RICERCA ITALIANA     

Critical and electronic edition of Marsilio Ficino's complete works

Università degli Studi di Cassino

Abstract

The research program consists in publishing on CD-roms and in traditional editions the complete works of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), including his translations from Greek into Latin. Ficino's writings are fundamental for the study of Italian and European Humanism and especially of the Platonic Renaissance of the XVth century. Nowadays his works are read, apart from those published in the last century, in the 1576 Basel edition, which is notoriously unreliable. The works published in recent times have been already almost entirely scanned for this project and will be transferred to the CD-rom. The unpublished works have been copied from first editions or manuscripts. These transcriptions, which have been nearly completed, will undergo a careful revision and then transferred to the CD-rom. At the same time this project foresees the critical edition of Ficino's still unpublished texts, with philological introductions and apparatuses of variant readings and sources. These critical editions will be printed in a Ficinian series by the pubblisher Nino Aragno (Turin). The CD-rom will allow a user-friendly consultation, thanks to a specific software already tested in similar undertakings, such as the CD-rom of the "Letteratura italiana Zanichelli" (LIZ) and those of the collection "Classici del pensiero europeo. Textual data banks on CD-rom", also published by Aragno as the Ficinian CD-rom will be. Apart from Ficino's importance in the history of philosophical thought, one should not disregard the usefulness of such a Cd-rom for studying XVth century Latin, a field for which scholars have very few such tools at their disposal. <<<

