ABSTRACT
The idealists' appropriation of Ficino for an Italian national intellectual and historiographical agenda accorded Ficino a central position in the emergence of an anthropocentric metaphysics trumpeted as Italy's signal contribution to the history of Western philosophy. This distorted if eyecatching perspective was in many ways the least of Kristeller's problems in the Ficinian world of 1931. Kristeller's was aware too of the methodological and rhetorical issues posed by a repetitive thinker like Ficino whose most arresting ideas are often buried in the veins of Platonic or Plotinian commentary. More than ascertaining his solution to, or his views on, this or that philosophical question, Kristeller insisted that arrive at an understanding of Ficinos forma mentis, at what he called his "complex conception of the universe". The springs that sustain decades of scholarly energy are often hidden. Kristeller never abandoned Ficino after his magisterial monograph and the comprehensive achievement of the two volumes of his Supplementum Ficinianum that he published in 1937.
