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Giovanni Pico. Biographic overview

Giovanni Pico was born on Thursday February 1463 at Mirandola from a family, who was ruling this City since a little more than 150 years, inside a small seigniory of the Po valley, situated in a strategic position among Modena, Mantua and Ferrara, along the way in direction of the Po and Verona.
The father, Giovan Francesco, Lord of Mirandola, had married Giulia Boiardo, a learned and refined woman, belonging to the noble sovereign lineage of the fief of Scandiano in province of Reggio Emilia and related to Matteo Maria, the author of the famous poem of Chivalry “Orlando in love”.

The first biographer of Giovanni, the nephew Giovan Francesco II, in proving himself careful to make use of the topic descriptive canons to use for the narration of extraordinary lives, wrote that, in the day of birth of his uncle philosopher “a circle-shaped flame was seen on the bed of the woman in labour and the flame soon disappeared”, premonitory sign of a character fated to enlighten the world with his intelligence and his mind, but for a short lapse of time.
When he was four, Pico lost his father and his mother Giulia started dealing with his education and looked after keeping his youngest son far from the bellicose spirits of the two older brothers Galeotto and Anton Maria, committed in a fierce battle for obtaining the command and the rule of Mirandola.
Giovanni, when he was fourteen, intentioned to study canon law, went to the university of Bologna, where he stayed until a little after the death of his mother, which took place in August 1478.
Then, he went to study to Ferrara, on invitation of the Duke Hercules I d’Este. He renounced canon law and began to attend the humanistic studies. Here, Giovanni had the opportunity to come across a city full of culture and he met a refined scholar such as Vespasiano Strozzi, poet at the Estense court and he also probably met a personality, who had a great role in the life of the Philosopher: the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola.
After one year in Ferrara, Pico moved again to attend the university of Padua. At that time, Padua was a major centre of Aristotelianism and the study of the philosophical thought of the “teacher of those who know”, i.e. Aristotle was developed, and, in particular,.an interpretation of the Aristotelic doctrine worked out by the Arabic philosopher and physician Averroes, who lived in the XII century.
Giovanni stayed there from the autumn of 1480 to the spring of 1482, he attended the courses of Nicoletto Vernia da Chieti and of the Cretese Elia Del Medigo, who began to teach Hebrew to Giovanni and then collaorated with him, by translating for him the comments to Aristotle of Averroes.

Paul Delaroche - Infanzia di Giovanni Pico - 1842, Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts) After staying for a short time at Mirandola, nearly at the end of the year 1482, Pico went to Pavia accompanied by Manuele Adramitteno, teacher of Greek, to attend, at the ancient university of Pavia, the courses of rhetoric and mathematical logic.
In the first months of 1484, Giovanni Pico moved to Florence, a great centre of intellectual motivations. There was, here, a cultural centre extremely live and brilliant, mainly thanks to Lorenzo de’ Medici, politician and scholar, who encouraged and supported an exceptional artistic, litterary and philosophical production.
In Florence, Pico, when he was twenty one, could relate with different personalities of great importance for his education. He could meet Angelo Poliziano, poet, humanist, philologist, with whom he had already had the oppotunity to be in contact in 1483 in order Poliziano to express his opinion on some Latin elegies of Pico, then distroyed by Pico himself. Of the poetical works of those years only about fifty sonnets in Italian are left. They were composed according to the litterary teaching of Francesco Petrarca.

