Teologie platoniche : l'interpretazione di Cesare Vasoli

This essay examines Cesare Vasoli's studies on the re-blossoming of Platonism and on the different forms the myth of the prisca theologia took on in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. His contributions to this area of research, over a series of studies published from the 1980s onwards, were the result of interests and stimuli that connected organically to the courses in History of Renaissance philosophy he held in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy of the University of Florence. Vasoli's interpretation of the thought of Marsilio Ficino develops in new and original directions from that of his mentor Eugenio Garin and stresses the strong link that may be established between Marsilio's thought and the religious crisis of the late fifteenth-century on the one hand, and, on the other, the prophetic andeschatological traditions that were particularly alive in Florence even before the city experienced the force of Savonarola's preaching.

Vasoli found in Francesco Giorgio Veneto and Francesco Patrizi, two authors whose writings were also informed by Plato's thought and who had long exerted their fascination over him, further changes in the development of Renaissance sensibility. The convergence of Platonic philosophy, Hermetic tradition and even Kabbalism in their work opened up the way for powerful new anthropological, religious andcosmological aspirations that were no longer compatible with the orthodox system of knowledge hitherto defended by the Church of Rome through the Inquisition's interventions and censorship system. [Publisher's text]

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