The most famous Pope Leo, Leo X, was steeped in Plato.

The eminent Byzantine Greek scholar George Gemistos Plethon, who privately rejected Christianity, so admired Plato that he took the name ‘Plethon’. At the 1438-39 Council of Florence, he reintroduced Plato to the West as part of a failed attempt to repair the Great Schism between the Eastern and the Western Church and present a united front to the Ottoman Empire (Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453).

While in Florence, Gemistos Plethon made an impression on the banker, politician, and patron of the arts Cosimo de’ Medici, who had, among others, commissioned the David of Donatello, the first freestanding male nude since antiquity. He persuaded Cosimo to establish an institute and informal discussion group, now known as the Platonic Academy of Florence, which, under Cosimo’s protégé Marsilio Ficino, went on to translate all of Plato’s extant works into Latin. Ficino seems to have coined the term ‘Platonic love’ [amor platonicus], which first appears in a letter that he wrote to Alamanno Donati in 1476. In 1492, he published a series of Platonic love letters to Giovanni amico mio perfettisimo [‘Giovanni my most perfect friend’], the poet Giovanni Cavalcanti.

Cosimo appointed Ficino as tutor to his grandson Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492)—who, within his own lifetime, came to be known as ‘the Magnificent’. Lorenzo retrieved large numbers of classical works from the East and established a workshop to have them copied and disseminated. His circle of friends, which included the likes of Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, supported the development of Renaissance humanism. His handsome brother Giuliano served as the model for Mars in Botticelli’s Mars and Venus, and Lorenzo also sponsored the likes of Ghirlandaio, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, who, for three years, lived and dined with him.

Lorenzo’s second son Giovanni rose to the papacy as Leo X (r. 1513-21). According to Alexandre Dumas père, Christianity under Leo ‘assumed a pagan, Greco-Roman character… Crimes for the moment disappeared, to give place to vices; but to charming vices, vices in good taste, such as those indulged by Alcibiades and sung by Catullus.’

After Giuliano’s murder in the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo raised his illegitimate nephew, Giulio di Giuliano, as his own son. As the second Medici pope, Clement VII (r. 1523-34), Giulio approved Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the universe a century before Galileo’s heresy trial for similar ideas. He also commissioned works by Cellini, Raphael, and Michelangelo, including Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. What an ending, for a bastard orphan.

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.