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Updated: June 20, 2025
Its philosophy was continuous from Thales to Proclus, and again from Ficino and Pico to Lotze and Bradley, after a long sleep which was not death. Its religion passes into Christian theology and cultus without any real break. The early Church spoke in Greek and thought in Greek.
In these halcyon days at this hospitable table Michael Angelo met such men as Massilio Ficino, the interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of erudition; Luigi Pulci and Angelo Poliziano—the latter is supposed to have incited Michael Angelo to carve the bas-relief now in the Casa Buonarroti, called by Condivi "The rape of Deianeira and the battle of the Centaurs."
Among the throng are men of learning who either came to Florence from the East or Florentines who assimilated their philosophy such as Georgius Gemisthos, Marsilio Ficino, and perhaps certain painters among them, all protégés of Cosimo and Piero, and all makers of the Renaissance.
The companion to this picture represents the angel appearing to S. Zacharias, and here again Ghirlandaio gives us contemporary Florentines, portraits of distinguished Tornabuoni men and certain friends of eminence among them. In the little group low down on the left, for example, are Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino, the Platonist.
In 1417, Cosimo, after his marriage with Contessina de' Bardi, had bought and Michelozzo had rebuilt for him the Villa Careggi, where, in the Albizzi conspiracy, he had retired, he said, "to escape from the contests and divisions in the city." It was here that he lay dying when he wrote to Marsilio Ficino to come to him. "Come to us, Marsilio, as soon as you are able.
There was Dante, whose little book of the Vita Nuova had early become a pattern of imaginative love, maintained somewhat feebly by the later followers of Petrarch; and since Plato had become something more than a name in Italy by the publication of the Latin translation of his works by Marsilio Ficino, there was the Platonic tradition also.
From privacy your founder rose to a throne; but on the throne he never forgot the studies which had been his delight in privacy. He was the centre of an illustrious group, composed partly of the last great scholars of Greece, and partly of the first great scholars of Italy, Theodore Gaza and George of Trebizond, Bessarion and Filelfo, Marsilio Ficino and Poggio Bracciolini.
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