Author:
Michela Andreatta, Ca’Foscari University
In the spring of 1486, the Sicilian convert Guillelmus Raimundus Moncada (alias Flavius Mithridates) made his official entrance as a private teacher and translator in the service of the humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Mithridates’ fame among the members of the Florentine academy was tied to the Arabic-Latin translations he produced for Duke Federico of Montefeltro and for a long apologetic sermon, entitled “Sermo de Passione Domini”, that he had delivered before the papal court in 1481.
In the span of a few months, the eccentric and ill tempered convert introduced Pico to the study of the Oriental languages (Hebrew and Aramaic, in primis), Jewish tradition and kabbala. Mithridates’ activity as Pico’s teacher was closely connected to his work as a translator. In fact, at the demand of his young patron, Mithridates rendered into Latin a large bulk of Hebrew works, mainly kabbalistic, creating a corpus running up to 3,500 folio pages, the majority still in manuscript. Included among the Hebrew works that Mithridates translated for Pico was Gersonides’ Commentary to the Song of Songs, a philosophical treatise in which human love is interpreted as an allegory of the epistemological process of ascent towards God and achievement of intellectual perfection. Mithridates’ rendition, extensively annotated in Pico’s own hand-writing, is still extant in the ms. Latin 4273 of the Vatican Library. The very nature and purpose of Gersonides’ work reveal something of Pico’s specific interests - at least at the beginning of his collaboration with Mithridates, when the translation was probably completed. The diffuse interventions on the text, mainly in the form of interpolations by the translator, shed light on Mithridates’ decisive role in the shaping of his patron’s opinions concerning Judaism and Jewish authors. Through this enthralling process of transmission, reading and interpretation of Gersonides’ Commentary “iuxta Mithridatem,” Pico derived the mystical motif of mot neshiqah, i.e. the “death by kiss,” a motif he used in his own treatise on love, the Commento a una Canzone d’amore, thus preparing the path for the nascent development of Christian kabbala.
