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CHAPTER 1

Prosopon/Persona

Philosophy and Rhetoric

But meanwhile closely inspect what hides under the mask (sub persona lateat). You will say, am I not contemplating youthful features instead of Marsilio’s face (vultus)?

—Marsilio Ficino, letter to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, 1488

Prosopa and Personae: Of Masks, Faces, and Persons

It is a commonplace in Renaissance scholarship to speak about the rediscovery of the dialogue genre. Why, then, did Marsilio Ficino, the Renaissance’s greatest student of the Platonic dialogue, write so few dialogues himself? Instead of concluding too quickly that he was too dogmatic, systematic, or insensitive to the dialogic nature of Plato as well as to stylistic questions of philosophical prose, and therefore not of the same ilk as his humanist contemporaries who were immersed in the dialogic form of Cicero’s (106–43 BCE) writings, one ought to examine how Ficino understood Plato’s use of interlocutors (prosopa/personae).¹ Such a study reveals that at the same time as his contemporaries were studying and imitating the Ciceronian concept of the rhetorical persona, Ficino was busy studying the Platonic one and imitating it as his own written persona. A comparison of Ficino’s letters with three famous epistolary debates over Ciceronianism and humanist Latin will make this clear. I will argue that Ficino is in fact deeply invested in questions about personae, in terms of both Platonic prosopopoeia and Ciceronian rhetorical personae. Like his fellow humanists Ficino employed the epistolary form to fabricate his own discursive rhetorical persona, yet in his case he worked at being known as the public spokesperson for Plato. Just as investigations into the rhetorical imitation of past and silent voices (especially Cicero’s) lead some humanists to question how someone’s discursive oratorical persona relates to their prediscursive person, so Ficino’s preoccupation with Platonic style and dialogic characters also helped shape his epistolary style and person. The examples I study below do not show Ficino in the ongoing Ciceronian controversies, debating the merit of imitating an ancient style and rhetorical persona; instead they reveal him in the process of crafting a rhetorical mask for philosophical purposes.

The Greeks had four words for masks: gorgoneion, mormolukeion, prosopon, and prosopeion. The first, as the name clearly indicates, denotes the mask of the Gorgons, three nightmarish sisters with snakes for hair, whom Plato evokes in the Symposium (198a–199b) to describe Agathon’s speech as an imitation of Gorgias’s style, whose long discourses, rhetorical figures, and public exhibitions would petrify his listeners, or render them speechless. Plato there plays with the reduplicative sound of Gorgias/Gorgon, and Gorgon itself derives from the word gorgos, whose meaning “grim” or “terrible” is reinforced again by the reduplication of the sound of “g” with the growling “gor,” or “gar” as it is also in the names of Rabelais’s giants Gargantua and Gargamelle. Plato’s description of Gorgias’s rhetoric as a frightful disguise woven in words points to the related fearful mask: the mormolukeion. The word itself derives from mormo, a fearsome female monster or a bugbear whose very name was shouted at children to frighten them (often translated as lamia and larva in Latin). Plato famously invokes the mormolukeion in the Phaedo, where, in a philosophical image that had a lasting impact on Lucian, Epictetus, Plutarch, and others, he presents Socrates as the philosophical magus who dispels the fear of death as one dispels a child’s fear of a terrifying mask by turning it upside down to show that it is merely a plaything that is empty on the reverse.² The mask of the mormolukeion found a later audience in the visual arts of the ancient Romans (often on sarcophagi) and later in the Italian Renaissance, where youthful putti spooked each other while wearing larva masks (Figure 7).³ As will be seen, in the Renaissance this kind of larva mask often had Platonic connotations. Finally, the related prosopon and prosopeion are by far the most common words for mask in ancient Greek. The latter, however, is derived from the former and only came into use in the third century BCE. The word prosopon is used to denote all forms of masks, including theatrical, religious, ritualistic masks, the two types previously mentioned, as well as the interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues. Most important, the Greeks also used the word prosopon to denote faces as well as masks.

FIGURE 7. Putti Playing with Masks, attributed to Girolamo Mocetto, after Mantegna, pen and ink on paper, c. 1485–95. Louvre, Paris, inv. 5072, nouveau 2854 (Martineau, 1992, cat. 149).

There is therefore an important anthropological difference to be noted between the Greeks and Romans that bears philosophical significance for Platonism. Unlike the Romans and moderns who distinguish between a mask (persona) and a face (os, vultus, and facies), the early Greeks did not make such a clear distinction. There is no duplicity, dissimilitude, or deceit in masks for the early Greeks. Rather, masks present and embody. As the prefix pros indicates, for the Greeks, the prosopon, the mask and the face, is literally that which is seen in front or facing something. Instead of this Greek visual etymology, Aulus Gellius (c. 125–180 CE, or later) records the Roman understanding of persona according to an auditory etymology, per-sonare, as that through which a voice resounds (a spokesperson or megaphone), and therefore something placed over the face.⁴ Beginning with Polybius (264–146 BCE) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60–7 BCE, or later) we can detect that the influence of the Latin persona began to be felt on the Greek prosopeion, which came to be used for a mask concealing the face. The distance from the early Greeks is evident. Their masks display, while the Romans’ and ours conceal. Classicists have studied and documented this problem carefully, replacing the old etymology of persona that offers a sonorous and phonetic derivation with the modern etymology derived from the darkness of infernal regions of the obscure Etruscan demon Phersu. Both cases, either sounds or shadows, deny sight and a visible presence.⁵

Plato’s Prosopon and the Greeks

Boethius’s often repeated reputation as the last Roman and the first medieval philosopher may have its roots in the desire of Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) to expose his stylistic barbarisms, but there is nevertheless some sense in seeing him on one side of the intersection of Greek Platonism and Latin philosophy, and seeing Renaissance Hellenism on the other. Already in the sixth century Boethius made the distinction between the phonetic etymology of the Latin persona and the visual etymology of the Greek prosopon, and corrected the former with the latter. According to Boethius’s visual etymology, however, instead of being what stands open and visible in front of the face, the prosopon becomes what is placed on top of the face, and therefore what covers it: a mask.⁶ Hence, despite switching out the Roman auditory meaning for a visual one, Boethius makes the Greek prosopon function like the Latin persona: it conceals. Yet Boethius is not simply applying a Latin understanding of the etymology of persona to the Greek prosopon; in fact he follows the logic of Plato’s prosopon all too closely.

As was often the case, Plato bucked the trends, traditions, received assumptions, and epistemic status quo of his age. As the example of the mask of the mormolukeion in the Phaedo illustrates, for Plato the prosopon can in fact deceive. Concerned with the moral and societal impact of poetic impiety, Socrates proposes in book 2 of the Republic that lawmakers ought to establish guiding myths to counter three Homeric offenses against the gods: the statement by one of the suitors in the Odyssey that gods travel among men in disguise (Resp. 381d), the “falsehoods about Proteus and Thetis,” and the false dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon in the Iliad (Resp. 383a).⁷ These passages imply three problems: that the gods deceive men, are mutable, and are somehow responsible for evil. Socrates and Adeimantus agree that the most perfect form of anything cannot admit change and alteration. Even the gods cannot alter themselves. After disparaging the poets for lying about Proteus, Socrates turns on mothers who scare their children by speaking evil of the gods in nursery tales. Finally Socrates says: “May we suppose that while the gods themselves are incapable of change they cause us to fancy that they appear in many shapes deceiving and practicing magic upon us?”⁸ In book 3 of the Republic, Socrates continues his critique and censures Homer for concealing himself behind his characters, Chryses for example, by imitating another in speech and manner (ἢ κατὰ φωνὴν ἢ κατὰ σχῆμα).⁹ Socrates’ criticism is directed against Homer’s use of prosopopoeia, that is, the adoption of different mimetic figurative prosopa or personae for speeches in his diegetic tale. Socrates’ focus on the imitation of speech and figure reveals how his critique of Homer extends more broadly into poetry’s realm of performative and theatrical imitation. At its best, the ability to imitate another’s voice and appearance is the work of a Protean poet capable of personifying all, from shameful drunks to the gods themselves.¹⁰ Yet one does not need to stray from this way of thinking to see how one can direct the same criticism at Plato’s own personifications and polyphonic dialogues. The Athenian philosopher’s dialogic imitations are therefore in public competition with other forms of education.

The Gorgias’s narrative framework clearly shows how Plato publicly stages an agonistic competition between Socrates’ philosophy and Gorgias’s rhetoric. The fearsome and formidable Callicles brings this clash of disciplines to life by embodying the rhetorician’s use of epic poetry, tragedy, and even philosophy to make his speech:

It is a good thing to engage in philosophy just so far as it is an aid to education, and it is no disgrace for a youth to study it, but when a man who is now growing older still studies philosophy, the situation becomes ridiculous, Socrates, and I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child. When I see a little child, for whom it is still proper enough (πρέπον) to speak in this way, lisping and playing, I like it and it seems to me pretty and ingenuous and appropriate to the child’s age, and when I hear it talking with precision, it seems to me disagreeable and it vexes my ears and appears to me more fitting for a slave, but when one hears a grown man lisping and sees him playing the child, it looks ridiculous and unmanly and worthy of a beating. I feel exactly the same too about students of philosophy. When I see a youth engaged in it, I admire it and it seems to me natural and I consider such a man ingenuous, and the man who does not pursue it I regard as illiberal and one who will never aspire to any fine and noble deed, but when I see an older man still studying philosophy and not deserting it, that man, Socrates, is actually asking for a whipping…. Now I am quite friendly disposed toward you, Socrates, and I suppose I feel much as Zethus, whom I mentioned, felt toward Amphion in Euripides. For I am moved to say to you the same kind of thing as he said to his brother, “You neglect, Socrates, what you most ought to care for, and pervert a naturally noble spirit by putting on a childlike semblance, and you could neither contribute a useful word in the councils of justice nor seize upon what is plausible and convincing, nor offer any brilliant advice on another’s behalf.”¹¹

In this passage Callicles, claiming that Socrates will be like a child unable to defend himself, speaks proleptically about Socrates’ looming trial in Athens. Yet even more than a personal reference to Socrates’ fate, Callicles’ argument seeks to establish philosophy’s proper boundaries within the polis’ conventions and decorum (πρέπον). Its pedagogical curriculum should reinforce these boundaries, not transgress them. Old philosophers, he relates, in their ridiculous insistence on playing the part of children break decorum and invert their own nature. To make his case before the crowd, Callicles draws on what were probably commonplace anecdotes. First, a reference to Phoenix’s reproving speech to his former ward Achilles (Iliad 9.441) for his childish brooding and for his tendency to isolate himself from the other troops reinforces Callicles’ argument about decorum: that one earns distinction among the company of men with the business of politics in the agora, rather than secluded away in contemplation. One hears echoes of this debate in Socrates’ courtroom defence against the accusations of Meletus and the general slander of public opinion when Socrates compares his willingness to die for his just way of life to Achilles’ fearless choice to avenge Patroclus and face death.¹²

Second, the quotation from Euripides’ lost Antiope casts Socrates in the role of Amphion and Callicles in the role of Zethus once more in order to reinforce Callicles’ agon between philosophical leisure (ἀπραγμοσύνη) and political activity (πολυπραγμοσύνη). The two brothers from Euripides’ Antiope came to represent for the ancients the contest of disciplines, with Zethus standing for the practical life of business and politics and Amphion for the contemplative life of music and philosophy.¹³ In the fifteenth century the Gorgias’s staging of the myth of Amphion as a dramatic contest between the contemplative life of Socrates and the active life of the busybody politician fascinated Marsilio Ficino, who recast the two brothers as personifications for Renaissance debates between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. He compared, for instance, Amphion’s philosophical music to Orpheus, the Dionysiac poet Arion, the lyre-playing Pythagoras, Empedocles, and even the aged Socrates, and he was also in the habit of calling his friend Cristoforo Landino (1424–98), the Platonically inspired poet, humanist, scholar, and philosopher, by the name Amphion.¹⁴

The Gorgias also stages an agon between dialogue and theater as forms of public education. Far from failing to realize that Socrates’ criticism of poetry’s prosopopoeic abilities in the Republic could be turned on his own dialogue form, Plato must have been acutely aware of the imitative and figurative implications of his dialogic personifications. Socrates often relates, as he does in the Gorgias, for example, that he would be useless in the public assembly—unlike the roars of the roaming lions Thrasymachus and Callicles or the frightful magic of Gorgias—since he is incapable of adopting the various rhetorical personae used to deliver different long speeches in courts and the agora. Philosophy, it seems, fails to meet the exigencies of varying public circumstances. In fact, such speeches, Plato warns semi-playfully in the Symposium, are capable of stealing the capacity of speech from others. Faced with the task of following Agathon’s speech in praise of love, Socrates compares his fellow symposiast to Gorgias: “For his speech so reminded me of Gorgias that I was exactly in the plight described by Homer: I feared that Agathon in his final phrases would confront me with the eloquent Gorgias’ head, and by opposing his speech to mine would turn me thus dumbfounded into stone.”¹⁵ With his playful pun on Gorgias/Gorgon, and more precisely in comparing Gorgias’s speech to the Gorgon’s face, Plato invokes the semantic range of the masks of the Gorgon and the mormolukeion. In seeing a likeness between Agathon’s speech and Gorgias’s rhetorical style, which he reinforces in producing word associations between head and peroration, Socrates in effect tells his audience that Agathon is covering himself with Gorgias’s prosopon (mask-face) to deliver his praise of love. So forceful is his delivery, Socrates jests, that he is almost dumbfounded into silence and petrified into stone.

