Platonic Science in the Vernacular: Sebastiano Erizzo’s Italian Translation of Plato’s Timaeus (1557)

Abstract

This article provides a textual and contextual investigation of the earliest Italian translation of Plato’s Timaeus, produced by Sebastiano Erizzo (1525-1585) and printed in Venice by Comin da Trino in 1557. While the work perfectly reflects Erizzo’s interests in Platonic philosophy, there is evidence that a key motivation behind this venture was the encouragement of his editor and literary agent, Girolamo Ruscelli (1518-1566), who sought to incorporate Erizzo’s translation into the first complete program of vernacularisation of Plato’s works ever attempted in Italy. This project was meant not only to rival Aristotle’s corpus in the vernacular, which by that time was available almost in its entirety, but also to contribute to the problem of the best method for teaching philosophy, an issue hotly debated in Padua and Venice in these years. Both the philological accuracy and the rich interpretive apparatus of Erizzo’s edition testify to a radical change in the way sixteenth-century intellectuals approached Platonic philosophy. By dismissing the most evident theologically-oriented elements of Marsilio Ficino’s translation (1484), Erizzo seems to be far more concerned with the philological aspects of the translator’s work. In this sense, Erizzo’s translation may be considered as the result of, and also a significant step towards, a new interpretation of Plato’s natural philosophy.