It was a stunning introduction, one that I felt quite sure—despite my normally confident bearing—I could hardly deserve. After all, in this company I recognized, besides Lorenzo, the genius translator, priest, and physician Marsilio Ficino; the respected poet Angelo Poliziano, who was said to be in love with Lorenzo; and Vespasiano da Bisticci, Florence’s premier bookseller.
Now stepping forward to place an arm around my shoulder, Lorenzo made my reintroduction to these men with the simple grace of naming. Then he began with the ones I did not know.
Leon Battista Alberti was the most elderly of the assembled, and the one Lorenzo introduced to me with the deepest reverence and formality. The moment I heard his name I was riveted to the spot. This was the very oracle of scholarship and culture in Florence. The “avatar of grace,” the prince of erudition. He had written authoritative books on architecture, painting, sculpture, and the art of living itself. “Artistry,” he was known to have declared, “must apply to three things—walking in the city, riding a horse and speaking.” He had also published on the properties of light and optics. Nothing, however remote from ordinary learning, was hidden from Alberti’s genius. But he was a paradox, too, an amazing athlete, said to have once jumped over a man from a standing start. Of all the great men in Florence, this was the one whom my Leonardo admired the most.
“I am deeply honored, signor,” I said and was rewarded by a kind smile.
“Meet ‘Gigi’ Pulci,” Lorenzo said of a ruddy-faced and almost corpulent man. “He is our favorite bawdy poet.”
“Amusing and sardonic,” Pulci corrected him with a friendly grimace.
“All of those and more,” Lorenzo cheerfully conceded. “And here is another. Antonio Pollaiuolo—the greatest master of painting in the city.”
“I’ve always admired your Hercules series in the Medici salon,” I told him. “My nephew, Leonardo da Vinci, deeply respects your work with the human form.”
Pollaiuolo, a man who seemed as muscular as the characters he painted, nodded to me with a pleased expression.
“Cristoforo Landino . . . ,” Lorenzo said of a tall, skinny man whose smile revealed several missing teeth, “who you of course know by reputation as a professor of rhetoric and the translator of Dante into the Tuscan tongue. And here,” Lorenzo said, walking me around the tree to a brown-robed scholar whose head was balding and whose shoulders seemed rounded from too much study, “is Count Pico della Mirandola.”
This, too, was a name I recognized. My father had stood in awe of the man for his brilliant translation of the book of Jewish mysteries—the
Cabala
.
“Again, I am honored,” I said, feeling overwhelmed at the extraordinary brilliance of this company, and beginning to wonder at the reason for such a rich and varied gathering of minds.
“Come, sit with us,” Lorenzo said, clearing a space for me on a cut-silk Ottoman carpet at the knee of Alberti, whose skin was wrinkled with age but whose clear green eyes blazed with fine intelligence. “We were discussing ancient Athens—the Athens of Socrates and Plato, and its similarities to modern Florence.”
“Similarities and
differences
,” Gigi Pulci insisted.
“The same in how Florence has attracted the greatest philosophers, artists, scientists, and writers of the Western world, and offered them generous patronage,” said Cristoforo Landino with a tone of authority.
“The same in its climate of cultural achievements and open-mindedness to new and original ideas,” Ficino added.
“Athens also put the entire male population of Kione and Melos to death, and sold their women into slavery,” Lorenzo interjected in a mournful tone, “not unlike your illustrious leader”—he looked down at his feet—“who allowed Volterra to be besieged and ravaged.”
“It was not your intention,” Angelo Poliziano quickly said. “It was a blunder, one for which you are making amends.”
“The Greeks had a public theater, as we do
not
,” Bisticci the bookseller offered. “When they had disgraced themselves in those massacres, they had Euripides to write a brave play about it—the
Trojan Women.
”
“We in Florence have only a repressive church with its inquisitions and heresies,” Pico said.
“True.” It was Pollaiuolo speaking. “But here we are—thinkers, writers, architects, artists—finding ways, even if they are hidden symbols in our paintings and the sculptured walls of our cathedrals, in the mathematics of our music, to display the messages and the mysteries that we all hold so dear.”
