The Reappearance of Hermes in Fifteenth-Century Florence

In 1463 Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin at the request of Cosimo de' Medici, employing a Greek manuscript recently brought to Florence from Macedonia. Yet even earlier, in his youthful writings, Ficino had cited Hermes, drawing on the available late ancient and medieval Latin sources and treating him both as a forerunner of Plato and as a witness to the Trinitarian nature of God. Since the first half of the fifteenth century, other humanists had shown a particular interest in Hermetic sources concerning the nature of God, which was linked to the revived study of the Church Fathers, above all Lactantius. This interpretation of a Platonic Hermes in partial agreement with the Christian religion was based mainly on the similarities between the Timaeus and the Asclepius and was influenced by the School of Chartres; it remained a fixed point in Ficino's conception of Platonic philosophy.