The other key meeting of the first stay in Florence of Giovanni Pico was with Marsilio Ficino, philosopher, who was, at that time fifty one, and who, starting from 1463, had edited the realization of an operation of extreme importance: the translation in Latin of the works of Plato.
By taking advantage of the positive influence of a live cultural environment, Pico fully dedicated himself to the philosphical speculation and started to consider the problem, inside the humanist and litteraty context of the time, of how to compare rhetoric and eloquence, on the one hand, and wisdom and doctrine on the other hand. Giovanni could directly express himself on this specific issue in the context of an important epistolary relationship with Ermolao Barbaro. This one, professor at Padua, had written to Giovanni by defining the philosophers sordid, churlish, uneducated and barbarian and by clarifying that, only an elegant language could provide the writers with eternal glory and remembrance. Pico replied energetically by defending the worth of the mere philosophical speculation, even when expressed with a not refined language, with respect to the vain research of the elegant discourse and unexceptionable stylistically, as truth can be manifested with any language.
From July 1485 to March 1486, Giovanni Pico stayed in Paris to attend the courses of theology and to participate to the debates of the Sorbonne, the most important centre in the whole Europe for Scholastic and Averroes philosophy.
After returning to Italy and settling in Florence, Pico dedicated himself, with great engagement and intensity, by relying on the contribution of Elia del Medigo and of the converted Jew Flavio Mitridate, to the knowledge in- depth of Hebrew, Caldaic, and, in particular of the Kabbalah. In the same time, he worked out a comment in prose to a doctrinal song of Girolamo Benivieni on the divine love, inspired to the theses of Marsilio Ficino.
For Pico, it was a period of fervent, great and inexhausted reflection, which drove him to realize the project of assembling in Rome a meeting of scholars from all over Europe to publicly debate on different issues and theories of the philosophical and theological wisdom.
To prepare this Roman debate, Giovanni Pico decided to move to the city of Perugia, but during his travelling to the city of Umbria, he became embroiled in a stormy and tragical love affair. On 10th May 1486, in Arezzo, Giovanni, kidnapped, as very seemingly agreed, a noblewoman named Margherita, wife of Giuliano Mariotto de’ Medici. The two, together with the servants and friends of Pico, ran off in the outskirts of Siena, but were caught by the Aretini, who killed the most part of the servants of the Philosopher, who was arrested. After a few days, upon the intervention of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pico was released and could reach Perugia.
When he next arrived in Rome, he committed himself to concretely organize his ambitious design to hold, in Rome, a kind of great and well attended meeting at the presence of the greatest scholars of his time, called together to debate on the knowm and knowable in philosophy and religion.
On 7th December 1486, the “Nine hundred Theses” of Giovanni Pico were printed. Or in other terms, “his own dialectical, moral, physical, mathematical, theological, magical, cabalistic clauses as well as of the Caldeian, Arabic, Jewish, Greek, Egyptian and Latin scholars”. The work should have to represent the reference text for the open Roman debate, which had to be preceded by an introductory speech, actually never delivered , then known as Oration de hominis dignitate, including some of the deepest and famous pages of Pico thought.
The critics and the widespread hostilities towards the work of Pico induced the Pope, Innocent VIII, to put off the development of the debate and to establish an investigation commission on the Theses of the Philosopher. On March 1487, the papal commission, after ending its investigation work, declared seven Pico Theses heretical or offensive and judged other six Theses as groundless.
Pico, in May of the same year, against this unfavourable judgement, intentioned to promptly defend his thought and claim the worth of his own freedom of philosopher, by wiriting the “Apologia” where he clearly accused his censors of ignorance. This defence of Pico pushed Innocent VIII to definitevely condamn all the Theses of Pico as heretical and outrageous and he forbid, resulting in excommunication, their reading, listening and print.

In the autumn 1487 Pico, after stating the hostile attidute of the Vatican City, decided to leave Rome. He intentioned to prospect his own Theses in other cultural contexts and, in particular, at the Sorbonne in Paris. The Pope, informed of the departure of Giovanni Pico Papa, decided, straightaway to make the “Sentence of the Pico Theses” public, by spreadng, in this way, the order for arrest of the Philosopher. In February 1488, he was arrested by Philip II of Savoy, count of Bresse and uncle of the king of France Charles in the outskirts of the city of Lyon. He was imprisoned at Vincennes, not far from Paris. His imprisonment, upon the intercession of several Italian princes, in particular of Lorenzo de’ Medici, was very short. On 10th March 1488 Pico was released.
From the spring of 1488, Pico settled near Florence, on the hills of Fiesole. He was deeply shaken by the sentence of heresy handed down by the Church. In that perod, while following an austere style of life, he mainly focused on mystic and religious subjects and also wrote a Comment to the biblical Psalms. In the meantime, Giovanni forced Lorenzo de’ Medici in order Girolamo Savonarola from Ferrara to be transferred to Florence, where the Dominican monk arrived at the Convent of Saint Mark, in 1489.
In that year Pico wrote the “Heptaplus”, a work composed by seven books, which are, in turn, subdivided in seven short chapters. This work is a mystico-allegorical exposition of the seven days of the creation.
In 1492, Pico worked out a text to be included in his more general design intended for demonstrating the substantial concord of the different phylosophical systems, the “De Ente et Uno”. Just, in that year, two dear persons close to Giovanni, died: Lorenzo il Magnifico and Angelo Poliziano. As a result of this, the philopher of Mirandola was more attracted by an inner mysticism, brightened up by the more and more intense relationships with Savonarola.
On 18th June 1493, the Pope Alexander VI, succeeded to Innocent VIII, cleared Pico of the papal censures and sentence of heresy. In that period, Giovanni Pico worked at a wide discussion to confute astrology and demonstrate the flimsiness of devinations of the future, based on the course of stars, the “Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem”, which were published by the nephew Giovan Francesco in 1496.
In those months of deep speculative reflection, Pico intensified his own religious meditation and his detachment in the solitary confinement of the Florentine convent of St. Mark. In this building, on 17th November 1494, the day when the soldiers of the king of France Charles VIII entered Florence, Giovanni Pico, after thirteen days of painful fevers, died. It was rumored that he was poisoned.
On the tombstone of his sepulchre in St. Mark in Florence appears this epigraph by the poet Ercole Strozzi  “Joannes iacet hic Mirandola. Caetera norunt et Tagus et Ganges forsan et Antipodes – here lies Giovanni from Mirandola, they know the rest, the Tagus, the Ganges and, maybe, also the Antipodes”.

THE WORKS

  • Sonnets
  • Comment on a love song composed by Girolamo Benivieni
  • Oration De hominis dignitate
  • Conclusiones Nongentae
  • Apologia
  • Liber epistolarum
  • Expositio singularis in orationem dominicam
  • Regulae
  • Expositiones in Psalmos>
  • Heptaplus
  • De Ente et Uno
  • Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem