Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher.
Background
Giovanni was born on February 24, 1463 at Mirandola, near Modena, the youngest son of Gianfrancesco I Pico, Lord of Mirandola and Count of Concordia, by his wife Giulia, daughter of Feltrino Boiardo, Count of Scandiano. The family had long dwelt in the Castle of Mirandola (Duchy of Modena), which had become independent in the fourteenth century and had received in 1414 from the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund the fief of Concordia. Mirandola was a small autonomous county (later, a duchy) in Emilia, near Ferrara. The Pico della Mirandola were closely related to the Sforza, Gonzaga and Este dynasties, and Giovanni's siblings wed the descendants of the hereditary rulers of Corsica, Ferrara, Bologna, and Forlì.
Born twenty-three years into his parents' marriage, Giovanni had two much older brothers, both of whom outlived him: Count Galeotto I continued the dynasty, while Antonio became a general in the Imperial army. [4] The Pico family would reign as dukes until Mirandola, an ally of Louis XIV of France, was conquered by his rival, Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor, in 1708 and annexed to Modena by Duke Rinaldo d'Este, the exiled male line becoming extinct in 1747.
Giovanni's maternal family was singularly distinguished in the arts and scholarship of the Italian Renaissance. His cousin and contemporary was the poet Matteo Maria Boiardo, who grew up under the influence of his own uncle, the Florentine patron of the arts and scholar-poet Tito Vespasiano Strozzi.
Education
A precocious child with an exceptional memory, Giovanni was schooled in Latin and possibly Greek at a very early age. Intended for the Church by his mother, he was named a papal protonotary (probably honorary) at the age of ten and in 1477 he went to Bologna to study canon law.
At the sudden death of his mother three years later, Pico renounced canon law and began to study philosophy at the University of Ferrara. During a brief trip to Florence, he met Angelo Poliziano, the courtly poet Girolamo Benivieni, and probably the young Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola. For the rest of his life he remained very close friends with all three, including the ascetic and anti-humanist Savonarola. He may also have been a lover of Poliziano.
From 1480 to 1482, he continued his studies at the University of Padua, a major center of Aristotelianism in Italy. Already proficient in Latin and Greek, he studied Hebrew and Arabic in Padua with Elia del Medigo, a Jewish Averroist, and read Aramaic manuscripts with him as well. Del Medigo also translated Judaic manuscripts from Hebrew into Latin for Pico, as he would continue to do for a number of years. Pico also wrote sonnets in Latin and Italian which, because of the influence of Savonarola, he destroyed at the end of his life.
He spent the next four years either at home, or visiting humanist centres elsewhere in Italy. In 1485, he travelled to the University of Paris, the most important centre in Europe for Scholastic philosophy and theology, and a hotbed of secular Averroism. It was probably in Paris that Giovanni began his 900 Theses and conceived the idea of defending them in public debate.
Career
Upon his arrival at Rome in 1486, he announced a public disputation on 900 theses, partly formulated by himself and partly taken from a wide range of authors. Declaring 13 of the theses heretical, the papal authorities prohibited the disputation. When Pico published an Apologia in defense of the condemned theses, he was met by ecclesiastical censure. He fled to Paris, where he had friends at the University and at the court, and in 1488, upon the request of Lorenzo de' Medici, he was permitted by papal authorities to retire to the neighborhood of Florence. He was a friend of Ficino and Polititan and, in his later years, of Savonarola. His early death in Florence, Nov. 17, 1494, was attributed to poison. Pico's 900 theses illustrate his syncretism, that is, his conviction that many different philosophers had some share in a common truth. He also planned a larger work, of which his treatise On Being and One is an extant fragment, on the grounds of agreement between Plato and Aristotle. His famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, probably the most widely known document of early Renaissance thought, asserts the unlimited freedom of man's will. Pico has God tell Adam: Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone, nor any function peculiar to thyself have We given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. Constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, thou shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. .. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine. A later work, Heptaplus, a sevenfold commentary on the first chapters of Genesis, shows traces of cabalistic influence. One of his letters, addressed to Ermolao Barbaro and answered by Melanchthon after Barbaro and Pico had died, is a defense of the medieval philosophers. His largest work is an elaborate refutation of astrology, a courageous and significant attempt, notwithstanding the fact that its underlying motive was moral and religious rather than scientific. Pico was closely associated with Ficino and his academy, but he cannot without some reservations be classified as a Platonist. Although his early death prevented him from developing his ideas, his social position, personal charm, and learning gained the admiration of his contemporaries and of posterity.
