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|education = [[University of Bologna]], [[University of Ferrara]], [[University of Padua]], [[University of Paris]]
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'''Giovanni Pico dei conti della Mirandola e della Concordia''' (
==Biography==
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|url= http://genealogy.euweb.cz/italy/pico1.html|title= Genealogy.eu|access-date= 2008-03-09|last= Marek|first= Miroslav|date= 16 September 2002|work= Pico family}}</ref> The family had long dwelt in the [[Castle of Mirandola]] (Duchy of Modena), which had become independent in the fourteenth century and had received in 1414 from the [[Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor|Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund]] the fief of Concordia. Mirandola was a small autonomous county (later, a duchy) in [[Emilia (region of Italy)|Emilia]], near [[Ferrara]]. The Pico della Mirandola were closely related to the [[Sforza]], [[House of Gonzaga|Gonzaga]] and [[House of Este|Este]] dynasties, and Giovanni's siblings wed the descendants of the hereditary rulers of [[Corsica]], Ferrara, Bologna, and [[Forlì]].<ref name="genealogy.euweb.cz"/>
Born twenty-three years into his parents' marriage, Giovanni had two much older brothers, both of whom outlived him: Count
Giovanni's maternal family was singularly distinguished in the arts and scholarship of the [[Italian Renaissance]]. His cousin and contemporary was the poet Matteo Maria Boiardo, who grew up under the influence of his own uncle, the Florentine [[Gaius Maecenas|patron of the arts]] and scholar-poet [[Tito Vespasiano Strozzi]].<ref>{{cite web|url= http://www.geocities.com/autorbis/boiardolife.html|title= Trionfi.com|access-date= 2008-03-09|work= Boiardo's Life: Time Table|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090806060236/http://geocities.com/autorbis/boiardolife.html|archive-date=6 August 2009}}</ref>
Giovanni had a paradoxical relationship with his nephew [[
===Education===
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A precocious child with an exceptional memory, Giovanni was schooled in Latin and possibly Greek at a very early age. Intended for the [[Catholic Church|Church]] by his mother, he was named a papal protonotary (probably honorary) at the age of 10 and in 1477, he went to Bologna to study [[canon law]].<ref name="Baird">{{cite web|url=http://www.whitworth.edu/core/classes/co250/Italy/Data/fr_pico.htm |title=Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) |last=Baird |first=Forrest |year=2000 |work=Philosophic Classics |publisher=Prentice Hall |access-date=2009-01-28 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081202004135/http://www.whitworth.edu/Core/Classes/CO250/Italy/Data/fr_pico.htm |archive-date=2 December 2008 }}</ref>
At the sudden death of his mother three years later, Pico renounced canon law and began to study philosophy at the [[University of Ferrara]].<ref name="Baird"/> During a brief trip to Florence, he met [[Angelo Poliziano]], the [[courtly]] poet [[Girolamo Benivieni]], and probably the young Dominican friar [[Girolamo Savonarola]]. For the rest of his life, he remained very close friends with all three.<ref name="bbcexhume">{{Cite news |title=Medici writers exhumed in Italy |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6920443.stm |access-date=2015-12-11 |periodical=[[BBC News]] |date=28 July 2007}}</ref> He may also have been a lover of Poliziano.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Death in Florence|last=Strathern|first=Paul|publisher=Jonathan Cape|year=2011|isbn=978-0224089784|location=London|pages=84}}</ref>
From 1480 to 1482, he continued his studies at the [[University of Padua]], a major
He spent the next four years either at home
===''900 Theses''===
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Pico based his ideas chiefly on Plato, as did his teacher, Marsilio Ficino, but retained a deep respect for Aristotle. Although he was a product of the ''studia humanitatis'', Pico was constitutionally an [[Eclecticism|eclectic]], and in some respects he represented a reaction against the exaggerations of pure humanism, defending what he believed to be the best of the [[Middle Ages|medieval]] and Islamic commentators, such as [[Averroes]] and [[Avicenna]], on Aristotle in a famous long letter to [[Ermolao Barbaro]] in 1485. It was always Pico's aim to reconcile the schools of Plato and Aristotle since he believed they used different words to express the same concepts. It was perhaps for this reason his friends called him "Princeps Concordiae", or "Prince of Harmony" (a pun on Prince of Concordia, one of his family's holdings).<ref>Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. Stanford University Press (Stanford, California, 1964.) p. 62.</ref> Similarly, Pico believed that an educated person should also study Hebrew and [[Talmudic]] sources, and the Hermetics, because he thought they represented the same concept of God that is seen in the [[Old Testament]], but in different words.
