Giovanni Pico della Mirandola Simulacrum

The Life

Giovanni Pico was born at the castle of Mirandola, near Modena, in 1463. He was of a minor princely family and was educated extensively — at Bologna in law, at Padua in Aristotelian philosophy, at Paris, at Florence under Ficino. By his early twenties he had learned Hebrew and Aramaic, had begun the study of Arabic, and had read deeply in the Kabbalah and in scholastic, Arabic, and Platonic philosophy. In 1486, when he was twenty-three, he proposed a public disputation in Rome on nine hundred theses drawn from all these traditions, to be defended against any challenger; the *Oration on the Dignity of Man* was composed as its introduction. The disputation was suspended by papal commission, some of the theses were condemned as heretical, and Pico was briefly imprisoned in France. He was eventually pardoned, returned to Florence, and died there in 1494 at the age of thirty-one, probably by arsenic poisoning — the cause of which has never been conclusively established.

The Thought

Pico's *Oration* is the most anthologised text of the Italian Renaissance. Its central image is man as a creature of no fixed rank in the hierarchy of being, free to descend to animal life or to rise toward the divine — "thou mayst, as the free and proud shaper of thy own being, fashion thyself in the form thou mayst prefer." The formulation has been read as a charter of Renaissance humanism and as a mild exaggeration of what was in fact a standard Christian Platonist doctrine of free will; both readings have something to them.

The *900 Theses* themselves ranged across Plato, Aristotle, the scholastics, the Arabic commentators, the Kabbalah, Pythagorean number-theory, Orphic theology, and magic. Pico's claim was that all genuine wisdom, however diversely expressed, converged on the same truth, and that the systematic display of that convergence would be the highest work of philosophy. The project was unfinished at his death; what survives shows both its extraordinary ambition and the difficulty of sustaining it in detail.

The Legacy

Pico made Christian Kabbalah a serious intellectual project in Latin Europe; his theses launched a tradition of Christian kabbalistic study that ran from Johann Reuchlin in the sixteenth century through a long line of early modern scholars. He was, with Ficino, the public face of the Florentine Platonic revival, and the *Oration* has continued to be read as a statement of the dignity and freedom of the human person across five centuries. His early death cut short what promised to be one of the largest philosophical enterprises of the Renaissance.