Principal Investigator

Sebastiano GENTILE Università degli Studi di CASSINO

Research Objectives

The work of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) represents a turning point in the history of Italian and European thought, in the transition from mediaeval to modern philosophy. Especially his integral translation and his commentaries of Plato's and Plotinus' writings, as well as his numerous other versions of neoplatonic writings (Proclus, Iamblichus, Synesius, ps. Dionysius Areopagita) and of Corpus Hermeticum's treatises, revealed to Latin culture many texts of Greek philosophical thought that had been known only fragmentarily and episodically during the Middle Ages. At the same time the study of Ficino's works and in general of Ficino's culture reveals his many debts toward mediaeval philosophical culture. These debts were also borne out again and again by the studies devoted to the sources of his thought as well as to the books belonging to his library that had been so far identified (among the others: Boethius, Avicenna, saint Thomas and the versions of Proclus made by William of Moerbeke ).
The impressive corpus of translations, commentaries and original works, that Ficino wrote during his life, returned to the Latin West the fundamental texts of Greek thought and made possible the great philosophical blossoming which took place in Europe from the XVIth century onwards. Thanks to Ficino's activity the West has recovered that Platonic tradition which is at the very beginning of its speculation and which in mediaeval times remained almost completely unknown, apart from some very significant, although isolated, recovery (as in the case of the study of the Timaeus in the XIIth century).
The versions of Iamblichus's De mysteriis Aegyptiorum and of Corpus Hermeticum I-XIV deserve special attention because they brought back to the Latin West the Aegyptian myths of "prisca theologia" and "pia philosophia", which in early modern age was often regarded as the common root of classical and christian culture. These myths were the ground from which many attractive theories arose, either scholarly or more philosophical and theological in purpose. These theories deeply affected not only the culture of his time. Ficino's translation of the Corpus Hermeticum gave new life to the medieval Hermetism, which was founded on the Asclepius, a treatise that Ficino studied for a long time and transcribed in the MS Riccardianus 709.
Only a limited percentage of the boundless number of Ficino's works has been published in modern and critical editions. Between the works still unpublished there are the De voluptate, the De Christiana religione, the Praedicationes, the Commentarium in Epistolas D. Pauli, the De sole et lumine, the Commentaria in Dyonisium Areopagitam, and other commentaries to Plato of extraordinary importance (particularly the In Parmenidem and the In Timaeum), the enormous commentary and the Latin version of Plotinus (as a whole 1500 pages made of 2000 strokes) and the translations of neoplatonic authors, some of them with commentaries. By now Ficino's original works are available in the two volumes edition printed in Basle in 1576, from which Ficino's works are generally quoted. The Basle edition is full of mistakes and marred by the many arbitrary corrections made by XVIth century editors. Although this edition is complete - the few opuscula which remained unpublished are now available in P.O. Kristellers's Supplementum Ficinianum (1937) - its inaccuracy gives an utmost omen of a reliable edition of Ficino's original works. For example is out of discussion that his Epistolae (in 12 books), whose edition has been started by the co-ordinator of this project, is of extremely relevance for the study of Platonism's fortune in Italy and Europe during the second half of the XVth century. Ficino's translations are instead available only in the incunabula printed during the author's life or in XVIth century or later editions.
To overcome this problem, which make the study of Ficino very difficult, we are going to publish his original Latin and vernacular works, and his translations from Greek. Our work will be completed in different stages, starting from the revision of modern published texts. The first stage will be to obtain the scanned texts, already done for the most part, of the works published in the XX century. These digitalized texts will be revised carefully to improve the punctuation and to correct the printing errors with checks from manuscripts. Regarding the unpublished part of Ficino's works, we have already completed the "recensio" of the manuscripts and printed editions and we have started collecting cd-roms, microfilms and photographs of useful wittnesses. To transcribe the texts we have used "editiones principes", usually published under the author's overseeing and therefore notably more correct than the XVI century editions. Collating the manuscripts we will obtain critical texts, divided into paragraphs and with modern punctuation; these texts will be published and employed in different ways.
The first step towards a complete edition will be a CD-ROM containing all of Ficino's works, including commentaries and translations. The CD-ROM will make possible any kind of hypertextual research, especially useful for inquiring such a wide corpus of texts, ranging from the works published in the Basel editions to those which remained unpublished. All texts are going to be provided with an apparatus of variant readings and sources. Beyond the philosophical interest, the possibility of studying and questioning these texts will encourage researches on linguistic and grammatical matters in a field, such as late mediaeval and humanistic Latin, which still lacks reliable tools for its study. Thanks to the texts assembled for the CD-ROM it will be possible the creation of data-bases of various entity and typology. This CD-ROM will become part of a series entitled "Classici del pensiero europeo. Textual data banks on CD-ROM" (Nino Aragno Editore) in which have been already published the Opera omnia of Giordano Bruno and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
The second step will be accomplished without interruption as regards to the cd-rom. It consists of publishing traditional editions, based on all MS witnesses, with a philological introduction, critical apparatus of variant readings and sources, and indexes. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The scientific background of this research is represented by the editions of Ficinian texts published in the 20th century. Thanks to Paul Oskar Kristeller's pioneering studies, in that century scholars could begin working on Ficino's texts with the project of publishing them, an undertaking which had been dismissed since the Parisian edition of his Opera omnia in 1641. Which was not, in fact, a new edition and not even the best available, since it reproduced the first Basel edition of 1561, without the important corrections and additions that distinguished the text of the second edition of the Opera printed in 1576.
Kristeller himself in 1937 started publishing in his Supplementum Ficinianum the works by Ficino which had not been included in the 1576 Basel edition, proceeding also to a census of all the manuscripts and editions of Ficino's works which had become an indispensable tool for all the scholars that intended to study the works of the Florentine philosopher. The census in the Supplementum Ficinianum has been kept up to date by Kristeller with new integrations, which he collected in his Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (1969) and in his Marsilio Ficino and His Work after Five Hundred Years (1987). We have to wait until 1956 to see the first edition of a Ficinian text of a certain length, that of the Commentarium in Convivium, edited by Raymond Marcel, the scholar to whom we owe also the publishing, in the years 1964-1970, of maybe the most important, surely the most famous work by Ficino, that is the Theologia Platonica. Toward the middle of the Seventies we have the editions of some of Ficino's commentaries to Plato – on the Philebus (1975), Phaedrus and Sophist (1989) – by Michael J. B. Allen, who published also some other shorter Ficinian texts connected to Plato. In 1978 Prudence Shaw gave us the critical edition of the vernacular version, made by Ficino, of Dante's Monarchia, which represented one of the most significant events in the attempt made by Florentine Humanism to take possession of Dante's figure and works. In 1987 S. Niccoli edited an other successful vernacular version, also due to Ficino himself, that of the Commentarium in Symposium (El libro dell'amore). In 1989 two American scholars, Carol Kaske and John Clark, published the De vita, the Ficinian work that won the wider success between the 15th and the 16th centuries, maybe because of its risky and almost heretical content. In the following year Sebastiano Gentile published the first book of Ficino's letters, which represents the best evidence of the philosopher's wide relations with his contemporaries and of the great interest that surrounded the Florentine 'novelties', that is those new texts and commentaries related to the Platonic tradition which were then starting to be known also outside the inner Ficinian circle. In 1999 Paola Megna has published the Latin translation by Ficino of the platonic Ion and its introductory Argumentum. This is the first modern edition of one of the many trtanslations from Greek which will form a weighty part of the project which is presented here. Recently a new edition of the Theologia Platonica has appeared, ed. by James Hankins and Michael Allen, which substitutes and betters Marcel's. The new edition, begun in 2001, has now reached books XII-XIV (2004). At the same time also the Commentarium in Convivium has been republished by P. Laurens (2002), who reprinted and corrected Marcel's edition. These works constituite the starting point for the electronic edition of Ficino, which has been already begun by scannering, for the present research, almost all the texts just mentioned.
Many contributions which are related to the Ficinian texts and their editorial problems have been published in recent years. One should at least mention the proceedings of the Ficinian conferences held in 1984 (in Florence and Naples) and in 1999 (in London, Tours and Florence). A very precious datum point is given by the bibliography of Ficinian editions and studies published by Teodoro Katinis in «Accademia» (2000) - which continues the previous bibliographies, due to Kristeller (the last one going back to 1986) - annualy updated on the same review by Katinis himself and Stéphane Toussaint. <<<