This essay focuses on the reception of Marsilio Ficino’s works and ideas in Naples at the time of the Aragonese domination, and it offers a preliminary discussion of this neglected area of Renaissance Neoplatonism. Based on a contextualization of Ficino’s letters to Giovanni d’Aragona, four manuscripts produced at the Aragonese library and other pieces of evidence such as Pierantonio Caracciolo’s Farsa de l’Imagico and Giovanni Pontano’s dialogue Actius, it argues that the works and ideas of Marsilio Ficino did circulate at king Ferrante’s court, but were criticized by Giovanni Pontano and his elite of followers. In particular, the essay provides new evidence about the existence of a Ficinian workshop based at the King’s library, and about some of its protagonists such as the scribe and scholar Ippolito Lunense.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Soranzo, M., (2025), "Reading Marsilio Ficino in Quattrocento Italy. The Case of Aragonese Naples", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Soranzo, Matteo. "Reading Marsilio Ficino in Quattrocento Italy. The Case of Aragonese Naples." Quaderni d'italianistica 32 (2): 2012. 27-46. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v32i2.16307. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.