Cristoforo Landino

Abstract

Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498) was a leading humanist in Medici Florence; he was known as an accomplished Latin poet and an enthusiastic proponent of the Italian vernacular. He lectured on Latin and Italian literature at the Florentine Studio from 1458 to 1497, numbering among his students Marsilio Ficino, the most important Renaissance translator, commentator, and promoter of Plato. Though not himself a professional philosopher, Landino took a keen interest in philosophy, especially – though not exclusively – Platonism. He produced three philosophical dialogues: De anima, Disputationes Camaldulenses, and De vera nobilitate. Largely derivative, not only of classical authors but also of medieval and Renaissance thinkers, these three works, written in elegant Ciceronian Latin, dealt with philosophical themes such as the immortality of the soul, the superiority of contemplation to action, the supreme good, and the primacy of virtue in determining nobility. In addition, he drew on various Platonic notions, mostly to do with ethics, in his allegorical interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid and his commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy, both of which were highly influential; and in this way he contributed to the Renaissance revival of Platonism.

Cristoforo Landino was born in Florence in 1424; his family, originally from Pratovecchio in the Casentino, was of modest means. In his early youth, he pursued legal studies in Volterra, earning a doctorate at the age of 15; however, he disliked the law and returned in 1439 to Florence, where he attended lectures in the studia humanitatis given by Carlo Marsuppini (1398–1453) and also came under the influence of other prominent humanists such as Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444). After Marsuppini’s death, he sought to take over his chair in the Florentine Studio, but he had several rivals for the post, each supported by different factions within the city. In the end, the various disciplines covered by Marsuppini were divided between three scholars: the Byzantine John Argyropoulos (c. 1415–1487) taught philosophy; Francesco da Castiglione (c. 1420–1484) lectured on Greek; and Landino, who was a specialist neither in philosophy nor in Greek, gained the chair of rhetoric and poetry in 1458, with the powerful support of Piero de’ Medici (1416–1469). In his long and successful career at the Studio, which lasted until 1497, the year before his death, Landino lectured mainly on the Roman poets (Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Persius), and also on Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Familiar Letters, and on the Divine Comedy of Dante and the Canzoniere of Petrarch. His lectures formed the basis of the line-by-line commentaries, which he published in Latin on Horace (1482) and Virgil (1488), and in Italian on Dante (1481); all three were frequently reprinted and influenced the later critical tradition of these authors. Landino took the view that the great poets – above all Virgil and Dante, and also Juvenal – included philosophical truths in their writings; however, they hid these under the veil of metaphors and allegories, which he thought was the task of learned commentators like him to uncover. These truths, which were usually closely connected to Platonism, centered on ethics, with the poet seen as deploying his art in order to inspire readers to seek virtue and shun vice.

In his own Latin poetry, he imitated the Roman poets Catullus, Horace, and Propertius, and also the Italian verse of Petrarch – Landino’s main major collection was entitled Xandra, after the woman who played the role of Laura in his poetry. The first book, begun around 1443, was originally dedicated to the humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), who later became a relative by marriage when, in 1459, Landino wed Lucrezia di Alberto di Adovardo Alberti. The final version of the collection, in three books, was rededicated to Piero de’ Medici and completed around 1459 or 1460. Apart from amatory verses to Xandra, it includes poems in praise of the Medici and of Landino’s circle of humanist friends: Carlo Marsuppini, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), and Bartolomeo Scala (1430–1497).

Like Alberti, Landino was a champion of the vernacular. He published two Italian translations from Latin: Pliny’s Natural History in 1476 and the Sforziad of Giovanni Simonetta (1420–1490) in 1490. He also composed a Formulario di lettere e di orazioni in volgare, which was first printed in 1485.

Following a well-established tradition among Florentine humanists, Landino attempted, in 1456, to enter the Chancery, the highest echelon of the Republic’s civil service. He did not succeed, but in 1467 he attained the lower post of chancellor of the Parte Guelfa, and in 1483 he became a secretary to the Signoria, the ruling body of Florence. Landino’s involvement in civic duties, which he carried in parallel to his career as a university professor, confirms his commitment to the view, put forward in his philosophical works, that the best life combines both action and contemplation and that humanist intellectuals had a responsibility to act as advisors to those who governed.

