Platonic Academy

Platonic Academy, a group of scholars in mid-15th-century Florence who met under the leadership of the outstanding translator and promulgator of Platonic philosophy Marsilio Ficino (q.v.), to study and discuss philosophy and the classics. The influence of their modernized and Christianized Platonism on Italian Renaissance thought was profound and still survives in the popular concept of “Platonic love.” Although the group was never formally organized, its members considered themselves a re-creation of the Academy that had been formed by Plato in Athens. The most important members of the group, most of them connected with the courts of Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, were Politian (or Poliziano), the outstanding poet and classical scholar of the Renaissance; the professor of poetry and oratory at the University of Florence, Cristofero Landino; and the scholars and philosophers Pico della Mirandola and Gentile de’ Becchi.