Like Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa, however, and just like the inversion of the mask of the mormolukeion in the Phaedo, Socrates’ discourse, which includes a long prosopopoeic personification of Diotima, overturns Agathon’s speech. In alluding to Gorgias/Gorgon in the Symposium Plato deploys rhetorical synaesthesia; Gorgias’s art is sonorous, reverberating the oral pronunciation of gorgos, but the force of the Gorgon’s face as a source of petrification and death is visual. The Gorgon is something visible that is not permitted to be seen, only heard. In speaking Agathon places the persona of Gorgias before the symposiasts’ eyes. The end result of the synesthesia of Gorgias/Gorgon is silence and lack of life: the exact opposite of Amphion’s and Orpheus’s musical voices, which were capable of enlivening stones. Like ancient visual depictions of Dionysus and the Gorgon, the rhetorician’s mask is also a frontal face. It stands before the crowd listening and staring in silence, unable to ask questions and converse in return. In its place, Plato confronts this form of discourse by proposing face-to-face dialogue as the central feature of philosophical communication. In doing so he revaluates the prosopon and the person.

Instead of seeing only the outer surface of the speech, Plato tells us that one can find concealed behind the public display—behind the prosopon—either nothing or mind, soul, and logos. On the one hand, dialogue for Plato is the external rationalization through language of common meanings, but on the other, it is also the characteristic form of internal thought. The first understanding of dialogue is characteristic of the Socratic elenchus, the second of Platonic dialectic. The Sophist, the dialogue between Socrates (who plays a minor role), Theodorus, Theaetetus, and the Eleatic Stranger, a disciple of Parmenides and Zeno (Sophist 216a1–4), explains the analogy of the discursive structure of thought to dialogue:

Stranger: Well, thinking (διάνοια) and discourse (λόγος) are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.

…

Stranger: Well then, since we have seen that there is true and false statement, and of these mental processes we have found thinking to be a dialogue of the mind with itself, and judgment to be the conclusion of thinking, and what we mean by “it appears” (φαίνεται) a blend of perception and judgment, it follows that these also, being of the same nature as statement (τούτων τῷ λόγῳ συγγενῶν ὄντων), must be, some of them and on some occasions, false.¹⁶

In fact, Plato makes the Eleatic Stranger agree with what Socrates said on the previous day (when the Stranger was not present) in the Theaetetus, which Plato stages the day before the Sophist. For there too Socrates interiorizes the logos, explaining discursive thinking as the soul conversing with itself.¹⁷

The Theaetetus warrants a pause, since the dialogue, which is often characterized as Plato’s investigation into epistemological theories of knowledge, does not in fact begin with the question “What is knowledge?” as one often hears but begins with the inquiry into whether or not Socrates and the younger Theaetetus resemble one another:

Theodorus: Yes, Socrates. I have met with a youth of this city who certainly deserves mention, and you will find it worthwhile to hear me describe him. If he were handsome, I should be afraid to use strong terms, lest I should be suspected of being in love with him. However, he is not handsome, but—forgive my saying so—he resembles you in being snub-nosed (σιμότης) and having prominent eyes, though these features are less marked in him. So I can speak without fear. I assure you that, among all the young men I have met with—and I have had to do with a good many—I have never found such admirable gifts. The combination of a rare quickness of intelligence with exceptional gentleness and of an incomparably virile spirit with both, is a thing that I should hardly have believed could exist, and I have never seen it before….

Socrates: You give him a noble character. Please ask him to come and sit down with us.

Theodorus: I will. Theaetetus, come this way and sit by Socrates.

Socrates: Yes, do, Theaetetus, so that I may study the character of my own countenance (τὸ πρόσωπον), for Theodorus tells me it is like yours. Now, suppose we each had a lyre, and Theodorus said they were both tuned to the same pitch, should we take his word at once, or should we try to find out whether he was a musician?

Theaetetus: We should try to find that out.

Socrates: And now, if this alleged likeness of our faces is a matter of any interest to us, we must ask whether it is a skilled draftsman who informs us of it.¹⁸

Plato’s memorable visual depiction of Socrates’ face is not simply decorative literary embellishment. Following various investigations into the nature of knowledge, the Theaetetus concludes with another bookended comparison of Socrates’ and Theaetetus’s faces. At this end point in the dialogue, the discussion has reached the following explanation for knowledge: if knowledge requires having a true belief with an account (λόγος), to provide such an account one needs to grasp the ways in which two things resemble one another, not only by way of what they have in common (τῶν κοινῶν) but also by their difference (διαφορότης). Yet even Socrates’ reasoning here leads to aporia, since it proposes a circular definition of knowledge: knowledge is true belief accompanied by an account, which is understood as knowledge of a thing’s commonalities and differences. The example that Socrates puts forward is once again the comparison of his snub-nosed face with Theaetetus’s snub-nosedness.¹⁹ In fact, the dialogic structure of the Theaetetus presents a similar aporia to the one Aristotle undertakes in book zeta of the Metaphysics, where he seeks to determine the essence of a thing according to a definition (ὁρισμὸς) with an added account (λόγος). It is no coincidence that Aristotle there uses the example of a snub nose (σιμότης), as he does elsewhere (De anima 3.7, and in the Categories, for instance). One can speculate whether Aristotle learned to employ examples like the comparison of Socrates’ and Theaetetus’s prosopa from Plato’s Academy. If so, such examples would stand behind the tradition in philosophical writing that seems to begin with Aristotle of using Socrates as an example of a particular man to argue per speciem—an example that even modern undergraduates hear all too often during their first (often tedious) encounter with syllogisms in the classroom, which typically begin with the first premise: “Socrates is a man.”

The Theaetetus thus provides an account of how one can attain self-knowledge through dialogue with another. Yet Plato’s Socratic conversations are not just between faces that share common ugly, snub-nosed, or even monstrous traits, as Nietzsche characterized Socrates’ appearance.²⁰ The beautiful countenances of some of Socrates’ interlocutors—Alcibiades, Phaedrus, Charmides—equally mark outer differences. As the Phaedrus (255a–e) reminds us, the face is often the site of physical beauty, with the eyes being the most immediately acute of all senses through which the effluences of beauty, the visual eidola, are emitted and received. Thus the face-to-face dialogue also serves Plato’s metaphysics of presence; the prosopon becomes the medium through which one can arrive at and communicate truth, beauty, and goodness. The Republic’s cave myth reinforces this conclusion. Plato, one will remember, argued that the human condition is akin to prisoners who are not blind but who are only able to look forward toward shadows cast on a wall, that is, they are unable to turn their heads either to look behind them or to converse with each other face to face.²¹ The shadows in the cave remain shadows for the prisoners so long as they are unable to converse with one another face to face. The sight of each other’s countenance would serve as an illuminating lamp, so to speak, by which they could reveal shadows as shadows and begin to name the real objects. The prisoners are unable to turn their heads in the right direction.

Hence for Plato prosopon is closely related to prosrhesis (πρόσρησις): the act of identifying and naming something by way of identity and difference, as well as the act of turning the head toward someone to address him or her in speech. The Timaeus thus gives an explanation for the prosopon that agrees with intellection: “And as the gods hold that the front is more honourable and commanding than the back, they made us move, for the most part, forwards. So it was necessary to distinguish the front of man’s body and make it different from the back; and to do this they placed the face (πρόσωπον) on this side of the sphere of the head, and fixed in it organs for the soul’s forethought (ψυχῆς προνοίᾳ), and arranged that this our natural front should take the lead.”²² Agreeing with its etymology, the prosopon is turned toward the front to favor the gods and is bestowed with eyes as organs for the soul’s divinatory foreknowledge and foresight. Face-to-face conversation among humans becomes a propaedeutic for dialogue with the divine. Given the Theaetetus’s face-to-face comparison of Socrates and Theaetetus, the famous digression at 176a–c that one ought to become like God as much as possible (ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν) perhaps ought to be interpreted to say that philosophical conversation prepares one to converse soul to soul, and internally soul to divine.

It is therefore with Plato that the singularity of prosopon (face)-prosopon (mask) begins to separate. The prosopon is no longer a simple presentation of the true individual, since the principle of unification that makes one a singular individual is interiorized. Plato thus refuses to identify the self with the external face in the Alcibiades: “When Socrates converses with Alcibiades through words, he isn’t addressing your face (πρόσωπον), it seems, but Alcibiades, that is your soul (ψυχή).”²³ With Plato the interiority of the prosopon is distinguished from its outer nature. The outer prosopon (face) begins to conceal, as masks do for many moderns, an inner self or an interior (soul). Hence the context is now clear for the well-known image from the Phaedo. The mormolukeion becomes the image of the soul’s inversion. It can be turned over to reveal its reverse side empty of spirit and soul. Thus if Socrates tells Alcibiades that he does not want to converse merely with his face but with his soul, Alcibiades, for his part, famously describes Socrates as Silenus, a follower of Dionysus whose ugly exterior covered interior divine treasures. In other words, Socrates’ face is a type of mormolukeion covering an inner divinity.

Therefore, although Plato interiorizes the person he also reasons that self-knowledge is reached through discursive processes, first, in conversation with another and, second, in an inner conversation with the self. It is important to know that these two conversations are not incommensurable. In the Sophist (263e–264b) Plato writes that they are part of a common family or kind (τούτων τῷ λόγῳ συγγενῶν ὄντων). What comes to light or appears both in face-to-face conversation with another and in the interior conversation of thinking and self-examination are part of the same discursive phenomenology of self-knowledge.²⁴ Plato, therefore, begins to delineate the field of truth by claiming that contradictions that emerge in conversation with another also hold when thinking with oneself. This search for internal contradictions frames a central question in Platonic self-knowledge: whether the self-examination of one’s interior discursive person (what one thinks one is) leads to a prior prediscursive person (what one actually is). For later followers of Plato, like Plotinus, the soul is the phenomenon of discursivity itself: the first principle of motion that originates the temporal processes and movements of reasoning.²⁵ Plato’s argument that thought takes the form of discursive internal conversation raises the question whether self-knowledge consists simply of a series of successive internal self-presentations (which would be equivalent to donning various internal masks corresponding to each successive state of self-consciousness) or whether self-knowledge leads to something prior to the successive states of soul, which would be the prediscursive core of one’s identity.

Platonic Colors: Ancient and Renaissance Rhetoric

If the force of Platonism turns us toward an inner persona, after Plato it is left to the rhetorical traditions of subsequent times to confront the discursive persona of external public speech. Even in rhetorical theory—equally among the ancients as in the Renaissance—one feels Plato’s attempt to distinguish discursive and prediscursive identities.

