Pico della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was the brilliant young prince of the Florentine Renaissance, a friend of Ficino and a prodigy of learning who mastered Hebrew and Arabic alongside Greek and Latin. He set out to defend nine hundred theses drawn from every tradition — Plato and Aristotle, the Hermetica, the Kabbalah, the Arabs — convinced that all true wisdom is ultimately one, the ancient theology.

His Oration on the Dignity of Man, often called the manifesto of the Renaissance, exalts the human being as the one creature without a fixed nature, free to ascend by its own choice toward the divine or sink toward the beasts. As the pioneer of the Christian Cabala, Pico did more than anyone to draw Jewish mysticism into the stream of Western esotericism.

The theses and after

Pico published his nine hundred theses at Rome in 1486 and invited scholars from all over Europe to debate them. A papal commission condemned a number of them as heretical, the debate never took place, and Pico briefly fled to France before settling in Florence under the protection of Lorenzo de' Medici. The Oration, written to open the disputation, was published only after his death.

His later works continued the search for concord. The Heptaplus offers a sevenfold interpretation of the creation account in Genesis, finding in it the structure of the cosmos and of man. On Being and the One argues that Aristotle and Plato agree, rejecting the Neoplatonic thesis, dear to Ficino, that the One stands above being. A commentary on a love poem by his friend Girolamo Benivieni sets out a Platonic theory of love in dialogue with Ficino's. His lengthy attack on predictive astrology, also published posthumously, was among the most influential critiques of the art in the period. In his last years he came under the influence of the preacher Savonarola, and he died in Florence at the age of thirty-one.

Pico's vision of a free human being, able to fashion itself, and his conviction that truth is scattered across many traditions, made him a lasting symbol of Renaissance humanism.