Statue of Marsilio Ficino, Rome 17th July 2007

One Response to “Statue of Marsilio Ficino, Rome”

1
Petra:

Een heel mooi portret heb je hier neergezet. Wat ik mooi vind is het contrast tussen de lichte kleur van het beeld en de donkere achtergrond. De lichtval maakt alles nog mooier.

July 18th, 2007 at 23:00

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The story behind "Statue of Marsilio Ficino, Rome"

I was wandering around in one of the parks in Rome, filled with dozens, maybe hundreds of statues. I only took one picture of any of them as I liked the stare and the light that hit this man of which I had never heard before.
Only back home I checked his name and of course WikiPedia knows about him.

Quite an interesting character, writing great philosophies half a millennium ago. I do not care much about his fondness of astrology, but the quoted lines of De vita libri tres (Three books on life.), his magnum opus are quite interesting:

“It provides a great deal of curious contemporary medical and astrological advice for maintaining health and vigor, as well as espousing the Neoplatonist view of the world’s ensoulment and its integration with the human soul. “[…] There will be some men or other, superstitious and blind, who see life plain in even the lowest animals and the meanest plants, but do not see life in the heavens or the world […] Now if those little men grant life to the smallest particles of the world, what folly! what envy! neither to know that the Whole, in which ‘we live and move and have our being,’ is itself alive, nor to wish this to be so.”

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