In the Gorgias Socrates resists classifying rhetoric as a techne, preferring instead to call it a knack (ἐμπειρία). He thereby establishes the analogy that rhetoric impersonates (ὑπόκειται) philosophy, just as cooking impersonates medicine.²⁶ Aristotle must have learned much from Plato about this matter, for he addresses the same question in his Rhetoric and gives a different answer while nonetheless following a logic similar to his teacher’s. His work begins: “Rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic; for both have to do with matters that are in a manner common (ἃ κοινά) for the cognizance of all men and not confined to any special science.”²⁷ He continues by stating that since rhetoric, like dialectic, does not deal with a particular class of subjects but argues about what is common, it must be able to persuade opposites.²⁸ Like dialectic, one should add, rhetoric is also discursive. Already one notices that rhetoric for Aristotle is concerned with the instrumentalization of techniques for persuading others; in Plato’s terms, it deals with seeming. Likewise, it is with Aristotle’s analysis of character (ἦθος) that one notices how much he, like Plato, understands rhetoric as the construction of a discursive persona put on display in the public sphere: “The orator persuades by moral character (ἤθους) when his speech is delivered in such a manner as to render him worthy of confidence; for we feel confidence in a greater degree and more readily in persons of worth in regard to everything in general, but where there is no certainty and there is room for doubt, our confidence is absolute. But this confidence must be due to the speech itself, not to any preconceived idea of the speaker’s character.”²⁹ Isocrates had postulated that in order for a speech to persuade there ought to be a correspondence between the orator’s speech (λόγος) and character (ἦθος). But for Aristotle, it is not the character of the prediscursive person that moves the members of his audience to emotion (πάθος) and persuades (πείθω; πιθανός) them to act. What matters for achieving these ends is the speech (λόγος), its style (λέξις), and the delivery or interpretation of the oratorical performance (ὑπόκρισς). Rhetoric is therefore the way in which one can discover these techniques of persuasion in order to perform them on the public stage. The sum total of these parts, when spoken and acted (including oratorical gestures, expressions, timing, and so on) assembles the orator’s traits and words into a discursive character.

Whereas in Athens speech was not so much a right as an obligation (and in Socrates’ case a mortal necessity), in Rome speech was reserved for privileged individuals who were legitimized for and recognized by public discourse, for example forensic oratory for legal advocates and deliberative oratory for patricians. Such a social and political order meant that charismatic authority first established the mechanisms for legitimacy in speech in the early republic. Beginning with the early Latin manuals, followed by the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Cicero’s early De inventione, the place of personae in rhetoric was primarily set by its supposed correspondence with the prediscursive moral character, first of the client and then of the orator speaking on his behalf. In speech, the rhetorical persona was therefore less a question of style (elocutio) and delivery (pronuntiatio, actio) than of establishing the trustworthiness of the persona for the audience in the exordium, establishing the attention (attentus), the goodwill (benivolus, benivolentia), and the receptivity (docilis) in the relationship between speaker and audience. The good orator assembles his attributes as a premise in an argument, or as a fixed object in the narration of the speech. In his mature rhetorical writings, however (especially the De oratore, the Brutus, and the Orator), Cicero fully realized the importance of Greek rhetorical theory about character and theorized that an orator can craft his individual identity through a rhetorical persona. In these later works, Cicero does not conceive of the rhetorical persona in terms of correspondence to an orator or client’s supposed prediscursive identity but, what is most important, contends that the oratorical persona is fabricated from all parts of the discourse, including inventio, elocutio, and actio or pronuntiatio. It is in discourse itself that the Roman orator fashions a self-image that he projects in public. This is especially felt in the Orator where Cicero seems, on the one hand, to replace a single persona with the technical skill to utilize various stylistic personae and, on the other, to argue that one’s persona is strictly dependent on decorum (used like the Greek prepon); that is, one’s style and delivery must suit the situation.³⁰

Cicero thus bolstered Latin rhetoric with the discursive persona of Greek rhetorical theory, and while he claims in his letter to Lentulus that he wrote the De oratore in the manner of Aristotle (Aristotelius mos), some have argued that Cicero is, broadly speaking, following an Isocratean tradition insofar as, unlike Aristotle and others, he never truly divorces the speaker’s persona in discourse from the speaker’s hypothetical prediscursive natural character.³¹ One immediately thinks of the famous passage in the De officiis where Cicero grounds the rhetorical persona in philosophy by employing the Stoic Panaetius’s fourfold schema of our personae: our common rational nature; what is particular to each individual person’s bodies and spirits; what befalls us by chance and circumstance (including social, civic, and familial character traits); and how we define ourselves by choosing to live in certain roles.³²

Ideally, oratorical delivery serves as a culminating moment for the alignment of these four roles in self-fashioning. Yet in rhetoric the tone of voice may charm, the hand gestures may reassure, the gait may inspire confidence, an exordium may establish the audience’s goodwill by recalling a positive ancestry, clothes may suit the decorum of the occasion or imitate the sartorial fashions of the powerful, the right style may seize the crowd’s attention, but a dart of the eyes and a furtive glance to a few intimates in the audience may equally reveal different motives, even while the speech aims at being effective and pleasing, persuading and moving the whole crowd. In Cicero’s rhetorical writings the theoretical discursive persona agrees exceptionally well with the old Latin auditory etymology for persona, as not only a mask that one puts on public display but also a megaphone, as it were, through which the various stylistic registers and modes of delivery of speech are performed (per-sonare).

Traditions examining rhetorical personae are without a doubt of central importance to Italian humanism as a whole. For instance, looking back to the origins of the movement in the mid-fifteenth century, Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) indicated the rediscovery of ancient oratory as a boundary line that marked generational differences in humanism’s history: “First of all, Francesco Petrarch, a man of great talent and great industry, began to awaken poetry and eloquence, but in that age in which we blame the dearth and lack of books more than of genius, he did not attain the flower of Ciceronian eloquence that adorns many we see in this century. For he himself, although he boasted of having found the letters of Cicero written to Lentulus at Vercelli, did not know the three books of Cicero’s De oratore and Quintilian’s (c. 35–c. after 96 CE) Institutiones except in fragmentary form, and likewise Orator maior and Brutus de oratoribus claris, books of Cicero, had not come to his knowledge.”³³ Although one should not diminish the resonance of Quintilian and other writers of rhetorical theory (and the imitation of good auctores in general) in the quattrocento, it is clear that for Biondo—who is probably inspired by Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) in this regard—Ciceronian oratory holds a preeminent place in the curriculum of the bonae artes.

In the generation after Petrarch (1304–74), the letters of the powerful Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), who desired (perhaps with some overstatement) to be seen as Petrarch’s friend and disciple, found a small but appreciative and impressed audience for their stilus rhetoricus. Varying his style according to his audience, Salutati’s missives were at times written in a medieval ars dictaminis, at times even in the vernacular when his political business required him to write to smaller Italian communes, but at other times in a grand oratorical Latin, drawing on classical literature and history. Legitimized by his office as chancellor, Salutati’s letters, whether sent to allies or foes like the Visconti in Milan, also held a powerful place in the public discourse by expressing the juridical persona of the Florentine republic itself. Leonardo Bruni, his successor as chancellor of Florence, continued on the same path but had a greater command over Cicero’s stylistic teachings and found a much larger audience capable of appreciating it. By the end of the quattrocento Ciceronian imitation had become almost a defining initiatory rite for humanists. Most collected and circulated their letters, as Petrarch had done, on the model of Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares. The humanists were consumed by attaining new heights in rhetoric and eloquence, and none seemed higher than Cicero.³⁴ Now the dominant form of the burgeoning Respublica literaria, Ciceronianism (as it came to be called) would later become the style of public discourse throughout early modern Europe, but at the same time it also lost its appeal for those humanists wishing to test the boundaries of stylistic canons. These later humanists explored a variety of styles to imitate and emulate, including but not limited to models based on the writings of Sallust, Apuleius, Pliny, and the church fathers, or, returning to one of Petrarch’s old favorites, Seneca.

Cicero’s Persona: Angelo Poliziano and Paolo Cortesi

Nowhere is the criticism of Ciceronianism in the late quattrocento more evidently and more powerfully expressed than in the short-lived exchange of letters between Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) and Paolo Cortesi (1465–1510).³⁵ Cortesi, a scriptor at the Holy See, prompted the debate when he sent his collected letters to the poet and sharpest of Florentine philologists, who subsequently returned them with a brief letter. Having conceded that he did appreciate a few of Cortesi’s letters, Poliziano dismissed the rest as a waste of his time, admonishing his junior of nine years: “Still, there is a point regarding style that I disagree with you on. For you generally do not approve of anyone, as I understand it, unless he copies the features of Cicero (liniamenta Ciceronis). To me the face of a bull or a lion seems far more honourable than that of an ape, which nonetheless is more like a man than they are. The men who are believed to have held the pinnacle of eloquence are not similar to one another, as Seneca demonstrated. Quintilian laughs at those who considered themselves brothers of Cicero because they closed a period with the phrase, ‘it would seem so.’ ”³⁶ Poliziano’s critique is directed at the fabrication of an imitative Ciceronian persona. The rhetorical mask of Cicero that Cortesi wears publicly, he tells him, resembles more the face of an ape. “Nothing there is true, nothing solid, nothing effective.”³⁷ Poliziano in turn speaks of himself: “ ‘You do not write like Cicero,’ someone says. So what? I am not Cicero. Yet I do express myself, I think.”³⁸ Poliziano’s brusque statement implies that for many of his contemporaries Cicero’s oratorical persona became confused with the person of the author.

This becomes especially clear when one notices that in this short letter Poliziano twice uses the Ciceronian term liniamentum (used by Cicero for geometric outlines, facial features, and stylistic form) to recall a specific passage from Cicero. In the dialogue Brutus, the character Cicero portrays the various traits of Roman orators for two other interlocutors, the work’s namesake and Atticus. The latter introduces the topic of rhetoric’s ability to mislead and accuses Cicero of irony in comparing the Roman Cato to the Attic Lysias. Cato might have been a great and extraordinary man, Atticus concedes, but not an orator and certainly not of the same caliber as Lysias, “with all his incomparable finish (pictius).”³⁹ Virtue is not the same as eloquence. Atticus is even willing to praise the speeches of the virtuous citizen, senator, and general, but with one fatal qualification, stating that they were good “for their day.” Cato does not stand alone in this respect; the Brutus produces the examples of Galba, Lepidus, Africanus, Laelius, Carbo, and the Gracchi as ancient orators who should be praised as exemplary men who conducted their lives admirably but whose unpolished speeches lacked eloquence.⁴⁰ Surely, Atticus reasons, Cicero does not want to compare these crude Tusculi to the Greek masters, nor does he think that Brutus ought to speak in their manner. Cicero responds that Latin models have changed since his youth: “We should have to turn over many books, especially of Cato as well as of others; you would see that his drawing (liniamentis) was sharp and that it lacked only some brightness and colours which had not yet been discovered.”⁴¹ As in Cicero’s example, in Poliziano’s day Latin had undergone historical changes, also in part due to the influence of Greek studies. Cicero’s point, however, is not that Brutus should imitate the features of one specific group of early orators, let alone one individual among them, but rather that he ought to read many books to learn from different styles. So Poliziano tells Cortesi, “Shift your eyes away from Cicero,” as though Cortesi were looking at Cicero as his only mirror to study his own features.⁴² In short, Poliziano draws on Cicero to critique a Ciceronian, in effect telling him that he does not understand the relationship between an authorial person and the discursive persona of the rhetorician.

