Renaissance.
Not by intention. The fact that the arrival of real Platonic ideas were a key incentive in the birth of the Renaissance, is indisputable. But the Renaissance started three generations BEFORE Ficino publishing his translations. The reason that the Plethon/Cosimo/Ficino narrative became dominant is because the Medici family compound, by history books and intense propaganda called their fake claim pretending that THEY were the fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and authors of the Renaissance.
In reality, what the Medici mafia wants us to forget is the fact that Plato and Classical Greek wisdom were injected in Italy and Europe by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and their immediate followers Salutati, Bruni, Traversari and Nicholas of Cusa. It were the latter who motivated and paid the main collectors of Greek manuscripts, mostly over the entire period leading up to the Council of Florence:
- Manuel Chrysoloras (1350-1415), a greek scholar, humanist, philosopher and translator of ancient Greek texts. Serving as the ambassador for the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, he became a renowned teacher of Greek literature and history in Florence and Venice. In 1396, Coluccio Salutati, the Chancellor of Florence invited Chrysoloras to teach Greek grammar and literature. In a letter to Poggio Bracciolini, quoting the Roman lawyer and statesman Cicero, Salutati wrote: « The verdict of our own Cicero confirms that we Romans either made wiser innovations than theirs by ourselves or improved on what we took from them, but of course, as he himself says elsewhere with reference to his own day: « Italy is invincible in war, Greece in culture. » For our part, and we mean no offence, we firmly believe that both Greeks and Latins have always taken learning to a higher level by extending it to each other’s literature
- Guarino da Verona (1374-1460), a student of Chrysoloras who spent years studying in Constantinople and returned to Italy with numerous Greek codexes, founding a major educational system based on classical Greek and Latin learning.
- Niccolò Niccoli (1364-1437): Niccoli rarely left Florence. Instead, he stayed behind to fund Poggio’s expeditions, receive the recovered texts, and painstakingly transcribe them into his beautiful, efficient handwriting—a style that directly invented modern Italic script. Noteworthy is the fact that when Niccoli had spent so much on books that he was close to bankruptcy, Cosimo de’ Medici bailed him out. In exchange, Cosimo got a hand on Niccoli’s collection of manuscripts which he used for the first public library in Europe, an idea first conceptualized by Pala Strozzi, the richest man of Italy before Cosimo but exiled by the latter.
- Giovanni Aurispa (1376-1459), a Sicilian humanist who traveled to the East and returned to Italy in 1423 with a massive haul of 238 Greek manuscripts, among which all the works of Plato and work of Proclus, and various Greek historians and poets.
- Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459): As a papal secretary, Poggio used his travels to church councils to gain access to remote monasteries. He famously rediscovered Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things, which preserved ancient Greek Epicurean philosophy, though written in Latin), as well as lost works by Cicero, Quintilian, and Vitruvius;
- Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), a diplomat and scholar who collected a substantial library of Greek manuscripts while living in Constantinople before bringing them back to Italy.
- Cardinal Bessarion (1403-1472), a Byzantine scholar who was a close friend of Cusa and who later converted to Catholicism and gathered a vast library of over 500 Greek manuscripts (which eventually formed the core of the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice), saving countless philosophical and scientific texts from destruction.
Conclusion
Finally, looking at what was produced by the “Platonic Academy”, it has to be noted that both Ficino and even more his most important pupil Pico della Mirandola, became fervent supporters of the Dominican priest Savonarola. The latter called the Florentines to burn all their luxury goods leading them to sin. The books of the Plato-loving Boccaccio were thrown into the fire. Renaissance paintings were burned with Sandro Botticelli himself throwing some of his works in the giant fire burning, both as a spiritual catharsis and carnaval. It was Ficino’s favorite pupil Pico della Mirandola which convinced Lorenzo de Medici to allow Savonarola to enter Florence and present his doom day speeches.
Once it became clear that Savonarola was captivating growing anti-Medici sentiment, Ficino, to preserve his financial backing from the Medicis, retracted and felt obliged to criticize Savonarola who was violently attacking Medici rule. Savonarola criticized Ficino’s heavy reliance on magic and astrology.
Ficino only escaped from the Inquisition, who didn’t like Ficino’s mixture of Platonism, magic and Christianity, because Lorenzo de’ Medici’s wife, a scion of the Roman Orsini family and as such a part of the deep state ruling from above, intervened to prevent him getting sentenced. Savonarola was burned at the stake, not for theological heresy, mut for creating political uproar. But the extremism he unleashed was so threatening that Lorenzo’s successor, Piero the unfortunate (1472-1503), according to recent research, most likely poisoned by arsenic Pico della Mirandola and the poet Politiano, another pupil and friend of Ficino, both considered too much related to the wild Dominican.
Main points of argument:
- Yes, real Platonism, together with augustinian christianity, promoted the image of « Renaissance » man, a free creative being as created as a living image of the creator.
- Thanks to Petrarch, Boccaccio, Salutati, Bruni, Traversari and Cusa, studies of Greek and Latin bloomed in Florence and kiscked off a “Renaissance” at the beginning of the 15th century (construction of the gates of the Baptistry by Ghiberti) an elan that culminated with the construction of the Dome and the 1438 Council of Florence.
- Plethon was not the first to bring the full works of Plato to the West, they arrived in 1423 thanks to a collaborator of Nicholas of Cusa, Giovanni Aurispa.
- The translations of Plato’s work by the neo-Platonist (Plotinist) Marsilio Ficino, requested by Cosimo de’ Medici, only arrived at the end of the century (1484), that is AFTER the “Golden” Renaissance. They were not causing what happened before.
- Ficino and his loyal follower Pico della Mirandola ended up backing the Renaissance book and art burning dominican monk Savonarola.
- The Medici family fabricated a fairy tale (storytelling, propaganda, narrative) pretending it was them (Cosimo and Lorenzo de Medici) which initiated the Renaissance whose splendor they mainly wanted to appropriate for their own dynastic glory. But yes, without spending too much money, through various channels, and for their own reasons, the Medicis did keep financially afloat Ghiberti, Uccello, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli and Michelangelo. But one should remember: the amount of money spent for the golden frames of paintings was at least five times higher than that received by the artist. And, Leonardo da Vinci, the archetype of the creative Renaissance genius said: « The Medici created and destroyed me. » (Li medici mi crearono e distrussono) (see part II coming soon)
Works consulted:
- Debolt, Darien C. George Gemistos Plethon on God: Heterodoxy in Defense of Orthodoxy, University of Oklahoma:
- Diller, Aubrey. The autographs of Georgius Gemistus Pletho. Scriptorium, Tome 10 n°1, 1956. pp. 27-41;
- Hankins, James, The Myth of the Florentine Academy, Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 3, 1991;
- Hankins, James, Cosimo de’ Medici and the ‘Platonic Academy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 53 (1990), pp. 144-162. Published by the Warburg Institute;
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Marsilio Ficino as a beginning student of Plato. Scriptorium, Tome 20 n°1, 1966. pp. 41-54;
- Palmer, Ada, Inventing The Renaissance, Myths of a Golden Age, Head of Zeus, Bloomsbury Publishing 2025;
- Papacostas A., George, George Gemistos-Plethon, an overview of his life and thought with a comprehensive bibliography, Harrisburg, PA, 1979;
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Marsilio Ficino, 2024
- Vanhaelen Maude. Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Eutyphro. In Scriptorium, Tome 56 n°1, 2002. pp. 20-47;
- Vereycken Karel, The Greek language project, Plato and the Renaissance, Artkarel.com, 2021;
- Vereycken Karel, Albrecht Dürer’s Fight Against Neo-Platonic Melancoly, Artkarel.com, 2005;
- Vereycken Karel, How Neo-Platonism gave Plato a Bad Name, Artkarel, 2005;
- Wilson, N. G., From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Woodhouse, C.M., George Gemistos Plethon, The Last of the Hellenes, Claredon Press, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1986;
Footnotes:
- Palmer, Ada, Inventing The Renaissance, Myths of a Golden Age, Head of Zeus, Bloomsbury Publishing 2025; ↩︎
- Hankins, James, Cosimo de’ Medici and the ‘Platonic Academy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 53 (1990), pp. 144-162. Published by the Warburg Institute; ↩︎
- As quoted by James Hankins, Ibid; ↩︎
- Woodhouse, C.M., George Gemistos Plethon, The Last of the Hellenes, Claredon Press, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1986. ↩︎
- Woodhouse, C.M., Ibid.; ↩︎
- Woodhouse, C.M., Ibid.; ↩︎
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Marsilio Ficino as a beginning student of Plato. In: Scriptorium, Tome 20 n°1, 1966. pp. 41-54; ↩︎
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Ibid.; ↩︎
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Ibid.; ↩︎
- Hankins, James, Ibid.; ↩︎
Uccello, Donatello, Verrocchio and the art of military command
Uccello, Donatello, Verrocchio and the art of military command. An inquiry into the key events and artistic achievements that created the Renaissance. By Karel Vereycken, Paris.
Prologue
If there is still a lot to say, write and learn about the great geniuses of the European Renaissance, it is also time to take an interest in those whom the historian Georgio Vasari condescendingly called « transitional figures ».
How can one measure the contributions of Pieter Bruegel the Elder without knowing Pieter Coecke van Aelst? How can we value Rembrandt’s work without knowing Pieter Lastman? How did Raphaelo Sanzio innovate in relation to his master Perugino?
In 2019, an exceptional exhibition on Andrea Del Verrocchio (1435-1488), at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., highlighted his great achievements, truly inspiring outbursts of great beauty that his pupil Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) would theorize and put to his greatest advantage.
The sfumato of Leonardo ? Verrochio is the pioneer, especially in the blurred features of portraits of women made with mixed techniques (pencil, chalk and gouache).
The joy of discovery
Leafing through the catalog of this exhibition, my joy got immense when I discovered (and to my knowledgne nobody else seems to have made this observation before me) that the enigmatic angel the viewer’s eye meets in Leonardo’s painting titled The Virgin on the Rocks (1483-1486) (Louvre, Paris), besides the movement of the body, is grosso modo a visual “quote” of the image of a terra cotta high relief (Louvre, Paris) attributed to Verrochio and “one of his assistants”, possibly even Leonardo himself, since the latter was training with the master as early as age seventeen ! The finesse of its execution and drapery also reminds us of the only known statue of Da Vinci, The Virgin with the laughing Child.
Many others made their beginnings in Verrocchio’s workshop, notably Lorenzo de Credi, Sandro Botticelli, Piero Perugino (Raphael’s teacher) and Domenico Ghirlandaio (Michelangelo’s teacher).
Coming out of the tradition of the great building sites launched in Florence by the great patron of the Renaissance, Cosimo de Medici for the realization of the doors of the Baptistery and the completion of the dome of Florence by Philippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), Verrocchio conceived his studio as a true “polytechnic” school.
In Florence, for the artists, the orders flowed in. In order to be able to respond to all requests, Verrocchio, initially trained as a goldsmith, trained his students as craftsman-engineer-artists: drawing, calculation, interior decoration, sculpture, geology, anatomy, metal and woodworking, perspective, architecture, poetry, music and painting. A level of freedom and a demand for creativity that has unfortunately long since disappeared.
The Ghiberti legacy
In painting, Verrocchio is said to have begun with the painter Fra Filippo Lippi (1406-1469). As for the bronze casting trade, he would have been, like Donatello, Masolino, Michelozzo, Uccello and Pollaiuolo, one of the apprentices recruited by Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) whose workshop, starting from 1401, over forty years, will be in charge of casting the bronze bas-reliefs of two of the huge doors of the Baptistery of Florence.
Others suggest that Verrocchio was most likely trained by Michelozzo, the former companion of Ghiberti who said up shop with Donatello. As a teenager, Donatello had accompanied Brunelleschi on their joint expeditions to Rome to investigate the legacy of Greek and Roman art, and not only the architectural legacy.
In reality, Verrocchio only perpetuated and developed the model of Ghiberti’s « polytechnic » studio, where he learned the art. An excellent craftsman, Ghiberti was also goldsmith, art collector, musician and humanist scolar and historian.
His genius is to have understood the importance of multidisciplinarity for artists. According to him « sculpture and painting are sciences of several disciplines nourished by different teachings ».
The ten disciplines that he considered important to train artists are grammar, philosophy, history, followed by perspective, geometry, drawing, astronomy, arithmetic, medicine and anatomy.
You can discover, says Ghiberti, only when you managed to isolate the object of your research from interfering factors, and you can discover by detaching oneself from a dogmatic system;
as the nature of things want it, the sciences hidden under artifices are not constituted so that the men with narrow chests can judge them.
Anticipating the type of biomimicry that will characterize Leonardo thereafter, Ghiberti affirms that he sought:
to discover how nature functioned and how he could approach it to know how the objects come to the eye, how the sight functions and in which way one has to practice sculpture and painting.
