Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) the leading exponent of the revival of Platonism in Renaissance Italy was both a Platonic philosopher as well as a trained physician. Following the Socratic tradition, Ficino envisioned himself as a medicus animarum, a “doctor of souls” who wished to cure his fellow Florentine's spiritual and physical ailments through an ideal compound of Platonic wisdom and medical knowledge. In particular, it was the fusion of his early medical training with his Platonic interest that allowed him to develop a powerful understanding of the nature of Platonic Eros. Ficino's unique understanding of Platonic Eros is evident in his commentary on Plato's Symposium, the Commentarium in Convivium Platonis. In this treatise Ficino relies on a medico-philosophical discourse to account for a love that ultimately is both physical as well as metaphysical in nature.

Most critical studies of Ficino's love treatise have centered their scholarship mainly on the metaphysical aspects of Ficino's concept of Platonic love. In contrast, by bringing to the fore the medical dimension of Ficino's theory of love, this dissertation argues that Ficino's Platonic language of love rested on a close intellectual symbiosis between medicine and philosophy. If anything, Ficino effectively deployed various medical concepts such as the theory of complexio, the four humors, amor hereos (love sickness) and genethliacal astrology (as part of medical prognostication) to render cognitively comprehensible the psycho-physiological workings of Platonic Eros.

Furthermore, my dissertation examines the reception of Ficino's theory of love among a select number of early sixteenth-century Italian writers for whom Ficino's appropriation of Platonic Eros became synonymous with “Platonic love.” Over the course of the sixteenth century, the concept of Platonic love, as it was elaborated by Italian authors of love treatises went through a process of literary refashioning. This dissertation will show that as this recuperation occurred, in itself a complex process of cultural translation, much of the richness and complexity originally associated with “Platonic love” fell by the wayside.