De wereld Als Kunstwerk * Marsilio Ficino (isbn: 9025954987 * 2005)

It has been a while since I studied Ficino. This was part of my series of articles about the Renaissance. At the time I mostly focussed on the esoteric side of the man. Later I reviewed Dutch translations of letters of Ficino and now just released is a Dutch translation of Ficino’s introduction to the Platonic theology. Ficino was writing a massive text of several books about the Platonic theology and he was so smart to make a short text for less specialised readers. This little book is introduced and translated by Rijk Schipper and comes in a very nice booklet. Schipper gives a nice introduction to Renaissance humanism, tells a bit about the life and thought of Ficino and then gives the contence of this book in a few alineas. After this the translation follows. The text is well readable, but not always fully clear to me. Since they are explanations of Plato in a (neo-)Platonic way, the book is very philosophical. Interesting, but not always my kind of literature. The introduction is very helpfull for sure. Ficino speaks about the soul, God, etc. and proves himself a child of him time. Yet, we owe it to Ficino (and almost to Ficino alone) that Plato came back in to the attention of man. More information about the man in my articles.