Cortesi, however, is no fool when it comes to Cicero. He immediately picks up on Poliziano’s reference and replies with a letter of his own: “You write that you have understood me to approve of none but those who seem to follow and imitate the features of Cicero (liniamenta Ciceronis).”⁴³ Cortesi denies this. He is not Cicero’s ape, he insists, since he believes himself to have a rightful claim to the Roman’s inheritance: “The son, however, reproduces appearances, walk, posture, motion, form, voices and finally the shape of his father’s body, but still has something of his own in this likeness, something natural, something different. So when compared, they still seem dissimilar from each other.”⁴⁴ Cortesi seeks a family resemblance to Cicero as a son, not as a brother of Cicero, as Poliziano had also mockingly described Ciceronians. Cortesi understands his rhetorical features (liniamenta) not on an equal footing with Cicero’s but as though he were a Roman orator displaying his imagines maiorum during the performance of his public persona. He calls on the notion of decorum to make his case and to criticize Poliziano’s own style—which is often characterized as docta varietas or eclectic—claiming that a discourse can only incorporate another’s stylistic features when it is suitable to do so. Otherwise, “one makes a sort of monstrosity when the adjacent parts of one’s discourse are badly integrated.”⁴⁵ To Poliziano’s forceful “I am not Cicero. Yet I do express myself, I think,”⁴⁶ Cortesi retorts: “But when a man wants to look as if he is imitating no one and pursuing praise without similarity to anyone, believe me, he demonstrates no strength or force in his writing, and someone who says that he depends on the support and power of his own talent cannot but pluck sentences from the writings of others and stuff them into his own.”⁴⁷ Cortesi stands his ground on the claim that imitation cannot be avoided in language and rhetoric, nor can it be avoided in any of the arts, nor even in nature.

Since one cannot flee to a nonimitative or prediscursive authorial person it is best to follow the finest guides. To do otherwise is to imitate not no one but in a sense everyone, taking words, expressions, style, wherever and however without any discriminating taste or elegantia; such a method risks breaking decorum and resulting in poor oratory. It is thus Poliziano, Cortesi argues, who does not understand the relationship between the authorial person and the oratorical persona. If Poliziano claims only to express himself and not to imitate anyone in particular, according to Cortesi’s logic, he denies the imitative nature of the rhetorical personae that he adopts. In effect Cortesi concludes that Poliziano’s position if he were to understand its implications would equate artifice with nature and create a world of masks in which there would be no chance at delineating a prediscursive persona. Poliziano’s brilliantly varied self-expression would be simply another act.

To be sure, if one spends time reading Poliziano one finds that there is no one quite like him, yet there is nothing stable about him either. Instead, one finds him in constant flux, varying his style, stringing together the most erudite philological or carefully selected Apuleian references into an elegant and sometimes seemingly casual letter to a friend or cultural competitor. Poliziano’s prefatory letter to Piero de’ Medici (1471–1503) for his collected epistles is also telling in this regard. Responding proleptically against potential critics who might reproach his miscellaneous style for breaking all conventions and rules of decorum (and he goes through a litany of them), Poliziano ends his preface, one imagines with a clever smile, by discharging one of Cicero’s preferred terms as a projectile aimed at future critics: “In such a manner I hope to be able to wriggle my way out (tergiversari) of whatever comes my way.”⁴⁸ At least, Cortesi reasons, his own style has a clear and noble lineage that expresses itself in a fitting manner at appropriate times. One wonders if Cortesi’s insistence on the filial genealogy of his rhetorical persona and on the orphaned nature of Poliziano’s style struck Poliziano on a personal note, for Poliziano himself was orphaned as a child when his father was murdered for supporting the Medici. Perhaps not. In any case, Poliziano, who found a home in the Medici’s extended familia, never responded to Cortesi’s reply.

The Philosopher’s Decorum: Giovanni Pico and Barbaro

The arguments Cortesi makes in his correspondence with Poliziano agree with his preface to his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, where he contends that even in the case of philosophy one cannot do without guidelines for rhetorical style. Contrary to those who see rhetoric and philosophy as incompatible, comparing the application of eloquence to philosophy as hiding a beautiful face behind cosmetics, Cortesi argues that philosophy should at least not be obscure.⁴⁹ The question of the stylistic decorum of philosophy evokes a second important epistolary exchange from 1485 between the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) on the topic of the correct Latin style for philosophy, otherwise known as the question de genera dicendi philosophorum.⁵⁰ These two friends of Poliziano and Ficino took up the question after Barbaro wrote to Pico on 5 April 1485 criticizing the uneducated and barbaric writings of scholastic philosophers. Barbaro was thus following the solidly humanist occupation, dating back to Petrarch, of critiquing medieval doctors for their lack of eloquence, learning, methods, and goals. Petrarch and Barbaro were good candidates for the task, but Pico was one of the prodigious humanists (Ficino is another) who was educated not only in the studia humanitatis but also in scholastic philosophy. Pico’s scholastic education brought him to the University of Bologna to study canon law at the age of fourteen, and a few years later to the Universities of Ferrara and Padua, where he studied philosophy until 1482—it is during a brief trip to Florence at this time that he seems to have first met Poliziano and Girolamo Benivieni (1453–1542). In 1484 he found himself residing in Florence, to which in later years he would often return to converse with Lorenzo, Poliziano, and Ficino. In 1485 the twenty-two-year-old count traveled to the University of Paris to immerse himself further in scholastic philosophy. Barbaro’s letter was therefore undoubtedly spurred by Pico’s scholastic education and perhaps even by his latest desire to study with the Parisian doctors.

Pico’s response abounds in eloquent and erudite wit, and sets the tone for the debate. Coming to the aid of scholastic philosophers, Pico writes a prosopopoeic defense expressed ex persona barbari. With a clear play on Barbaro’s name—in the Venetian’s own words “barbaros contra Barbarum defendis”—Pico writes in the persona of a barbarian philosopher defending scholasticism through an eloquent rhetorical speech.⁵¹ Pico, who admits his desire to imitate Barbaro’s own rhetorical voice, in effect doubles the personification of his letter, writing in a style that approaches Barbaro’s actual stylistic inclinations.⁵² In effect, Pico is personifying Barbaro, who is cast in the role of a barbarian philosopher eloquently defending the scholastics’ lack of eloquence. For his part, Barbaro responds in the persona of a certain ape from the University of Padua, where Pico had studied. Portraying Pico not as a learned philologist (grammaticus) but as a lowly schoolteacher (grammatista), the Paduan philosopher (Barbaro’s fabricated character) declaims that the scholastic method does not need the help of rhetoric.⁵³ Barbaro’s ape bumbles his way through Cicero’s distinctions between the personae of the client, the patron, and the advocate, as well as the distinctions in registers of Attic, Asiatic, Germanic, and even Persian styles, concluding that none of them is necessary. In the end, he produces clumsy syllogisms to argue his case.

One should not dismiss the two letters, written in the genre of a paradoxical encomium, as a fictitious debate produced for the private amusement of two humanists essentially sharing the same opinion on the question. Indeed, I would stress two points: first, that since Pico was trained in both camps his exchange with Barbaro was not a simple literary game within the closed circle of humanism and, second, that the tone of the disputation is that of serioludere, or playfully communicating serious matters, often associated with Socrates’ manner of talking. Pico’s own appeal to Glaucon from the Republic underscores the Platonic nature of their exchange. Like Socrates who disavows opinions he has just expressed—one thinks, for example, of Socrates’ personification of Protagoras in the Theaetetus (164e–168c)—Pico declares after his barbarian philosopher has just finished his speech: “But I exercised myself with pleasure in this infamous matter, so to speak, like those who praise the quartan fever, not only to prove my ingenium, but also with this intention: that, just as Plato’s Glaucon praises injustice not according to his own judgment but so that he might spur Socrates to praise justice, so I, in order to hear you defend eloquence passionately, turned on it without restraint—even though my own nature and disposition briefly fought back.”⁵⁴ Barbaro’s initial accusation forces Pico’s philosopher to give a public defense for his office on his own terms without an advocate, which is exactly what Socrates repeatedly claimed the philosopher would never be able to do, stressing the uselessness of philosophy for the public life.⁵⁵ Through these layers and inversions of personifications Pico and Barbaro debate central questions regarding philosophical writing, asking in what style philosophy should be written, does philosophy’s formalized, even artificial language clarify or obscure its content, and, simply, what counts as philosophical language?

Pico’s philosopher defines these questions by contrasting philosophical and rhetorical language. What is a rhetorician’s duty, he asks, if not to lie, deceive, trick, turn things upside down? The orator changes white into black, black into white, and magically changes his face and appearance. “Does he not mislead just as larvae and simulacra projected onto the mind of the audience to mislead them? Will this person have something in common with the philosopher, whose zeal is completely turned towards the knowledge and demonstration of truth to others?”⁵⁶ The rhetorician’s art is better suited to forensic questions than to the Academy. Pico’s barbarian continues, “Do you not know that not all things made in the same fabric are appropriate to all? I’ll admit that eloquence is filled with lures and delight is indeed elegant, but it is neither acceptable nor fit for the decorum of a philosopher. Who does not esteem a soft step, graceful hands, and playful eyes in an actor or a dancer? But in a citizen, a philosopher, who does not disapprove, complain, and loathe the same features?”⁵⁷ What one says and how one says it must suit the situation, time, place, and audience. If the rhetorician is to retain and present a prediscursive persona in his speech (instead of being nothing but a deceitful magician), his discourse must conform to his natural character. Playing with the imagery of fabric as the textus of speech, Pico’s letter conveys the idea that one’s style of speech must suit one’s style of life, just as one ought to wear clothes appropriate to the occasion. In this case, it is a philosopher’s style of life that is at stake. In the end, Pico’s performance as a scholastic philosopher orating in beautiful Latin to make his case destabilizes any fully defined notion of decorum.

Glossaries of the Dead: Gianfrancesco Pico and Bembo

Before turning to Ficino’s own epistolography I think it important to examine a final exchange of letters, dated 1512–13—one of the most famous exhanges on the issue of Ciceronianism—between Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1470–1533), the nephew of Giovanni Pico, and Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) on the question of imitation.⁵⁸ Their correspondence serves as a capstone to the previous debates, not so much because they have the final say on the question of Ciceronianism—in fact Erasmus reignited the question among a wider European audience—but because they recapitulate Poliziano’s and Cortesi’s as well as Giovanni Pico’s and Barbaro’s epistles while adding their own arguments. Most important, they bring some of the Platonic preoccupations latent in the two previous exchanges to light.

On the surface Bembo suggests that he is generally in agreement with Cortesi for arguing that one ought to imitate Cicero in prose (as well as Virgil in poetry) and claims that Gianfrancesco Pico is in Poliziano’s camp for defending eclecticism. Despite protesting that their disagreement is different from Poliziano and Cortesi’s, Gianfrancesco Pico picks up where Poliziano left off by discussing Ciceronian liniamenta. The fact that he employs the term liniamenta on seven occasions further underscores that their debate is also centred on the notion of the rhetorical persona. Gianfrancesco Pico, moreover, argues in more explicit terms than the two previous groups of letters for the existence of a prediscursive persona. Given that he was one of the first close readers of Sextus Empiricus, Giovanni Pico is usually described as a skeptic or fideist dogmatist rather than a Platonist. Nevertheless, he articulates at the outset of the controversy’s first letter the importance of Plato (whose position he compares broadly to that of Cicero and Horace) for their debate.

