1493 - Events. January 4 - Christopher Columbus leaves the New World. March 15 - Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after his first trip to the Americas. July 28 - Great fire in Moscow. November 19 - Christopher Columbus goes ashore on an island he saw for the first time only the day before. He names it San Juan Bautista (later renamed Puerto Rico). December 23 - Georg Alt's German translation of Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle is published.

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Pico was a younger son of the family of the Counts of Mirandola and Concordia, feudal lords of a small region in the province of Emilia-Romagna. A precocious child with an amazing memory, he 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 at the age of ten and in 1477 he went to Bologna to study canon law. At the sudden death of his mother two years later, Pico renounced canon law and began to study philosophy at the University of Ferrara. During a ...

See also:

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Biography, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Writings, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Footnotes

Read more here: » Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Encyclopedia II - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Biography

In the Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), Pico justifies the importance of the human quest for knowledge within a neo-Platonic framework. He writes that after God had created all creatures, he conceived of the desire for another, sentient being who would appreciate all his works, but there was no longer any room in the chain of being; all the possible slots from angels to worms had been filled. So, God created man such that he had no specific slot in the chain. Instead, men were capable of learning from and imitating any existing creature ...

See also:

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Biography, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Writings, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Footnotes

Read more here: » Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Encyclopedia II - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Writings