Ficino and the Pimander: the translation that changed the Renaissance

In fifteenth-century Florence, a Greek manuscript changed the work schedule of the most famous philosophical academy in Europe. Around 1460 the monk Leonardo da Pistoia, commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici to search for ancient codices, brought from Macedonia a copy of fourteen treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum. Cosimo, by then elderly, asked the young Marsilio Ficino to set aside his translation of Plato and turn at once to those texts.

Cosimo's choice

The decision is explained by the conviction, shared by many humanists, that Hermes Trismegistus was a very ancient sage who lived in the time of Moses or shortly after. Translating his writings meant going back to the source of wisdom, even before Plato. Ficino completed the work in 1463 and called it Pimander, after the divine figure who appears in the first treatise, the Poimandres.

In the dedication to Cosimo, Ficino set out a genealogy of ancient wisdom: from Hermes the knowledge of divine things was said to have passed to Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus and finally Plato. This is the doctrine of the prisca theologia, the ancient theology, which saw pagan sages as forerunners of Christianity. In this scheme Hermes held first place.

Printing and diffusion

The Pimander circulated first in manuscript and was printed for the first time at Treviso in 1471. Numerous editions followed across Europe, making the text one of the most widely read philosophical books of the Renaissance. As early as 1463 Tommaso Benci had made an Italian vernacular version of it, published in Florence in 1548, a sign of an interest reaching beyond the circle of Latinists.

Ficino's translation did not include all the treatises known today. The last ones in the Corpus were put into Latin later by other scholars, and the complete Greek edition appeared in Paris in 1554. For a long time, however, the name Pimander remained a byword for the whole Hermetic doctrine. The title Ficino chose, later extended to the whole collection, helped create the impression of a unified book, whereas it consisted of different writings gathered in the Byzantine period.

Hermes in images and ideas

Enthusiasm for Hermes can also be seen in art. In the pavement of Siena Cathedral, in 1488, a marble inlay was made depicting him with the inscription Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus contemporaneus Moysi, «contemporary of Moses». The image, placed at the entrance of the cathedral, shows how widely accepted the idea of a pagan prophet of Christianity was. Along the nave of the same pavement the Sibyls also appear, other pagan figures whom tradition regarded as heralds of Christ.

Hermetic ideas influenced thinkers such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Ludovico Lazzarelli and, later, Giordano Bruno. The theme of human dignity, man being created in the image of the divine mind, and that of an animate cosmos bound together by correspondences found an authoritative source in the Pimander. Ficino himself, in his writings on medicine and astrology, combined these suggestions with Platonism.

The authority of Hermes began to decline only in 1614, when Isaac Casaubon dated the treatises to the Roman age. By then, however, Ficino's work had had its effect. For a century and a half the translation of 1463 had offered Europe an image of ancient Egypt as the homeland of wisdom, an image that still survives in modern culture. Even after Casaubon, moreover, the treatises went on being read as philosophical testimony, no longer as prophecy.