He finished his "Oration on the Dignity of Man" to accompany his ''900 Theses'' and
[[File:Innocent VIII 1492.JPG|thumb|left|Innocent VIII, 15th century]]
In February 1487, [[Pope Innocent VIII]] halted the proposed debate, and established a commission to review the orthodoxy of the ''900 Theses''. Although Pico answered the charges against them, thirteen theses were condemned. Pico agreed in writing to retract them, but he did not change his mind about their validity. Eventually, all 900 theses were condemned. He proceeded to write an ''[[apologia]]'' defending them, ''Apologia J. Pici Mirandolani, Concordiae comitis'', published in 1489, which he dedicated to his patron, Lorenzo. When the pope was apprised of the circulation of this manuscript, he set up an inquisitorial tribunal, forcing Pico to renounce the ''Apologia'', in addition to his condemned theses, which he agreed to do. The pope
{{quote|In part heretical, in part the flower of heresy; several are scandalous and offensive to pious ears; most do nothing but reproduce the errors of pagan philosophers [...] others are capable of inflaming the impertinence of the Jews; a number of them, finally, under the pretext of 'natural philosophy', favour arts [i.e., [[Christian views on magic|magic]]<ref name="Hanegraaff p.54"/>] that are enemies to the Catholic faith and to the human race.<ref name="Lybereclatnetopcit">Lyber-eclat.net ''op.cit.''</ref>}}
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Pico's ''De animae immortalitate'' (Paris, 1541), and other works, developed the doctrine that man's possession of an [[immortal soul]] freed him from the hierarchical stasis. Pico believed in [[universal reconciliation]], as one of his 900 theses was "A mortal sin of finite duration is not deserving of eternal but only of temporal punishment;" it was among the theses pronounced heretical by Pope Innocent VIII in his bull of 4 August 1487.<ref>"[http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/encyc01.html?term=Apocatastasis Apocatastasis]". ''New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. I''.</ref>
In the ''Oration'' he argues, in the words of [[Pier Cesare Bori]], that "human vocation is a mystical vocation that has to be realized following a three
A portion of his ''Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem'' was published in Bologna after his death. In this book, Pico presents arguments against the practice of [[astrology]] that have had enormous resonance for centuries, up to our own time. ''Disputationes'' is influenced by the arguments against astrology espoused by one of his intellectual heroes, [[Augustine of Hippo]], and also by the medieval philosophical tale [[Hayy ibn Yaqdhan|''Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān'']] by [[ibn Tufail]], which promoted [[autodidacticism]] as a philosophical program.<ref>see Ben-Zaken, Avner, "Defying Authority, Rejecting Predestination and Conquering Nature", in ''[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801897394/ref=rdr_ext_tmb Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism]'' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 65–100.</ref>
Pico's antagonism to astrology seems to derive mainly from the conflict of astrology with Christian notions of free will. But Pico's arguments moved beyond the objections of Ficino, who was himself an astrologer. The manuscript was edited for publication after Pico's death by his nephew [[Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola]], an ardent follower of Savonarola, and may possibly have been amended to be more forcefully critical. This might possibly explain the fact that Ficino championed the manuscript and enthusiastically endorsed it before its publication.
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Early in his career, Pico wrote a ''Commento sopra una canzone d'amore di Girolamo Benivieni'', in which he revealed his plan to write a book entitled ''Poetica Theologia'':<ref>Butorac, pg. 357</ref>{{quote|It was the opinion of the ancient theologians that divine subjects and the secret Mysteries must not be rashly divulged... the Egyptians had sculpted sphinxes in all their temples, for no other reason than to indicate that divine things, even when they are committed to writing, must be covered with enigmatic veils and poetic dissimulation... How that was done... by Latin and Greek poets we shall explain in the book of our Poetic Theology.|''Commento'', Libro Terzo, Cap. xi, Stanza Nona<ref>Hanegraaff, pg. 64</ref>}}
Pico's ''Heptaplus'', a
''On Being and the One'' ({{lang-la|De ente et uno}}) has explanations of several passages in the [[Pentateuch]], Plato and Aristotle. It is an attempted reconciliation between Platonic and Aristotelian writings on the relative places of being and "[[henology|the one]]" and a refutation of opposing arguments.
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He wrote in Italian an imitation of Plato's ''[[Symposium (Plato)|Symposium]]''. His letters (''Aureae ad familiares epistolae'' Paris, 1499) are important for the history of contemporary thought. The many editions of his entire works in the sixteenth century sufficiently prove his influence.
Another notorious text by Pico is ''De omnibus rebus et de quibusdam aliis'' ("Of all things that exist and a little more"), which is mentioned in some entries on Thomas More's ''[[Utopia (More book)|Utopia]]'' and makes fun of the title of Lucretius' ''[[De rerum natura]]''.
==Cultural references==
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[[File:Hypatia Sanzio.png|thumb|Figure from [[Raphael]]'s ''[[The School of Athens]]'', possibly Pico della Mirandola.]]
