Lodovico Lazzarelli

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On Palm Sunday, 11 April 1484, a bearded rider came through the streets of Rome on a snorting black horse — nigrum frementemque equum — crowned with thorns, wrapped in a black mantle sewn with crescent moons, his wife, his sons, and a small company of disciples behind him. At St. Peter’s he laid upon the altar a placard that began: Ego Joannes Mercurius de Corigio, sapientiae angelus Pimanderque — “I, Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio, angel of wisdom and Pimander.” The Pimander of the Hermetic books had stepped out of Marsilio Ficino’s Latin and into the street as a living man, and among those who saw him ride was a laureled poet of San Severino Marche who had known the preacher for three years and now recognized his master.

The poet was Lodovico Lazzarelli (4 February 1447 – 23 June 1500), and the account he wrote of that day, the Epistola Enoch, preserves the prophet’s placard verbatim and the disciple’s regeneration alongside it. Lazzarelli is remembered chiefly for the Crater Hermetis — the Mixing-Bowl, or Cup, of Hermes — a dialogue in which the recovered wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus is read not as ancient philosophy to be admired but as a way still open to the living. He was the first Renaissance writer to turn the newly recovered Hermetic texts into a personal religion of spiritual rebirth — modern scholarship knows no earlier case — and so he is the point where Renaissance Hermetism turns devotional. He came to this late, and by way of an encounter.

The crowned poet

He was born in San Severino Marche — Roman Septempeda, whence the cognomen Septempedanus he wore all his life — and the first half of his career was the ordinary humanist ascent, done brilliantly. After his father’s death the family moved to Teramo, where the bishop-humanist Giovanni Antonio Campano tutored him from 1464 to 1466 in Greek and Hebrew, with mathematics and astrology beside them. At thirteen he won a prize from Alessandro Sforza of Pesaro for a poem on the battle of San Flaviano. On 30 November 1468, in the church of San Marco at Pordenone during the imperial progress through Friuli, he recited a hexametric poem before Emperor Frederick III, and the emperor crowned him poet laureate on the spot.

A crowned poet writing on classical themes: that is what he was trained to be, and his early works show it. The De gentilium deorum imaginibus (1471), a verse treatise on the images of the pagan gods presented to Borso d’Este and re-dedicated in 1474 to Federico da Montefeltro, drew its illustrations from the engravings of the so-called Mantegna Tarocchi. The more ambitious Fasti christianae religionis, begun by 1480, recast Ovid’s calendar poem for the Christian year; its three dedications — to Sixtus IV, then to King Ferrante I of Naples and his son Alfonso of Calabria, finally to Charles VIII — track their author’s shifting patrons, and its deluxe presentation copy, now at Yale, was left with miniatures unfinished, the poem itself unprinted until 1991. From 1473 Lazzarelli lived in Rome in the service of Lorenzo Zane, patriarch of Antioch, moving through the reformed Roman Academy and the Florence–Rome humanist circuit. By 1481 he stood where a hundred ambitious Latin poets stood. Then the prophet came.

The prophet and the disciple

Giovanni “Mercurio” da Correggio (c. 1451 – after 1506) bore the name of Mercury, the Hermes of the Romans, and rode in penitential dress through the cities of an Italy thick with Joachimite expectation and prophetic ferment, proclaiming a Hermetic and Christian renewal. His first documented appearance in Rome came on 12 November 1481, preaching apocalypse toward the court of Sixtus IV, and Lazzarelli’s acquaintance with him dates from that year: he heard, and became a pupil. The event that converted him came three years later, on Palm Sunday, 11 April 1484 — the entry on the black horse, the crown of thorns, the placard on the altar of St. Peter’s.

The Epistola Enoch, written in the year or so after the event, renders the entry as the disciple saw it: the prophet announcing the water of the kingdom — hanc aquam regni pro paucis — given to the few and proclaimed over all. Lazzarelli signed the letter “Enoch,” the patriarch who walked with God, in symmetry with his master’s “Mercurius”; in verse he addressed him as Mercuri pater et patria pietate magister — Mercury, father, and with a father’s devotion, master. What the master worked in him he calls regeneration: the rebirth the Hermetic books teach, undergone, dated, and witnessed. His own figure for the turn is geographic — he left the hills of Parnassus for Mount Zion — and from that point his work bends entirely toward the Hermetic writings.

The documentary record holds firm around the event. The Epistola’s one internal date, “MCCCCLXXV,” is a scribal or symbolic slip, since the reigning pope it names is Sixtus IV; and when Kurt Ohly doubted in 1938 that Correggio had existed at all, Paul Oskar Kristeller answered the same year with the external witnesses — Trithemius’s annals, the dispatches preserved in Sanuto’s diaries, and the Hebrew Magen Avraham of Abraham Farissol, a Ferrarese Jew who saw the prophet with his own eyes in Rome, Bologna, and Ferrara. Whether Correggio was visionary or charlatan the sources do not settle; a Venetian observer at Lyon wrote dryly in 1501 that among the barbarians the prophet’s get-up counted for a great deal. Lazzarelli’s devotion to him remains the strangest and most personal thing in his life, and the disciple’s testimony does not waver: the man on the black horse was the angel of wisdom, and the rebirth he worked was real.

Completing the Latin Hermetica

Discipleship made Lazzarelli a philologist of scripture. Around 1482, between the first acquaintance and the Palm Sunday entry, he translated into Latin the Definitiones Asclepii ad regem Ammonem — the Definitions of Asclepius to King Ammon, the closing treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum (XVI–XVIII) — working from a Greek manuscript independent of the one behind Ficino’s version. Ficino’s translation of 1463, the first rendering of the Greek Hermetica for Florence, had carried only the first fourteen treatises; Lazzarelli supplied what it left out, and collated his Greek witness against Ficino’s fourteen while he was at it. The finished work he gave to his master: a bilingual presentation codex of 1482, still at Viterbo, gathering Ficino’s Pimander, the Latin Asclepius, the new translation, and three prefaces signed “Enoch.” The translation reached print at Lyon in 1507, as an appendix to Symphorien Champier’s De quadruplici vita — seventy-two years before the Greek text of the Hermetica was first printed at Paris in 1554. For three generations of readers the Latin Hermetic canon ran whole from the first treatise to the eighteenth because a disciple in Rome had finished what Florence began.

The Crater of Hermes

The Crater Hermetis came a decade later, composed at Naples around 1492–94 and dedicated to King Ferrante I of Naples — Ferdinand of Aragon — at whose court it was presented without success. Its full title as printed declares the double way: De summa hominis dignitate dialogus qui inscribitur Via Christi et Crater Hermetis — a dialogue on the supreme dignity of man, called the Way of Christ and the Crater of Hermes. The crater is the mixing-bowl of the fourth Hermetic treatise, filled with divine nous and set down among souls; the dialogue is prosimetric, a teacher speaking to a king, and the teacher is a man who has himself been begotten anew.

Its doctrine builds on a claim Lazzarelli drew from the Latin Asclepius: that the human being, made in the divine image, can in turn generate “gods” — that the regenerated person becomes a maker of living spiritual beings, much as God makes. This is generatio deorum, god-making, the most arresting and most contested idea in his thought, and in the Crater it is the crown of the Hermetic art: the master who has undergone the rebirth begets divine souls in his disciples, as Hermes begot Tat in the old books and as Correggio begot the new Lazzarelli on the road into Rome. The mystery is disclosed at the close of the dialogue in a hymn. Lazzarelli frames the whole as wholly Christian — the new birth of the soul through Christ and the Word, the Pauline “Christ in me” spoken in the accents of Hermetic gnosis — and the adept of the dialogue professes himself at once Christian and Hermetic without contradiction. Readers since have argued over how far his Hermetism strains against orthodoxy and how far it stays within it. The dialogue also cites the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation of Jewish Kabbalah, which makes it one of the earliest witnesses to Christian-Kabbalistic letter mysticism outside the circle of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and his translator Mithridates — a parallel current rather than a documented exchange, for no letter between Lazzarelli and Pico has ever surfaced.