One finds out from Gianfrancesco Pico’s letters that a Platonic approach to rhetoric entails two related positions: an epistemological theory of innatism, according to which one naturally possesses inborn reasons or forms of ideas in one’s ingenium, and a metaphysical theory that persons have interior souls and minds. The younger Pico says, “Perhaps some will say that we should concentrate on imitating those who please us the most. I would not disagree with this advice. Plato may please you more than others; so may Cicero who is Platonic not only in his views but also in style. We should follow them. For although the features (face; facies animi) of each person’s soul, like those of his body, are so proper to him that it is difficult to find two that are completely alike, our souls are still less dissimilar to some than to others, and it will therefore be easier for us to become like them.”⁵⁹ In his first letter, arguing that one ought to emulate all good writers, the younger Pico also stresses the reliance on one’s singular innate conception of beauty and eloquence over multiple models. With this in mind he values the free discovery of ingenium in rhetoric, and accordingly prioritizes inventio over dispositio, elocutio, memoria, or pronuntiatio in the stages of rhetorical composition: “I don’t think there is any need to talk about memory or pronunciation, since neither of these is set down on paper.”⁶⁰

Both authors seek to delineate the method of rhetorical composition (scribendi ratio, to use Bembo’s terminology), but contrary to Gianfrancesco Pico’s Platonic appeal to one’s natural ingenium, Bembo puts forward the case that to become eloquent one needs ars and imitative exercises:

But it’s your business if you see in your soul an idea and form of writing planted there and handed down by nature. I can speak to you only of my soul. I saw no form of style in it, no pattern of discourse before I developed myself in mind and thought by reading the books of the ancients over the course of many years, by long labor, practice and exercise. Since something should be said about this, I now turn to that topic. I see by thought, as though with my eyes, from what source to take the highest example which I need to compose some piece of writing. Yet, before I engaged in the thoughts I mention, I too used to look no less into my soul and to seek, as in a mirror, some likeness I might use to compose what I wanted. But there was no likeness in my soul, nothing presented itself to me; I saw nothing.⁶¹

Instead of looking into the interior mirror of his soul, Bembo self-fashions his rhetorical persona on Cicero’s likeness, which he sees externally before his eyes (ante oculos).⁶² To put it succinctly, for Bembo there seems to be no prediscursive persona.

These epistolary exchanges illustrate how much humanist Latin imitative practices are also dominated by prosopopoeia. The debates over Ciceronianism and the question de genere dicendi philosophorum investigate what it means to fabricate one’s own persona. Continuing Poliziano’s discussion of Cicero’s liniamenta, and Giovanni Pico and Barbaro’s examination of decorum, Gianfrancesco Pico and Bembo consciously draw on the correspondence between text, clothes, and body, but more importantly on the correspondence between a rhetorical persona and a human face, to make their case. For instance, Gianfrancesco Pico describes Ciceronians who base their style on one sole model as wishing to copy all aspects of a human face, including scars, warts, and the like.⁶³ With such a method, he reasons, they attempt to raise Cicero from the dead and give his texts a voice. Yet Gianfrancesco Pico’s philological sensitivity also leads him to believe that some of Cicero’s texts, like decaying corpses, may have been corrupted in the great span of time that separates him from Cicero’s age. “If Cicero were revived from the dead, he would deny that they had taken these words from him. Or they pay careful regard even to what booksellers have published, who corrupt the integrity of the text throughout in the process.”⁶⁴

Bembo’s reply to Gianfrancesco Pico’s criticism instead argues that Pico’s eclecticism corrupts Cicero’s body. It takes some of his facial features and some from others, and grafts together their skin, bones, eyes, mouth into a grisly human mask-something like Victor Frankenstein’s creation, which is certainly far from elegant. For Bembo, each part ought to fit into a harmonious whole: “What is good and excellent in any writer flows together and coalesces from all the parts of his work. All his virtues, but also his faults (if he has any) go together to make up his style. If we consider the faces of men, one reflects a kind of character; another, a lively nature; another, courage; another, a fertile intelligence; another, grandeur; another, charm. Yet individual characteristics come not only from the shape of one’s eyes, eyebrows, mouth, cheeks or the quality of any other part, but each is constituted of all the parts and members of its own face.”⁶⁵ To do otherwise would create a polycephalic monster, like Homer’s deceitful Proteus.⁶⁶

In his second letter to Bembo, Gianfrancesco Pico cedes him neither the point nor even the imagery. Once more he compares strict Ciceronian imitators to false necromancers who try to resurrect Cicero:

But go on and imagine that you are Apelles or have raised Zeuxis, Phidias, Praxiteles, Lysippus and Pyrgoteles from the underworld to reproduce for you not the garments but the body of Cicero. For when these great artists have used brush, chisel or the art of metal-casting and have set the image of Cicero himself before your eyes (sub oculos), they will have performed their duty. Yet this Cicero will be painted or marble or bronze, not flesh. I’ll even grant something more: that they equal Cicero’s flesh through imitation. But shouldn’t we think that the only true Cicero was his soul and spirit which informed his flesh—the Cicero who envisioned the form of oratory in his soul, added living strength and grace to it and then expressed all these spiritual motions through the medium of his tongue? So whoever supposes that they have acquired the living tongue of Cicero should bear in their mind Cicero’s conceptions; they should have experience and knowledge, moreover, of a great many important affairs. Otherwise, if they lack the Tullian spirit, Cato may call them “Glossaries of the Dead” (mortuaria glossaria).⁶⁷

Cicero is dead, his soul is extinguished, and his voice silenced. Ciceronians who wish to resuscitate him, employing rhetorical enargeia by placing his persona before our eyes (sub oculos), or who wish to give him his voice again, trying to revive a lost orality from his surviving writings, do nothing more than become mortuaria glossaria.⁶⁸ The death masks of Cicero that they fabricate with texts are really “larvae, phantoms or vanishing shades, rather than men, for they lack the strength and spirit of living beings.”⁶⁹ Like Socrates wishing to dispel the fear of the mormolukeion by turning the mask upside down to show that there is nothing on its reverse, so Gianfrancesco Pico wishes to do the same by flipping the Ciceronian mask to reveal that it is in fact a larva, an empty horror mask. Yet, one should remember that this is also Bembo’s point: when he looks inside himself for a prediscursive persona he claims to find none. Much of their debate hinges on a specific passage from Cicero’s Orator: “In fashioning the best orator I shall construct such a one as perhaps has never existed.”⁷⁰ Gianfrancesco Pico interprets this passage to mean that Cicero denies that the best orator ever existed in history; he therefore points to an interior Platonic ideal. Bembo understands this passage to say that no such ideal orator ever existed or ever will exist (in history or in the mind), and so one can only look outside oneself for imitative models.

For Bembo, the adoption of a rhetorical persona is not simply a question of donning a ready-made mask, one first needs to fabricate it by imitation. Before placing something over one’s face, one needs to set texts before one’s eyes (ante oculos) as though entering into a dialogue with an author. Therefore, even Bembo’s critique of Gianfrancesco Pico’s Platonic theory of style retains an element of Platonism. When Bembo turns inward to his soul to see his own rhetorical persona, as Gianfrancesco Pico prescribes, he admits that he finds nothing. Instead he needs to participate in a discursive process of dialogue and imitation in order to know himself.

There is therefore, I believe, a close correspondence for these humanists between the dialogue and the epistolary form. Christopher Celenza has singled out the term disputatio from Cortesi’s description of his correspondence with Poliziano, explaining how rules of public epistles would allow for disagreement on good terms.⁷¹ Given Poliziano’s variegated style, responding to his call for debate would have been a particularly difficult task, especially since the short length of his letter reveals one of his strongest arguments: that he has little time for rehearsing Ciceronian routines.⁷² Giovanni Pico and Barbaro stage their letters as two courtroom orators, Pico’s eloquent barbarian philosopher and Barbaro’s Paduan ape, argue similarly over the defense of scholastic argumentation, almost self-consciously testing the limits of compatibility between humanist and scholastic disputatio. One can also easily imagine how the letters between Poliziano and Cortesi, and even Pico and Barbaro, could resemble oral conversations that might have occurred in person. Their letters could in fact include reworked versions of oral arguments that they transcribed onto paper for a larger public. Indeed, the letters between Gianfrancesco Pico and Bembo make it explicitly clear that they were restaging in writing what originally took place face to face. There certainly are, as Bembo remarks in his letter, differences between their oral conversations and their letters. Nevertheless, their epistles mark an attempt at transferring this oral debate into writing. They describe their own exchange as a disputatio and a controversia (a term they also apply to Poliziano and Cortesi’s letters), but also importantly as sermones, colloquia, and orationes.⁷³ The language introducing Bembo’s response places it firmly within the field of rhetoric, and the humanists in whose circle it circulated would immediately have recognized it as such. It reveals the performative nature of their epistles and sets the stage for the written debate. Bembo carefully documents the resemblances as well as the differences, even noting improvements, carried over from their previous oral conversations and speeches into letters. Despite the effects of time and memory on writing, in Bembo’s opinion, the previously spoken words are not completely separated from their transposition into a literary form. These humanist epistolary forms are thus fabrications of discursive rhetorical personae that anchor themselves more firmly into the memory of their readers. In short, whether it is through Ciceronians reanimating only the single corpse of Cicero or eclectic imitators stitching together various body parts to form a creature of their own design, examinations of past languages are akin to necromantic desires to raise dead voices by evoking fragmentary bursts from various otherwise silent prosopa. Prosopopoeia and enargeia are thus key ways in which Renaissance humanists investigated and related to the past.

Ficino’s Persona: A Platonic Republic of Letters

Ficino is absent from these famous epistolary conversations of friends and at times amicable competitors. He is also almost completely absent in scholarly studies on Ciceronianism, rhetoric, and Renaissance dialogue.⁷⁴ Nevertheless, Ficino’s epistolography is directly relevant to these topics. The eldest of the aforementioned humanists by at least twenty-one years, Ficino corresponded with many of them, often expressing a common bond of friendship. Cortesi and Bembo are two exceptions, but Bembo’s father, the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo (1433–1519), was one of Ficino’s favorite correspondents. When surveying these controversies a generation later in his Ciceronianus (1528), Erasmus claimed that only Pietro Bembo could be considered Ciceronian, explaining that Barbaro’s style is overworked like that of Quintilian and Pliny, the styles of Giovanni and Gianfrancesco Pico are harmed by their zeal for philosophy and theology, and Poliziano’s great talent for all kinds of writings does not compare to Cicero. He groups Ficino in their company, but the philosopher fares only slightly better than Cortesi, whom Erasmus ignores altogether, since Erasmus simply says that he would not dare to speak about Ficino’s style.⁷⁵ Why would Erasmus hesitatingly write of Ficino’s style as being on the periphery of Ciceronian debates?

Like his contemporaries, and like the generation of humanists before him, Ficino continued the Petrarchan project of collecting his epistles for publication. Like other humanists of his day, Ficino sent his letters to individual addressees, had scribes prepare second versions of some meant for transmission to other recipients in his network, and circulated collections in manuscript copies dedicated to important patrons. He was, however, also one the first humanists, and certainly one the first philosophers, to make use of the printing press to publish his collected letters, bringing out twelve volumes of his epistolography in Venice in 1495. In writing these epistles Ficino does not immediately follow the two traditional models for philosophical letters, Seneca and Cicero, yet philosophical style was nonetheless important to him.⁷⁶ If Ficino did not participate in the above-mentioned epistolary controversies and disputations on Ciceronianism, his writings neglect neither to address the question of rhetorical personae nor to develop a particular philosophical style. As I pointed out in the Introduction to this book, Ficino employs a trope inspired by Plato’s Phaedrus in the preface to the 1495 printing of his letters, addressing the prefatory letter to his letters themselves, which he personifies as his children. On the first page of the volume, therefore, Ficino signals to his readers that his letters will be written in a Platonic style.

