The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning. Christopher S. Celenza. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xvi + 438 pp. $120.
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans (chapter 4), and Plato himself (chapter 5). Plato’s Persona offers a global vision of Ficino’s hermeneutical work, which has the advantage of presenting a rigorous historical-philological method. In particular, I find three highlights that advance Ficino scholarship and open up new research directions. The first one is Robichaud’s study of the rhetorical features that Ficino implements in his philosophical work. Although the topic of the relations between rhetoric and philosophy in the Renaissance has been explored from various points of view (suffice to mention Pico’s famous letter De Genere Dicendi Philosophorum), Robichaud’s perspective is unique because it shows how Ficino’s rhetorical tools, mainly prosopopoiea and enargeia (i.e., “the fabrication and presentation of vivid personae” [17]), serve specific philosophical or performative purposes. The second great contribution is the research of the “Iamblichean undercurrents” (212) in Ficino’s opera. The presence of these undercurrents has been ignored by the literature probably because Ficino’s translations of Iamblichus were never published. While the book is not limited to exploration of this influence, the discoveries presented by Robichaud on the relations between Iamblichean elements and the Renaissance-Pythagorean conception of the dialogues certainly constitute its most innovative part. Without a doubt, this book will invite the publication of more studies on this topic. Finally, the textual work done by Robichaud on the different historical elements contained in manuscripts owned or annotated by Ficino is outstanding. His expertise allows him to clarify several new elements in Ficino’s exegetical practices—for example, the importance of scholia in his interpretations and their incorporation in his published commentaries. In sum, Robichaud has written a work that explores with great detail and originality Ficino’s relations with various traditions of Platonism. It definitely constitutes a very important contribution to Renaissance studies.