Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Biography, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Footnotes, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Writings
ARTICLES RELATED TO Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - Footnotes
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 ...
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 ...
