The Divine Letters of the Great Marsilio Ficino, Volume 1

...until our times. Beyond this, I cannot make a gift of it to anyone else, because for a long time now, everything that the most divine intellect original: "ingegno"; a Renaissance term for innate creative power and genius. of the marvelous Marsilio Ficino ever produced has belonged to the great House of Medici; for while he lived, he was as dear as life itself to the most illustrious ancestors of this so noble a family. Therefore, I do not give these to Your Excellency as a thing of my own, but rather restore to you what is yours: the divine letters of the great Marsilio Ficino, which I have translated into our Tuscan tongue original: "lingua Thoscana"; the literary dialect of Florence which was then evolving into the standard Italian language., so that the grace and great knowledge found within them might delight and benefit a greater number of people. And because I also do not think that, by being in this language—which has no cause to envy Latin, and which Your Excellency has always defended and favored—they lose any degree of