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 The unpublished works have been copied from first editions or manuscripts.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 At the same time this project foresees the critical edition of Ficino's still unpublished texts, with philological introductions and apparatuses of variant readings and sources.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 >>>

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 >>>

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 >>>