Pico della mirandola facts of the world

He was named papal protonotary at the age of ten and was sent to study canon law at Bologna in Two years later he began the study of philosophy at Ferrara, and from to 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 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. 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.

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 , 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 , a sevenfold interpretation of Genesis — 27; Of Being and Unity , on the harmony of Plato and Aristotle; and a long treatise attacking astrology as demeaning to human liberty and dignity.

Giovanni pico della mirandola contributions to the renaissance

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. Although Pico's Opera Basel, is not readily accessible, Eugenio Garin has published editions of various texts: De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, e Scritti vari Florence, and the Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem , 2 vols.

Florence, —