, where the group may have met In about 1462
Cosimo de' Medici established the young
Marsilio Ficino at Montevecchio, a villa close to his own
Villa di Careggi in the Florentine countryside. There Ficino, who was an ardent
Neo-Platonist, was to study ancient Greek and work on translating the works of
Plato into Latin.
Cosimo de' Medici attended
Gemistos Plethon's lectures and was motivated to establish the
Accademia Platonica in Florence, where Italian students of Plethon continued their teachings following the conclusion of the council. Ficino became the central figure of an informal group of people interested in his work, who both corresponded and met for intellectual discussions at Montevecchio, at Careggi, or perhaps in Florence itself. It was never a formal body – it had no statutes and kept no records of membership – and there is no contemporary evidence that it was ever known as a "
Platonic Academy". Arnaldo della Torre identified about a hundred people as participants in the group, among them
Alessandro Braccesi,
Demetrius Chalcondylas,
Cristoforo Landino,
Angelo Poliziano,
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and
Lorenzo de' Medici. Among those who Ficino specifically stated had never been among his
auditores ('listeners') are
Benedetto Accolti,
Leon Battista Alberti, Demetrius Chalcondylas, Cristoforo Landino, Poliziano, and Pico della Mirandola. According to some accounts, the group continued to meet after the death of Ficino in 1499, centred round
Francesco Cattani da Diacceto. Meetings were no longer at Careggi but in the
Orti Oricellari, the gardens of the
Palazzo Rucellai, made available by
Bernardo Rucellai. The group was dissolved in 1522 in the aftermath of the
plot to assassinate Giulio de' Medici. Other accounts give an earlier date of 1492–1494 for the dissolution of the group, suggesting that the meetings in the Orti Oricellari were not directly connected, although many of the same people participated in them. == References ==