De vita libri tres (Three Books on Life)
Catalogue updated 2026-06-08
Soni voces preces hymni verba invocationes incantationes musica optimam spiritus influxum ex coelis attrahunt.
Our renderingSounds, words, prayers, hymns, voices, invocations, incantations, music — these best draw the inflow of celestial spirit down to us.
What it is
Ficino's three-book treatise on the care of the soul and body was printed in Florence on 3 December 1489 by Antonio Miscomini, with a dedicatory preface to Lorenzo de' Medici. The three books were composed over several years: De vita sana (c. 1480), De vita longa (1489), and De vita coelitus comparanda (between 1480 and 1489). Book III presents the most explicit treatment of prayer as a theurgic and devotional practice, arguing that songs, prayers, and hymns transmit celestial spiritual influences to the receptive soul. The work was one of the most widely reprinted philosophical texts of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, running to at least five editions before 1500 and reaching readers across learned Europe.
Why it still matters
While the astrological medicine of Book III is dated, Ficino's core claim — that song, prayer, and contemplation orient the soul toward its divine source — maps coherently onto Christian mystical tradition and can enrich any reflective approach to liturgical prayer.
Contemplatio starter guide
A daily portion of stillness
Chosen Portion delivers one short contemplative reading and a guided moment of silence each day — the ascent, one step at a time.
- Daily bite-sized excerpts from the contemplative classics, never a wall of text
- A built-in timed stillness practice that grows from 2 minutes to 10
- Gentle progression through the tradition — the app remembers where you are on the ascent
Kept alongside
Girolamo Savonarola, Expositio in Psalmum Miserere mei Deus (Infelix ego)
Expositio ac meditatio in Psalmum Miserere mei Deus / Infelix ego
Written by Savonarola in May 1498 while imprisoned in Florence awaiting execution, this meditation on Psalm 51 (Miserere mei Deus) was smuggled from his cell and published in Ferrara the same year, reaching numerous Italian editions before 1500. It proceeds verse by verse through the psalm, weaving personal confession with theological reflection on divine mercy and human unworthiness. Savonarola had been the dominant preacher in Florence throughout the later Medici period, and this text became the most widely circulated spiritual writing in post-Medici Florence, carried by the Piagnoni lay reform movement as their central devotional text. Its composition under sentence of death gives it an intensity matched by few comparable documents of the Italian Renaissance.
Triumph of the Cross (Triumphus Crucis)
Triumphus Crucis seu De Veritate Fidei
Savonarola's major theological apologetic, arguing that the Christian faith rests on reason, history, Scripture, and the testimony of the Church Fathers, with a sustained central meditation on the Cross as the triumph of divine love over sin and death. First printed in Florence by Bartolommeo di Libri c. 1497 under the title Triumphus Crucis seu De Veritate Fidei, it was composed while Savonarola led San Marco—the convent patronised and rebuilt by the Medici—and it circulated throughout Florence during Leo X's youth and Clement VII's formation. It was not commissioned by the Medici; Savonarola remained their declared political adversary throughout its composition.
Theologia Platonica de Immortalitate Animae (Platonic Theology)
Ficino's eighteen-book systematic exposition of Neoplatonic philosophy in service of Christian theology, dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici in its preface; the manuscript was circulated from the 1470s, and the editio princeps was printed in Florence by Antonio di Bartolommeo Miscomini on 7 November 1482. Its central argument — that the human soul is the copula mundi, the pivot of the cosmos, drawn upward through love and contemplation from body through mind to God — provided the intellectual and theological backbone of Medici court culture. While not a prayer manual, it was the philosophical foundation from which Ficino drew his personal letters of spiritual direction to Cosimo and Lorenzo and shaped the devotional atmosphere of the Careggi Academy.