Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

• 1. Introduction

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  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was 23 years old when he announced a challenge to the entire intellectual world. In December 1486, he published 900 theses covering religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic, and offered to pay the travel expenses of any scholar in Europe willing to come to Rome and debate him publicly. He wanted the debate to begin on the 6th of January, chosen deliberately: it was the feast of Epiphany, the symbolic date on which pagan scholars had bowed before Christ. The young nobleman from a small county near Modena was not merely showing off. He believed these 900 propositions, taken together, formed a complete and sufficient basis for all human knowledge. The Church saw things differently. What happened next would make Pico a fugitive, send him to a French prison, and produce the text that later generations would call the Manifesto of the Renaissance. How did a minor Italian nobleman become the founder of Christian Kabbalah, the author of the Church's first universally banned printed book, and a man whose ideas still echo in philosophy, music, and fiction more than five centuries after his death at 31?

• 2. Noble Roots and Early Learning

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  Mirandola, the small autonomous county where Giovanni was born on the 24th of February 1463, had been independent since the fourteenth century and had received the fief of Concordia from the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund in 1414. His father, Gianfrancesco I Pico, ruled as Lord of Mirandola and Count of Concordia. His mother Giulia was the daughter of Feltrino Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, and her side of the family was deeply woven into the arts and scholarship of the Italian Renaissance. Giovanni's cousin was the poet Matteo Maria Boiardo, who grew up under the influence of the Florentine scholar-poet Tito Vespasiano Strozzi.

  Giovanni was a precocious child with an exceptional memory. His mother intended him for the Church and had him named a papal protonotary, probably an honorary appointment, at the age of 10. In 1477, he went to Bologna to study canon law. When his mother died suddenly three years later, the young man abandoned law entirely and turned to philosophy at the University of Ferrara.

  A brief trip to Florence changed the direction of his life. There he met the courtly poet Angelo Poliziano, the poet Girolamo Benivieni, and probably the young Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. All three would remain his closest companions for the rest of his life, and Pico may also have been a lover of Poliziano. From 1480 to 1482 he studied at the University of Padua, already a major centre of Aristotelian philosophy in Italy. There he learned Hebrew and Arabic from Elia del Medigo, a Jewish scholar in the tradition of the Islamic philosopher Averroes, and read Aramaic manuscripts alongside him. Del Medigo translated Judaic manuscripts from Hebrew into Latin for Pico, a collaboration that would continue for years and quietly lay the foundations for everything that followed.

• 3. Paris, Florence, and the 900 Theses

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  In 1485, Pico travelled to the University of Paris, then the foremost centre of scholastic philosophy and theology in Europe and a hotbed of secular Averroism. It was probably in Paris that he began drafting the 900 Theses and conceived the idea of defending them in public debate. That same year he wrote a famous long letter to the humanist Ermolao Barbaro, defending what he believed were the best of the medieval and Islamic commentators on Aristotle, including Averroes and Avicenna, against the snobbery of pure humanists.

  In November 1484, he had settled briefly in Florence and met two figures who would shape him profoundly: Lorenzo de' Medici and the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. The day of their meeting was one that Ficino had chosen for the astrological significance of publishing his Latin translations of Plato's works. Ficino became convinced of a Saturnine affinity between himself and the young visitor and believed divine providence had brought Pico to Florence at that moment. Lorenzo de' Medici would support and protect Pico until Lorenzo's death in 1492.

  Pico was travelling from Florence toward Rome when, stopping in Arezzo, he became caught up in a love affair with the wife of one of Lorenzo's cousins. He attempted to run off with the woman, was wounded and imprisoned by her husband, and was released only through Lorenzo's personal intervention. He spent months recovering in Perugia and nearby Fratta. It was there that he encountered texts he described to Ficino as "Chaldean books of Esdras, of Zoroaster and of Melchior" full of mystery. In Perugia he was also introduced to the mystical Hebrew Kabbalah through the scholar Rabbi Johannan Alemanno, who was born in the 1430s and died around 1510. Alemanno taught that mastery of magic was the final stage of true intellectual and spiritual education. Pico also worked with Flavius Mithridates, a convert who, according to scholar Brian Copenhaver, was also a prolific forger. Flavius supplied Pico with doctored Kabbalistic texts that convinced Pico the mysteries of the Kabbalah were, in his words, "keys to heaven for Christians."

  The result was the founding of an entirely new tradition. Pico's engagement with the Kabbalah, approached through Christian eyes, generated what became known as Christian Kabbalah, a current that ran through early modern Western esotericism for generations afterward.

• 4. The Church Strikes Back

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  Pico published his 900 Theses in December 1486 under the Latin title "Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalasticae et theologicae." The Oration on the Dignity of Man was written as an introduction and address to accompany them. As historian Steven Farmer has observed, the debate Pico planned for the feast of Epiphany was not merely academic: Pico may have been expecting quite literally that his Vatican debate would end with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse arriving over Rome. He envisioned not just intellectual victory but the conversion of Jews, who would recognise through the debate that Jesus was the true secret of their own traditions.

  In February 1487, Pope Innocent VIII halted the debate before it began and convened a commission to examine the theses. Thirteen were condemned. Pico agreed in writing to retract them but did not change his private conviction that they were correct. Eventually, all 900 were condemned. The papal censure described them as partly heretical, partly the flower of heresy, scandalous, capable of inflaming impertinence in Jews, and favouring arts that were enemies to the Catholic faith. This was the first time a printed book had been banned by the Church, and nearly all copies were burned.

