[1] 1484 was the year of the publication of Ficino's Platonis Opera Omnia . As Donald Weinstein observes in his Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970), it was also "a key year in much of the apocalyptic speculation of the time, . . . the annus mirabilis of contemporary prophetic speculation about religious change. Astrologi, profeti, uomini dotti e santi as well as men of lesser degrees of holiness were predicting for that year some great turning point in the history of Christianity, indeed in the religious history of the world" (pp. 75, 88). Indeed Eugenio Garin, Lo zodiaco , p. 86, speaks of the 1480s themselves as a decade "satura di profetismo ermetico, di annunzi escatologici de eversione o de adventu Antichristi ." In his Prognostica ad Viginti Annos Duratura of 1484, Paul of Middelburg, the astrologer
bishop of Fossombrone and Ficino's friend and correspondent, calculated on the basis of his reading of the ninth-century Arab Albumasar that the year 1484 would see a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter that heralded mighty changes in the Christian religion (Weinstein, Savonarola , pp. 87–88, 89, notes that his calculations were taken over by Johannes Lichtenberger, court astrologer to the Emperor Frederick III, who in 1488 heralded the coming of a second Charlemagne to purify the Church). Cristoforo Landino, another of Ficino's friends, predicted on the basis of the same conjunction the return in 1484 of the veltro of Dante's Inferno 1.101–111 to inaugurate religious reform. The Hermetic prophet Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio chose 1484 as the year to appear on Palm Sunday in Rome and later on the Florentine streets calling for repentance before the coming millennium and proclaiming the advent of a new world religion (see Weinstein, Savonarola , pp. 199–202). And a contemporary dialogue entitled Trialogus in Rebus Futuris XX Annorum Proximorum and attributed to Lodovicus Rigius (Cornarius)—see Martin C. Davies, "An Enigma and a Phantom: Giovanni Aretino and Giacomo Languschi," Humanistica Lovaniensia 37 (1988), 1–29 at 17–21—calculated that a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn would occur between 1484 and 1504 and that this would announce the end of the world and the coming of Antichrist. See too Pico's Disputationes adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem 5 passim (ed. Eugenio Garin, 2 vols. [Florence, 1946–1952], 1:520–623, with bibliography and notes on pp. 635–639 and 667–669). In the event, it turned out to be the year of the death of Pope Sixtus IV.
Both Sebastiano Gentile, in his edition of the first book of Ficino's Epistulae , pp. xxxvi–xlii, and James Hankins, in his Plato in the Italian Renaissance 1:302–304, have recently called our attention to the role of "astrological considerations" in general in Ficino's career. Hankins cites the astrological significance Ficino assigned to the publication date of his Plotinus translation (Opera , p. 1537), and also his reply to Janus Pannonius (Opera , pp. 871–872). He concludes—and Gentile concurs—that, in view of the evidence, "it is difficult to believe that the appearance of Ficino's Platonis opera omnia in the Great Year 1484 was not related to Ficino's millennial hopes for a renewal of Christianity through the pia philosophia of Platonism" (p. 304). He observes, moreover, that for Ficino the "conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter signified the conjoining of wisdom and power, the precondition for a Golden Age," and refers to Ficino's argumentum for Plato's Second Letter : "Wisdom which remains distant from power is lame. The great conjunctions of the planets teach us this. Jupiter is the lord; Saturn the philosopher. Surely, unless these be conjoined nothing either great or stable may be established" (his trans., p. 304). On the other hand, Ficino devotes chapter 4 of his De Christiana Religione of 1473–1474 (Opera , pp. 12–13) to refuting the idea that the laws of Christianity could be influenced by the stars.