BURIED TOGETHER
Friend Giovanni Benivieni, buried together
Queer Places:
Sorbonne, Sorbona, Parigi, Francia
Università di Bologna, Via Zamboni, 33, 40126 Bologna BO, Italia
St Marco, Via Camillo Cavour, 50, 50121 Firenze FI, Italia
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (24 February 1463 – 17 November 1494) was
an
Italian Renaissance nobleman and
philosopher.[1]
He is famed for the events of 1486, when, at the age of 23, he proposed to
defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy,
natural philosophy, and
magic against all comers, for which he wrote the
Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of
the Renaissance",[2]
and a key text of
Renaissance humanism and of what has been called the "Hermetic
Reformation".[3]
A precocious child with an exceptional memory, Giovanni 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 (probably honorary)
at the age of ten and in 1477 he went to Bologna to study
canon law.[7]
At the sudden death of his mother three years later, Pico renounced canon
law and began to study philosophy at the University of Ferrara.[7]
During a brief trip to Florence, he met
Angelo Poliziano, the
courtly poet
Girolamo Benivieni, and probably the young Dominican monk
Girolamo Savonarola. For the rest of his life he remained very close
friends with all three, including the ascetic and anti-humanist Savonarola.[8]
He may also have been a lover of Poliziano.[9]
From 1480 to 1482, he continued his studies at the
University of Padua, a major center of
Aristotelianism in Italy.[7]
Already proficient in Latin and Greek, he studied Hebrew and Arabic in
Padua with
Elia del Medigo, a Jewish
Averroist, and read Aramaic manuscripts with him as well. Del Medigo also
translated
Judaic manuscripts from Hebrew into Latin for Pico, as he would continue
to do for a number of years. Pico also wrote
sonnets in
Latin and Italian which, because of the influence of Savonarola, he destroyed
at the end of his life.
He spent the next four years either at home, or visiting
humanist
centres elsewhere in Italy. In 1485, he travelled to the
University of Paris, the most important centre in Europe for
Scholastic philosophy and theology, and a hotbed of secular Averroism. It
was probably in Paris that Giovanni began his 900 Theses and conceived
the idea of defending them in public debate.
In 1494, at the age of 31, Pico was poisoned under mysterious circumstances
along with his friend
Angelo
Poliziano.[14]
It was rumored that his own secretary had poisoned him because Pico had become
too close to Savonarola.[12]
He was interred together with Girolamo Benivieni at San Marco and Savonarola
delivered the funeral oration. Ficino wrote: "Our dear Pico left us on the
same day that Charles VIII was entering Florence, and the tears of men of
letters compensated for the joy of the people. Without the light brought by
the king of France, Florence might perhaps have never seen a more somber day
than that which extinguished Mirandola's light."[12]
In 2007, the bodies of Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola were exhumed from
St. Mark's Basilica in Florence. Scientists under the supervision of Giorgio
Gruppioni, a professor of
anthropology from Bologna, wished to use modern technology to determine
the cause of the two men's death.[8]
In February 2008 they announced that these forensic tests showed that both
Poliziano and Pico died of arsenic poisoning, probably at the order of
Lorenzo's successor, Piero de' Medici.[15]
My published books:
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