INTRODUCTION Michael J. B. Allen Animarum gradus colligamus Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), the eminent Florentine Platonist and one of the most learned and influential thinkers of his age, was ordained in 14 73 and elected a canon of Florence's cathedral in 1487. Destined for a medical career by his father, a doctor in the seiVice of the Medici, he acquired, in addition to much medical learning, a rare mastery of Plato, Aristotle and later Greek philosophy. Under the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici who gave him a villa at Careggi in 1463, he set out to render all of Plato's dialogues into Latin, but interrupted this task almost immediately in order to translate the Corpus Hermeticum under the title of the Pimander which was named after the first of the fourteen treatises known to him (Tommaso Benci produced a vernacular translation of this within the year). In 1464 Ficino actually read his versions of Plato's Parmenides and Philebus to Cosimo on his deathbed. Eventually, with financing from Filippo V alori and other admirers, and having selectively consulted the ren­ derings of some of the dialogues by such humanist predecessors as Leonardo Bruni, he published the complete Plato in 1484 (a date coinciding with a grand conjunction ofJupiter and Saturn) and dedi­ cated it to Lorenzo de' Medici. He included prefaces (argumenta) for each dialogue and a long commentary on the Symposium that he had written by 1469 and called the De amore (a vernacular version of which he also prepared). This became the seminal text of Renaissance love theory. Later he composed other magisterial Plato commen­ taries, some complete, some not, on the Timaeus, Philebus (the subject too of a public lecture series), Parmenides, Phaedrus, Sophist, and on the Nuptial Number in Book Vlll of the Republic. While continually revising his Plato during the 14 70s and pub­ lishing his De Christiana religione in 14 76 (which was partly indebted, we now realize, to earlier anti-Jewish and anti-Moslem polemicists), he compiled his original philosophical masterpiece, an eighteen-book summa on metaphysics and the immortality of the soul which he did XIV MICHAEL J. B. ALLEN not publish until 1482. Indebted to Augustine and Aquinas, and sus­ tained by his own conviction that Platonism- for us Neoplatonism since he regarded Plotinus (AD 205-70) as Plato's most profound interpreter--was reconcilable with Christianity, it was called the Iheologia Platonica. The title was borrowed from the title of Proclus's magnum opus to which Ficino was often, if secretly, indebted, and the subtitle, De immortalitate animorum, echoed the title of a treatise by Plotinus and also that of an early Platonizing treatise by Augustine. Ficino had been familiar with Plotinus since the 1460s but in the 1480s Ficino returned to the Enneads anew, and completed the mon­ umental task of rendering them entire into Latin. He also wrote extensive notes and commentaries, publishing the whole in 1492 with a dedication to Lorenzo. Meanwhile he compiled a three-book treatise, De vita, on pro­ longing health, having begun it apparently as part of his Plotinus commentary. It deals with regimen, diet, abstinence, salves, beneficent powders and sprays, aromas, psychosomatic exercises, meditation and mood-lifting techniques, as well as astrological and daemono­ logical attuning. It is replete with encyclopedic pharmacological and other learning which daringly combines philosophical, astrological, magical and psychiatric speculations. The third book in particular, entitled 'On bringing one's life into harmony with the heavens' (De vita coelitus comparanda), is a rich and complex exploration of scholar­ ly melancholy, holistic medicine and psychiatry that makes continual reference to zodiacal and planetary influences, to stellar oppositions and conjunctions, to astrological election, to the theory of universal sympathies, and to synastry, the assumption that particular people born under the same planet and under the same astral configurations are therefore star twins. Additionally, following Albert the Great and Aquinas, the De vita's three books treat of the therapeutic powers of talismans and amulets when properly fashioned and inscribed, draw­ ing upon scholastic notions of acquired form and the hylomorphic structuring of both corporeal and, contra Aquinas, of incorporeal enti­ ties. They also draw upon the Galenic and subsequently medieval notions of the vital, vegetable and animal spirits that can be refined into the pure spirit whose health is the goal of all the various inter­ locking therapies, since the body will be perfectly tempered if the spiritus is well. When the De vita appeared in 1489, Ficino was threat­ ened, not unexpectedly, with a Curial investigation into its orthodoxy, but he fended it off successfully, if disingenuously, by asserting that .