Escape from the Labyrinth

Abstract

A common summing up of what happened during the scientific renaissance is to say that it was occasioned by a victory of Plato over the church’s Aristotelianism. We may perhaps recall Walter Pater’s compelling image of the young Pico della Mirandola, fresh from wide-ranging studies in the north, standing at the threshold of the room in Florence where Marsilio Ficino had just completed his Latin translation of Plato. The enthusiastic Pico was later to undertake the defence of nine hundred theses in Rome, an undertaking which was in the event proscribed by the Pope, and Ficino was to devote the rest of his life to the translation of Plotinus, ‘that new Plato, in whom the mystical element in the Platonic philosophy had been worked out to the utmost limit of vision and ecstasy’ (1). The Florentine Academy in which Ficino had been dedicated from his youth to the study and translation of Plato was indeed a focal point in the focal city of the Italian Renaissance.