Demetrios Chalkokondyles, Latinized as Demetrius Chalcocondyles and found variously as Demetricocondyles, Chalcocondylas or Chalcondyles was one of the most eminent Greek scholars in the West. He taught in Italy for over forty years; his colleagues included Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, and Theodorus Gaza in the revival of letters in the Western world, and Chalkokondyles was the last of the Greek humanists who taught Greek literature at the great universities of the Italian Renaissance. One of his pupils at Florence was the famous Johann Reuchlin. Chalkokondyles published the first printed publications of Homer, of Isocrates, and of the Suda lexicon.
Demetrios Chalkokondyles, detail of Zachariah in the Temple by Domenico Ghirlandaio. Fresco. Santa Maria Novella, Cappella Tornabuoni, Florence, Italy. 1486–1490.
Demetrios Chalkokondyles at the Academie des sciences et des arts, 1682
Gravestone in Milan.
Page from the first printed edition (editio princeps) of collected works by Homer edited by Demetrios Chalkokondyles. Florence, 1489. Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Marsilio Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin. His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy, influenced the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European philosophy.
Marsilio Ficino from a fresco painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
Corpus Hermeticum: first Latin edition, by Marsilio Ficino, 1471, at the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam.
Zachariah in the Temple (detail), a fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1486–1490) in the Tornabuoni Chapel, Florence, showing (L-R): Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano and Gentile de' Becchi or Demetrios Chalkondyles
De triplici vita, 1560