United States or Cocos Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
He kept a lamp always burning before Plato's bust, and later founded the Platonic Academy, at which Plato's works were discussed, orations delivered, and new dialogues exchanged, between such keen minds as Marsilio, Pulci, Landini, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Leon Battista Alberti, the architect and scholar, Pico dell a Mirandola, the precocious disputant and aristocratic mystic, Poliziano, the tutor of Lorenzo's sons, and Lorenzo the Magnificent himself.
The pioneer now is not a professor but a general practitioner, Antonio Benivieni, of whom we know very little save that he was a friend of Marsilio Ficino and of Angelo Poliziano, and that he practiced in Florence during the last third of the fifteenth century, dying in 1502.
Here Marsilio Ficino's Platonic Academy used to meet, in the loggia and in the little temple which one gains from the cloisters, and here Pico della Mirandola composed his curious gloss on Genesis.
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.
But perhaps certain high prelates and princes who dislike the Frate's denunciations might be pleased to hear that, though Giovanni Pico, and Poliziano, and Marsilio Ficino, and most other men of mark in Florence, reverence Fra Girolamo, Messer Francesco Cei despises him." "Poliziano?" said Cei, with a scornful laugh.
Word Of The Day