Marsilio Ficino on Saturn, the Plotinian Mind, and the Monster of Averroes
This chapter explores some striking aspects of Marsilio Ficino’s many-sided engagement with Saturn. It focuses, however, not so much on the old god’s traditional mythological and astrological associations, though these played important roles for Ficino fo
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Marsilio Ficino on Saturn, the Plotinian Mind, and the Monster of Averroes Michael J.B. Allen
English speakers have always associated saturnian melancholy with that incomparable compilation by the hypochondriacal Robert Burton in the seventeenth century, The Anatomy of Melancholy,1 though the problem of the black humour goes back to antiquity and to the Pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata.2 Academic study of melancholy’s complex history in the Renaissance, however, is the work of a number of distinguished twentieth-century scholars, beginning effectively with Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky’s penetrating investigation of Dürer’s great woodcut, Melencolia
I am especially indebted in this essay to conversations with Brian Copenhaver, Stephen Clucas, Peter Forshaw, Guido Giglioni, Dilwyn Knox, Jill Kraye, and Valery Rees. This article was first published in Bruniana et Campanelliana, 16 (2010), pp. 11–29. I would like to thank the publisher for allowing the article to be included in the present volume. 1 Now edited and annotated by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair, with introduction and commentary by J. B. Bamborough and Martin Dodsworth, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000). See Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and James Hankins, ‘Monstrous Melancholy: Ficino and the Physiological Causes of Atheism’, in Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and His Influence, eds Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw and Valery Rees (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 25–43 (published in Italian as ‘Malinconia mostruosa: Ficino e le cause fisiologiche dell’ateismo’, Rinascimento, 47 (2007), pp. 3–23), which deals inter alia with some of Burton’s Ficinian sources. 2 Problemata, XXX.1.953a10-955a39. See Hellmut Flashar, Melancholie und Melancholiker in den medizinischen Theorien der Antike (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1966); Jackie Pigeaud, La maladie de l’âme: Étude sur la relation de l’âme et du corps dans la tradition médico-philosophique antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981); and John Monfasani, ‘George of Trebizond’s Critique of Theodore of Gaza’s Translation of the Aristotelian Problemata’, in Aristotle’s Problemata in Different Times and Tongues, eds Pieter De Leemans and Michèle Goyons (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006), pp. 273–292. M.J.B. Allen (*) UCLA, 633,18th Street, 90402, Santa Monica, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Akasoy and G. Giglioni (eds.), Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 211, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5240-5_5, © Fabrizio Serra Editore, Pisa and Rome 2010. All Rights are Reserved.
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1 (1514), and of Dürer generally.3 This was followed by the pioneering studies of Don Quixote by Harald Weinrich4 and Otis Green,5 and of Elizabethan drama by Lawrence Babb in The Elizabethan Malady.6 Then in 1963 appeared Rudolf and Margot Wi
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