I can say more about the connection between Lazzarelli and Champier. According to Hanegraaff, the intermediary between the two was probably Giovan "Mercurio" Correggio, the self-styled "son of God" whom Lazzarelli first encountered in 1481 Rome. In 1482 Lazzarelli gave him his translations of Tractates XVI-XVIII of the
Corpus Hermeticum, which had not been in Ficino's manuscript.
Then in 1501, a year after Lazzarelli's death, Correggio went to Lyon, where Louis XII was staying, for the purpose of getting him to instigate a crusade against the infidels. While there, according to a letter from an Italian manuscript-hunter named Pierro Aleandro to the diarist Marin Sanudo (with whose works it is preserved), Correggio gave a work written by himself to the king, and a "similar work" to "the ambassador", from whom Aleandro says he "got it later". I am not sure who "the ambassador" is. Hanegraaff says Sanudo was "the Venetian ambassador", but if the letter was to him, why would Aleandro be telling him about it? Maria Paola Saci, cited in footnote 131, says it was given to "the orator", again unspecified.)
Saci (
Ludovico Lazzerelli, 1999) examined the codex of Lazzarelli's translation, and says there are annotations in Aleandro's handwriting. So probably Aleandro brought it back to Venice with him, and then to Rome, "from where," Hanegraaff writes, "Egidio di Viterbo could have taken it to Viterbo."
In addition, while Correggio was with Louis XII in Lyon in 1501, the king had his claims to vast medical knowledge put to the test by two physicians (he was proved to have "superhuman knowledge," according to Trithemius, who heard this from a couple of acquaintances with occultist leanings). Aleandro's letter says only that one of these physicians was a Spaniard and the other a Frenchman. Carlo Vecce in
Iacopo Sannazaro, 1988, pp. 18-19, identifies them as Gonsalvo di Toledo and his friend and colleague Symphorien Champier, who of course is the one who published Lazzarelli's translations in 1507.
Haanegraaff concludes:
Aleandro's letter therefore confirms what has already been assumed by scholars for some time: Correggio's visit to Louis XII in 1501 was a crucial event in view of the diffusion of the Hermetica in Latin translations from Italy to France.
The relevant documentation is in Hanegraaff's introductory essay to
Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500), pp. 40-41.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-baWWO1kGrpg/ ... 0-41-1.jpg
He does not say how d'Estaples got a copy of Lazzarelli's
Crater Hermetis so as to print his expurgated version. He, like Champier, was in Lyon in 1501. He also traveled to Italy occasionally. But at the time of his 1483 visit to Florence, the
Crater Hermetis wasn't yet written (not until c. 1490). And I know of no record of communication between Lazzarelli and Ficino, or of Lazzarelli's visiting Florence.
Correggio did go to Florence, in 1486, in rather uncongenial circumstances. Il Magnifico had him arrested and turned over to the Franciscan Inquisition, which sneeringly subjected him to public examination in shackles. That the self-declared Pimander, spiritual son of Hermes Trismegistus, could be so treated by Lorenzo somewhat shocks Hanegraaff. I'd think it was other language that caused him problems, his claiming to be "son of God".