Ghiberti, who was familiar with some of the leading members of the circle of humanists led by Salutati and Traversari, based his own reflexions on optics on the authority of ancient texts, especially Arabic. He wrote:
But in order not to repeat in a superficial and superfluous way the principles that found all opinions, I will treat the composition of the eye particularly according to the opinions of three authors, namely Avicenna [Ibn Sina], in his books, Alhazen [Ibn al Haytam], in the first book of his perspective, and Constantine [Qusta ibn Luqa] in the first book on the eye; for these authors are sufficient and treat with more certainty the things that interest us.
Deliberately ignored (but copied) by Vasari, Ghiberti’s Commentaries are a real manuel for artists, written by an artist. Most interestingly, it is by reading Ghiberti’s Commentaries that Leonardo da Vinci became familiar with important Arab contributions to science, in particular the outstanding work of Ibn al Haytam (Alhazen) whose treatise on optics had just been translated from Latin into Italian under the title De li Aspecti, and is quoted at length by Ghiberti in his Commentario Terzio. Author A. Mark Smith suggests that, through Ghiberti, Alhazen’s Book of Optics
may well have played a central role in the development of artificial perspective in early Renaissance Italian painting.
Ghiberti’s comments are not extensive. However, for the pupils of his pupil Verrocchio, such as Leonardo, who didn’t command any foreign language, Ghiberti’s book did make available in italian a series of original quotes from the roman architect Vitruvius, arab scientists such as Alhazen), Avicenna, Averroes and those european scientists having studied arab optics, notably the Oxford fransciscans Roger Bacon, John Pecham and the Polish monk working in Padua, Witelo.
Finally, in 1412, Ghiberti, while busy coordinating all the works on the Gates of the Baptistry, was also the first Renaissance sculptor to cast a life-size statue in bronze, his Saint John the Baptist, to decorate Orsanmichele, the house of the Corporations in Florence.
Lost wax casting
However, in order to cast bronzes of such a size, the artists, considering the price of metal, would use the technique known as “lost wax casting”.
This technique consists of first making a model in refractory clay (A), covered with a thickness of wax corresponding to the thickness of the bronze thought necessary.
The model is then covered with a thick layer of wet plaster (B) which, as it solidifies, forms an outer mold. Finally, the very hot molten bronze, pored into the mold it penetrates by rods (J) provided for this purpose, will replace the wax.
Finally, once the metal has solidified, the coating is broken. The details of the bronze (K) are then adjusted and polished (L) according to the artist’s choice.
This technique would become crucial for the manufacture of bells and cannons. While it was commonly used in Ifé in Africa in the 12th century for statuary, in Europe it was only during the Renaissance, with the orders received by Ghiberti and Donatello, that it was entirely reinvented.
In 1466, after the death of Donatello, it was Verrocchio’s turn to become the Medici’s sculptor in title for whom he produced a whole series of works, notably, after Donatello, his own David in bronze (Bargello National Museum, Florence).
If with this promotion his social ascendancy is certain, Verrocchio found himself facing the greatest challenge that any artist of the Renaissance could have imagined: how to equal or even surpass Donatello, an artist whose genius has never been praised enough?
Equestrian art
This being said, let us now approach the subject of the art of military command by comparing four equestrian monuments:
- Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline square in Rome (175 AD) ;
- Paolo Uccello’s fresco of John Hawkwood in the church of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence (1436);
- Erasmo da Narni, known as “Gattamelata” (1446-1450), casted by Donatello in Padua.
- Bartolomeo Colleoni by Andrea del Verrocchio in Venice (1480-1488).
Equestrian statues appeared in Greece in the middle of the 6th century B.C. to honor the victorious riders in a race. From the Hellenistic period onward, they were reserved for the highest state figures, sovereigns, victorious generals and magistrates. In Rome, on the forum, they constituted a supreme honor, subject to the approval of the Senate. Apart from being bronze equestrian statues, each one is placed in a place where their troops fought.
While each statue is a reminder of the importance of military and political command, the way in which this responsibility is exercised is quite different.
Marcus Aurelius in Rome
Marcus Aurelius was born in Rome in 121 A.D., into a noble family of Spanish origin. He was the nephew of the emperor Hadrian. After the death of Marcus Aurelius’ father, Hadrian entrusted him to his successor Antonin. The latter adopts and gives him an excellent education. He was initiated early in philosophy by his master Diognetus.
Interested in the stoics, he adopted for a while their lifestyle, sleeping on the ground, wearing a rough tunic, before he was dissuaded by his mother.
He went to Athens in 175 A.D. and became a promotor of philosophy. He helps financially the philosophers and the rhetoricians by granting them a fixed salary. Concerned with pluralism, he supported the Platonic Academy, the Lyceum of Aristotle, the Garden of Epicurus and the Stoic Portico.
On the other hand, during his reign, persecutions against Christians were numerous. He saw them as troublemakers – since they refused to recognize the Roman gods, and as fanatics.
Erected in 175 A.D., the statue was entirely gilded. Its location in antiquity is unknown, but in the Middle Ages it stood in front of the Basilica of St. John Lateran, founded by Constantine, and the Lateran Palace, then the papal residence.
In 1538, Pope Paul III had the monument of Marcus Aurelius transferred to the Capitol, the seat of the city’s government. Michelangelo restored the statue and redesigned the square around it, one of the fanciest in Rome. It is undoubtedly the most famous equestrian statue, and above all the only one dating back to ancient Rome that has survived, the others having been melted down into coins or weapons…
If the statue survived, it is thanks to a misunderstanding: it was thought that it represented Constantine, the first Roman emperor to have converted to Christianity at the beginning of the 4th century, and it was out of the question to destroy the image of a Christian ruler.
Neither the date nor the circumstances of the commission are known.
But the presence of a defeated enemy under the right foreleg of the horse (attested by medieval testimonies and since lost), the emperor’s gesture and the shape of the saddle cloth, unusual in the Roman world, make us to belief that the statue commemorated Marcus Aurelius’ victories, perhaps on the occasion of his triumph in Rome in 176, or even after his death. Indeed, his reign (161-180) was marked by incessant wars to counter the incursions of Germanic or Eastern peoples on the borders of an Empire that was now threatened and on the defensive.
The horse, while not that large, but looking powerful, has been sculpted with great care and represented with realism. Its nostrils are strongly dilated, its lips pulled by the bit reveal its teeth and tongue.
One leg raised, he has just been stopped by his rider, who holds the reins with his left hand. Like him, the horse turns his head slightly to the right, a sign that the statue was made to be seen from that side. Part of his harness is preserved, but the reins have disappeared.
The size of the athletic rider nevertheless dominates that of a powerful horse that he rides without stirrups (accessories unknown to the Romans). He is dressed in a short tunic belted at the waist and a ceremonial cloak stapled on the right shoulder. It is a civil and not a military garment, adapted to a peaceful context. He is wearing leather shoes held together by intertwined straps.
The statue is striking for its size (424 cm high) and for the majesty it exudes. Without armor or weapons, eyes wide open and without emotion, the emperor raises his right arm. His authority derives above all from the function he embodies: he is the Emperor who protects his Empire and his people by punishing their enemies without mercy.
The fresco by Paolo Uccello
In 1436, at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici, the young Paolo Uccello was commissioned to paint a fresco depicting John Hawkwood (1323-1394), the son of an English tanner who had become a warlord during the Hundred Years’ War in France and whose name would be Italicized into Giovanno Acuto.
Serving the highest bidder, especially rival Italian cities, Hawkwood’s company of mercenaries was no slouch.
In Florence, although it may seem paradoxical, it was the humanist chancellor Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) who put Hawkwood at the head of a regular army in the service of the Signoria.
This approach is not unlike that of Louis XI in France, who, in order to control the skinners and other cutthroats who were ravaging the nation, did not hesitate to discipline them by incorporating them into a standing army, the new royal army.
The humanists of the Renaissance, notably Leonardo Bruni (1370-1440) in his De Militia (1420), became aware of the curse of using mercenaries in conflicts and of the fact that only standing army, i.e. a permanent army formed of professionals and even better by citizens and maintained by a state or a city could guarantee a lasting peace.
Although Hawkwood faithfully protected the city for 18 years, his ugly “professionalism” as a mercenary was not unanimously accepted, to the point of inspiring the proverb “Inglese italianato è un diavolo Incarnato” (« An Italianized Englishman is a devil incarnate »).
Petrarch denounced him, Boccaccio tried in vain to mount a diplomatic offensive against him, St. Catherine of Sienna begged him to leave Italy, Chaucer met him and, no doubt, used him as a model for The Knight’s Tale (The Canterbury Tales).
All this will not prevent Cosimo, a member of the humanist conspiracy and a great patron of the arts, returning from exile, from wanting to honor him. But in the absence of the bronze equestrian statue (which had been promised to him…), Florence, will only offer him a fresco in the nave of Santa Maria del Fiore, that is to say under right under the cupola of the Duomo.
From the very beginning, Paolo Uccello’s fresco seems to have stirred quite a controversy. A preparatory drawing in the collections of Florence’s Uffizi Museum indicates the commander, more armed, taller, and, with his horse in a more military position. Uccello had originally depicted Hawkwood as « more threatening », with his baton raised and horse « at the ready ».
A recent ultraviolet study confirms the fact that the painter had originally depicted the condottiere armed from head to toe. In the final version, he wears a sleeveless jacket, the giornea, and a coat; only his legs and feet are protected by a piece of armor. The final version presents a less imposing rider, less warlike, more human and more individualized
In the dispute, it was not Uccello who was considered faulty, but his sponsors. Moreover, the painter was quickly given the task of redoing the fresco in a way deemed “more appropriate”.
Unfortunately, there is no record of the debates that must have raged among the officials of the church fabric (Opera Del Domo). What is certain is the fact that in the final version, visible today, the condottiere has been transformed from a warlord running a gang of mercenaries, into the image of philosopher-king whose only weapon is his commanding staff. At the bottom of the fresco, we can read in Latin: “Giovanno Acuto, British knight, who was in his time held as a very prudent general and very expert in military affairs.”
The position of the horse and the perspective of the sarcophagus have been changed from a simple profile to a di sotto in su view.
If this perspective is somewhat surrealistic and the pose of the horse, raising both legs on the same side, simply impossible, it remains a fact that Uccello’s fresco will set “the standards” of the ideal and impassive image of virtue and command that must embody the hero of the Renaissance: his goal is no longer to “win” a war (the objective of the mercenary), but to preserve the peace by preventing it (the objective of a philosopher-king or simply a wise head of state).
Paradigm shift
As such, one might say that Uccello’s fresco announces the “paradigm shift” marking the end of the age of perpetual feudal wars, to that of the Renaissance, that is to say to that of a necessary concord between sovereign nation-states whose security is indivisible, the security of one being the guarantee of the security of the other, a paradigm even more rigorously defined in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia, when it made the agapic notion of the “advantage of the other” the basis of its success.
One historian suggests that the recommissioning of Uccello’s fresco was part of the « refurbishing » of the cathedral associated with its rededication as Santa Maria del Fiore by the humanist Pope Eugene IV in March 1436, determined to convince the Eastern and Western Churches to peacefully overcome their divisions and réunite as was attempted at the Council of Florence of 1437-1438 and for which the Duomo was central.
Interesting is the fact that Uccello’s fresco appeared at around the same time that Yolande d’Aragon and Jacques Coeur, who had his Italian connections, persuaded the French king Charles VII to put an end to the Hundred Years’ War by setting up a permanent, standing army.
In 1445, an ordinance was passed to discipline and rationalize the army in the form of cavalry units grouped into Compagnies d’Ordonnances, the first permanent army at the disposal, not of warlords or aristocrats, but of the King of France.
Donatello’s “Gattamelata” (1447-1453)
It was only some years later, in Padua, between 1447 and 1453, that Donatello would work on the statue of Erasmo da Narni (1370-1443), a Renaissance condottiere, i.e. the leader of a professional army in the service of the Republic of Venice, which at the time ruled the city of Padua. An important detail is that Erasmo was nicknamed “il Gattamelata”.
In French, « faire la chattemite » means to affect a false air of sweetness to deceive or seduce… Others explain that his nickname of “honeyed cat” comes from the fact that his mother was called Melania Gattelli or that he wore a crest (a helmet) in the shape of a honey-colored cat in battle…
The man was of humble origin, the son of a baker, born in Umbria around 1370. He learned to handle weapons from Ceccolo Broglio, lord of Assisi, and then, when he was in his thirties, from the captains of Braccio da Montone, who was known for recruiting the best fighters.
In 1427, Erasmo, who had the confidence of Cosimo de’ Medici, signed a seven-year contract with the humanist Pope Martin V, who wished to strengthen an army corps loyal to his cause with the aim of bringing to heel the lords of Emilia, Romagna and Umbria who were rebellious against papal authority.
He bought a huge suit of armor to reinforce his high stature. He was not an impetuous fighter, but a master of siege warfare, which forced him to take slow, thoughtful and progressive action. He spied on his prey for a long time before trapping it.
In 1432, he captured the fortress of Villafranca near Imola by cunning alone and without fighting. The following year he did the same to capture the fortified town of Castelfranco, thus sparing his soldiers and his treasure.
Those who were unable to grasp his tactics, accused him of being a coward for “running away” from the front-line, not realizing, that on a given moment, this was part of the tactics of his winning strategy.
