Oldal 143 [143]
A CHRISTIAN-HERMETIC-JUDAIC INITIATION...
LAZZARELLI AS THE NEW ENOCH AND DA CORREGGIO AS TRISMEGISTUS
Pico’s cabalistically oriented interest in Enoch/Metatron* gained a new
dimension in the late fifteenth century, when Christian cabalists and
Renaissance magi in increasing numbers claimed themselves either the heirs
to the patriarch or even his reincarnation. A notable example was Lodovico
Lazzarelli (1447-1500), one of those eccentric wandering Humanists who
were in possession of great philological knowledge about ancient languages
and philosophies while at the same time their minds were filled with syncretic
and esoteric ideas about religious enthusiasm and magical exaltatio. These
people thronged the roads of Europe as they travelled from court to court
looking for prospective patrons, and they not infrequently ended up in
the prisons of dissatisfied princes or representatives of the Inquisition.
Lazzarelli* was born in a Jewish neighborhood of San Severino. Like
Ficino, he was the son of a medical doctor. At the beginning of his career,
he resembled a typical Humanist, under the spell of Classical genres and
rhetoric. Around 1466, he moved to Venice, where he studied Latin and Greek
with the humanist Giorgo Merula. In 1468, Emperor Frederick III came to
Italy, and in Pordenone (near Venice) Lazzarelli had the opportunity to greet
the emperor with a Latin oration on the dignity of poetry (De laudibus poesis
et de dignitate poetica). Lazzarelli moved to Rome around 1469 and later
joined the Societas Literatorum S. Victoris in Esquiliis, a reformed version of
the former Roman Academy, which had been of dubious repute and had been
dissolved by Paul I], who had accused the institution of having conspired
against the pope and having practiced pagan rites and sodomy. In this period,
Lazzarelli wrote his first major work, Fasti christianae religionis, which was
® Inhis famous 900 theses, in which he sought to lay new foundations for Christian philosophy,
Pico della Mirandola, the first Christian Cabalist, identified Enoch with the archangel
Metatron, the regent of God. This idea first appeared in 3 Enoch, the Hebrew version of the
Book of Enoch, and in the fifteenth century it was not common knowledge among gentile
Humanists. See Copenhaver, Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala...
(1999), 36. On Pico’s cabalist-Hermeticism see also Brach, Umanesimo e correnti esoteriche
in Italia (2010), especially 262-70; Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486)
(1998), 105-33; Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (1989);
on Jewish intellectual culture in the Italian Renaissance see Ruderman ed., Essential Papers
on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (1992), especially Moshe Idel’s paper,
The Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretations of the Kabbalah in the Renaissance, 107-69;
and Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery In Early Modern Europe (1995).
On Lazzarelli see primarily the critical edition of Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn (Lazzarelli,
The Hermetic Writings (2005); and Hanegraaff’s monographic introductory study in that
volume (Lazzarelli, 1-151). Furthermore: Brach, Umanesimo e correnti esoteriche in Italia
(2010), 271ff; Kristeller, Marsilio Ficino e Lodovico Lazzarelli (1938); Kristeller, Lodovico
Lazzarelli e Giovanni da Correggio (1960); Rudermann, John Giovanni Mercurio da
Correggio’s Appearance in Italy (1975); Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino
to Campanella (2000), 64-72; Thorndike The History of Magic and Experimental Sciences
(1923-1958), 5:438.
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