COMMENTO SOPRA UNA CANZONE D'AMORE
Pico della Mirandola · Thomas Stanley
Pico's commentary on his friend Benivieni's Platonic canzone of love (1486): the threefold existence of things, the Angelic Mind and the World-Soul, the two Venuses, and the soul's ascent from sensible to celestial beauty. The companion piece to Ficino's On Love, in Thomas Stanley's English of 1651.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Commento on Girolamo Benivieni’s Platonic canzone of love (written 1486), in the abridged English translation by Thomas Stanley, first published in his Poems of 1651 as A Platonick Discourse upon Love. Stanley’s version of the canzone (“The Sonnet”) stands between the Second and Third Books, and the Third Book is the stanza-by-stanza commentary. Text of the edition by Edmund G. Gardner (Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1914; The Humanist’s Library VII), with Gardner’s Introduction and notes. Public domain.
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The prodigy of the Florentine Renaissance, who sought to reconcile all wisdom into one truth.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was the brilliant young prince of the Florentine Renaissance, a friend of Ficino and a prodigy of learning who mastered Hebrew and Arabic alongside Greek and Latin. He set out to defend nine hundred theses drawn from every tradition — Plato and Aristotle, the Hermetica, the Kabbalah, the Arabs — convinced that all true wisdom is ultimately one, the ancient theology.
Pico della Mirandola in the library →
Pico della Mirandola · Thomas Stanley. Each edition has its page, the reader and a plain-text file:
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