Pico della Mirandola, one of the most curious figures in the history of the Renaissance, was born in 1463, and was the son of Francesco Pico, Count of Mirandola and Concordia in the Modenese. He was a wonderfully precocious boy, and in his youth he visited the chief universities of Italy and France. In 1486 he issued a challenge to all comers to engage with him in public discussion at Rome, but the debate was forbidden by the pope on the score of the heretical tendency of certain of the nine hundred theses which Pico had offered to maintain. An Apologia which he issued in his defence exposed him to considerable persecution until Alexander III. in 1493 absolved him of the charge of heresy. He spent much of his life in travelling, and became known as a generous benefactor of the poor. He was an intimate friend of Politian and Lorenzo de' Medici. He died of fever in 1494, and Savonarola, who had been anxious to enrol him among the Friars Preachers, vested him after death in the habit of the order. Mirandola was the last of the schoolmen. He endeavoured to reconcile the Catholic theology with mediæval philosophy, and his works are a bewildering compound of mysticism, scholasticism, and recondite knowledge. He interpreted the Mosaic text by the Neoplatonic doctrine of the microcosm and the macrocosm, and maintained that in natural magic lay the strongest testimony to the truth of the Gospels. He appealed to the authority of the Cabbalists and Pythagoreans as well as to the Apostles; he exhibited, along with a childlike credulity, an argumentative ingenuity worthy of the subtlest schoolman. He was a humanist as well as a theologian, and was the author of various Latin epistles and elegies and of a series of florid Italian sonnets. His writings are of little value, but the magic of his personality survives. A theologian and an erotic poet, a philanthropist, a scholar, and a traveller, an adherent at once of Duns Scotus and of Politian, he was one of the most chivalrous, generous, and versatile of men; his character is as engaging as it is curious and complex.
See G. P. della Mirandola, his life by his nephew (trans. by Sir Thomas More; Nutt, Lond. 1890), and Pater's Studies in the Renaissance.