Lazzarelli, Lodovico

While the rise of Florentine Neoplatonism is usually associated with the philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,
Lodovico Lazzarelli also made important contributions to the forging of
Christian Hermeticism. Like Pico, he became attracted to Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah and in his work Crater Hermetis (c. 1493), he contributed to this intellectual trend with a passionate and poetical vision of ascension, the technology of which he partly borrowed from the mystical Judaica, at the same time creating (according to Wouter Hanegraaff) a particularly pure form of ecstatic Christian mystery. In my paper I introduce this text and point out the decisive meeting of Lazzarelli with Giovanni “Mercurio” da Correggio, whom he identified as the reborn Hermes Trismegistus, while he styled himself as a reborn Enoch. Their twin story is a fascinating example of early Renaissance Neoplatonic mysticism which synthesized high religiosity with classical philosophy and a fervent desire for the deification of man.

This is the first complete edition and translation in any modern language of the Hermetic writings of Lodovico Lazzarelli, an Italian poet and mystical philosopher from the late 15th century. Lazzarelli’s seminal importance for the history of Renaissance Hermetism was recognized by Paul Oskar Kristeller as early as 1938. While Marsilio Ficino had famously translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin, it was Lazzarelli who had first translated its final three tracts, that had been absent from the manuscript used by Ficino. Furthermore, with his Crater Hermetis Lazzarelli had produced a jewel of Christian Hermetic literature, which still remains one of the purest and most impressive examples of the genre, in addition to being one of the very earliest testimonies of Christian kabbalah as well. In recognition of these facts, Lazzarelli was given a central role in the first scholarly collection of Renaissance Hermetic texts, published by Eugenio Garin and others in 1955. However, in the wake of Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), which brought the Hermetic Tradition to the attention of a large international audience, Lazzarelli was marginalized and forgotten. Only since the mid-1980s, Italian scholars like Claudio Moreschini and Maria Paola Saci have began once more to call attention to the poet from San Severino, but again their influence has remained restricted to the circles of Italian specialists.

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