  Pico responded by writing an Apologia defending himself, published in 1489 and dedicated to Lorenzo. When the pope learned the manuscript was circulating, he convened an inquisitorial tribunal and forced Pico to renounce the Apologia as well. Pico fled to France in 1488, where Philip II, Duke of Savoy, arrested him at the demand of papal nuncios and imprisoned him at Vincennes. Through the intercession of several Italian princes, all of them acting at Lorenzo's urging, King Charles VIII released him. The pope was persuaded to allow Pico to live under Lorenzo's protection in Florence. Pico was not formally cleared of all papal censures and restrictions until 1493, after Rodrigo Borgia took the throne as Alexander VI.

• 5. The Writings and Their Reach

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  From a villa near Fiesole that Lorenzo prepared for him, Pico produced a steady stream of work. The Heptaplus, published in 1489, was a mystical and allegorical reading of the creation story according to seven Biblical senses, arguing that different religious traditions described the same God. De Ente et Uno, published in 1491, attempted to reconcile Plato and Aristotle on the fundamental question of being and unity. His friends had taken to calling him "Princeps Concordiae," meaning Prince of Harmony, a play on his family's title Prince of Concordia, precisely because reconciling opposing schools of thought was his consuming ambition.

  Pico believed the educated person should study Hebrew and Talmudic sources alongside Hermetic texts, because he held all of them expressed the same concept of God. Among his 900 theses were 72 describing what he believed to be a complete system of physics. One thesis he considered among his most important stated that a mortal sin of finite duration deserved only temporal punishment, not eternal damnation. That proposition was among those Pope Innocent VIII condemned as heretical in his bull of the 4th of August 1487.

  The Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, a sustained attack on predictive astrology, was written at Fiesole but not published in Pico's lifetime. A portion appeared in Bologna after his death, and the full work was edited for publication by his nephew Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, an ardent follower of Savonarola who may have sharpened its critical edge. Ficino, himself an astrologer, endorsed and championed the manuscript before publication, which may explain some of its force. Pico's case against astrology drew on Augustine of Hippo and on the medieval philosophical tale Hayy ibn Yaqzan by Ibn Tufail, and rested ultimately on the conflict between astrological determinism and the Christian doctrine of free will.

  Pico also wrote an Italian imitation of Plato's Symposium and a commentary on a love poem by Girolamo Benivieni, in which he outlined a planned work called Poetica Theologia, arguing that the ancient Egyptians had covered divine truths in enigmatic and poetic veils. His letters, published in Paris in 1499, were seen as significant documents for the history of thought in his time.

• 6. Savonarola's Shadow and a Suspicious Death

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  After Lorenzo de' Medici died in 1492, Pico moved to Ferrara, though he continued to visit Florence. It was Pico himself who had persuaded Lorenzo to invite Savonarola to Florence, and he watched as the friar's influence grew amid the political instability that followed Lorenzo's death. Savonarola's reactionary opposition to the expansiveness of the Renaissance brought him into conflict with the Medici family, who were eventually expelled from Florence, and would lead to the burning of books and paintings. Despite witnessing this, Pico became a follower of Savonarola, resolved to become a monk, dismissed his Egyptian and Chaldean texts, destroyed the sonnets in Latin and Italian he had written over the years, and gave away his fortune.

  In 1494, at the age of 31, Pico died under circumstances that were never fully explained, on the same day that King Charles VIII of France entered Florence. Marsilio Ficino wrote that the tears of men of letters on that day compensated for the joy of the people welcoming the king. Rumours at the time held that Pico's own secretary had poisoned him because Pico had grown too close to Savonarola. Pico was buried together with Girolamo Benivieni at the church of San Marco, where Savonarola delivered the funeral oration.

  In 2007, the bodies of Pico and Poliziano were exhumed from San Marco. Forensic testing found that both men likely died of arsenic poisoning, possibly on the orders of Lorenzo's successor, Piero de' Medici. Subsequent investigation refined that conclusion: while Pico may have died from acute arsenic poisoning, intentional or otherwise, the evidence was insufficient to reach the same conclusion for Poliziano, whose arsenic levels might have resulted from chronic exposure or even from post-mortem contamination.

• 7. Five Centuries of Echoes

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  The beardless young man visible in Raphael's fresco The School of Athens, painted between 1509 and 1511, is thought by some scholars to be Pico della Mirandola. Art historian Christiane Joost-Gaugier described Pico as a major philosophical inspiration for the fresco's program, particularly as the most outspoken champion of the harmony between Plato and Aristotle.

  Walter Pater devoted an entire chapter to Pico in his book Studies in the History of the Renaissance, published in 1873. James Joyce placed Pico in the mind of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, where the character recalls boyhood ambitions and associates them with the ambition of Mirandola. H. P. Lovecraft name-checked Mirandola in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in 1927, attributing to him an incantation that scholars note was actually first recorded by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim in Three Books of Occult Philosophy, written decades after Pico's death. Psychoanalyst Otto Rank, a disciple of Sigmund Freud, chose a passage from the Oration on the Dignity of Man as the motto for his book Art and Artist, quoting God's address to man: "I created thee as a being neither celestial nor earthly... so that thou shouldst be thy own free moulder and overcomer."

  Umberto Eco put Pico at the centre of a plot point in Foucault's Pendulum. Roberto Bolano placed him first in a three-column list of philosophers in 2666. English composer Gavin Bryars set his texts to music in pieces including "Pico's Flight" for soprano and orchestra and "Incipit Vita Nova" for alto and string trio. In Costica Bradatan's 2015 study Dying for Ideas, Pico's life is presented as one of the earliest examples of human life conceived as a project of self-fashioning, rooted in his heretical idea that human nature is indefinite and self-determined. The nephew who edited his anti-astrology manuscript and worked to destroy his uncle's legacy described that effort as an attempt "to destroy what his uncle had built." The fact that the effort failed entirely is perhaps the clearest measure of how durably Pico della Mirandola had built.