He was a prudent captain, with a very well-mannered troop, and he was careful to maintain good relations with the magistrates of the towns that employed him. He obtained the rank of captain-general of the army of the Republic of Venice during the fourth war against the Duke of Milan in 1438 and died in Padua in 1443. Following his death, the Venetian Republic gave him full honors and Giacoma della Leonessa, his widow, commissioned a sculpture in honor of her late husband for 1650 ducats.
The statue, which represents the life-size condottiere, in antique-style armor and bareheaded, holding his commanding staff in his raised right hand, on his horse, was made by the lost-wax method. As early as 1447, Donatello made the models for the casting of the horse and the condottiere. The work progresses at full speed and the work is completed in 1453 and placed on its pedestal in the cemetery that adjoins the Basilica of Padua.
Brilliant for his cunning and guile, Gattamelata was a thoughtful and effective fighter in action, the type of leader recommended by Machiavelli in The Prince, and which appears in the sixteenth century by François Rabelais in his account of the “Picrocholine wars”.
Not the brute power of weapons, but the cunning and the intelligence will be the major qualities that Donatello will make appear powerfully in his work.
Contrary to Marcus Aurelius, it is not his social status that gives the commander his authority, but his intelligence and his creativity in the government of the city and the art of war. Donatello had an eye for detail. Looking at the horse, we see that it is a massive animal but far from static. It has a slow and determined gait, without any hesitation.
But that’s not all. A rigorous analysis shows that the proportions of the horse are of a “higher order” than those of the condottiere. Did Donatello make a mistake and make Erasmo too small and the horse too large? No, the sculptor made this choice to emphasize the value of Gattamelata who, thanks to his skills, is able to tame even wild and gigantic animals. In addition, the horse’s eyes show him as wild and untameable. Looking at him, one could say that it is impossible to ride him, but Gattamelata manages it with ease and without effort.
Because if you look at the reins in the hands of the protagonist, you will notice that he holds them in complete tranquility. This is another detail that highlights Erasmus’ powerful cunning and ingenuity.
Next, did you notice that one of the horse’s legs rests on a sphere? If this sphere (which could also be a cannonball, since Erasmus was a warrior) serves to give stability to Donatello’s composition as a whole, it also indicates how this animal of gigantic strength (symbolizing here warlike violence), once tamed and well used, allows the globe (the earthly kingdom) to be kept in balance.
Having told you about the horse, it is time to know more about the condottiere.
He has a proud and determined expression. The baton of command, which he holds in his hand, delicately touches the horse’s mane. The baton is not just a symbolic object; he may have received it in 1438 from the Republic of Venice.
Unlike Uccello’s fresco, Gattamelata is not dressed as a contemporary prince of commander, but as a figure beyond time embodying both the past, the present and the future. To capture this, Donatello, who takes care of every detail, has taken an ancient model and modernized it with incredible results. The details of the protagonist’s armor include purely classical motifs such as the head of Medusa, taken from Marcus Aurelius, in Greek mythology one of the three gorgons whose eyes had the power to petrify any mortal who crossed her gaze.
Although the helmet of Gattamelata would have allowed to identify him at eyesight, Donatello has discarded this option. With a helmet on his head, he would have been the symbol of a bloodthirsty warrior, rather than a cunning man. Even better, the absence of a helmet allows the artist to show us a fearless commander whose fixed gaze shows his determination. With the figure slightly bowed and legs extended, the sword in its scabbard placed at an angle, Donatello gives the illusion of an “imbalance” that reinforces in the viewer’s mind the idea that the horse is advancing with full strength.
Art historian John Pope-Hennessy is emphatic:
The fundamental differences between the Gattamelata and Marcus Aurelius are obvious. The (roman) emperor sits passively on his horse, legs dangling. In the fifteenth century, on the other hand, the art of riding implies the use of spurs. The impression of authority that emanates from the monument designed by Donatello comes from the total domination of the condottiere over his horse. (…) The soles of the feet are exactly parallel to the surface of the pedestal, as are the large six-pointed spurs, stretched to the middle of the animal’s flank.
As a result, Gattamelata is not a remake of the “classical Greek or Roman sculpture” of a hero with a sculpted physique, but a kind of new man who succeeds through reason. The fact that the statue has such a high pedestal also has its reason. Placed at such a height, the Gattamelata does not “share” our own space. It is in another dimension, eternal and out of time.
Verrocchio’s Colleoni
Some thirty years later, between 1480 and 1488, Andrea del Verrocchio, after a contest, was selected to make a large bronze equestrian statue of another Italian condottiere named Bartolomeo Colleoni (1400-1475).
A ruthless mercenary, working for a patron one day and his rival the next day, he served from 1454 the Republic of Venice with the title of general-in-chief (capitano generale). He died in 1475 leaving a will in which he bequeathed part of his fortune to Venice in exchange for the commitment to erect a bronze statue to his honor in St. Mark’s Square.
The Venetian Senate agreed to erect an equestrian monument to his memory, while charging the costs to the widow of the deceased…
In addition, the Senate refused to erect it in St. Mark’s Square, which was, along with St. Mark’s Basilica, at the heart of the city’s life. The Senate therefore decided to interpret the conditions set by Colleoni in his last will and testament without contradicting them, choosing to erect his statue in 1479, not in St. Mark’s Square, but in an area further from the city center in front of the Scuola San Marco, on the campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo.
Although Verrocchio had started working on the project since 1482, it remained unfinished at his death in 1488. And it is, not as Verrocchio wished, his heir Lorenzo di Credi who will cast the statue, but the Venetian Alessandro Leopardi (who lost the contest to Verrocchio), who will not hesitate to sign it!
If the horse is in conformity with the typology of the magnificent horses composing the quadriga overseeing the Basilica of Saint Mark of Venice (Greek statuary of the IVth century BC brought back by the crusaders from Constantinople to Venice in 1204) and of the horse of Marcus Aurelius, its musculature is more nervously underlined and traced. Objectively, this statue is ideally more proportionate. There is also more fine detail, a result of new pre-sculpture techniques, making the work captivating and realistic to look at.
The sculpture overflows its pedestal. According to André Suarès quoted in The Majesty of Centaurs:
Colleone on horseback walks in the air, he will not fall. He cannot fall. He leads his earth with him. His base follows him […] He has all the strength and all the calm. Marcus Aurelius, in Rome, is too peaceful. He does not speak and does not command. Colleone is the order of the force, on horseback. The force is right, the man is accomplished. He goes a magnificent amble. His strong beast, with the fine head, is a battle horse; he does not run, but neither slow nor hasty, this nervous step ignores the fatigue. The condottiere is one with the glorious animal: he is the hero in arms.
His baton of command is even metamorphosed into a bludgeon! But since it is not Verrocchio who finished this work, let us not blame the latter for the warlike fury that emanates from this statue.
Venice, a vicious slave-trading financial and maritime Empire fronting as a “Republic”, clearly took its revenge here on the beautiful conception developed during the Renaissance of a philosopher-king defending the nation-state.
On the aesthetic level, this mercenary smells like an animal. As a good observer, Leonardo warned us: when an artist represents a man entirely imprisoned by a single emotion (joy, rage, sadness, etc.), he ends up painting something that takes us away from the truly human soul. This is what we see in this equestrian statue.
If, on the contrary, the artist shows several emotions running through the figure represented, the human aspect will be emphasized. This is the case, as we have seen, with Donatello’s Gattamelata, uniting cunning, determination and prudence to overcome fear the face of threat.
Leonardo’s own, gigantic project to erect a gigantic bronze horse, on which he worked for years and developed new bronze casting techniques, unfortunately was never build, seen the hectic circumstances.
Finally, beyond all the interpretations, let us admire the admirable know-how of these artists. In terms of craft and skill, it generally took an entire life to become able to realize such great works, not even mentioning the patience and boundless passion required.
Up to us to bring it back to life !
Bibliography:
- Verrocchio, Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence, Andrew Butterfield, National Gallery, Princeton University Press, 2020;
- Donatello, John Pope-Hennessy, Abbeville Press, 1993;
- Uccello, Franco and Stefano Borsi, Hazan, 2004;
- Les Commentaires de Lorenzo Ghiberti dans la culture florentine du Quattrocento, Pascal Dubourg-Glatigny, Histoire de l’Art, N° 23, 1993, Varia, pp. 15-26;
- Monumento Equestre al Gattamelata di Donatello: la Statua del Guerriero Astuto, blog de Dario Mastromattei, mars 2020;
- La sculpture florentine de la Renaissance, Charles Avery, Livre de poche, 1996 ;
- La sculpture de la Renaissance au XXe siècle, Taschen, 1999;
- Ateliers de la Renaissance, Zodiaque-Desclée de Brouwer, 1998;
- Rabelais et l’art de la guerre, Christine Bierre, 2007.
- The Greek language project, Plato and the Renaissance, Karel Vereycken, jan. 2021.
La révolution du grec ancien, Platon et la Renaissance
les élèves ont bien du mal à se concentrer.
Par Karel Vereycken,
peintre-graveur, zoographe, passionné d’histoire.
cet article en PDF
Des amis m’ont interrogé sur les conditions ayant conduit à la découverte de la philosophie grecque, en particulier les idées de Platon, et le rôle qu’a pu jouer la découverte du grec ancien pendant la Renaissance européenne.
On entend parfois dire que c’est à l’occasion des grands conciles œcuméniques de Ferrare et de Florence (1439) qu’en apportant avec lui les manuscrits grecs de Byzance, le cardinal Nicolas de Cues (Cusanus), avec ses amis Pléthon et Bessarion, aurait permis à l’Europe occidentale d’accéder aux trésors de la philosophie grecque, notamment en redécouvrant Platon dont les œuvres étaient perdues depuis des siècles.
C’est l’introduction par Nicolas de Cues de la vision positive de l’homme qui aurait suscité en partie la Renaissance. Comme preuve, le fait qu’après le Concile de Florence, les Médicis auraient été les premiers à financer la traduction de l’œuvre complète de Platon, une percée qui aurait permis à la Renaissance de devenir ce qu’elle est devenue.
Si tout ceci n’est pas entièrement faux, permettez-moi d’y apporter quelques précisions.
La Renaissance fut-elle le fruit du Concile de Florence ?
Pas vraiment. C’est le programme de renouveau des études grecques et hébraïques, lancé par Coluccio Salutati (1332-1406), futur chancelier de Florence, qui marqua le début du processus.
L’idée lui vient de Pétrarque et de Boccace. Avec Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), c’est sans doute le poète italien Pétrarque (1304-1374) qui incarne le mieux l’idéal qui animait les humanistes de la Renaissance.
Toute sa vie, il tenta de « retrouver le très riche enseignement des auteurs classiques dans toutes les disciplines et, à partir de cette somme de connaissances le plus souvent dispersées et oubliées, de relancer et de poursuivre la recherche que ces auteurs avaient engagée ». *
Après avoir suivi ses parents à Avignon, Pétrarque fit ses études à Carpentras où il apprit la grammaire, puis à Montpellier, la rhétorique, et enfin à Bologne, où il passa sept ans à l’école de jurisconsultes.
Cependant, au lieu d’étudier le droit qui ouvrait sur une belle carrière, Pétrarque, en secret, lira tous les classiques alors connus, notamment Cicéron et Virgile, malgré le fait que son père ait brûlé ses livres à l’occasion.
Barlaam de Seminara
traverse une rivière. Haguenau, 1469. Encre et lavis sur papier.
Sous le pontificat de Benoît XII, Pétrarque tenta d’acquérir les rudiments de la langue grecque grâce à un savant moine de l’ordre de Saint-Basile, Barlaam de Seminara (1290-1348), dit Barlaam le Calabrais, venu en 1339 à Avignon en tant qu’ambassadeur d’Andronic III Paléologue afin de tenter, en vain, de mettre un terme au schisme entre les Églises orthodoxe et catholique.
Philosophe, théologien et mathématicien, Barlaam, tout en ayant une connaissance limitée du grec et du latin, fut un des premiers à souhaiter que l’étude de la langue et de la philosophie grecques renaisse en Europe.
Dans son Traité sur sa propre ignorance et celle de beaucoup d’autres (1367), Pétrarque se déclara fier de ses manuscrits grecs – et de sa bibliothèque en général – et évoqua avec admiration Barlaam :
J’ai chez moi seize œuvres de Platon. Je ne sais pas si mes amis en ont jamais entendu nommer les titres […]. Et ce n’est là qu’une petite partie de l’œuvre de Platon, car j’en ai vu, de mes yeux, un grand nombre, en particulier chez le calabrais Barlaam, modèle moderne de sagesse grecque qui commença à m’enseigner le grec alors que j’ignorais encore le latin et qui l’aurait peut-être fait avec succès si la mort ne me l’eût ravi et n’eût fait obstacle à mes honnêtes projets, comme de coutume.