I thought then of Sandro Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
and the pagan mythical secrets embedded within his images of feminine beauty and nature. He was not present this day, but I knew without asking that he must be a welcome member of this “family.”
“Let us not lose our cheerfulness,” Ficino urged his companions, “which is a most becoming attribute of a philosopher.”
“If you keep harping at us that cheerfulness and pleasure are the highest good and the fruition of knowledge,” Gigi Pulci shot back, “we shall all become
joyful
.” He uttered the last with so dolorous a tone that everyone laughed.
“Come,” Ficino said, getting to his feet. “It is time we began our meeting.” The others stood as well, straightening their tunics and stretching their joints.
Their meeting?
I thought.
How much more of a meeting was there to be?
The answer became more apparent as the men began to wander down a farther gravel path in the direction of the round Greek pavilion. I saw Lorenzo, his arm around Poliziano’s shoulder, gesturing to me with a tilt of his chin to follow.
Hanging back, I noticed that all amiable chatter had ceased, and what had begun as a casual stroll had, as it reached the edifice, become a stately, single-file procession. Lorenzo opened the tall double doors, and one after another the illustrious Florentines disappeared from sight.
Lorenzo was waiting for me, bringing up the rear, with that mysterious smile again. “Welcome to the Thinkery,” he said. “The Temple of Truth.”
I stared at him perplexed.
“Enter at your own peril,” he added with real gravity now. “It is the most dangerous chamber in all of Europe.”
I stepped across the threshold and he followed, pulling closed the doors, then bolting them behind us.
Before me was a scene I could never in my wildest dreams have conjured. The fluted columns of the circular space and the walls that connected them were of the purest and most finely polished white marble I had ever seen. There was a solidity, a permanency about the place, and yet it was suffused by a sense of ethereal translucency. It was lit from above by a skylight in the arched dome, as golden within as it was without. In the center of the floor was a round pool of crystal-clear water, and in its center a torch that burned with the look of a fierce eternal flame.
The men had retained their silent single file and were moving slowly and with the greatest reverence around the perimeter of the temple, itself lined with marble benches. I joined the train behind Pico della Mirandola, and a third of the way around the circle found myself confronted by a niche in the wall, one that displayed a bust of a man in the Greek style. Even before I saw his name inscribed in the stone pedestal I knew it was Plato. The finely carved marble statue had been crowned with a wreath of fresh laurel, and I could hear Pico murmuring a quiet
reverence
to the long-dead philosopher.
But the parade continued and, another third of the way around the circle, I had come to a second niche and its inhabitant, a great and elderly sage by the sight of his long, curled beard. The inscription read “Hermes Trismegistus.” I felt my breathing run shallow and my skin grew clammy
. These men dared worship the thrice-great Hermes!
Pico passed it and took a seat on the bench beyond. With Lorenzo behind me, my eyes fell on the last icon. The outrageousness, in a Christian world, of the first two had prepared me, I believed, for anything. In fact, I was anything but prepared.
It was a full-length statue of Isis.
Pressed into the niche on every side and at the feet of the Egyptian goddess of magic and healing, motherhood, virginity, and sexuality were fresh bundles of flowers and fragrant herbs. Someone had made a garland of peonies and hung it around her neck.
So paralyzed and confounded was I at the sight of her that only Lorenzo coming up behind me and whispering in my ear to sit did finally move me from my stance before the statue.
I watched Lorenzo make the subtlest obeisance to Isis before taking a seat on the bench several feet from me. All the men, I could see, were perfectly spaced. The eyes of the gathered were wide open and fixed on the flame in the fountain. No one spoke. No one moved but for the gentle rising and falling of chests, and occasional blinking. Thus the contemplative hush grew to a length that should, in any other circumstance, have proven unnerving. But strangely, it grew more comfortable. Almost companionable.
And then without a word being uttered, as if by an inaudible signal given, the men suddenly broke their reverie. Postures relaxed, gentle laughter was heard, and quiet conversations began.
Marsilio Ficino stood, his eyes sweeping round the temple and gazing warmly at each and every smiling face. I found myself surprisingly and happily at ease in the presence of such unspeakable greatness.
