Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (February 24, 1463 – November 17, 1494) was an Italian Renaissance humanist philosopher and scholar. Most famous for the events of 1486, when at the age of twenty-three, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the famous Oration on the Dignity of Man which has been called the "Manife ...

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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 ...

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He belonged to a family that had long dwelt in the Castle of Mirandola (Duchy of Modena). To devote himself wholly to study, he left his share of the ancestral principality to his two brothers, and in his fourteenth year went to Bologna to study canon law and fit himself for the ecclesiastical career. Repelled, however, by the purely positive science of law, he devoted himself to the study of philosophy and theology, and spent seven years wandering through the chief universities of Italy and France, studying also Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac ...

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1463 - Events. January 5 - Poet Francois Villon is banned from Paris 1463 - Births. January 17 - Frederick III, Elector of Saxony (died 1525) February 24 - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Italian philosopher (died 1494) October 20 - Alessandro Achillini, Italian philosopher (died 1512) Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, Italian patron of the arts (died 1503) 1463 - Deaths. June 4 - F ...

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Marsilio Ficino (also known by his Latin name, Marsilius Ficinus) (Figline Valdarno, October 19, 1433 - Careggi, October 1, 1499) was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance, astrologer, and a reviver of Neoplatonism who was in touch with every major academic thinker and writer of his day. During the sessions at Florence of the Council of Siena in 1439, during the failed attempts to heal the schism of the Latin and Greek churches, Cosimo de' Medici and his intellectual circle ha ...

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1494 - Events. January 25 - Alfonso II becomes King of Naples. May 31 - Natives of the island of Tenerife, known as Guanches, defeat invading Spanish forces at the First Battle of Acentejo. June 7 - Spain and Portugal sign the Treaty of Tordesillas which divides the New World between the two countries. October 22 - Ludovico Sforza becomes Duke of Milan. Start of the Italian Wars. The University of Aberdeen is founded by the bishop of Aberdeen. Amda Seyon ...

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Note O: - For more information about this person's contribution to philosophy, see his/her entry in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press; 1995. ISBN 0198661320 Note R: - For more information about this person's contribution to philosophy, see his/her entry in the Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge; 2000. ISBN 0415223644 ...

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Lorenzo was born into the leading family in Florence, owners of an international bank with branches throughout Europe. His grandfather, Cosimo de Medici, became the first of the Medici to combine running the bank with leading the Republic in both government and philanthropy, spending an enormous portion of his fortune (he was one of the wealthiest men in Europe) on art and public works. Lorenzo's father Piero Piero 'the Gouty' de' Medici was also at the center of Florentine life, and extremely active as a patron and collector. Lorenzo, groom ...

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Another of Lorenzo's successes was in the fields of art and learning; he gathered at his court the leading artists and intellectuals of his day. His support for artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Andrea del Verrocchio and Michelangelo Buonarroti was instrumental in the development of Florence as the epicenter of 15th century Renaissance Europe. Although his financial straits made it impossible for him to commission many works himself, he saw to it that they received commissions from ...

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One area in which he was not successful was business; during his tenure several branches of the family bank collapsed because of bad loans, and in later years he got into financial difficulties himself, and resorted to mis-appropriating trust and state funds for his own needs. Toward the end of Lorenzo's life, Florence came under the spell of Savonarola, who believed that Christians had strayed too far into Greco-Roman culture. Oddly enough, Lorenzo played a role in bringing Savonarola to Florence, even though Savonarola disliked popula ...

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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 ...

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

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