En 1350, c’est-à-dire deux ans après le décès de Barlaam, Pétrarque rencontra Boccace (1313-1375). Ce dernier, comme Pétrarque, se prit d’un vif amour pour le grec. Dans sa jeunesse, à Naples, il avait lui aussi rencontré Barlaam et appris quelques mots de grec, recopiant avec une émouvante maladresse des alphabets, des vers, y joignant la traduction latine et des indications de prononciation.
traducteur d’Euripide, d’Aristote et d’Homère.
Pour se remettre au grec, Boccace fit alors venir de Thessalonique un disciple de Barlaam, Léonce Pilate (mort en 1366), un personnage austère, laid et de fort mauvais caractère. Mais ce Calabrais lui expliqua l’Iliade et l’Odyssée d’Homère et lui traduisit seize dialogues de Platon. Comment se fâcher avec lui ?
Boccace le garda trois ans dans sa maison et fit créer pour lui, chose totalement nouvelle, une chaire de grec à Florence. Mais Pilate ne maîtrisait pas vraiment cette langue. Bien que se faisant passer pour un Grec de souche, l’homme n’avait qu’une maigre connaissance du grec ancien et ses traductions ne dépassèrent jamais le niveau du mot-à-mot. Quant aux leçons qu’il donna à Pétrarque, elles étaient si brutales qu’il l’en dégoûta pour toujours.
Ce qui ne l’empêchera pas, sur les instances de Boccace, de traduire l’Iliade et l’Odyssée d’Homère en latin à partir d’un manuscrit grec envoyé à Pétrarque par Nicolaos Sigeros, l’ambassadeur de Byzance à Avignon.
L’histoire étant ce qu’elle est, c’est grâce à cette traduction très imparfaite que l’Europe redécouvrit une des grandes œuvres fondatrices de sa culture !
Et sur ce terreau fragile s’élèvera une flamme qui va révolutionner le monde.
Ne fut-ce pas moi, écrit Boccace dans sa Généalogie des Dieux, qui eus la gloire et l’honneur de me servir le premier de vers grecs parmi les Toscans ? Ne fut-ce pas moi qui amenai par mes prières, Pilate à s’établir à Florence et qui l’y logeait ? J’ai fait venir à mes frais des exemplaires d’Homère et d’autres auteurs grecs alors qu’il n’en existait pas en Toscane. Je fus le premier des Italiens à qui fut expliqué, en particulier, Homère, et je le fis ensuite expliquer en public.
La chasse aux manuscrits
Ce qui importe, c’est qu’au cours de ces rencontres, Pétrarque créa un réseau culturel couvrant toute l’Europe, qui se prolongea jusqu’en Orient.
Il demanda alors à ses relations et amis, qui partageait son idéal humaniste, de l’aider à retrouver dans leur pays ou leur province, les textes latins des anciens que pouvaient posséder les bibliothèques des abbayes, des particuliers ou des villes. Au cours de ses propres voyages il retrouva plusieurs textes majeurs tombés dans l’oubli.
C’est à Liège (Belgique) qu’il découvrit le Pro Archia et à Vérone, Ad Atticum, Ad Quintum et Ad Brutum, tous de Cicéron. Lors d’un séjour à Paris, il mit la main sur les poèmes élégiaques de Properce, puis, en 1350, sur une œuvre du Quintilien. Dans un souci constant de restituer le texte le plus authentique, il soumet ces manuscrits à un minutieux travail philologique et leur apporte des corrections par rapprochements avec d’autres manuscrits. C’est ainsi qu’il recomposa la première et la quatrième décade de l’Histoire Romaine de Tite-Live à partir de fragments et qu’il restaura certains textes de Virgile.
Ces manuscrits, qu’il conserva dans sa propre bibliothèque, en sortirent par la suite sous forme de copies et devinrent ainsi accessibles au plus grand nombre. Tout en reconnaissant que « la vraie foie » manquait aux païens, Pétrarque estimait que lorsqu’on parle vertu, le vieux et le nouveau monde ne firent pas en lutte.
Le « Circolo di Santo Spirito »
A partir des années 1360, Boccace réunira un premier groupe d’humanistes connu sous le nom de « Circolo di Santo Spirito » (Cercle du Saint Esprit), emprunté au couvent augustinien florentin datant du XIIIe siècle.
Forme embryonnaire d’une université, son Studium Generale (reconnu en 1284) était alors au cœur d’un vaste centre intellectuel comprenant des écoles, des hospices et des réfectoires pour les indigents.
Avant son décès en 1375, Boccace, qui avait récupéré une partie de la bibliothèque de Pétrarque, léguera au couvent l’ensemble de cette précieuse collection de livres et manuscrits anciens.**
Ensuite, dans les années 1380 et au début des années 1390, un deuxième cercle d’humanistes s’y réunit quotidiennement dans la cellule du moine augustinien Luigi Marsili (1342-1394). Ce dernier, qui avait étudié la philosophie et la théologie aux universités de Paris et de Padoue, où il était déjà entré en contact avec Pétrarque en 1370, se lia rapidement d’amitié avec Boccace.
En fréquentant à partir de 1375 le Cercle du Saint Esprit, le futur chancelier de Florence Coluccio Salutati (1332-1406) s’éprit à son tour d’un amour infini pour les études grecques.
En invitant à Florence le savant grec Manuel Chrysoloras (1355-1415) pour y enseigner le grec ancien, c’est Salutati qui donnera l’impulsion décisive conduisant à la fin du schisme entre l’Orient et l’Occident et donc à l’unification des Églises, consacrée lors du Concile de Florence de 1439.
Un siècle avant Salutati, le philosophe et scientifique anglais Roger Bacon (1214-1294), un moine franciscain résidant à Oxford, auteur d’une de l’une des premières grammaires grecques, appela déjà de ses vœux une telle « révolution linguistique ».
Comme le précise Dean P. Lockwood dans son article Roger Bacon’s Vision of the Study of Greek (1919) :
« De toute évidence, le grec ancien était la clé de voûte du grand entrepôt des connaissances antiques, l’hébreu et l’arabe étant les deux autres. En outre, nous ne devons pas oublier qu’à l’époque de Bacon, la supériorité des anciens était un fait incontestable. Le monde moderne a surpassé les Grecs et les Romains dans d’innombrables domaines ; les penseurs médiévaux se rapprochaient encore du standard hellénique.« Trois choses étaient claires pour Roger Bacon : la nécessité de maîtriser la langue grecque, l’ignorance qu’on avait de cette langue à son époque et aussi, l’occasion réelle de pouvoir l’acquérir. On peut dire la même chose de l’hébreu, mais Bacon faisait passer, à juste titre, le grec en premier. Le programme de Bacon était simple :
1. Rechercher les Grecs byzantins natifs résidant en Europe, de préférence des grammairiens. Ils sont très peu nombreux, bien sûr, mais on peut les trouver dans les monastères grecs du sud de l’Italie.
2. A partir de ceux-ci et de toute autre source disponible, retrouver des livres en grec ancien. Si l’on réalisait ce programme, Bacon prophétisa avec confiance que les résultats ne se feraient pas attendre ».
Leonardo Bruni
Manuel Chrysoloras arriva à Florence à l’hiver 1397, un événement qui apparaîtra comme une nouvelle grande opportunité selon l’un de ses élèves les plus célèbres, le savant humaniste Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444). Celui-ci occupera le poste de chancelier de Florence lors du Concile qu s’y déroula. Bruni disait qu’il y avait beaucoup de professeurs de droit, mais que personne n’avait étudié le grec ancien en Italie du Nord depuis 700 ans.
En faisant venir Chrysoloras à Florence, Salutati permit à un groupe de jeunes, dont Bruni et Vergerio, la lecture d’Aristote et de Platon en grec original.
bas-relief de Luca della Robbia.
Jusque-là, en Europe, les chrétiens connaissaient les noms de Pythagore, Socrate et Platon par leurs lectures des pères de l’Eglise : Origène, Saint-Jérôme et Saint Augustin. Ce dernier, dans sa Cité de Dieu, n’hésite pas à affirmer que les « platoniciens », c’est-à-dire Platon et ceux qui ont assimilé son enseignement (Plato et qui eum bene intellexerunt), étaient supérieurs à tous les autres philosophes païens.
Comme nous l’avons démontré ailleurs, notamment dans notre étude sur Raphaël et l’École d’Athènes, c’est en grande partie la démarche philosophique optimiste et prométhéenne de Platon, pour qui la connaissance provient avant tout de la capacité d’hypothèse et non pas du simple témoignage des sens, comme le prétend Aristote, qui fournit la sève permettant à l’arbre de la Renaissance d’offrir à l’humanité tant de fruits merveilleux.
Le témoignage suivant, de l’imprimeur français Etienne Dolet, mort sur le bûcher à Paris en 1546, révèle bien que pour les humanistes, il s’agissait d’un projet civilisationnel décidé à faire reculer la barbarie en élevant l’homme « au-dessus de l’animal par son âme ».
Le cercle d’Ambrogio Traversari
L’élève le plus célèbre de Chrysoloras fut Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) qui devint général de l’ordre des Camaldules. Aujourd’hui honoré comme un saint par son ordre, Traversari fut l’un des premiers à conceptualiser le type « d’humanisme chrétien » que promouvront le Cusain et plus tard Erasme de Rotterdam (qui forgea le concept de « Saint-Socrate » en unissant Platon aux Saintes Ecritures et aux Pères de l’Eglise), ainsi que celui qui se considérait comme son disciple, le bouillonnant François Rabelais.
Traversari, l’un des principaux organisateurs du Concile de Florence, fut également le protecteur personnel du grand peintre de la Renaissance Piero della Francesca et l’architecte du Dôme Filippo Brunelleschi.
Selon Vespasiano de Bisticci, l’historien de la cour d’Urbino, Traversari animait des séances de travail hebdomadaires sur Platon et la philosophie grecque au couvent florentin Sainte-Marie-des-Anges avec la fine fleur de l’humanisme européen dans le domaine des lettres, de la théologie, de la science, de la politique, de l’aménagement des villes et des territoires, de l’éducation et des beaux-arts. Parmi eux :
- Le cardinal-philosophe allemand Nicolas de Cues ;
- Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, le célèbre médecin et cartographe, lui aussi ami et protecteur de Piero della Francesca et de Léonard de Vinci ;
- L’érudit collectionneur de manuscrits Niccolò Niccoli, conseiller de Côme l’ancien, héritier de l’empire industriel et financier des Médicis. Considéré à l’époque comme l’homme le plus riche d’Occident, il fut l’un des mécènes du sculpteur Donatello ;
- Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, le futur pape humaniste Pie II ;
- Le secrétaire apostolique du pape Innocent VII puis de ses trois successeurs, Leonardo Bruni, élève de Chrysoloras. Il succèdera à Coluccio Salutati à la chancellerie de Florence (1410-1411 et 1427-1444).
- L’homme d’Etat italien Carlo Marsuppini, passionné de l’Antiquité grecque et successeur de Bruni, à sa mort en 1444, au poste de chancelier de la République de Florence.
- Le philosophe, antiquaire et écrivain Poggio Bracciolini. Après avoir conseillé pas moins de neuf papes (!), il est nommé chancelier de la République de Florence suite à la mort de Marsuppini en 1453 ;
- L’homme politique et ambassadeur Gianozzi Manetti. Amoureux du grec ancien et de l’hébreu, son cercle comprend Francesco Filelfo, Palla Strozzi et Lorenzo Valla. Valla ;
Manuel Chrysoloras à Florence
dessin de Paolo Uccello.
Chrysoloras ne resta que quelques années à Florence, de 1397 à 1400. Tout comme à Bologne, Venise et Rome, il y enseigna les rudiments du grec ancien. Parmi les nombreux jeunes qui profiteront de ses cours, plusieurs de ses élèves comptèrent parmi les figures les plus marquantes du renouveau des études grecques dans l’Italie de la Renaissance.
Outre Leonardo Bruni et Ambrogio Traversari, on compte parmi eux Guarino da Verona et le banquier florentin Palla Strozzi (1372-1462), par la suite l’ami et protecteur du sculpteur et traducteur Lorenzo Ghiberti). A noter, le fait que Strozzi prit à sa charge une partie du traitement de Chrysoloras et fit venir de Constantinople et de Grèce les livres nécessaires à l’enseignement nouveau.
Chrysoloras se rendit à Rome à l’invitation de Bruni, à l’époque secrétaire du pape Grégoire XII. En 1408, le savant grec fut envoyé à Paris par l’empereur Manuel II Paléologue (1350-1425) pour une importante mission. En 1413, choisi pour y représenter l’Église d’Orient, il se rendit également en Allemagne pour une ambassade auprès de l’empereur Sigismond, dont l’objet est de décider du lieu du Concile sur l’union des églises, qui se tiendra à Constance en 1415.
Chrysoloras a traduit en latin les œuvres d’Homère et La République de Platon. Son Erotemata (Questions-réponses), qui fut la première grammaire grecque de base employée en Europe occidentale, circula d’abord sous forme de manuscrit avant d’être publiée en 1484.
Réimprimée à de multiples reprises, elle connut un succès considérable non seulement auprès de ses élèves à Florence, mais également auprès des humanistes les plus éminents de l’époque, dont Thomas Linacre à Oxford et Erasme lorsqu’il résida à Cambridge. Son texte devint le manuel de base des élèves du fameux « Collège Trilingue » créé en 1515 par Erasme à Louvain en Belgique.
