MARSILIO FICINO AND THE CHEMICAL ART

Peter J. Forshaw

In a work on the origin and development of chemistry, De Ortu & Progressu Chemiæ Dissertatio (1668) by the Danish alchemist Ole Borch (1626–1690), Ficino’s name appears at the head of a list of Italian alchemical authorities, that includes the fourteenth-century Petrus Bonus, to whom is attributed the famous Pretiosa Margarita Novella, first published in 1546, the early sixteenth-century poet Marcellus Palingenius, composer of an allegory of gold-making, the Zodiacus Vitae, and Angelo Sala (1576–1637), author of such chryso- poetic and iatrochemical works as the Chrysologia seu examen auri chymicum (1622) and Descriptio auri potabilis (1631).1 To a Ficino scholar, the inclusion of his name must doubtless come as something of a surprise, because ‘our Marsilio’ has no modern reputation as an alchemist. There is, nonetheless, a text attributed to him in one of the best-known alchemical collections, Jean-Jacques Manget’s Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa (1702), where we find a trea- tise entitled Marsilii Ficini Florentini Liber de Arte Chemicâ.2 Sifting further through the alchemical compendia, it transpires that there is yet another alchemical work attributed to him: in his Bibliotheca Chimica of 1654, the chymist and physician Pierre Borel (1620–1689) mentions a De Aurei Velleris Mysterio, supposedly penned by our industrious Florentine.3 Borel has perhaps taken this title from the anonymous author of the Animadversiones chemicae quatuor, a work

1 Olaus Borrichius, De Ortu & Progressu Chemiæ Dissertatio, in Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa, edited by Jean Jacques Manget, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1702), vol. 1, pp. 1–37, at pp. 35–36: ‘Venerantur Itali suos Marsilios Ficinos, Palingenios, Fioravantas, Locate- llos, Caneparios, Ant. Nerios, Carellos, Bonos Ferrarienses, Cornachinos, Bartholeros, Thom. Bovios, Angelos Salas, & tempore quidem posteriorem.’ Ficino’s name can be found in an even earlier list in Laurentius Hofmanus, De vero usu & fero abusu Medi- camentorum Chymicorum Commentatio (Halle, 1611), p. 101 during a discussion of distillations and sublimed spirits, in the company of Isaac Holland, Petrus Bonus, George Ripley, Jean Fernel, Conrad Gesner, Joseph DuChesne, Andreas Libavius, Martin Ruland, Johann Hartmann, Oswald Croll, etc. 2 Manget, Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa, vol. 2, pp. 172–82. 3 Pierre Borel, Bibliotheca Chimica (Paris, 1654), p. 94. 250 peter j. forshaw first published in 1615, and then in 1622 included in the fifth volume of the most famous and most extensive alchemical collection ever printed, the six-volume Theatrum Chemicum, published by Lazarus Zetzner. There we read: ‘I have heard that divine Hermes’s book Apocalypsis Solis et Lunae was first communicated to Cosimo de Medici by Marsilio Ficino, given with a book that Ficino had written on the mystery of the Golden Fleece and that he had dedicated it to Cosimo himself.’4 It is not so far-fetched to imagine that the Florentine banker might have had some interest in the possibility of transmuting base metals into gold. Writing on the historical sources of alchemy in Italy, Giovanni Carbonelli mentions the existence of a codex in the Biblioteca di San Marco, allegedly written by Cosimo on the subject of alchemy.5 Less transmutational, but equally lucrative alchemically, was the Medici monopoly over all sales of alum throughout Christendom; at least two of Ficino’s letters were addressed to a member of a group of alum traders in Bruges.6 Given the reputation Ficino was to enjoy in the sixteenth century as the translator of the Corpus Hermeticum and the attraction of the dream-revelation in Mercurii Trismegisti Pimander, seu Liber de Potestate et Sapientia Dei (1471) for the more hermetically inclined alchemists, it is perhaps not all that surprising to discover Ficino’s name connected with an alchemical apocalypse or revelation of Hermes, ‘author’, after all, of the ur-text of alchemy, the Tabula Smaragdina or Emerald Tablet.7 The myth of Jason’s quest for the fleece and the

4 Anon, Animadversiones chemicae quatuor (Frankfurt, 1615), p. 38: ‘[. . .] apud divum Hermetem [. . .], qui inscribitur Apocalypsis Solis & Lunae, quem audivi primo ad Cosmum de Medicis, à Marsilio Ficino, una cum libro quodam (quem Ficinus de aurei velleris mysterio inscripserat, ipsique Cosmo dedicaverat) delatum, com- municatumque fuisse [. . .].’ See also Theatrum chemicum, edited by Lazarus Zetzner, 6 vols. (Strassburg, 1622), vol. 5, p. 921. 5 Giovanni Carbonelli, Sulle Fonti Storiche della Chimica e dell’Alchimia in Italia (Rome: Istituto Nazionale Medico Farmacologico, 1925), p. X: ‘Un codice attribuito a Cosimo de’ Medici si trova nella Biblioteca di S. Marco, è una copia fatta da Mo Pietro Grignolo di Pont Canaverse nel 1475 (R. Bib. Marciana lat. 30 da fol. 258 a 261. con titolo: Cosmus de Medicis seruus fidelis manu propria scripsit Pio pape).’ 6 Charles Singer, The Earliest Chemical Industry: An Essay in the Historical Rela- tions of Economics & Technology illustrated from the Alum Trade (London: The Folio Society, 1948), p. 152. See also Fritz Saxl, ‘A Marsilio Ficino Manuscript Written in Bruges in 1475, and the Alum Monopoly of the Popes’, Journal of the Warburg Insti- tute, 1 (1937–8): 61–62. 7 See, for example, Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (Hanau, 1609), II, pp. 168–69 and the Amphitheatre’s ‘Pyramid’ engraving.