Landino, Vergil, and Plato

Summary

The long line of late antique, medieval, and early Renaissance commentators on the Aeneid, from Macrobius and Fulgentius to Bernardus Silvestris and Dante, interpret Vergil’s epic as an evolving tale of the hero’s moral progress from metaphorical infancy to mature responsibility, particularly in the first six books in which Aeneas gives up his adolescent love affair with Dido, accepts the duty to lead his people, and turns toward a contemplation of the virtues and vices of the immortal soul. Their belief that the Aeneid demonstrates moral progress is an inheritance of Neoplatonic modes of interpretation derived ultimately from Plato’s theories of moral progress.

Cristoforo Landino’s Platonic allegory of Aeneas’s moral progress in the Disputationes Camaldulenses of 1474 represents the culmination of this mode of criticism by directly applying Plato’s original doctrines, unlike the earlier tradition of Vergilian commentary, which assumed moral progress with little reference to Plato. Landino’s interpretation of the Aeneid builds on the previous tradition (especially in its emphasis on virtue) but is informed to a great extent by Ficino’s De amore (on Plato’s Symposium) and his Theologia Platonica (on Plato’s conception of soul), which Landino read as they were being written and edited in the 1470s. These two works of Ficino are the impetus for the late Quattrocentro Florentine resurgence of interest in Plato, which resulted in a deeper philosophical grounding of Neoplatonic symbolism in literary criticism and art. The basic theory of Platonic moral progress which inspired Landino and Ficino was that man ascends to God through the intellect’s application of ideas to perception—separating realities from appearances according to Plato’s eidetic doctrine of forms in Republic books 6–7, culminating in the philosopher’s ascent from the cave, led by the light of reason toward the good—and through desire’s prompting by love—moving from its baser instincts toward the divine idea of beauty according to Plato’s erotic doctrine of forms in the Symposium.

Through the patronage of the Medici family, Landino obtained the chair in rhetoric and poetry at the University of Florence in 1457 and became one of the most influential voices on classical literature in the Medici Platonic studio.