Traversari rencontra Chrysoloras à l’occasion des deux séjours qu’il fit à Florence pendant l’été 1413, puis en janvier-février 1414, et le vieux lettré byzantin fut impressionné par la culture bilingue du jeune moine. Il lui adressera une longue lettre philosophique en grec sur le thème de l’amitié. Ambrogio lui-même exprima dans ses lettres la plus grande considération pour Chrysoloras et son émotion pour la bienveillance qu’il lui avait témoigna.
Notons également que le riche érudit humaniste Niccolò Niccoli, grand collectionneur de livres, ouvrit sa bibliothèque à Traversari et le mit en relation avec les cercles érudits de Florence (notamment Leonardo Bruni, et aussi Côme de Médicis dont il était le conseiller), de Rome et de Venise.
En 1423, le pape Martin V envoie deux lettres, l’une au prieur du couvent Sainte-Marie-des-Anges, le Père Matteo, l’autre à Traversari lui-même, exprimant son soutien au grand développement des études patristiques dans cet établissement, et tout particulièrement au travail de traduction des Pères grecs mené par Traversari.
Le pape avait en vue les négociations qu’il allait mener avec l’Église grecque : début 1423, son légat Antoine de Massa rapporta de Constantinople plusieurs manuscrits grecs qu’il confia à Traversari pour traduction : notamment l’Adversus Græcos de Manuel Calécas, et pour les classiques les Vies et doctrines des philosophes illustres de Diogène Laërce, qui ne sera longtemps diffusé que dans la traduction latine de Traversari.
C’est suite à ce travail que Traversari manifesta son intérêt à voir résolu le schisme entre les Eglises latine et grecque. Fin 1423, Niccolò Niccoli procura à Traversari un vieux volume contenant tout le corpus des anciens canons ecclésiastiques. Le savant moine exprima dans sa correspondance avec l’humaniste son enthousiasme de pouvoir se plonger dans la vie de l’Église chrétienne antique alors unie. Sur sa lancée il traduira en grec une longue lettre du pape Grégoire le Grand aux prélats d’Orient.
Bessarion et Pléthon furent-ils les premiers à introduire l’ensemble de l’œuvre de Platon en Europe ?
Pas vraiment. Si Jean Bessarion (1403-1472) apporta effectivement en 1437 sa propre collection des « œuvres complètes de Platon » à Florence, elles avaient déjà été introduites plus tôt en Italie, notamment en 1423 par le Sicilien Giovanni Aurispa (1376-1459), le précepteur de Lorenzo Valla (un autre collaborateur du Cusain, avec lequel il dénonça la fraude de la « Donation de Constantin » et dont les travaux influenceront fortement Erasme).
En 1421, Aurispa, travaillant avec Traversari, fut envoyé par le pape Martin V afin de servir de traducteur au marquis Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, en mission diplomatique auprès de l’empereur byzantin Manuel II Paléologue. Sur place, Aurispa gagna la faveur du fils et successeur de l’empereur, Jean VIII Paléologue (1392-1448), qui fit de lui son secrétaire. Deux ans plus tard, Aurispa accompagnera l’empereur byzantin dans une mission à la cour d’Europe.
fresque de Benozzo Gozzoli.
Le 15 décembre 1423, 16 ans avant le Concile de Florence de 1439, Aurispa arriva à Venise avec la plus grande et la plus belle collection de textes grecs à pénétrer en Occident ; donc avant ceux apportés par Bessarion.
En réponse à une lettre de Traversari, il précisa avoir ramené 238 manuscrits. Ceux-ci contenaient toutes les œuvres de Platon, dont la plupart jusqu’alors n’étaient connues que très partiellement ou pas du tout en Occident, à quelques exceptions près. Par exemple, en Sicile, dès 1160, Henri Aristippe de Calabre (1105-1162) avait traduit en latin le Phèdre et le Ménon, deux dialogues de Platon.
Le virus du néo-platonisme
Les authentiques platoniciens (tels que Pétrarque, Traversari, Nicolas de Cues ou Erasme), s’opposèrent avec force aux « néo-platoniciens » (tels que Plotin, Proclus, Jamblique, le Ficin et autres Pic de la Mirandole) dont l’influence suscitera ce que l’on peut et doit appeler une « contre-Renaissance ».
Quelques siècles plus tard, le philosophe humaniste Leibniz mettra lui aussi fortement en garde contre les « néo-platoniciens » et exigera que l’on étudie Platon dans ses écrits originaux plutôt qu’à travers ses commentateurs, aussi brillants soient-ils :
« Non ex Plotino aut Marsilio Ficino, qui mira semper et mystica affectantes diceren tanti uiri doctrinam corrupere. » Il faut étudier Platon, dit-il, « mais non pas Plotin ou le Ficin, qui, en s’efforçant toujours de parler merveilleusement et mystiquement, corrompent la doctrine d’un si grand homme. »
Examinons maintenant, dans ce contexte, la figure de Pléthon, qui estimait que Platon et Aristote pouvaient jouer chacun leur propre rôle.
fresque de Benozzo Gozzoli.
George Gemistos « Pléthon » (1355-1452), fut un disciple du neo-platonicien radical Michael Psellos (1018-1080).
Vers 1410, Gemistos ouvrit son académie « néo-platonicienne » à Mistra (près du site de l’ancienne Sparte) et ajouta « Pléthon » à son nom pour ressembler à Platon. A part Platon, il admirait aussi Pythagore et les « Oracles chaldéens », qu’il attribua à Zoroastre.
Alors que la plupart des écrits de Pléthon, soupçonné d’hérésie, furent brûlés, une partie de son œuvre finira entre les mains de son ancien élève, le cardinal Jean Bessarion. Ce dernier, avant de mourir, légua sa vaste collection de manuscrits et de livres à la bibliothèque Saint-Marc de Venise (ville où résidaient plus de 4000 Grecs). Parmi ces livres et manuscrits se trouvait le Résumé des Doctrines de Zoroastre et de Platon. Ce texte, un mélange de croyances polythéistes et d’éléments néo-platoniciens, était un résumé que Pléthon avait écrit en partant de l’œuvre de Platon, Les Lois.
Jean Bessarion, ce véritable humaniste qui participa au Concile de Ferrare (1437) et de Florence (1439), en tant que représentant des Grecs et a signa le décret de l’Union, il s’en tint au principe :
« J’honore et respecte Aristote, j’aime Platon » (colo et veneror Aristotelem, amo Platonem).
Pour lui, la pensée platonicienne ne serait acceptable pour le monde latin (Occident) que lorsqu’elle obtiendrait le même droit que la pensée aristotélicienne en apparaissant comme une interprétation irénique de l’aristotélisme, sans être en contradiction avec le christianisme.
Les Médicis financèrent-ils un programme intensif pour traduire les œuvres de Platon ?
En 1397, le banquier et industriel Giovannni « di Bicci » de’ Medici (1360-1429) fonda la Banque des Médicis. Giovanni possédait deux manufactures de laine à Florence et fut membre de deux guildes : l’Arte della Lana et l’Arte del Cambio. En 1402, il fut l’un des juges du jury qui sélectionna le projet du sculpteur Lorenzo Ghiberti pour les magnifiques bas-reliefs en bronze des portes du Baptistère de Florence.
En 1418, Giovanni di Bicci, souhaitant doter les Medicis de leur propre église familiale, confia à Filippo Brunelleschi, futur réalisateur du Duomo, la fameuse coupole de la cathédrale de Santa Maria del Fioro, le Duomo, le soin de transformer radicalement l’église basilique de San Lorenzo et chargea Donatello de réaliser les sculptures.
Politiquement, la puissante famille des Médicis, actifs dans la finance et l’industrie textile, n’accéda au pouvoir qu’en 1434, trois ans avant le Concile de Florence alors que la Renaissance battait déjà son plein.
Certes, le fils et héritier de Giovanni di Bicci, Cosimo (Côme) di Medici (1389-1464), connu comme l’homme le plus riche de son siècle, fut si enthousiasmé par les paroles de Pléthon qu’il acquit une bibliothèque complète de manuscrits grecs. Il lui acheta également un ensemble de 24 dialogues de Platon, ainsi qu’un exemplaire du Corpus Hermeticum d’Hermès Trismégiste l’Égyptien (entre 100 et 300 après JC.), trouvé en Macédoine par un moine italien, Leonardo de Pistoia.
Cosimo songea à faire traduire du grec ancien au latin la totalité des œuvres de Platon. Cependant, comme nous l’avons déjà dit, Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444), chancelier de la république florentine de 1427 à 1444, avait déjà traduit bien avant une grande partie des œuvres de Platon du grec ancien vers le latin.
Cosimo choisit comme traducteur Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), le fils de son médecin personnel, âgé seulement de cinq ans au moment du Concile de Florence en 1439. Ayant de sérieux doutes sur les capacités du Ficin lorsque ce dernier lui offre en 1456 sa première traduction, Les institutions platoniques, Cosimo lui demanda de ne pas publier cet ouvrage et d’apprendre d’abord la langue grecque… que le Ficin apprit auprès du savant byzantin Jean Argyropoulos (1395 -1487), un élève aristotélicien de Bessarion.
Avancé en âge et gagné par la corruption, Cosimo lui donna finalement le poste. Il lui alloue une bourse annuelle, les manuscrits nécessaires et une villa à Careggi, un quartier de Florence, où le Ficin fonda son « Académie platonicienne » avec une poignée d’adeptes, parmi lesquels Angelo Poliziano (1454-94), Jean Pic de la Mirandole (1463-1494) et Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498).
L’Académie du Ficin, reprenant (comme il le dit lui-même) l’ancienne tradition néo-platonicienne de Plotin et de Porphyre organisait chaque année, le 7 novembre, un banquet cérémonial « négligé depuis mille deux cents ans ». Cette date correspondait, selon lui, à la fois à l’anniversaire de Platon et de sa mort.
Après le dîner, les participants lisaient le Symposium de Platon, puis chacun d’entre eux commentait l’un des discours de l’œuvre. Il s’agissait de démonstrations sans véritable dialogue et dépourvus de l’essence de toute vraie dialectique socratique : l’ironie.
En outre, il est à noter que la plupart des réunions de l’Académie du Ficin avaient lieu en présence de l’ambassadeur de Venise à Florence, en particulier le puissant oligarque Bernardo Bembo (1433-1519), père du cardinal « poète » Pietro Bembo, plus tard conseiller spécial du pape guerrier, le génois Jules II.
C’est cette alliance formée par la famille des Médicis, de plus en plus dégénérée, des Vénitiens et des néo-platoniciens qui permit de consolider une emprise oligarchique sur l’Église catholique romaine.
Les Médicis eurent peu de considération pour Léonard de Vinci dont ils jugeaient trop lente l’exécution de ses œuvres et ses fresques défaillantes techniquement. Déçu de n’obtenir aucune commande de la part du pape, Léonard se rendit en France où le roi François Ier l’attendait.
Giorgio Vasari, peintre médiocre, fut l’homme orchestre des Médicis. Dans sa Vies des peintres, il répandit le mythe que la Renaissance fut le bébé quasi-exclusif des ses employeurs.
Soulignons également qu’avant de traduire les œuvres de Platon, et à la demande expresse de Cosimo, le Ficin traduira d’abord (en 1462) les Hymnes orphiques, les Dictons de Zoroastre et le Corpus Hermeticum d’Hermès Trismégiste.
Ce n’est qu’en 1469 (trente ans après le Concile de Florence) que le Ficin achèvera ses traductions de Platon après une dépression nerveuse en 1468, décrite par ses contemporains comme une crise de « profonde mélancolie ».
En 1470, sous le titre plagié de Proclus, le Ficin écrivit sa Théologie platonicienne de l’immortalité des âmes. Bien que complètement gagné au néo-platonisme ésotérique, il devint prêtre en 1473 et écrira son Livre de la religion chrétienne sans renoncer à sa vision païenne néo-platonicienne, puisqu’il entreprit alors toute une nouvelle série de traductions des néo-platoniciens d’Alexandrie : les cinquante-quatre livres des Ennéades de Plotin ainsi que les œuvres de Porphyre et de Proclus.
