A MEMORABLE MEAL.(re-creation of Marsilio Ficino's November 7, 1468, Neoplatonist dinner celebrating Plato's birth and death)

The re-creation the other night of Marsilio Ficino's Neoplatonist dinner did not go exactly the way the original dinner did, on November 7, 1468, when Ficino, the philosopher, sat down with eight fellow-Neoplatonists, at the Medici Villa at Careggi, in Tuscany, to celebrate the anniversary of Plato's birth and death. For one thing, Ficino was a red-wine man, but the Pierpont Morgan Library, where the re-created banquet was held, didn't like the idea of people spilling red wine on the precious manuscripts, so the Italian Cultural Foundation of America, one of the event's sponsors, went with white instead. For another, the Medici Villa was, in accordance with Ficino's specifications, "high and far away from heavy and cloudy air," whereas the Morgan villa is in midtown.

However, some of the two hundred or so guests who were at the Morgan, on a recent rainy night, did show up in period dress, including Carolin Young, who came up with the idea for the evening, and whose new book, "Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver," describes a series of historical banquets. Young was wearing a gown made of fabric that had been modelled on a cloak worn by Lorenzo de' Medici, the sponsor of the original meal, in Benozzo Gozzoli's fifteenth-century fresco "Procession of the Magi." "I'm pretty obsessive," Young said.

Young has a lot of historical-meal re-creation experience. Two years ago, in a Sotheby's boardroom, she re-created a dinner that Casanova shared with a young nun in 1753, which might have included pigeon "a l'impromptu" and "chicken in panties." The Morgan evening began with Young describing the Ficino banquet and the Renaissance view of the body as a system of four humors--sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. She encouraged participants to eat with an eye to their prevailing humor. "I suffer from an overabundance of melancholy," ...