ABSTRACT
1492 was the year when Columbus sailed the wine-dark Atlantic and discovered the Caribbean. But it was also the year of Lorenzo the Magnificent's death and of the magnificent publication of the first complete Latin translation of Plotinus' Enneads by the great Florentine Platonist, Marsilio Ficino. Ficino's 1492 letters to his three German correspondents thus serve, albeit incidentally, as mirrors reflecting own contemporary engagement with a universal interpretative language, even as interpretation itself is a singularly problematic activity in the life of any Platonist. In a famous letter of 13 September 1492 to the first of three German correspondents, Paul of Middelburg, "distinguished natural philosopher and astronomer", Ficino praises his own century as a golden age created by its "golden wits", what would call, too loosely perhaps, its men of genius. For Ficino the Germans were famous as astrologers.
