Medicina y política en Francesco Patrizi: el cuerpo de La Ciudad Feliz
Besides some disagreements, La citta felice of Francesco Patrizi has usually been considered both as a work belonging to the utopian genre of sixteenth century or as a philosophical portrait of the real Venice. In this essay, I maintain, instead, that La citta felice was born in Patrizi’s mind from his attempt to support the Aristotelian political, aristocratic, order and to justify it according to the principles of the philosophical and Platonic medicine of Marsilio Ficino. Such an attempt led him to describe the polis as a human body, applying the Hippocratic-Galenic system to explain its internal functions and considering that the political order of the city arises from the civic body’s needs for maintaining the quantity and quality of natural, vital and animal spiritus.
The Inward Zodiac: A Development in Ficino's Thought on Astrology
Ever since Della Torre posited in 1902 that Ficino had undergone a religious crisis that led him to abandon the pagan beliefs of his youth and take holy orders, scholars have wrestled with how to explain the seeming inconsistencies in his thought. Though they downplayed Della Torre's notion of a specific crisis of faith, the next generation of scholars, including Thorndike, Sarton, Kristeller, Garin, Walker, and Yates, still labeled Ficino inconsistent, or at best, melancholic, wavering, and anxious.
Marsilio Ficino as a Man of Letters and the Glosses Attributed to Him in the Caetani Codex of Dante*
The Archivio Caetani, now owned by the Fondazione Camillo Caetani, is one of the most important and interesting family archives that have been preserved in Rome. In addition to numerous old documents, it also contains many letters and papers of writers and scholars of the sixteenth century, and a certain number of valuable literary manuscripts. The most famous among them is the Caetani Codex of Dante's Divine Comedy, which has been well known to Dante scholars since the last century and which was made available, along with the numerous Latin glosses accompanying the text, through a beautiful and accurate edition published by Don Gelasio Caetani in 1930. The manuscript is written on parchment in a beautiful calligraphic hand of the late fourteenth or very early fifteenth century and contains in its margin numerous Latin glosses.