Among Landino’s students was Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who later became a close friend. In 1456, Ficino dedicated his treatise Institutiones ad Platonicam disciplinam, now lost, to Landino, who impressed on the budding Platonist the need to study Greek in order to gain access to the original sources, thus setting Ficino on the course that would lead to his publication of the first complete translation of Plato into Latin (1484) and his emergence as the key figure in Renaissance Platonism. In his commentary on the Symposium, completed in 1469 and written in the form of a dialogue, Ficino cast Landino as one of the interlocutors, given the task of interpreting the famous speech of Aristophanes.

Landino himself composed three philosophical dialogues. The earliest, De anima, written around 1471–1472, features three interlocutors – himself, Marsuppini and the mathematician Paolo Toscanelli (1397–1482) – who discuss a variety of issues concerning the soul over the three days of Easter. Landino broadly structures the treatise on Aristotle’s De anima: Book I deals with the nature of the soul and its origin; Book II with the faculties of the soul that interact with the body; and Book III with the mind, the intellectual virtues, and the immortality of the soul. As one would expect of a humanist, he draws on a range of classical, Christian, and Renaissance sources; more surprisingly, he makes extensive use of works by medieval scholastics, especially the commentary on De anima by Albert the Great (McNair 1993). Interestingly, Landino’s account of the Platonic doctrine of the soul relies more on Macrobius, Albert the Great, and the treatise In calumniatorem Platonis, published a few years earlier in 1469, of Cardinal Bessarion (1403/1408–1472), than on the translations of Plato by Ficino, which may not yet have been in circulation (McNair 1992).

By the time Landino wrote his second philosophical dialogue, Disputationes Camaldulenses, now dated to around 1474 (Fubini 1996), he had gained access to Ficino’s translations of Plato and also to his Theologia Platonica, completed in 1474. The dialogue, which was first printed in 1480, is set in the summer of 1468 at the monastery of Camaldoli. Landino again includes himself among the interlocutors, along with Ficino and other Florentine intellectuals; but the main speakers in the first half are Alberti and Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492), who discuss the relative merits of action and contemplation, in Book I, and the ultimate good, in Book II. Although in the debate, Alberti, the spokesman for contemplation, triumphs over Lorenzo, the advocate of action, both sides accept that, in reality, the best life will be a combination of the two, as represented by the dialogue’s dedicatee, Federico da Montefeltro (1422–1482), Duke of Urbino, a successful military commander, whose leisure moments were devoted to study. A discussion of the competing theories of the ultimate good leads to the conclusion that it lies in the soul’s cognition of God in the afterlife, a position that is supported by arguments liberally borrowed from Book III of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles. These themes are picked up in the second half of the dialogue, in which Alberti delivers an extended Neoplatonic interpretation of Books I–VI of the Aeneid as an allegory of the soul’s arduous ascent from pleasure (Troy), through political activity (Carthage), avoiding moral hazards such as greed (Harpies) and ambition (Polyphemus), so that it can reach its final destination of true wisdom (Italy).

The last of Landino’s philosophical dialogues, De vera nobilitate, is set in 1469 but could not have been written before 1487, since it refers to Ficino as a canon of the Florentine cathedral, an office he obtained in that year. Unlike his other two dialogues, the interlocutors are not friends and associates of Landino, but instead are given fictional Greek names: Aretophilus (“lover of virtue”), who is poor but learned, and his wealthy patron, Philotimus (“lover of honor”). In line with earlier humanist treatments of true nobility, the argument is overwhelming weighted in favor of virtue, in particular, the virtues of the mind and soul.

Cross-References

• Albert the Great

• Aristotelianism in the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew Traditions

• Dante Alighieri

• Petrarch

• Platonism, Renaissance

• Thomas Aquinas

• Virtue and Vice