Le Ficin, dans ses « Cinq questions concernant l’esprit », s’attaqua explicitement à la conception prométhéenne de l’homme :
Rien n’est plus déraisonnable que l’homme qui, par la raison, est le plus parfait de tous les animaux, non, de toutes les choses du ciel, le plus parfait, dis-je, par rapport à cette perfection formelle qui nous est donnée dès le commencement, que l’homme, également par la raison, devrait être le moins parfait de tous par rapport à cette perfection finale pour laquelle la première perfection est donnée. Cela semble être celui du plus malheureux Prométhée. Instruit par la sagesse divine de Pallas, il a pris possession du feu céleste, c’est-à-dire de la raison. C’est à cause de cette possession, sur le plus haut sommet de la montagne, c’est-à-dire à la place la plus élevée de la contemplation, qu’il est à juste titre jugé le plus misérable de tous, car il est rendu misérable par le rongement continuel du plus vorace des vautours, c’est-à-dire par le tourment de l’enquête…
(…) Que disent les philosophes de ces choses ? Certainement que les Mages, disciples de Zoroastre et d’Ostanès, affirment quelque chose de similaire. Ils disent que, à cause d’une certaine vieille maladie de l’esprit humain, tout ce qui est très malsain et difficile nous arrive…
L’Académie néo-platonicienne florentine, soutenue par le flamboyant Lorenzo de Médicis (1449-1492) dit « Laurent le Magnifique », ne fut jamais à l’origine d’une quelconque Renaissance. Bien au contraire, elle servira d’opération « delphique » : défendre Platon pour mieux le détruire ; le louer en des termes tels qu’il en devienne discrédité.
Et surtout détruire l’influence de Platon en opposant la religion à la science, à un moment où Nicolas de Cues et ses partisans réussirent à fertiliser l’une avec la semence de l’autre. N’est-il pas étrange que le nom du Cusain n’apparaisse pas une seule fois dans les œuvres du Ficin ou de Pic de la Mirandole, si érudits ?
Infecté par ce néo-platonisme ésotérique, Thomaso Inghirami (1470-1516), le bibliothécaire en chef du pape Jules II, n’accomplira rien d’autre que cela en dictant au peintre Raphaël le contenu des Stanze (chambres) au Vatican quelques décennies plus tard.
La « mélancolie » néo-platonicienne, que l’ami d’Erasme, le peintre-graveur Albrecht Dürer, prendra comme thème de sa célèbre gravure, deviendra la matrice philosophique des romantiques, des symbolistes et de l’école dite moderne.
Quant à la révolution que susciteront les études grecques dans les sciences, j’ai eu l’occasion d’expliquer la question dans mon texte « 1512-2012 : De la cosmographie aux cosmonautes, Gérard Mercator et Gemma Frisius ».
Humanistes et traducteurs
Pour conclure, voici une courte liste de traducteurs (il en manque certainement) et des langues étrangères qu’ils maîtrisaient.
Remercions-les pour tout ce qu’ils nous ont apporté. Sans eux, l’homme n’aurait certainement pas pu poser le pied sur la Lune !
- Cicéron, 106-43 av. JC. : italien, latin et grec ;
- Philon d’Alexandrie, vers 20 av. JC- 45 apr. JC : hébreu, grec ;
- Origène, v. 185-v. 253 après JC. : grec, latin ;
- Saint Jérôme (de Stridon), 342-420 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Boèce, 477-524 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Bède le Vénérable, 672-735 : anglais, latin, grec et hébreu ;
- Charlemagne, 742-814, parlait couramment le latin et connaissait le grec, l’hébreu, le syriaque et l’esclavon (l’ancien serbo-croate) ;
- Jean Scot Erigène, 800-876 : irlandais, grec, arabe et hébreu ;
- Hunayn ibn Ishaq, 809-873 : arabe, syriaque, persan et grec ;
- Thabit ibn Qurra, 826-901 : syriaque, arabe et grec ;
- Al-Fârâbi, 872-950 : farsi, sogdien et grec ;
- Al-Biruni, 973-1048, chorasmien, farsi, arabe, syriaque, sanskrit, hindi, hébreu et grec ;
- Héloïse, 1092-1141 : français, latin, grec et hébreu ;
- Hugues de Saint Victor, 1096-1141 : français, latin, grec ;
- Constantin l’Africain, XIe siècle. : arabe, latin, grec et italien ;
- Jean Sarrazin, XIIe siècle : latin et grec ;
- Henri Aristippe, 1105-1162 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Gérard de Crémone, 1114-1187 : Italien, latin et arabe ;
- Robert Grosseteste, 1168-1253 : anglais, latin et grec;
- Michael Scot, 1175-1232 : écossais, latin, grec, hébreu et arabe;
- Moïse de Bergame, XIIe siècle : italien, latin et grec ;
- Burgundio de Pise, XIIe siècle : italien, latin et grec ;
- Jacques de Venise, mort après 1147 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Roger Bacon, 1214-1294 : anglais, latin, grec, hébreu, arabe et chaldéen ;
- Guillaume de Moerbeke, 1215-1286 : flamand, latin et grec ;
- Raymond Lulle, 1232-1315 : catalan, latin et arabe ;
- Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321 : italien et latin
- Léonce Pilate, (?-1366) : italien, latin et grec ;
- Francesco Pétrarque, 1304-1374 : Italien, latin et notions de grec ;
- Giovanni Boccaccio (Bocace), 1313-1375 : italien, latin et notions de grec ;
- Coluccio Salutati, 1331-1406 : italien et latin ;
- Geert Groote, 1340-1384 : néerlandais, latin, grec et hébreu ;
- Florens Radewijns, 1350-1400 : néerlandais et latin ;
- Manuel Chrysoloras, 1355-1415 : grec, latin et italien ;
- Jacopo d’Angelo, 1360-1410, italien, latin, grec ;
- Georgius Gemistus Pléthon, 1360-1452 : grec ;
- Pier Paolo Vergerio (l’Ancien), 1370-1445 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Leonardo Bruni, 1370-1441 : italien, latin, grec, hébreu et arabe ;
- Guarino Guarini (de Vérone), 1370-1460 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Palla di Onorio Strozzi, 1372-1462 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Giovanni Aurispa, 1376-1459 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Vittorino da Feltre, 1378-1446 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Poggio Bracciolini, 1380-1459 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Ambrogio Traversari, 1386-1439 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Gianozzo Manetti, 1396-1459 : italien, latin, grec et hébreu ;
- Jean Argyropoulos, 1395-1487 : grec, italien et latin ;
- Georges de Trébizonde, 1396-1472 : grec, latin et italien ;
- Tommaso Parentucelli (pape Nicolas V), 1397-1494 : italien et latin ;
- Francesco Filelfo, 1398-1481 : Italien, latin et grec ;
- Carlo Marsuppini, 1399-1453 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Théodore de Gaza, 1400-1478 : grec et latin ;
- Jean Bessarion, 1403-1472 : grec, latin et italien ;
- Lorenzo Valla, 1407-1457 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Nicolas de Cues, 1401-1464 : allemand, latin, grec et hébreu ;
- John Wessel Gansfoort, 1419-1489 : néerlandais, latin, grec et hébreu ;
- Georg von Peuerbach, 1423-1461 : allemand, latin et grec ;
- Démétrios Chalcondyle, 1423-1511 : grec et latin ;
- Marcilio Ficino, 1433-1499 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Constantin Lascaris, 1434-1501 : grec, latin, italien ;
- Regiomontanus, 1436-1476 : allemand, latin et grec ;
- Alexander Hegius, 1440-1498 : néerlandais, latin et grec ;
- Rudolf Agricola, 1444-1485 : néerlandais, latin, grec et hébreu ;
- Janus Lascaris, 1445-1535 : grec et latin ;
- William Grocyn, 1446-1519, anglais, latin et grec ;
- Angelo Poliziano, 1454-1494 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Johannes Reuchlin, 1455-1522 : allemand, latin, grec et hébreu ;
- Thomas Linacre, 1460-1524 : anglais, latin et grec ;
- Erasme de Rotterdam, 1467-1536 : néerlandais, français, latin et grec ;
- Guillaume Budé, 1467-1540 : français, latin et grec ;
- William Latimer, 1467-1545 : anglais, latin et grec ;
- Willibald Pirckhimer, 1470-1530 : allemand, latin et grec ;
- Marcus Musurus, 1470-1517, italien, latin et grec ;
- Thomas More, 1478-1535 : anglais, latin et grec ;
- Pietro Bembo, 1470-1547 : italien, latin et grec ;
- Jérôme Aléandre, 1480-1542, italien, latin et grec;
- François Rabelais, 1483-1553 : français, latin et grec ;
- Germain de Brie, 1490-1538 : français, latin et grec;
- Juan Luis Vivès, 1492-1540 : espagnol, latin, grec et hébreu.
* * * * *
NOTES :
*A. Artus et M. Maynègre, La Fontaine de Pétrarque, n° spécial consacré au 700e anniversaire de la naissance de François Pétrarque, Avignon, 2004.
**Dans son testament du 28 août 1374, Boccace avait prédisposé qu’à sa mort (advenue le 21 décembre 1375), une partie de sa riche bibliothèque (l’essentiel des textes latins et grecs, à l’exclusion donc des œuvres en langue vernaculaire) aille en héritage au frère augustin Martino da Signa et que celui-ci, à sa propre mort (survenue en 1387), la lègue intégralement à son institution d’appartenance, le couvent de Santo Spirito à Florence.
The Greek language project, Plato and the Renaissance
By Karel Vereycken
Some friends asked me to elaborate on the following:
It is sometimes said that the introduction of Plato in the context of the Councils of Ferrara and Florence (1439) “triggered the explosion of the Italian Renaissance”.
And of the great humanist, the German Cardinal-philosopher Cusanus, it is said that he “brought to Florence Bessarion and Plethon, who were both Greek scholars of Plato and brought the entire works of Plato which had been lost in Europe for centuries”.
At the same time, goes the narrative, “the Medicis financed a crash program to translate the works of Plato. This excitement made the Italian Renaissance what it became”.
While Plato’s ideas and the renewal of greek studies did play a major role in triggering the European Renaissance, the preceding affirmations, as we shall document here, require some refinement.
Was the Italian Renaissance “triggered” by the Council of Florence?
Not really. It was rather –40 years earlier–, the “Greek language revival project” project of Coluccio Salutati (1332-1406), who would become the chancellor of Florence and invite the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (1355-1415) to his city, that “triggered” a revival of Greek and Hebrew studies, which in return lead to the unification of the churches at the Council of Florence (1439).
The idea had regained interest from Petrarch and Boccaccio, which Salutati admired. Along with Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), it is undoubtedly the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) who best embodies the ideals guiding the humanists of the Renaissance.
All his life, it is said, Petrarch tried to
« rediscover the very rich teaching of classical authors in all disciplines and, starting from this sum of knowledge, most often scattered and forgotten, to revive and pursue the research that these authors had begun. »
After following his parents to Avignon, Petrarch studied in Carpentras where he learned grammar, then in Montpellier, rhetoric, and finally in Bologna, where he spent seven years at the school of jurisconsults.
However, instead of studying law, which in those days paved the way to a brilliant career, Petrarch secretly read all the classics hitherto known, including Cicero and Virgil, despite the fact that his father occasionally burned his books.
Petrarch and Barlaam of Samara
Under the pontificate of Benedict XII, Petrarch tried to learn Greek language with the help of a learned monk of the Order of St. Basil, Barlaam of Seminara (1290-1348), known as Barlaam the Calabrian, who came to Avignon in 1339 as ambassador of Andronic III Paleologus in an unsuccessful attempt to put an end to the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.
A philosopher, theologian and mathematician, Barlaam, while having limited knowledge of Greek and Latin, was one of the first to wish that the study of the Greek language and philosophy be reborn in Europe.
In his Treatise On my own ignorance and that of many others (1367), Petrarch declared himself proud of his Greek manuscripts – and of his library in general – and expressed his deep admiration for Barlaam:
« I have at home sixteen works of Plato. I don’t know if my friends have ever heard the titles […]. And this is only a small part of Plato’s work, for I have seen, with my own eyes, a large number of them, especially in possession of the Calabrian Barlaam, a modern model of Greek wisdom who began to teach me Greek while I was still ignorant of Latin, and who might have done so successfully if death had not taken him away from me and hindered my honest plans, as usual.«
In 1350, two years after Barlaam’s death, Petrarch met the son of a banker, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). The latter, like Petrarch, fell in love with the Greek culture and language. In his youth, in Naples, he too had met Barlaam and learned a few words of Greek, meticulously copying alphabets and verses, adding the Latin translation and pronunciation indications.
Boccaccio and Leontius Pilatus
To increase his mastery of Greek, Boccaccio then called from Thessaloniki a disciple of Barlaam, Leontius Pilatus (died in 1366), an austere, ugly and very bad-tempered character. But this Calabrian lectured him on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and translated sixteen of Plato’s dialogues. How could one get angry with him?
Boccaccio offered him shelter and food for three years in his home and had a chair of Greek created for him in Florence, the first time ever!
Unfortunately, Pilatus did not really master this language. Although posing as a native Greek, the man had poor knowledge of ancient Greek and his translations never got beyond the level of word-for-word. As for the lessons he gave Petrarch, they were so brutal that he disgusted him forever.
This did not prevent Pilatus, at the insistence of Boccaccio, from translating Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into Latin from a Greek manuscript sent to Petrarch by Nicolaos Sigeros, the Byzantine ambassador to Avignon.
Hence, history being what it is, it was thanks to this highly imperfect translation that Europe rediscovered one of the great founding works of its culture!
And on this fragile ground will rise a flame that will revolutionize the world.
