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Updated: June 20, 2025
How paltry do the triumphs of conquerors which end with the night, the feasts of princes which leave still hungry, appear beside the triumphs of intellect, the symposium of souls. After Boccaccio, Mary rapidly ran over the careers of Lorenzo de' Medici, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Politian, and the Pulci, exhibiting again, after the lapse of a century, the study in Italy of the Greek language.
They form a series of full-length portraits, sometimes of celebrated contemporaries, as Politian, Marsilio Ficino, and others, but always of flesh-and-blood people, living, moving, and having a being. One almost catches the winged syllogisms as they fly from lip to lip.
Under Pietro Medici, Ficino was already at the head of a school; to him Pietro's son and Cosimo's grandson, the illustrious Lorenzo, came over from the Peripatetics. Among his most distinguished fellow-scholars were Bartolommeo Valori, Donato Acciaiuoli, and Pierfilippo Pandolfini.
Pamponazzo preached an atheistic doctrine, with the plausible reservation of Salva Fide, which then covered all. The more delicate thinkers, Pico and Ficino, sought to reconcile irreconcilables by fusing philosophy and theology, while they distinguished truths of science from truths of revelation.
The family name was Ambrogini, but from the Latinized name of his native town turned into Italian he constructed the title of Poliziano, by which he was afterward known. At the age of ten he was sent to Florence, then governed by Lorenzo de Medici. He studied under the famous Greeks Argyropoulos and Kallistos and the equally famous Italians, Landino and Ficino.
Your brother's state of mind was no more than a form of that theosophy which has been the common disease of excitable dreamy minds in all ages; the same ideas that your father's old antagonist, Marsilio Ficino, pores over in the New Platonists; only your brother's passionate nature drove him to act out what other men write and talk about.
Guarino of Verona was instructing the heir of Ferrara, and Vittorino da Feltre was educating the children of the Marquis of Mantua. Lionardo was delighting Milan with his music and his magic world of painting. Poliziano was pouring forth honeyed eloquence at Florence. Ficino was expounding Plato. Boiardo was singing the prelude to Ariosto's melodies at Ferrara.
Here in the loggia that looks over the city the Platonic Academy often met, so that these very pillars must have heard the gentle voice of Marsilio Ficino, the witty speech of the young Lorenzo, the beautiful words of Pico della Mirandola, the laughter of Simonetta, the footsteps of Vanna Tornabuoni.
While during the one hour he would be found learnedly discussing the rival claims of the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophers with Ficino and Landino, the next might witness him the foremost reveller in the Florentine carnival, crowned with flowers and with the winecup in his hand, gayly carolling the ballate he had composed for the occasion; while the third might behold him surrounded by the leading painters and sculptors of Tuscany, discoursing profoundly on the aims and mission of art.
Under Pietro Medici, Ficino was already at the head of a school; to him Pietro's son and Cosimo's grandson, the illustrious Lorenzo, came over from the Peripatetics. Among his most distinguished fellow-scholars were Bartolommeo Valori, Donato Acciaiuoli, and Pierfilippo Pandolfini.
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