The fact that the Platonic philosopher and excellent Hellenist also received an education both in scholastic philosophy and in the Latin curriculum of the liberal arts in humanist schools in Florence should not be neglected in the present discussion.⁷⁷ These latter two facets of his education are evident throughout his life. First, concerning his scholasticism, Ficino cites numerous scholastic authorities, and with the exception of so-called Averroists and Alexandrians, he usually does so positively. He regularly adopts scholastic terminology in his Latin prose, which demonstrates that he did not fear employing Latin as a lingua artificialis, but he also constantly returns to the Greek sources and demonstrates a certain willingness to critique scholastic neologisms and rethink their Latin prose in Platonic terms.⁷⁸ For instance, in his epitome to the Euthydemus, Ficino critiques the terminological confusion of logic and dialectic present throughout the Middle Ages.⁷⁹ More than just orthographic and terminological preferences lie behind Ficino’s critique of dialecticen, dialectica, and logica. In fact, there is a Platonic critique of syllogistic methods. Plotinus and later Neoplatonists argued that dialectic is the highest part of philosophy and not merely an external instrument to clarify its subject matter and formulate arguments, and in doing so differentiated themselves from most Stoics and Peripatetics.⁸⁰ Ficino pairs dialectic with rhetoric and also distinguishes rhetoric from pure sophistry, which he often characterizes as magically enchanting or bewitching (fascinationis maleficae speciem) its audience’s mind by manipulating appearances instead of speaking truth. Ficino, however, stakes his claim on Platonic grounds. Dialecticen (the medieval arts of logic and syllogistics) concerns itself with terms, predicates, and propositions, and if not correctly used is also capable of approaching sophistry when it employs enthymeme. Dialectica or Platonic dialectic, conversely, concerns itself not with terms, predicates, and propositions as such but rather with the movement of the mind itself in analysis and synthesis, that is, the division and weaving together of the presence of intelligibles as logoi in the mind. Ficino’s argument closely resembles Plotinus’s in Enneads 1.3.4, where Plotinus explains that the discursive process of dialectic comes to rest in the quiet tranquility (ἡσυχία) of Plato’s noetic “Plain of truth” (Phaedrus 248b6), and leaves logic behind to busy itself by meddling in the affairs of propositions and syllogisms (πολυπραγμονοῦσα).⁸¹ Thus Ficino thought of dialectic as the philosophical or even metaphysical-theological capstone to the demonstrative and mathematical sciences.

Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Parmenides once more places Latin neologisms under the light of Platonic metaphysics.⁸² When some Platonists speak about the triad of divine attributes being-life-intellect, Ficino explains, they not only demarcate concrete designations (being or ens, for example) from abstract ones (essentia), they also differentiate a third class, abstractions of abstractions (essentialitas), which push Latin as a lingua artificialis to its limits. There, Ficino notes, language seems out of place and even ludicrous.⁸³ His point, however, is not to dismiss abstract neologisms altogether, nor to dismiss the triad of being-life-intellect. Quite the contrary: he frequently employs neologisms and the triad. To be more precise, in his commentary Ficino is observing Proclus’s remarks regarding the arguments of certain Platonists who claim that, since the first principle of all things—the One—is above the triad of being-life-intellect, which for the Neoplatonists was situated at the second hypostasis of Intellect, “it possesses within itself in some way the causes of all these things unutterably and unimaginably and in the most unified way, and in a way unknowable to us but knowable to itself.”⁸⁴ These higher abstract neologisms demonstrate an attempt to designate what cannot be designated since they would speak from the perspective of the One. Ficino’s Latin neologisms speak more to language’s failure to assert and to its capabilities to negate. In short, the philosophical brevity of Neoplatonic dialectic begins to turn toward apophatic philosophy.

Turning to the second facet of his education and his relationship to humanistic rhetoric, Ficino employs his rhetorical training in various forms. For example, in addition to his philosophical occupations he taught the liberal arts, including oratorical composition and progymnasmata exercises, to some of the noble youth of Florence.⁸⁵ It has been noted by past scholars that although his prose is polished, clear, and precise, Ficino does not often bother with the same kinds of ornate figures of speech as those used by his often more Ciceronian humanist contemporaries.⁸⁶ Gianfrancesco Pico and Bembo noted that however much humanists tried to revive Cicero’s eloquence they would never hear him speak or see his features in person. They were acutely aware that although many wished to fashion Ciceronian personae, they could never fully achieve their aims, since an oratorical persona, as Cicero and other ancient rhetoricians explained, is not only formed by the style (elocutio) and narrative content (inventio and dispositio) of recorded speech but is made of the actual oratorical delivery. The absence of the persona of pronuntiatio and actio, that is, of the orator’s own voice and performance, thus led to important debates among humanists regarding their relationship to the past and concerning the fabrication of rhetorical personae.

Ficino’s approach to the recovery of Plato’s voice reveals similar preoccupations. Giovanni Corsi’s biography of Ficino exactly expresses this when Corsi explains that under Cicero’s influence Ficino desired to be able to speak to Plato and the Platonists face to face. It is of course a humanist commonplace to wish to speak with the ancients. To cite two famous examples, Petrarch was in the habit of writing that he would speak with Cicero and longed to converse with Homer and Plato, and Machiavelli described how at the end of the day he would dress in his best clothes to enter into conversation with the ancients.⁸⁷ It is equally apparent, however, that Corsi is not simply drawing on current intellectual fashions but working explicitly with Ficino’s own writings to describe Ficino’s conversations and communions with Plato and the Platonists. Already in 1464, in the preface to his first Latin translation of ten of Plato’s dialogues, Ficino wrote to Cosimo de’ Medici: “As you saw already some time ago Plato’s spirit echoing with a living Attic voice in the text itself flew from Byzantium to Florence to Cosimo de’ Medici. So that he may discuss with him not only in Greek but also in Latin, it seemed to me worthwhile to translate some of the many things he says in Greek into Latin.”⁸⁸ What at first sight comes across as a somewhat superficial humanist commonplace turns out in Ficino’s hands to be part of a sophisticated approach toward Plato’s texts.

In a passage from the preface to his commentaries on Plato’s dialogues, addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ficino draws on the trope of Socratic serioludere to interpret Plato’s style of writing:

Meanwhile, while our Plato discusses often in a hidden manner the duty belonging to mankind it sometimes seems as though he is joking and playing. But Platonic games and jokes are much more serious than the serious things of the Stoics. For he does not disdain to wander occasionally through certain humble matters, if only gradually to guide his listeners, who grasp humble things more easily, to more elevated matters. With the most serious purpose he often mixes the useful with the sweet, by which with the modest grace of charming speech he may lure minds that are naturally prone to pleasure to sustenance with the bait of pleasure itself. And he often composes fables in a poetic manner, for in fact the style itself of Plato seems not so much philosophical as poetic. For he sometimes raves and wanders, as a vates, all the while paying no attention to a human order but to one prophetic and divine. And he acts not so much in the persona of a teacher as in the persona of a certain priest or vates, at times in furor but sometimes purifying others and seizing them similarly in divine fury…. However, Plato delivers everything in the dialogues so that he may place living speeches, as speaking personae before our eyes, as well as persuade effectively and move vehemently.⁸⁹

I want to emphasize that in this passage Ficino is calling upon the rhetorical concept of persona in two separate ways, which one can compare to the distinction made in Cicero’s De Oratore between the actoris persona, the mask of the actor, and the auctoris persona, the mask of the author.⁹⁰ First, Ficino is approaching Cicero’s explanation of the rhetorical persona in the De Oratore insofar as personae are understood as how one presents oneself distinctly through discursive techniques that in effect become the textual masks of the author. The persona Platonis, Ficino tells us, is less a docentis persona than a sacerdotis atque vatis persona.⁹¹ In other words, following Cicero’s three levels of style, the high, middle, and low, Ficino is drawing attention to the fact that Plato’s prose is only expressed in the low or humble style, the sermo humilis or the stylus sobrius, when it aims at elevating the reader’s thoughts. The prose’s lighthearted treatment of grave matters, Plato’s serioludere, hovers around the middle style, which aims to teach serious topics in a pleasing manner, before it reaches toward the sublime heights of the persona of the priest or prophet (sacerdotis atque vatis persona).

Second, and most important, by saying that Plato is writing living speeches that bring speaking personae before our eyes, Ficino offers an insightful etymological explanation of the dialogic role of the actoris persona, insofar as he is not invoking the Latin auditory etymology of persona but rather the Greek visual etymology of prosopon. As the prefix pros indicates, for the Greeks the prosopon, the mask and the face, is literally that which is seen in front of or facing something. Ficino here offers a corrective to Boethius’s erroneous etymology by telling his readers that Plato’s prosopa are masks placed not on top of our eyes (ante oculos obtegant, as Boethius has it) but in front of our eyes, speaking before us (personas loquentes ante oculos ponat, as Ficino expresses the etymology).⁹² To quote from Ficino again, the use of dialogic personae allows Plato to present various levels of style and different opinions within one text by offering various actorum personae. His dialogic personae serve as the reader’s interlocutors and invoke Plato’s argument expressed in the Republic that the prosopon is intimately related to the Greek prosrhesis, or man’s ability to address someone in speech and name things. That is, in order to begin to do philosophy one first needs to turn one’s head and begin a face-to-face dialogue with another interlocutor, which Plato’s allegorical prisoners were unable to do.

Ficino’s letters often exhibit similar Platonic dialogic qualities. For example, in a series of letters written in 1468 to his dear friend Giovanni Cavalcanti (1444–1509), of the same patrician family as the poet Guido Cavalcanti, Ficino, who was thirty-five years old then, plays the part of the Socratic lover and casts the younger twenty-four-year-old Cavalcanti in the role of his beloved, his Hellen, his Achates, or his Eros.⁹³ The letters are the first of many that reperform the Phaedrus’s dialogic structure. As a group they offer an example of a constant in Ficino’s work: the investigation and imitation of Socratic/Platonic serioludere. In the second letter of the series, written to Cavalcanti not too long after the first, Ficino renews the game:

I have often searched for myself, Giovanni, first laying my hands on my chest, then I would often see this face in a mirror, but I can claim that on the one hand I could never really touch myself, nor on the other ever see myself. For when I seek myself I in fact seek none other than the one who is searching, whereby it is altogether the same Marsilio who is searching and who is sought. Who therefore is seeking? Only the rational soul can decide. Therefore, I seek only the rational soul when I search for myself, inasmuch as I am only the rational soul itself…. Clearly, in this interior gaze of mine I am neither pleased enough nor at rest. However, he who tracks down what is sought, immediately rejoices and is at peace, therefore I do not discover myself in me. But if I seek myself in another, how will I apprehend myself? If I do not have myself through which alone I am able to grasp whatever I am able to grasp. Therefore return and give yourself, or rather myself, back to me.⁹⁴

Ficino’s love letters to Cavalcanti are occasions, as letters often are, to reflect on the distance between sender and recipient. In this case, Ficino plays with the distance of longing as a demonstration of the Meno’s paradox (80d–e) that one cannot search for what one already has, but that one will also not know what to search for if one does not already have it. Yet Ficino’s letters also evoke the proximity of the closest intimacy. In his letters, Ficino engages in a discursive process of self-knowledge whereby before one turns inward toward one’s own spirit or inner self, one seeks oneself in another person, just as though one were to look at one’s face in the mirror; that is, he enacts Socrates’ claim in the Phaedrus (255d) that the lover sees himself in his beloved. Ficino’s letter to Cavalcanti evokes similar aesthetics to later Renaissance depictions of Socratic philosophy in the visual arts. Ficino’s description of Cavalcanti holding his letter as though it were a mirror reflecting Ficino and Cavalcanti’s countenance uniting two persons in a single gaze is analogous to the later canvas by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) of a philosopher seeing his Socratic reflection in a mirror (Figure 8). In turn, like Socrates and Theaetetus studying each other’s faces, Ficino’s letters reveal Cavalcanti’s own countenance to himself and are meant to serve as mirrors for Cavalcanti’s own interiorization of discursive self-knowledge. Ficino proclaims to his friend: “The same, or at least the most similar, spirit (genius) directs both of us.”⁹⁵ In asking Cavalcanti to return himself, Ficino playfully requests a reply to his letter.

The theme of friendship is also central to the Petrarchan revival of the Ciceronian form of letters to friends. Thus, on the one hand, in his letters to Cavalcanti Ficino rehearses what was becoming a standard mode of humanistic expression. Yet, on the other, Ficino demarcates himself from his company by framing the letters to friends in the mos Platonicus of Socratic love. In the same group of letters Ficino reveals some of the mechanisms of his artifice to Cavalcanti: “I wrote a few letters to you, my greatest friend, in which I tried my hand in a certain way at the style of lovers, which indeed seems to be appropriate to our intimacy, and is not far from that honest free speech of Socrates and Plato. However, in the manner of the Platonists, now after the lovers’ game (for this is the Platonic manner of introduction) we come to serious matters. Now hear what was said with Bernardo Giugni and Bartolomeo Fortini, excellent citizens in justice, when we discussed the intellect.”⁹⁶ The ludus now over (at least temporarily), what follows in this other letter is Ficino’s serious and quite sober transcription of questions concerning the mind and soul, which he claims to have discussed with two learned Florentine statesmen. In this second exposition of questions concerning the mind and soul Ficino considers it important to argue against the so-called Averroist opinion on the unity of the intellect, that is, that all men share a single intellect. This is all the more significant for Ficino because in writing to Cavalcanti that the real self is an interior person, he wishes to maintain its individuality while also explaining how it unites with others. Ficino is therefore carefully avoiding the risk of being interpreted as advocating the so-called Averroist position on the unity of the intellect.

