Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1463–1494)

Italian scholar and philosopher, whose writings became the most important philosophical testaments of Renaissance humanism. Born into a noble family, the son of the Count of Mirandola and Concordia, he was a precocious young student of Latin and Greek, and left home for Bologna at the age of fourteen to study canon law, the law of the church. He gave up this coursework and moved to Ferrara, where he studied philosophy, and then to the University of Padua, where he studied the teachings of the ancient Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle. In Florence he met Angelo Poliziano and the monk Girolamo Savonarola, who would later establish a puritanical dictatorship over the city. In 1485 Pico journeyed to Paris, where he took part in lively scholarly debates over the nature of philosophy and the teachings of the medieval Scholastics. After returning to Italy, he was soon embroiled in a scandal after abducting the wife of a member of the Medici clan, the powerful ruling house of Florence. He was arrested and thrown into prison, but eventually saved from execution by Lorenzo de' Medici, whose friendship and patronage he had won in Florence.

Pico's studies in Italy and Paris had led him to the conclusion that it was possible to discover the underlying agreements of Plato, Aristotle, and all the medieval religious philosophers—Christian, Muslim, and Jewish—and bring these competing schools of thought into harmony. He wrote out a series of 900 Conclusions, which was published in 1486 and which he intended to defend in a grand conclave of the best scholars of his day.

As an introduction to the 900 Conclusions, Pico wrote his famous essay Oration on the Dignity of Man. But his plans for a council of scholars, before which he would defend the points of his work, were blocked on the orders of Pope Innocent VIII, who appointed a church council that studied and rejected most of Pico's arguments. When Pico responded with his Apology, which in large part defended his original arguments, the pope responded by denouncing his entire body of work. Sensing danger in the church's formal disapproval of his thinking, and the pope's accusations of heresy, Pico fled Italy for Paris, but was arrested in France on the orders of the pope's representatives and imprisoned in the fortress of Vincennes, near Paris. Eventually he was released He received the protection of Lorenzo de' Medici, who settled him in an estate near the village of Fiesole, where he wrote another controversial tract, Heptaplus, A Sevenfold Account of the Six Days of Genesis. In 1493 he received a formal pardon from Pope Alexander VI for his transgressions against orthodox church doctrine. During this period he also wrote Disputations Against Divinatory Astrology, which attacked the precepts of astrology. When Girolamo Savonarola took control of Florence and decreed the destruction of works of art, philosophical writings, and all other worldly vanities, Pico surrendered his money and property and burned all of the poetry he had written. He did not take monastic vows, however, and died in 1494 of a sudden illness, brought on in the opinion of some historians by poison. On the day of his death, King Charles VIII of France entered Florence and overthrew the Medici dynasty.

See Also: Medici, Lorenzo de'; Savonarola, Girolamo