« Was it not I, » writes Boccaccio in his Genealogy of the Gods, « who had the glory and honor of employing the first Greek verses among the Tuscans? Was it not I who, through my prayers, led Pilatus to settle in Florence and who housed him there? I brought at my own expense copies of Homer and other Greek authors when none existed in Tuscany. I was the first of the Italians to whom Homer, in particular, was explained, and then I had him explained in public.«
The hunt for manuscripts
What is important is that during these encounters Petrarch created a cultural network covering the whole of Europe, a network reaching into the East.
He then asked his relations and friends, who shared his humanist ideals, to help him find in their respective country or province, the Latin texts of the ancients that the libraries of abbeys, individuals or cities might possess. In the course of his own travels, he found several major texts that had fallen into oblivion.
It is in Liege (Belgium) that he discovered the Pro Archia and in Verona, Ad Atticum, Ad Quintum and Ad Brutum, all by Cicero. During a stay in Paris, he got his hands on the elegiac poems of Propertius, then, in 1350, on a work by Quintilian. In a constant concern to restore the most authentic text, he subjected these manuscripts to meticulous philological work and made corrections by comparing them with other manuscripts. This is how he reconstructed the first and fourth decades of the Roman History of Titus Livius from fragments and restored some of Virgil’s texts.
These manuscripts, which he kept in his own library, later came out in the form of copies and thus became accessible to the greatest number of people. While acknowledging that the pagans lacked the « true faith, » Petrarch believed that when one speaks of virtue, the old and new worlds are not at war.
The « Circolo di Santo Spirito »
From the 1360s onwards, Boccaccio gathered a first group of humanists known as the « Circolo di Santo Spirito » (Circle of the Holy Spirit), whose name was borrowed from the 13th century Florentine Augustinian convent.
An embryonic form of a university, its Studium Generale (1284) was then at the heart of a vast intellectual center including schools, hospices and refectories for the needy.
Before his death in 1375, Boccaccio, who had recovered part of Petrarch’s library, bequeathed to the convent his entire collection of precious ancient books and manuscripts.
Then, in the 1380s and early 1390s, a second circle of humanists met daily in the cell of the Augustinian monk Luigi Marsili (1342-1394). The latter, who had studied philosophy and theology at the universities of Paris and Padua, where he already established contact with Petrarch in 1370, became friends with Boccaccio. Hence, by attending the Cercle Santo Spirito from 1375 onwards, Coluccio Salutati in turn fell in love with Greek studies.
By inviting the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (1355-1415) to Florence to teach Ancient Greek, it was Salutati who gave the decisive impulse leading to the end of the schism between East and West and thus to the unification of the Churches, consecrated at the Council of Florence in 1439.
Roger Bacon
A century before Salutati, the English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon (1214-1294), a Franciscan monk residing in Oxford, author of one of the first Greek grammars, already called for such a « linguistic revolution ».
As wrote Dean P. Lockwood in Roger Bacon’s Vision of the Study of Greek (1919):
« Obviously, Greek was the master-key to the great storehouse of ancient knowledge, Hebrew and Arabic to lesser chambers. Furthermore, we must not forget that in Bacon’s day the superiority of the ancients was an indisputable fact. The modern world has outstripped the Greek and the Romans in countless ways; the medieval thinkers were still climbing toward the Hellenic standard.
« Three things were clear to Roger Bacon: the need of Greek, the contemporary ignorance of Greek, and the feasibility of acquiring Greek. The same may be said of Hebrew, but Bacon rightly put Greek first. Bacon’s program was simple:
« 1. Seek out the native Byzantine Greeks resident in Europe, preferably grammarians. The latter were very few, of course, but might be found in the Greek monasteries of Southern Italy.
« 2. From these and from any other available sources let Greek books be sought. If this program were to be carried out, Bacon confidently prophetized that results would not be long in forthcoming.«
Leonardo Bruni
Manuel Chrysoloras, arrived in winter 1397, an event remembered by one of his most famous pupils, the humanist scholar Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444) and later chancellor of Florence at the time of the Council of Florence, as a great new opportunity: there were many teachers of law, but no one had studied Greek in northern Italy for 700 years.
Thanks to Chrysoloras, Bruni and Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder were able to read Aristotle and especially Plato in the original Greek version.
Until then, in Europe, Christians knew the names of Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato by their reading of the church fathers Origen, St. Jerome and St. Augustine.
The latter, in his City of God, did not hesitate to affirm that the « Platonists », that is Plato and those who assimilated his teaching (Plato et qui eum bene intellexerunt), were superior to all other pagan philosophers.
As we have demonstrated elsewhere, in particular in our study on Raphael and the School of Athens, it is to a large extent Plato’s optimistic and Promethean philosophical approach, for whom knowledge comes above all from the capacity for hypothesis and not from the mere testimony of the senses as Aristotle claims, that clearly provided the sap that allowed the Renaissance tree to offer humanity so many wonderful fruits.
Traversari’s humanist circle
The most famous pupil of Chrysoloras was Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439), who became general of the Camaldolese order. Today honored as a saint by his order, Traversari was one of the first to conceptualize the type of “Christian Humanism” that would be promoted by Nicolaus of Cusa (Cusanus) and later Erasmus of Rotterdam (who framed the concept of “Saint-Socrates”) and the latter’s admirer Rabelais, uniting Plato with the Holy Scriptures, and the fathers of the Church.
Traversari, a key organizer of the Council of Florence, was also the personal protector of the great Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca and of the architect of the Dome Filippo Brunelleschi.
According to Vespasiano de Bisticci, the court historian of the Court of Urbino, Traversari had weekly working sessions on Plato and Greek philosophy at the Santa Maria degli Angeli convent with the crème de la crème of European humanism in the fields of literature, theology, science, politics, architecture, infrastructure, urban planning, education and the fine arts. Among those :
- The German cardinal-philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus);
- Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, the great physician and cartographer, also friend and protector of Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci.
- The erudite manuscript collector Niccolò Niccoli, adviser to Cosimo the Elder, heir to the Medici’s industrial and financial empire. Considered at the time to be the richest man in the West, Cosimo was one of the patrons of the sculptor Donatello;
- Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future humanist pope Pius II;
- Leonardo Bruni, the apostolic secretary of Pope Innocent VII and his three successors. He succeeded Coluccio Salutati at the chancellery of Florence (1410-1411 and 1427-1444).
- The Italian statesman Carlo Marsuppini, passionate about Greek Antiquity, and successor of Bruni as Chancellor of the Republic of Florence after the latter’s death in 1444.
- The philosopher, antiquarian and writer Poggio Bracciolini. After having advised no less than nine popes (!), he was appointed Chancellor of the Republic of Florence following the death of Marsuppini in 1453;
- The politician and ambassador Gianozzi Manetti. In love with ancient Greek and Hebrew, his circle includes the éducator Francesco Filelfo, the banker Palla Strozzi and the founder of the Vatican library Lorenzo Valla ;
Chrysoloras in Florence
Chrysoloras remained only a few years in Florence, from 1397 to 1400, teaching Greek, starting with the rudiments. He moved on to teach in Bologna and later in Venice and Rome. Though he taught widely, a handful of his chosen students remained a close-knit group, among the first humanists of the Renaissance. As said before, among his pupils one could count some of the foremost figures of the revival of Greek studies in Renaissance Italy.
Aside from Bruni and Ambrogio Traversari, they included Guarino da Verona and the Florentine banker Palla Strozzi (1372-1462), later the friend and protector of the sculptor and translator Lorenzo Ghiberti. It is worth noting that Strozzi paid part of Chrysoloras’ salary and had the books necessary for the new teaching brought from Constantinople and Greece.
Chrysoloras went to Rome on the invitation of Bruni, who was then secretary to Pope Gregory XII. In 1408, he was sent to Paris on an important mission from the emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (1350-1425). In 1413, he went to Germany on an embassy to the emperor Sigismund, the object of which was to decide on the site for the church council that assembled at Constance in 1415. Chrysoloras was on his way there, having been chosen to represent the Greek Church, when he died that year.
Chrysoloras translated the works of Homer and Plato’s Republic from Greek into Latin. His Erotemata (Questions-answers), which was the first basic Greek grammar in use in Western Europe, circulated initially as a manuscript before being published in 1484.
Widely reprinted, it enjoyed considerable success not only among his pupils in Florence, but also among later leading humanists, being immediately studied by Thomas Linacre at Oxford and by Erasmus when he resided at Cambridge. It’s text became the basic manual used by pupils of the Three Language College set up by Erasmus in Leuven (Belgium) in 1515.
Traversari meets Chrysoloras during his two stays in Florence in the summer of 1413 and in January-February 1414, and the old Byzantine scholar is impressed by the bilingual culture of the young monk; he sends him a long philosophical letter in Greek on the theme of friendship. Ambrogio himself expresses in his letters the highest consideration for Chrysoloras, and emotion for the benevolence he showed him.
It should also be noted that the rich humanist scholar Niccolò Niccoli, a great collector of books, opened his library to Traversari and put him in constant contact with the scholarly circles of Florence (notably Leonardo Bruni, and also Cosimo de Medici, of whom he was advisor), but also of Rome and Venice.
In 1423, Pope Martin V sent two letters, one to the prior of the Convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Father Matteo, and the other to Traversari himself, expressing his support for the great development of patristic studies in this establishment, and especially for the work of translation of the Greek Fathers carried out by Traversari.
The Pope had in mind the negotiations he was conducting at the time with the Greek Church: at the beginning of 1423, his legate Antonio de Massa returned from Constantinople and brought back with him several Greek manuscripts which were to be entrusted to Traversari for translation: notably the Adversus Græcos by Manuel Calécas, and for the classics the Lives and Doctrines of the Illustrious Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, a text which circulated for a long time only in Traversari’s Latin translation.
It was following these undertakings that Traversari expressed his great interest in seeing the schism between the Latin and Greek Churches resolved. At the end of 1423, Niccolò Niccoli provides Traversari with an old volume containing the entire corpus of the ancient ecclesiastical canons, and the learned monk expresses in his correspondence with the humanist his enthusiasm for being able to immerse himself in the life of the then united ancient Christian Church, and in the process, he translates into Greek a long letter from Pope Gregory the Great to the prelates of the East.
Arrival of Plato’s mind
Were Bessarion and Plethon the first to bring the entire works of Plato to Europe?
Not really. While John Bessarion did indeed bring his own collection of the “complete works of Plato” in 1437 to Florence, they had already been brought to Italy earlier, most notably in 1423 by the Sicilian Giovanni Aurispa (1376-1459), who was the teacher of Lorenzo Valla (another collaborator with whom Cusanus exposed the fraud of the “Donation of Constantine” and a major source of inspiration of Erasmus).
In 1421 Aurispa was sent by Pope Martin V to act as the translator for the Marquis Gianfrancesco Gonzaga on a diplomatic mission to the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Palaiologos.
After their arrival, he gained the favor of the emperor’s son and successor, John VIII Paleologus (1392-1448), who took him on as his own secretary. Two years later, he accompanied his Byzantine employer on a mission to the courts of Europe.
On 15 December 1423, 16 years prior to the Council of Florence of 1439, Aurispa arrived in Venice with the largest and finest collection of Greek texts to reach the west prior to those brought by Bessarion. In reply to a letter from Traversari, he says that he brought back 238 manuscripts.
These contained all of Plato’s works, most of them hitherto unknown in the West.
Plato’s works so far were only known very partially. In Sicily, Henry Aristippus of Calabria (1105-1162) had translated into Latin Plato’s Phaedo and Meno dialogues as early as 1160.
Evil neo-Platonist
Platonists (such as Petrarch, Traversari, Cusanus or Erasmus), have nothing to do and even violently opposed “Neo-platonist” (such as Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblicus, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola) whose influence would create what could and should be called a “counter-Renaissance”.
Already Leibniz strongly warned against the “neo-Platonists” and demanded Plato be studied in his original writings rather than through his commentators, however brilliant they might be:
“non ex Plotino aut Marsilio Ficino, qui mira semper et mystica affectantes diceren tanti uiri doctrinam corrupere.”
[In English: Plato should be studied, but “Not from Plotinus nor Marsilio Ficino, who, by always striving to speak wonderfully and mystically, corrupt the doctrine of so great a man. »]
George Gemisthos « Plethon »
Now, let us enter Plethon, who thought Plato and Aristotle could each one play their own role. George Gemistos « Plethon » (1355-1452), was a follower of the radical “neo-Platonist” Michael Psellos (1018-1080). Around 1410 Gemistos created a “neo-Platonic” academy in Mistra (near the site of ancient Sparta) and added “Plethon” to his name to make it resemble to « Plato ». He was also an admirer of Pythagoras, Plato, and the “Chaldean Oracles”, which he ascribed to Zoroaster.
Gemistos came for the first time to Florence when he was fifteen years old and became an authority in Mistra. So at the time of the Council, the Emperor, John VIII Paleologus, knew they were going to face some of the finest minds in the Roman Church on their own soil; he therefore wanted the best minds available in support of the Byzantine cause to accompany him. Consequently, the Emperor appointed George Gemistos as part of the delegation. Despite the fact that he was a secular philosopher — a rare creature at this time in the West — Gemistos was renowned both for his wisdom and his moral rectitude. Among the clerical lights in the delegation were John Bessarion, Metropolitan of Nicaea, and Mark Eugenikos, Metropolitan of Ephesus. Both had been students of Gemistos in their youth. Another non-clerical member of the delegation was George Scholarios: both a future adversary of Gemistos and a future Patriarch of Constantinople as Gennadios II. Initially, Gemistos was opposed to the unity of the western and eastern churches.