In response to an inquiry by the humanist Bartolomeo della Fonte (1445–1513) about his own style of prose, Ficino took the opportunity to explain how the best writers—Plato chief of all—mixed poetry into prose: “You recognize that Plato’s style surges high above pedestrian style and prose, as Quintilian says, so much that our Plato seems not to have a human ingenium, but is instead inspired by a certain Delphic oracle. In fact, Plato’s mixing and combination of poetry and prose pleased Cicero to such an extent that he claimed that if Jupiter wished to speak with a human tongue he would use no other tongue than the one with which Plato speaks.”⁹⁷ Plato’s style takes on universal proportions for Ficino. He compares what he takes to be similar infusions of poetic rhythms into prose in the Old Testament, in the Egyptian works of Hermes (that is, the Corpus Hermeticum), among eloquent Greeks (Gorgias, Isocrates, Herodotus, Aristides), among Latin authors of the golden age (Livy and Cicero), and later (Apuleius, Jerome, and Boethius). Following further reflection on the nature of prose, poetry, and music, Ficino returns to his own imitative style to drive his point home.⁹⁸ He is not claiming that all of the authors cited are Platonic. Rather, he is marshaling a series of ancient authorities who either praised Plato’s style or mixed poetic rhythm into prose, as a way of building a consensus to defend Plato’s style, and in turn his own. More specifically, he addresses the very question of the appropriate stylistic decorum for writing philosophy. In his case, he shapes his rhetorical style to correspond to Platonic philosophy. In his mind, it is only appropriate that he imitate a Platonic stylistic form to suit his Platonic content.

FIGURE 8. Philosopher with Mirror, copy after Jusepe de Ribera. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The union with Cavalcanti also characterizes Ficino’s bonds with other intimates. Playing on the physical distance between himself and his letters’ recipients, Ficino often conveys the message that the material letter serves the role of one’s body or face, bridging the distance with mixed results, as, for instance, when he writes to Carlo Marsuppini on 1 March 1473: “Marsuppini, I saw a more beautiful Marsilio in the pupil of your eye than the present Marsilio. But let us go on. Indeed, your letter is so persuasive that it compels me to respond with my feet instead of my hands, and with my voice instead of my letters.”⁹⁹ Ficino is once more playing an epistolary game. The “beautiful Marsilio in the pupil of your eye” to which he refers in the letter is none other than Marsuppini’s previous letter.¹⁰⁰ Similarly, to Giuliano de’ Medici, younger than Ficino by twenty-one years, he writes: “ ‘But why did you not send for me,’ you say, ‘when you were able to?’ Even if I were to think that you are absent there, I would not have sent for you, lest I would become a greater nuisance to you. In fact, for some time now my great love for you has impressed your figure into my mind (figuram tuam animo impressit meo), and in the same way that I see myself in the mirror (speculo) sometimes, I see (speculor) you most often in me in my heart. Moreover, your brother Lorenzo, your other self, your other nature, and your other will, was also present then; and thus, when I saw clearly (perspicerem; perspicue) my Giuliano equally within me and outside me, I was not able to think that he was absent from me.”¹⁰¹ The letters—filled with self-reflective puns—convey the persistent philosophical trope that the presence of Ficino’s companions, whether in person or in text, are means for self-knowledge and communion of souls. Ficino’s letter defines Lorenzo as his brother Giuliano’s “alter ego,” just as Ficino at times characterized some of his correspondents, and just as some of Ficino’s contemporaries portrayed him as “alter Plato.”

Therefore, more than joining together merely two individuals, Ficino’s Platonic love letters aim at uniting communities. In a response to Cavalcanti’s complaint that Ficino is sacrilegiously breaking their sacred friendship by not writing to him while he worked on his Platonic Theology in his country residence, Ficino first personifies Plato to reproach himself for not writing and concludes: “But if you do not want to respond to me, at least respond to Plato. But behold, while I see you speaking—as it were—I soon find myself staring at twin faces—a wonderful sight—where I had only seen one. If I duly recognize friendly faces (vultus) I seem to see (speculari videor)—as in a mirror (speculo)—Lorenzo de’ Medici’s countenance (ora) in yours, and I seem to be rebuked by him similarly as by you. Therefore, once these twin faces have been doubled for you, salute them once again for me, that is the two whom just now I addressed as one, and whom I now address as two.”¹⁰² One immediately recognizes the same self-reflective rhetorical devices as in the previous letters to Cavalcanti; the person that Ficino sees is Cavalcanti’s letter, and conversely he depicts his own person as his reply. Yet he includes another face in the mirrored reflections, Lorenzo’s, which may be a simple way to greet and commend his two friends at once. After all, Ficino makes it clear that he was too busy working on his Platonic Theology, which he dedicates to Lorenzo, to be distracted with letters. But the letter nevertheless also further reveals how Ficino’s Platonic style tries to convey how the madness of love blurs the distinctions between individuals, forcing Ficino to see double as Pentheus sees Dionysus in the Bacchae: two Giovannis or two Lorenzos, but one person.

Ficino also finds sources for inspired and intoxicated Bacchic style in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Because Pseudo-Dionysius adopted the terminology of late ancient Platonists, notably from Proclus, scholars now date his writings to a later period. Ficino does not realize that Dionysius is a pseudonym and still thinks that the author is Paul’s convert (from Acts 17:34), yet Ficino is nonetheless acutely aware of the similarities between Pseudo-Dionysius’s and the Neoplatonists’ philosophical style and terminology. In his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology, dedicated in 1492 to Lorenzo’s son, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, the future Pope Leo X, Ficino introduces the work with a discussion of style and love’s intoxication:

The ancient theologians and the Platonists believe that the spirit of the god Dionysus dwells in the ecstasy, the ecstatic departure, of separated minds, when partly out of inborn love and partly with the god prompting them, they have surpassed the natural limits of understanding, and are wondrously transformed into the beloved god. Then with a new draft of nectar and with unconscionable joy they reel as though they were intoxicated bacchantes. With this Dionysian wine, therefore, our inebriated Dionysius runs riot everywhere: he pours forth enigmas, he sings in dithyrambs.¹⁰³

Ficino characteristically puns on the names Dionysus and Dionysius, claiming that Pseudo-Dionysius’s drunken and inspired state transforms him into the god Dionysus. The transfiguration of Dionysius, as it were, into Dionysus transforms his style so that he becomes a reveler singing in dithyrambs in the god’s thiasus, not unlike the ispired Socrates in the Phaedrus, who also sings in vatic dithyrambs.¹⁰⁴ Immediately afterward in the commentary, Ficino expresses the difficulty of imitating Pseudo-Dionysius’s vatic, even Orphic, style in his own Latin translation, and prays that God might illuminate his commentaries and translation just as he did for Pseudo-Dionysius when he interpreted the prophets and apostles.

Ficino reflects once more on his own Platonic style in another letter to Bernardo Bembo, on 3 November 1480: “When I wished in the preceding days to exhort my friends to the ardent love of true virtue while being as brief as possible in my discourse, I attempted to paint with certain Platonic colors—as I am often wont to do—the image of a beautiful mind from a certain resemblance befitting a beautiful body. But when I attempt to express the same image of a beautiful body and mind, while painting, on account of my inexperience and ignorance of painting, I express not so much the image itself, which I aimed at depicting, than its resounding shadow.”¹⁰⁵ Ficino makes it clear through his employment of a synaesthetic auditory/visual figure of a resounding shadow that the painted shadow in this case is both the letter itself and Ermolao Barbaro conveying the letter to Bembo in Venice. Ficino tells Bembo that if he inspects the shadow he will begin to see himself in this other person. If Ficino’s skiagraphia is not Platonic enough, he tells us that this technique of painting the human figure with shadows is in fact employing Platonic colors (Platonicis quibusdam, ut soleo saepe, coloribus pingere). Ficino is therefore employing the same common rhetorical terminology for features and colors that his humanist contemporaries were using to describe various styles in their Ciceronian debates.¹⁰⁶

Ficino capitalizes on a scribal mistake in a letter to one of his most important patrons, Filippo Valori (1456–94) to make a similar point. Having accidentally begun to write the name of another prominent Florentine, Filippo Carducci, instead of Filippo Valori, Ficino or his scribe merely crossed out the mistaken last name, writing: “Marsilio Ficino sends his greetings to Filippo Cardu Valori. Look Filippo! As I was about to write ‘to Valori,’ I almost wrote ‘to Carducci.’ Is this any wonder? The truth is, both of you are one to each other and you are both one to me. So it even happens that when I play the lyre or sing, one of you plays with me and the other sings.”¹⁰⁷ Although the most commonly cited printed edition of Ficino’s Opera omnia no longer preserves the canceled name, the manuscripts of Ficino’s letter make it clear that he wished the letter to be copied and circulated with the erased name “Cardu.” Adding to the image of the three friends in musical harmony, Ficino ends the letter by relating that he will soon travel with Valori in the Florentine countryside from Careggi to Maiano. Although Ficino could have followed Valori to his destination it is clear that the “Ficino” going to Maiano is in fact the letter itself being carried by Francesco Berlinghieri (1440–1500), another Florentine nobleman: “But since there is change in all things, I shall soon go to Maiano with you as my guide, but lest something hides from you, when you read ‘I’ you ought to understand Berlinghieri also as though under a greater ‘I.’ ”¹⁰⁸ The letter’s conjoining of persons, Carducci and Valori on the one hand and Ficino and Berlinghieri on the other, demonstrates how Ficino employed the rhetorical devices of his Platonic letters to build social communities and networks. Ficino ends the letter by asking Valori to send his greetings to the members of their Academy, to their compatres Giovanni Battista Buoninsegni (1453–1512) and Jacopo Guicciardini (1422–90), as well to their confratres. The very short letter reveals two stages of rhetorical play. First, Ficino plays with his authorial persona (the writer) and his epistolary or public persona (the written letter itself). Second, he plays with the letter’s written and oral natures. One can easily recognize how, on the one hand, Valori’s reading is visual insofar as he needs to see the scribal error in the recipient’s name to conflate the persons of Valori and Carducci, but on the other hand his reading is also aural to the extent that it is understood that Berlinghieri is intended to read the letter aloud in order to join the two persons into one, that is Ficino’s written “I” and the “greater I” (ubi legis ego quasi sub grandiori quodam egone Berlingherium subintellige) that emerges from Berlinghieri’s oral delivery of the letter. Berlinghieri is thus tasked to speak the letter in the persona of Ficino, or ex persona Ficini, as Ficino would have expressed the technique. In the letter’s performance before Valori, Ficino’s authorial persona and Berlinghieri’s oratorical persona harmonize together in a manner similar to when Valori and Carducci sing and play the lyre with Ficino, which is a direct allusion to Plato’s juxtaposition of Theodorus’s ability to compare Socrates’ and Theaetetus’s faces to a musician judging whether two lyres are in harmony (Tht. 144d–e).

