Pico Della Mirandola, Giovanni
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, GIOVANNI (1463–1494), philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, was the youngest son of Francesco Pico, count of Mirandola and Concordia, a small feudal territory just west of Ferrara. He was named papal protonotary at the age of ten and was sent to study canon law at Bologna in 1477. Two years later he began the study of philosophy at Ferrara, and from 1480 to 1482 he studied at Padua, one of the main centers of Aristotelianism. He visited Paris, where he encountered Scholastic theology, returned to Florence, and then moved to Perugia, where he studied Hebrew and Arabic with several Jewish teachers. In Perugia, Pico developed an interest in Ibn Rushd (Averroës) and the mystical Jewish Qabbalah. In his late twenties, after a carefree youth, Pico's life took a more serious turn. He gave up his share of his patrimony and planned to give away his personal property in order to take up the life of a poor preacher. During his final years Pico came under the influence of the Dominican friar Savonarola. He died of a fever in Florence on November 17, 1494, the very day on which Charles VIII of France made his entry into Florence, after the expulsion of its ruler, Piero de' Medici.
A brilliant young philosopher, Pico is best known as the author of Oration on the Dignity of Man, which is considered to be the manifesto of Renaissance humanism. "I have read in Arabian books," Pico wrote, "that nothing in the world can be found that is more worthy of admiration than man." To support this humanistic assertion of the first part of the Oration he cites a broad array of ancient sources—the mystical writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos, various Persian writers, David, Moses, Plato, Pythagoras, Enoch, the qabbalists, Muhammad, Zarathushtra, the apostle Paul, and many others. Unlike Marsilio Ficino, his friend and mentor at the Platonic academy in Florence, Pico did not give humans a fixed place in the great chain of being; he described humanity as the object of special creation and the focal point of the world with no fixed place, outline, or task, but free to make its own choices and to seek what is heavenly and above the world, free to become a veritable angel. The Oration served as the rhetorical introduction to his Conclusiones (1486), nine hundred "theses" providing a summation of all learning, which Pico offered for public disputation. Upon publication in Rome, seven of the theses were found by a commission of Innocent VIII to be heretical and six of them dubious. Pico's apologia for them was not accepted, but Alexander VI subsequently vindicated his orthodoxy.
Pico's mature philosophical writings include the Heptaplus (1489), a sevenfold interpretation of Genesis 1:1–27; Of Being and Unity (1491), on the harmony of Plato and Aristotle; and a long treatise attacking astrology as demeaning to human liberty and dignity. He allowed for sidereal influence only because of heat and light, but not because of any occult power of the stars. His thought was notable for its synthesis of Aristotelianism and Platonism, its combination of scholastic and humanist elements, and for the fascination with Qabbalah that it reflects.
Bibliography
Although Pico's Opera (Basel, 1572) is not readily accessible, Eugenio Garin has published editions of various texts: De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, e Scritti vari (Florence, 1942) and the Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, 2 vols. (Florence, 1946–1952). For a translation of the Oration, see The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, edited by Ernst Cassirer et al., translated by Josephine L. Burroughs (Chicago, 1948), pp. 223–254. For Pico's life and thought, see Eugenio Garin's Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Florence, 1937) and La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence, 1961); Eugenio Anagnine's Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Bari, 1937); and Paul O. Kristeller's Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, Calif., 1964), pp. 54–71, the best brief treatment in English.
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