PICO, Giovanni, Count of Mirandola and Concordia. - Philosopher and man of vast erudition
("the phoenix of intellects" of his time), b. at Mirandola (Modena) on 23 Feb. 1463, d. at Florence on 17 Nov. 1494. While still very young, at Bologna, Ferrara and Florence he formed friendships with some of the greatest scholars of the time and took a keen interest in literary and philosophical disputes. At Padua (1480-82) he was initiated into the study of Aristotelian philosophy and came under the influence of Averroism (v.), of which Nicoletto Vernia was a champion in official teaching and, among the repeaters and pedagogues, the Cretan Jew Elijah del Medigo, who composed for him short treatises on the unity of the intellect and on the possibility of the conjunction of the human intellect with the agent intellect. But at Padua he had also formed firm relations with Thomists, such as Domenico Grimani and Antonio Pizzamanno; and he had likewise become familiar with the disputes between Thomists and Scotists.
The need to know directly the Greek commentaries on Aristotle (Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Simplicius, Philoponus) and to penetrate the Platonic world led him to study Greek, to procure no small number of Greek texts and to draw near (having left Padua in 1482) to the Platonism of Ficino (v.), whose Theologia platonica he read. The acquaintance with Plotinus (v.) awakened in him a lively speculative ardour, far deeper than the rhetorical humanism of Ermolao Barbaro. Driven by this ardour and by the example of the Neoplatonists, he thought that not only Plato and Aristotle, but even Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes and all the great thinkers from the most remote antiquity to his own times could be reduced to concord, by penetrating into the living core of their thought.
Around 1484 he was at Florence, in the centre of the renewed Platonism, taken up by Ficino as a propaedeutic to Christianity. The daily conversations with the author of the Theologia platonica and of the De christiana religione, with Lorenzo the Magnificent, with Poliziano and with Girolamo Benivieni left an indelible trace on his spirit. In July 1485 he went to France. In March 1486 he returned to Florence. A love affair forced him to take refuge at Perugia and then at Fratta; where, joined by Elijah del Medigo, he resumed with him the discussions on Averroism and was helped by him in the study of the Kabbalah (v.), into which he was initiated by Flavio Mitridate, a converted Sicilian Jew. With the help of the latter he learned Hebrew and Chaldean. The Kabbalah, by means of the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, seemed to eliminate many of the difficulties that stood in the way of the agreement of philosophy with the sacred texts. Moreover the Kabbalah was wholly impregnated with Neoplatonic doctrines and esoteric mysticism. Thanks to Kabbalistic speculation, Zoroaster and the Chaldeans, the fabulous Hermes Trismegistus, already regarded by Ficino as the father of the most ancient Egyptian wisdom, meet with Moses, and all together with Plato, with Plotinus, with Iamblichus (v.) and with the Arab Neoplatonists, so that the agent intellect of the Aristotelians comes to be identified with the Metatron of the Kabbalists, chief of the angels set over the world of creation. This philosophical panorama, which by now captivated the soul of P., is revealed clearly already in the commentary on the Canzone d'amore composta per Hieronymo Benivieni fiorentino secondo la mente e opinione de' Platonicini, dictated during the retreat at Fratta, and is displayed in all its vastness and complexity in the contemporary Conclusiones nongentae, which were to have been the object of a public disputation at Rome, and for which the Oratio de hominis dignitate was to serve as a premise.
Drawn from Aristotle and his Greek and Arab commentators, from Plato, from Plotinus and the other Neoplatonists, from Jewish and Christian thinkers, from Albert the Great, from St. Thomas, from Duns Scotus and other masters of scholasticism, from Kabbalistic and Hermetic writings, they embrace the whole rich philosophical-theological encyclopedia of the second half of the 15th century, and while some of them concern his particular way of understanding the thought of the authors mentioned and of others, others hint at an independent thought, the fruit of his own modifications, sometimes very bold, concerning the most delicate and difficult problems, so as to arouse wonder, not so much for the "prodigious memory" as for the vastness of his knowledge and the maturity of judgment attained by a young man barely twenty-three years old.
The disputation that was to have been held in the winter of 1487 did not take place, because certain theses of a theological character were incriminated and condemned (5 March). P. defended himself with the Apologia dedicated to Lorenzo (v.) the Magnificent. But Innocent VIII ordered that he be tried for heresy and on 6 Aug. condemned the booklet of the Conclusiones, because together with "Catholic and true" theses there were mixed theses deserving of censure. The man of Mirandola tried to escape arrest by fleeing to France. But imprisoned in Jan. 1488 in the fortress of Vincennes, he was freed two months later through the intervention of certain Italian princes. Expelled from France, he settled at Florence under the protection of the Magnificent, and in 1489 he brought to completion the Heptaplus de septiformis sex dierum Genesees enarratione, dedicated to Lorenzo. In 1491 he renounced a part of his possessions in favour of his nephew Giovanni Francesco (v. below) in order to plunge wholly into the study of Christianity, with the intention of preparing a vast apology into which he would bring together all his uncommon learning. Of the same year is the De ente et uno dedicated to Poliziano. While he pursued the aim of reducing Aristotle to concord with Plato, relying on Plotinus against Ficino, he did not turn his mind from the great design of demonstrating (as he wrote to Aldo Manuzio on 11 Feb.) that "philosophia veritatem quaerit, theologia invenit, religio possidet" (Ep., I, 6). Of the seven categories of adversaries of the Christian faith, which he intended to combat one by one, he first took aim at the astrologers, whose charlatanical science annihilated man's freedom and was the most pernicious because it ensnared the conscience of the learned no less than that of the common people with prejudices and superstitions. After the death of the Magnificent in 1492 he drew ever closer to Savonarola, whose thought on the necessity of a reform he shared, although P. understood this reform in a far broader way; and he remained faithful to the Dominican even when some were already beginning to doubt that he was a true prophet. Death overtook him treacherously in the full vigour of his promising youth, before he had brought to completion the work whose outlines are nonetheless discernible.
Compared with the thought of Ficino, that of P. is distinguished from it by a broader information, by a greater complexity of elements gathered and by a more audacious effort at synthesis. While the Aristotelians lingered over particular problems which, being badly posed, proved insoluble, and the Averroists, by opposing to what is true according to reason what is true by faith, shattered the unity of human consciousness, P. tends to reconstitute it, reconquering the superior Parmenidean and Platonic unity of being.