Not assisting at every theological debate during the Council of Florence of 1439, he went in town to give lectures to intellectuals and nobles on the essence of Plato and Neo-platonic philosophy. Plethon also brought with him the text of the “Chaldean Oracles” attributed to Zoroaster.
While most of Plethon’s writing were burned, since he was suspected of heresy, a large number of Plethon’s autograph manuscripts ended up in the hands of his former student Cardinal Bessarion. On Bessarion’s death, he willed his personal library to the library of San Marco in Venice (where over 4000 Greeks resided). Among these books and manuscripts was Plethon’s Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato. This Summary was a summary of the Book of Laws, which Plethon wrote inspired by Plato’s laws. The Summary is a mixture of polytheistic beliefs with neo-Platonist elements.
While John Bessarion (1403-1472), a real humanist, took part in the Council in Ferrara (1437) and Florence (1439), and as the representative of the Greek, signed the decree of the Florentine Union, he held nevertheless to the principle: “I honor and respect Aristotle, I love Plato” (colo et veneror Aristotelem, amo Platonem). For him Platonic thought would have the right of citizenship equal to Aristotelian thought in the Latin world only when it appeared in an irenic interpretation to Aristotelianism and as not in contradiction with Christianity, since only such an interpretation of Platonism could succeed at that time.
Cosimo di Medici and Ficino
Did the Medicis finance a crash program to translate the works of Plato?
In 1397, Giovannni « di Bicci » de’ Medici (1360-1429) set up the Medici Bank. Giovanni owned two wool factories in Florence and was a member of two guilds: the Arte della Lana and the Arte del Cambio.
In 1402, he was one of the judges on the jury that selected Lorenzo Ghiberti’s design for the bronzes for the doors of the Baptistery of Florence.
In 1418, Giovanni di Bicci, wishing to endow his family with their own church, entrusted Filippo Brunelleschi, future architect of the famous dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fioro, the Duomo, with the task of radically transforming the basilica church of San Lorenzo and ordered Donatello to execute the sculptures.
Politically, the Medici family did not come to power until 1434, three years before the Council of Florence and at a time when the Renaissance was already in full swing.
Admittedly, Giovanni’s son and inheritor of his financial empire, Cosimo di Medici (1389-1464), known as the richest man of his epoch, became so inspired by Plethon that he acquired a complete library of Greek manuscripts. He bought a copy of the Platonic Corpus (24 dialogues) from Plethon, and a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus, acquired in Macedonia by an Italian monk, Lionardo of Pistoia. Cosimo also decided to initiate a project to translate from the Greek into Latin, the totality of Plato’s works.
However, as said before, Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444), who after having been papal secretary became chancellor of the Florentine republic from 1427 till 1444, had already translated close to all of Plato’s works from Greek into Latin.
It should be underlined that the translator chosen by Cosimo was Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), the son of his personal physician and only five years old at the time of the Council of Florence in 1439. Cosimo had some severe doubts concerning Ficino’s capacities as translator. When the latter offers in 1456 his first translation, The Platonic Institutions, Cosimo asks him kindly not to publish this work and to learn first the Greek language… which Ficino learns then from Byzantine scholar John Argyropoulos (1415-1487), an Aristotelian pupil of Bessarion who rejected the Council of Florence’s epistemological revolution.
But seeing his age advancing and despite his unfortunate descent into corruption, Cosimo finally gave him the post. He allocates him an annual stipend, the required manuscripts and a villa at Careggi, close to Florence, where Ficino would set up his “Platonic Academy” with a handful of followers, among which Angelo Poliziano (1454-94), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) and Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498).
Ficino’s “Academy”, taking up the ancient neo-platonic tradition of Plotinus and Porphyry (as Ficino states himself) would organize each year a ceremonial banquet “neglected since one thousand two hundred years” on November 7, thought to be simultaneously the birthday of Plato and the day of his death.
After the dinner, the attendants would read Plato’s Symposium and then each of them would comment on one of the speeches. The comments are demonstrations, without any real dialogue and void of the essence of real platonic thinking: irony. On top of that it is remarkable that most gatherings of Ficino’s academy were attended by the ambassador of Venice in Florence, notably the powerful oligarch Bernardo Bembo (1433-1519), father of “poet” cardinal Pietro Bembo, later special advisor to the evil Genovese “Warrior Pope” Julius II.
It was this alliance of the increasingly more degenerated Medici family, the Venetian Empire’s maritime slave trade and the anti-Platonic neo-Platonists that gained dominant influence over the Curia of the Roman Catholic Church. The Medici’s clearly disliked Da Vinci (who never got an order from the Vatican and subsequently left Italy), and through their propaganda man Vasari made the world belief that the Renaissance was exclusively their baby.
But before translating Plato, and at the specific demand of Cosimo, Ficino translated first (in 1462) the Orphic Hymns, the Sayings of Zoroaster, and the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus the Egyptian (between 100 and 300 after BC).
It will be only in 1469 that Ficino will finish his translations of Plato after a nervous breakdown in 1468, described by his contemporaries as a crisis of “profound melancholy”.
In 1470, and with a title plagiarized from Proclus, Ficino wrote his “Platonic Theology or on the immortality of the Soul.” While completely taken in by esoteric neo-Platonism, he became a priest in 1473 and wrote “The Christian Religion” without changing his neo-platonic pagan outlook, producing an entire new series of translations of the neo-Platonists of Alexandria: he translated the fifty-four books of Plotinus “Enneads”, Porphyry and Proclus.
Ficino, in his “Five Questions Concerning the Mind” explicitly attacks the Promethean conception of man:
« Nothing indeed can be imagined more unreasonable than that man, who through reason is the most perfect of all animals, nay, of all things underheaven, most perfect, I say, with regard to that formal perfection that is bestowed upon us from the beginning, that man, also through reason, should be the least perfect of all with regard to that final perfection for the sake of which the first perfection is given. This seems to be that of the most unfortunate Prometheus. Instructed by the divine wisdom of Pallas, he gained possession of the heavenly fire, that is, reason. Because of this very possession, on the highest peak of the mountain, that is, at the very height of contemplation, he is rightly judged most miserable of all, for he is made wretched by the continual gnawing of the most ravenous of vultures, that is, by the torment of inquiry…” (…) “What do the philosophers say to these things? Certainly, the Magi, followers of Zoroaster and Hostanes, assert something similar. They say that, because of a certain old disease of the human mind, everything that is very unhealthy and difficult befalls us…«
The Florentine Neo-Platonic Academy, backed by the libido-driven Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492) “The Magnificent”, will serve as a “Delphic” operation: defend Plato to better destroy him; praise him in such terms that he becomes discredited. And especially destroying Plato’s influence by opposing religion to science, at a point where Cusanus and his followers are succeeding to do exactly the opposite. Isn’t it bizarre that Cusa’s name doesn’t appear a single time in the works of Ficino or Pico della Mirandola, so overfed with all-encompassing knowledge?
Lorenzo did protect artists such as Sandro Botticelli, whose Birth of Venus exemplifies Lorenzo’s neo-platonic symbolism.
Infected with this evil neo-Platonism, Thomaso Inghirami (1470-1516), the chief librarian of pope Julius II, will accomplish nothing but this when dictating to the painter Raphaël the content of the Stanza in the Vatican some decades later.
Neo-platonic “melancholy”, which Albrecht Dürer went after in his famous engraving, will become the matrix for the romantics, the destructive virus affecting the symbolists and the so-called modern school. As for the revolution that Greek studies will bring about in the sciences, I refer you to our article on this website: 1512-2012: From Cosmography to Cosmonauts, Gerard Mercator and Gemma Frisius.
To conclude, here is a short list of translators, and I certainly forgot some of them, and their mastery of foreign languages. Even if some of them can’t be called « humanists », let’s thank them for everything they allowed us to discover. I’m profoundly convinced that without them, man would certainly not have set foot on the Moon!
- Marcus Tullius Cicero 106-43 BC: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Philo of Alexandria 20 BC – 40 AD: hebrew, Greek;
- Origen of Alexandria 184 – 253: Greek and Latin;
- Jerome of Stridon 342-420: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Boethius 477-524: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Bede the Venerable 672-735: English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Charlemagne 742-814, spoke Latin and understood Greek, Hebrew and Slavonic;
- John Scotus Eriugena 800-876: Irish, Greek, Arab and Hebrew;
- Ḥunayn ibn Isḥaq 809-873: Arabic, Syriac, Persian and Greek;
- Thābit ibn Qurra 826-901: Syriac, Arabic and Greek;
- Al-Fârâbi 872-950: Farsi, Sogdian and Greek;
- Al–Biruni, 973-1048: Chorasmian, Farsi, Frabic, Syriac, Sanskrit, Hindi, Hebrew and Greek ;
- Adelard of Bath 1080-1152: English, Latin and Arabic;
- Héloïse 1092-1141: French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Hugh of Saint Victor 1096-1141: French, Latin, Greek;
- Constantine the African XIth Cent: Arabic, Latin, Greek and Italian;
- John Sarrazin XIIth Cent: Latin and Greek;
- Henricus Aristippus 1105-1162: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Gerard of Cremona 1114-1187: Italian, Latin and Arabic;
- Robert Grosseteste 1168-1253: English, Latin and Greek;
- Michael Scot 1175-1232: Scottish, Latin, Greek, Arab and Hebrew;
- Moses of Bergamo (XIIth Century): Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Burgundio of Pisa (XIIth Century): Italian, Latin and Greek;
- James of Venice (second half IIth Century, dies after 1147): Italian, Latin and Greek ;
- Roger Bacon 1214-1294: English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean ;
- William of Moerbeke 1215-1286: Dutch, Latin and Greek;
- Raymond Lull 1232-1315: Catalan, Latin and Arabic;
- Arnaldus de Villa Nova 1240-1311: Catalan, Latin, Greek and Arabic;
- Dante Alighieri 1265-1321: Italian and Latin;
- Francesco Petrarch 1304-1375: Italian and Latin;
- Giovanni Boccaccio 1313-1375: Italian and Latin;
- Coluccio Salutati 1331-1406: Italian and Latin;
- Geert Groote 1340-1384: Dutch, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Florens Radewijns 1350-1400: Dutch and Latin;
- Manuel Chrysoloras 1355-1415: Greek, Latin and Italian;
- Georgius Gemistus « Pletho » 1360-1452: Greek;
- Jacopo d’Angelo 1360-1410, Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Pier Paolo Vergerio (the Elder) 1370-1445: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Leonardo Bruni 1370-1441: Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic;
- Guarino Guarini 1370-1460: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Palla di Onofrio Strozzi 1372-1462: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Giovanni Aurispa 1376-1459: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Vittorino da Feltre 1378-1446: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Poggio Bracciolini 1380-1459: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Ambrogio Traversari 1386-1439: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Gianozzo Manetti 1396-1459: Italian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Georges of Trebizond 1396-1472: Greek, Latin and Italian;
- Tommaso Perentucelli (Pope Nicolas V) 1397-1494: Italian and Latin;
- Francesco Filelfo 1398-1481: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Carlo Marsuppini 1399-1453: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Theodorus Gaza 1400-1478: Greek and Latin;
- John Bessarion 1403-1472: Greek, Latin and Italian;
- Lorenzo Valla 1407-1457: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Nicolas of Cusa 1401-1464: German and Latin;
- John Wessel Gansfoort 1419-1489: Dutch, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Georg von Peuerbach 1423-1461: German, Latin and Greek;
- Demetrios Chalkokondyles 1423-1511: Greek and Latin;
- Marcilio Ficino 1433-1499: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Constantine Lascaris 1434-1501: Greek, Latin and Italian;
- Regiomontanus 1436-1476: German, Latin and Greek;
- Alexander Hegius 1440-1498: Dutch, Latin and Greek;
- Rudolf Agricola 1444-1485: Dutch, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Janus Lascaris 1445-1535: Greek and Latin;
- William Grocyn 1446-1519,: English, Latin and Greek;
- Poliziano 1454-1494: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Johannes Reuchlin 1455-1522: German, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Thomas Linacre 1460-1524: English, Latin and Greek;
- Erasmus of Rotterdam 1467-1536: Dutch, Latin and Greek;
- William Latimer 1467-1545 : English, Latin and Greek;
- Guillaume Budé 1467-1540: French, Latin and Greek;
- Marcus Musurus 1470-1517: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Willibald Pirckheimer 1470-1530: German, Latin and Greek;
- Pietro Bembo 1470-1547: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Thomas More 1478-1535: English, Latin and Greek;
- Girolamo Aleandro, 1480-1542: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Germain de Brie 1490-1538: French, Latin and Greek;
- Juan Luis Vivès 1492-1540: Spanish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;