Ficino also restages similar synesthetic mixings of oral and visual performances for other epistles by his letter’s carriers, as he did with Berlinghieri, to solidify his Platonic persona with other addressees. In fact, Filippo Valori, formerly the recipient, played the part to deliver a letter to Giovanni Pico in 1488:

Lest you ever say that Marsilio, who is your first friend, came to you last, behold he has come. Contemplate (if you wish) the face (vultus) and gestures (gestus) of he who at present salutes you. But meanwhile closely inspect what hides under the mask (sub persona lateat). You will say, am I not contemplating youthful features instead of Marsilio’s face? But Pico (if you are unaware) the suppliant Ficino was recently rejuvanated just like an eagle. Yes, indeed this prayer has been granted. What about his gestures (gestus), however? According to what reason has he now been made younger but also heavier (gravior)? O my friend, as with such serious (gravibus) prayers it has been just now finally granted that he exchanges youth for old age, so it is not so strange that this man praying so seriously thence turned out both younger and heavier at the same time. Indeed, this has come about, but why is he wearing especially the face (vultus) of Filippo Valori? I pass over for the moment what exact form was chosen by Love.¹⁰⁹

Other than Ficino’s characteristic use of “Platonic” puns (Valori, valore, vale/gravior, and iunior for light-hearted seriousness, as well as jokes about Valori’s age and weight), Ficino’s letter reveals further tropes of serioludere that depend on the letter’s oratorical delivery (gestus)—a technical rhetorical term used by Cicero, Quintilian, and other ancient rhetoricians.¹¹⁰ Ficino plays on the identification of his letter’s authorial persona with Valori’s oratorical persona, and even with Valori’s very face/mask. The letter exists for us as a written document, but in order for the rhetorical device to work one needs to imagine the letter’s oral delivery: Valori reciting the letter face to face with Pico. Ficino invokes Eros as the god responsible for the transformation of external appearances, like a spiritello hiding behind a mask (see Figure 7 above). Pico’s response in turn appeals to his union with Ficino, whom he addresses as the father of the Platonic family, due to their participating in a common Saturnine intellect (νοῦς). Beneath the exterior persona one finds a Saturnine ingenium. Far from a correction of Ficino’s invocation of love, Pico’s turn toward Saturn would have greatly pleased Ficino, the Renaissance’s greatest orchestrator of the notion of a melancholic and Saturnine genius.¹¹¹

Ficino’s rhetorical strategies are especially evident in letters that he writes to recipients who share a certain enthusiasm for Platonism. In these, he examines the various personae of the author, the letter, the messenger, and the recipient, and often postulates a divine principle of unification for the different personae (the One, Eros, Saturn, intellect, spiritus, soul). We can look at a final excellent example in this regard from his correspondence with Pierleone Leoni (also known as Pier Leone da Spoleto, c. 1445–92), the court physician of Lorenzo de’ Medici, whom Ficino calls his “alter ego,” along with his German humanist friend Martin Prenninger (1450–1501), known in Latin circles as Martinus Uranius. Lest Cavalcanti, whom Ficino designates as his unique friend (amicus unicus), think that he is the philosopher’s sole beloved, Ficino also repeats this rhetorical stratagem with other close correspondents. In fact, by 1491 he would also refer to Prenninger with the same epithet, “amicus unicus.”¹¹² Thus Cavalcanti, Pierleone, and Prenninger had to share the roles of being Ficino’s “alter egos” and/or “unique friends.” On 12 May 1491 Ficino wrote to Pierleone a letter entitled “How someone thinking under another persona can encounter himself”:

In [your letters] you clearly write that when at first something Platonic occurs to you, Marsilio immediately comes to mind. But beware perhaps that you are not deceived by an exterior image. Indeed, I think that Pierleone himself is there lurking underneath the persona of Marsilio. For if any human species presents itself to you while contemplating Platonic matters, it is probable that it is the greatest Platonic species above all that presents itself. But what is more Platonic among human matters than Leo the great abode of the Platonic sun. Perchance, therefore, just like Narcissus, you are admiring yourself, when you think that you are admiring another. But Love clothes you especially in the image of Marsilio. But since we have happened upon the image, you surely know that reason is between the imagination and the intellect, and that natural images flow into it from the source of the imagination, and that divine species flow into it from the intellect. On account of this does it not often happen that a certain divine species assumes the form of a certain natural image when it emanates to human reason, and so does not what is divine on the inside often appear as natural to the eyes of reason? What if a similar reason does not explain why Pierleone often meets himself under the mask (persona) of Marsilio?¹¹³

The Platonic, or Neoplatonic, emanative metaphysics is evident in the letter. It acts as a philosophical grounding for the imitative practices of Ficino’s rhetoric and as a principle of unification for the identities of Ficino’s and Perleone’s persons. It further reveals how Ficino understood self-knowledge discursively on the one hand as an encounter with others, and on the other as a contact with the divine.

Ficino’s epistolography plays with central epistemological problems concerning the intellect and its unity with what it thinks. The thesis of the unity of the intellect and its thinking has its clearest origins in Aristotle’s De anima.¹¹⁴ The fortune of this theory has a long and manifold history among Aristotle’s many interpreters, much of which turns on the twofold nature of Aristotle’s identity thesis, that the intellect somehow becomes like what it intelligizes so that, on the one hand, when it intelligizes something, a tree for instance, it takes on the form of the tree but, on the other hand, when it intelligizes itself, the intellect and its thinking are identical. Aristotle’s thesis that the intellect becomes like and even identical to its thoughts becomes in Plotinus a core tenet of his epistemological and metaphysical theory that the hypostasis Intellect is identical to the intelligibles (one and many). In its Platonic appropriations, however, Aristotle’s identity thesis does not necessarily lead to an epistemology that posits the human intellect as a blank slate capable of becoming like anything that it intelligizes. On the contrary, something of the divine intelligibles is communicated to all human intellects insofar as a portion of our intellects always touches the Intellect.

Thus Ficino’s Platonic arguments in the previously quoted letter to Givoanni Cavalcanti, where Ficino recounts his philosophical discussions with Bernardo Giugni and Bartolomeo Fortini, can be distilled accordingly: the intellect is not only identical to its thinking, the human intellect becomes like the divine Intellect—like a form of divine painting—when it intelligizes. Here are Ficino’s words: “From intellect to intellect, from light to light. How easily does this happen? Most easily: for on account of a certain natural relationship, visible light immediately illuminates a transparent medium when it is first clear and pure, and visible light forms it into this very form, and through its own form, it forms the forms of all visible things. Similarly, the intelligible and the hyperintelligible light, that is God, forms the transparent intellectual medium, when it is first clear; it forms, I say, its form, and this is divine, and through this form, it forms all intelligibles into forms.”¹¹⁵ It is because of this common participation in the divine Intellect that humans can truly know one another. Ficino is not simply appealing to fairly common Augustinian theories of divine illumination on human thought. In his explaining the identity of the knower both with the known and with the divine, it is apparent that Ficino draws directly on Neoplatonism. Beginning with Plotinus, the late ancient Neoplatonists themselves had long appropriated Aristotle’s identity thesis between the intellect and what it thinks in order to argue that the Intellect qua hypostasis is identical to the intelligible forms. What is more, by his calling God hyperintelligible it is also clear that the explanation Ficino offers is based on a Neoplatonic philosophy of emanation. Even though the Neoplatonic Intellect is the first being, it is nevertheless posterior to the One. Ficino’s God is thus akin to the One as hyperintelligible and thus also, to use the language of Proclus, beyond being, or hyperousios. The exercise in Socratic self-knowledge of Ficino’s Platonic epistolography reveals that when one knows oneself through knowing another, one also begins to know God. Instead of positing that one knows others as though they were painted images external to us, like separate objects, in his correspondence Ficino expresses the unification of persons according to an identity thesis between intellect and what it intellegizes—all the while distinguishing his thinking from the Averroist theory of the single intellect. Ficino appreciated Plotinus’s description of the Intellect as a many-faced or innumerably-faced being, glowing with individual living faces.¹¹⁶ The communicated participation between two persons and God, both visual and sonorous, is expressed according to a metaphysics of light, which Ficino often understands according to geometrical optics whereby a voice is projected on a linear vector to touch its listener like a ray of light extending a transparent medium (diaphane).¹¹⁷ Ficino becomes like his interlocutors in his letters, and in turn, following the goal of deification or assimilating to the divine in the Theaetetus, he becomes like God.

At first glance one can understand Ficino’s Platonic letters as a correspondence network strengthening the social bonds of fifteenth-century philosophers, theologians, poets, statesmen, and scholars. That is, they simply perform a literary game in which members of an inner circle of elites are cast in roles played for their own amusement. They do indeed form a network of connections. In a famous letter to the aforementioned Martinus Uranius, Ficino catalogues a long list of his friends for his German correspondent. He classifies them into three kinds (genera): first, his Medici patrons, which he characterizes as a race of heroes; second, auditors (auditores), who are not necessarily disciples but friendly acquaintances and partners in dialogues who share a common bond in the liberal arts (included in this group are the likes of Naldo Naldi, Cristoforo Landino, Leon Battista Alberti, Platina, Demetrius Chalcocondyles, Poliziano, Pierleone Leoni, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, to name a few); and third, auditors who are Ficino’s students and disciples (including the likes of Filippo Valori and Filippo Carducci, Giovanni Nesi, Giovanni Guicciardini, Francesco Cattani da Diacceto, and Niccolò Valori).¹¹⁸ Documenting the interlocutors who participated in the epistolary games Ficino played, this letter certainly records the long reach of his cultural influence in his own day. The particular rules of the game are not arbitrary, however. The letters constitute a discursive process that encourages one to reflect Socratically on self-knowledge as an engagement with another. Ficino explicitly formulates this exercise in self-knowledge as something like a network uniting humanists—liberalium disciplinarum communione—in a common Platonic republic of letters: “For since neither should I nor would I ever want to be away from my friends, and since my very self is not only in Italy in me myself, but also in you in Germany, it is appropriate that I desire my friends here to be there also with me. Know that all these friends have been vetted with respect to their ingenium and character.”¹¹⁹ Playing variations on similar rhetorical themes of philosophical love, very often a letter’s author’s absence also leads Marsilio to reflect on Plato’s famous sayings on orality and writing at the end of the Phaedrus. Like Plato’s dialogue, Ficino’s letters exhibit dialogic traits: on one side of the coin, Ficino studies the consequences of the written rhetorical persona to reveal the existence of an interior prediscursive self that participates in a divine principle of unification; on the reverse side, however, the very same letters also present Ficino’s discursive exterior public persona with the mask of the Platonic philosopher.

Once more a comparison to later Renaissance depictions of Socratic philosophy is appropriate. In a painting by Pietro della Vecchia (1603–78) Socrates and a pupil, likely Theaetetus, study the similarities and differences in each other’s faces (Figure 9).¹²⁰ There are differences between della Vecchia’s painting and Plato’s Theaetetus. Unlike the figures in the painting, Socrates and Theaetetus have snub-nosed faces. In the dialogue, Theaetetus has just oiled himself in a gymnasium, while in the canvas he is fully clothed—and not in ancient Greek garb. The painting is therefore not an exact realistic representation of the dialogue’s dramatic setting. Still, even if della Vecchia does not depict Socrates and Theaetetus’s physical likenesses, he (like Ficino’s letters) depicts their philosophic and dialogic roles. Their glances meet in the mirror, showing that a shared attention and dialogue with one another unites them in their self-knowledge.¹²¹ A third figure meets the gaze of the viewers of the canvas, inviting them into the same discursive process of self-knowledge. His hand holds a book in one version and a paper, perhaps a letter, in the other. Their exact contents are unclear, but philosophical elements are visible: geometric shapes, perhaps squares of opposition, or schematizations of arguments and concepts, as was fairly common in manuscripts and early modern books. These texts in the paintings are analogous to the canvases and face the readers/viewers as mirrors for their selves—mirrors that not only reflect external objects as though they were different images but also unify the reflected selves in the same way that the intellect ought to be identified with what it intelligizes when it self-reflects. Ficino’s intimate letters to friends are of course intended for a wider audience. One imagines that Ficino would like his letters to attract the gaze of all readers who, when confronted with the reflections of Cavalcanti and Ficino, would also be faced with their own as though in a hall of mirrors.

FIGURE 9. Socrates and Two Students (Know Thyself), by Pietro della Vecchia, c. 1650–60. Prado Museum, Madrid.