“Welcome, all,” he said, “to Plato’s Academy of Florence, and the Confraternity of the Magi.”
The Platonic Academy!
I was thunderstruck. Of course there were rumors about in the city of secret religious societies—“companies of night”—of every persuasion. But of the one that was said to worship at the altar of “the Perfect Man of the Greeks,” only the faintest of whispers were uttered. Such practices were, to the church, the height of heresy and the depth of depravity.
“We have with us today,” Ficino went on, “a guest in our midst, Cato Cattalivoni, a scholar and apothecary. He comes to us by the highest recommendation of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and if, when we’re through with him . . .” Ficino smiled and I heard good-natured chuckling all around. “. . . he so chooses, the honorable Cato will become a brother in our quest for Universal Truth.”
“Here, here!” several men cried out.
Ficino sat and Lorenzo began speaking, though he remained seated on his bench. Despite the gravitas of the circumstance, his tone was as natural and friendly as it was in any of our private conversations.
“My grandfather Cosimo, in 1438—eighteen hundred and sixty-six years after Plato’s birth—founded the Academy. The books and manuscripts of the ancients were just then beginning to flow in from the East, and the educated and curious-minded men—many of them humanists, many of them clerics—were eager to explore the ideas of antiquity. The previous centuries in Europe had grown so dark, so bleak, plague-ridden and superstitious. And the church was in every corner of every household, terrifying men, women, and even little children with the horrors of hellfire and damnation . . . for the sin of simply being alive.
“Then Grandfather discovered Silio,” Lorenzo continued, gazing fondly at Ficino, “and had him begin the translation of
all
the works of Plato. Poggio Bracciolini, Cristoforo, and Pico here worked very hard on their translations as well.” He smiled at Bisticci. “And Vespasiano, bless his heart, made the selling of books into an honorable trade. Of course, now we have Silio’s translation of the
Corpus Hermeticum
to guide our work.”
“Tell Cato about the
original
Academy,” Gigi Pulci demanded.
“Why don’t you tell him, Gigi?” Lorenzo relaxed back on his bench.
“In the three hundred and eighty-third year before Christ’s birth, at the age of forty, Plato the Greek visited
Italy
,” Pulci announced with the greatest pride. “We do not know much about what he saw or studied, but we do know that when he returned home, he was inspired to begin his own college of scholars and teachers and students. . . .”
“Italy inspired Plato himself !” Poliziano cried to the approval of all.
“With one purpose alone,” Pulci continued, “to dedicate themselves to every sort of intellectual study—philosophical, mathematical, astronomical, biological, medicinal. And as we now revere the Greeks, we have come to understand that they revered the Egyptians.”
Landino continued from there. “Of course philosophy was Plato’s first love. And his earliest years and dialogues defended the memory of his beloved teacher, Socrates, against his many detractors.”
“And murderers,” Leon Battista Alberti added with great passion. “Imagine being put on trial and executed by the state for simply teaching young Athenians to think for themselves and speak the Truth. The irony is that Socrates had been hired by those young men’s
own fathers
to tutor them.”
“So the Athens that we so revere was not, in fact, the Ideal State?” I asked, suddenly finding my voice.
Several men began to answer at once, but the melodious voice of Antonio Pollaiuolo prevailed. “Democracy was attempted, but was ultimately scorned by men as wise as Plato himself. Other forms of government—oligarchy and plutocracy—were even more miserable failures.”
“Yet Lorenzo is enthralled by Plato’s ‘Perfect State’ in the
Republic
,” Poliziano insisted. “Wishes to fashion Florence after it.”
“Guilty as charged,” Lorenzo announced. “But look here, we are veering away from our general introduction of our Academy to Cato toward politics, when it is philosophy that truly brings us together.”
“Quite right,” Ficino said. Now he came to his feet and began to walk slowly around the fountain, speaking with deserved authority. “Philosophy, we believe, is man’s highest calling, a mystical and esoteric initiation for the chosen few. In the tradition of Plato we have cultivated a taste for fine argument. We esteem conscious inquiry into knowledge and reality. We strive to leave ourselves open to new influences, and remain ready at all times to reconsider our opinions.”