Marsilio Ficino and the Magical Music of the Renaissance
The philosopher who sang Orphic hymns to the lyre: how Marsilio Ficino, in his De vita of 1489, linked music, the spirit and the influence of the planets.
In Medici Florence, the philosopher who translated Plato into Latin also had another, less well-known habit: he sang to his own accompaniment on the lyre. Marsilio Ficino, born in Figline Valdarno in 1433 and dead at Careggi in 1499, regarded music not as a mere pastime, but as a means of attuning the soul to the order of the cosmos. His ideas, set out above all in the De vita of 1489, made him the chief theorist of what is called the musical magic of the Renaissance.
The Translator of Plato and Hermes
Ficino grew up under the protection of Cosimo de' Medici, who entrusted him with translating the works of Plato into Latin and gave him the use of a villa at Careggi. Even before Plato, Cosimo asked him to translate a group of Greek treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the so-called Corpus Hermeticum, which Ficino completed in 1463. The complete translation of Plato was printed in 1484.
Around Ficino gathered a circle of friends and pupils whom contemporaries called the Platonic Academy. Ficino also translated the hymns attributed to the mythical singer Orpheus, without publishing them, and sang them to the lira da braccio, a bowed string instrument of the time. For him Orpheus was one of the great ancient theologians, keeper of a wisdom that foreshadowed Christian wisdom.
The Spirit and the Influence of the Planets
The third book of the De vita, entitled De vita coelitus comparanda, on obtaining life from the heavens, sets out a theory of celestial influence. Ficino takes up a concept of ancient medicine, the spiritus, a subtle substance acting as a link between body and soul, and connects it to the spirit of the world, which pervades the universe. Music, being made of moving air and numerical proportions, was for him the means best suited to act upon the spirit.
According to this doctrine, each planet has a character that is also expressed in a kind of song. Ficino describes in general terms the qualities of a jovial, solar or venereal music, suited to drawing down the influence of the corresponding planet. This is a philosophical theory rooted in the astrology of its time, and it should be read as such: an attempt to unite music, medicine and cosmology in a single system.
Natural Magic and Caution
Ficino was a priest and knew that these ideas could arouse suspicion. He therefore insisted on distinguishing his natural magic, which made use of the properties of the created world, from demonic magic, which invoked spirits. The De vita nonetheless met with criticism, and Ficino had to defend himself through influential friends in the Roman curia.
His ideas had a wide echo. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, in his nine hundred theses of 1486, devoted several conclusions to the Orphic hymns and their power in natural magic. The English historian Daniel Pickering Walker, in his book Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella of 1958, reconstructed this tradition up to the early seventeenth century.
Today Ficino is remembered above all as a philosopher and translator, but his conception of music as a bridge between the soul and heaven remains one of the most fascinating pages of Renaissance thought. It links the ancient harmony of the spheres to a concrete practice: playing and singing to attune oneself to the cosmos. It was an ancient idea, which he made relevant once again.