Alchemy and the last years

In his final years Lazzarelli turned to alchemy. The Vade mecum, compiled between 1495 and 1500 and surviving in a single Florentine manuscript, is a personal anthology of alchemical recipes drawn from texts under the names of Ramon Llull, Arnald of Villanova, and Peter Bonus, prefaced in his own verse and prose; in it he names the master who taught him the art in 1495, one Giovanni Ricardi de Branchis from the Low Countries. Modern editors accept the attribution, with a recorded caution. He died on 23 June 1500 in the town where he was born. His brother Filippo wrote his life soon afterward, a Vita that stayed in manuscript until 1765, when it was printed at Jesi together with his shorter Latin verse.

Print, eclipse, and recovery

For half a century after his death he was printed and read. On 1 April 1505 the Paris printer Henri Estienne the elder, in a volume edited by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, issued the editio princeps of the Crater Hermetis, bound after Ficino’s Pimander and the Asclepius — Lazzarelli entered print inside the Hermetic canon itself. The volume was reprinted at Paris in 1522, and in 1557 Gabriel Du Préau’s French translation appeared as Le Bassin d’Hermès. The Definitiones had their own printing at Lyon in 1507. And the Crater found at least one great reader: Cornelius Agrippa, whose conviction that gnosis rather than technique raises man to more-than-human power descends, by Wouter Hanegraaff’s demonstration, from Lazzarellian Hermetism.

After the mid-sixteenth century came the eclipse. The names that carried Renaissance Hermetism forward — Ficino, Giordano Bruno, the theorists of Renaissance magic — crowded the quieter Septempedan out, and he lay nearly forgotten until Kristeller’s article of 1938 recovered him from obscurity. Mirella Brini’s first modern editions followed in 1955; D. P. Walker treated the Crater’s god-making hymn in 1958, noting that Correggio had himself, as Lazzarelli tells us, been regenerated by Hermes Trismegistus; Frances Yates gave him a chapter’s corner in 1964, reading him toward Bruno’s magic. The critical edition of his Hermetic writings by Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn reset the picture: on its reading, the late-antique rebirth treatises were scripts of a transformation to be undergone, and Lazzarelli is their closest Renaissance heir — not a way station between Ficino and Bruno but the structural midpoint of Renaissance Hermetism. Ficino had honored Hermes as the most ancient of the gentile theologians, a witness to the prisca theologia, the single old wisdom held to run beneath the traditions; Lazzarelli took the further step of undergoing the rebirth those texts describe. Modern scholarship sets him beside Ficino and Pico as a distinct third voice — quieter, odder, and more thoroughly committed to the texts as scripture rather than as antiquities.

Sources and further reading

The modern gateway is Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (Tempe: ACMRS, 2005), the critical edition of the Latin texts with facing English and a monograph-length introduction; the University of Amsterdam repository indexes Hanegraaff’s Lazzarelli studies at dare.uva.nl. The standard biography is Guido Arbizzoni, “Lazzarelli, Ludovico,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 64 (2005), online at Treccani; for the prophet, Simona Foà, “Giovanni da Correggio,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 55 (2001), also at Treccani. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Better than Magic: Cornelius Agrippa and Lazzarellian Hermetism,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 4/1 (2009), pp. 1–25, traces the sixteenth-century inheritance; an author’s copy is openly accessible. David B. Ruderman, “Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio’s Appearance in Italy as Seen through the Eyes of an Italian Jew,” Renaissance Quarterly 28/3 (1975), pp. 309–322, presents Farissol’s outside witness; an open copy is held at the University of Pennsylvania. The 1505 Paris editio princeps can be read in facsimile at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Champier’s 1507 Lyon volume carrying Lazzarelli’s Definitiones translation at the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon.

→ In the library: The Definitions of Asclepius unto King Ammon (Mead) · The Cup or Monad (Mead) · The Secret Sermon on the Mountain — On Rebirth (Mead) · Poemandres, the Shepherd of Men (Mead)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Renaissance Hermetism · Marsilio Ficino · Prisca Theologia · Asclepius · Apotheosis · Hermetic Palingenesia · Christian Kabbalah · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Cornelius Agrippa · Late Quattrocento Prophetic Messianism