*The beardless young man in [[Raphael]]'s [[fresco]] ''[[The School of Athens]]'' (1509–11) is thought to be Pico della Mirandola (or maybe [[Francesco Maria I della Rovere, Duke of Urbino|Francesco della Rovere]]).<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XRY6rgYan00C&q=%22Pico+della+Mirandola%22+%22school+of+athens%22&pg=PR15|title=Group Identity in the Renaissance World|first=Hannah Chapelle|last=Wojciehowski|year=2011|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1107003606|via=Google Books}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yzH9CwAAQBAJ&q=%22Pico+della+Mirandola%22+%22school+of+athens%22&pg=PA69|title=Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint|first=Mary|last=Jacobus|year=2016|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-1400883288|via=Google Books}}</ref> [[Christiane Joost-Gaugier]] described Pico della Mirandola as "a major philosophical inspiration of the fresco's program, especially insofar as he was the most outspoken proponent of the harmony of [[Plato]] and [[Aristotle]]."<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=SC7Id_HAa7IC&q=%22Pico+della+Mirandola%22+%22school+of+athens%22&pg=PA158|title=Vision and the Visionary in Raphael|first=Christian K.|last=Kleinbub|date=2019|publisher=Penn State Press|isbn=978-0271037042|via=Google Books}}</ref>
* In [[James Joyce]]'s ''[[Ulysses (novel)|Ulysses]]'', the precocious [[Stephen Dedalus]] recalls with disdain his boyhood ambitions, and apparently associates them with the career of Mirandola: "Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep...copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world...Pico della Mirandola like."<ref>Source: [
* Of minor interest is a passing reference to Mirandola by [[H. P. Lovecraft]], in the story ''[[The Case of Charles Dexter Ward]]'' (1927). Mirandola is given as the source of the fearsome incantation used by unknown evil entities as some sort of evocation. However, this "spell" was first depicted (as the key to a rather simple form of divination, not a great and terrible summoning) by, and in all likelihood created by, [[Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim]] in his ''[[Three Books of Occult Philosophy]]''. This was written several decades after Mirandola's death and was the first written example of that "spell", so it is almost impossible for Mirandola to have been the source of those "magic words".
* Psychoanalyst [[Otto Rank]], a rebellious disciple of [[Sigmund Freud]], chose a substantial excerpt from Mirandola's ''Oration on the Dignity of Man'' as the motto for his book ''Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development'', including: "...I created thee as a being neither celestial nor earthly... so that thou shouldst be thy own free moulder and overcomer...".<ref>Rank, Otto, ''Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development'', Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1932.</ref>
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** at the end of Chapter 24, having discussed [[Martin Luther|Luther]]'s concept of free will{{clarifyme|date=August 2019}}, the sage wants the acquaint Giovanni with Mirandola's ideas on this issue and lets him read "De hominis dignitate"; Giovanni peruses the book with great interest in Chapter 25;
** at the beginning of Chapter 26, with Giovanni having now read the ''Oration on the Dignity of Man'', the sage discusses two issues from the book with him. One is Pico della Mirandola's attempt to form one unified and universal philosophy and the difficulties thereof. The other one is Mirandola's concept of free will. Giovanni has learnt one passage from the book by heart, about God addressing man and telling him, that He has made him neither a heavenly nor an earthly creature and that man is the forger of his own fate. This passage is quoted in the novel.
* English composer [[Gavin Bryars]]
* Pico della Mirandola appears as the character Ikaros in [[Jo Walton]]'s novels ''[[The Just City]]'' and ''[[The Philosopher Kings (novel)|The Philosopher Kings]]''. Also, he is one of the main characters in her novel ''[[Lent (novel)|Lent]]''.
* In the book ''Dying for Ideas; The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers'' (2015) by Romanian philosopher [[Costica Bradatan]], Mirandola's life and work is taken as an early or even first example of taking human life as a project of 'self-fashioning', relating this to Mirandola's heretic idea of man being part of creation with 'an indefinite nature'.
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==See also ==
* [[Caterina Pico]] (sister)
* [[Christian Kabbalah]]
* Contemporary [[Italian Renaissance]] philosophers: [[Marsilio Ficino]], [[Lodovico Lazzarelli]], [[Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio]]
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==Sources and further reading==
{{Refbegin|
* {{CE1913|wstitle=Giovanni Pico della Mirandola}}▼
* Ben-Zaken, Avner, "Defying Authority, Rejecting Predestination and Conquering Nature", in ''Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism'' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 65–100. {{ISBN|978-0801897399}}.
* Borchardt, Frank L. "The ''Magus'' as Renaissance Man." ''Sixteenth Century Journal'' (1990): 57–76. {{doi|10.2307/2541132}}.
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* {{cite SEP |url-id=pico-della-mirandola |title=Giovanni Pico della Mirandola}}
* [http://www.exclassics.com/Pico/picintro.htm Life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola]
{{Medici}}
{{Platonists}}
▲{{CE1913|wstitle=Giovanni Pico della Mirandola}}
{{Authority control}}
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[[Category:1463 births]]
[[Category:1494 deaths]]
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[[Category:15th-century Italian philosophers]]
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[[Category:Christian Kabbalists]]
[[Category:Christian mystics]]
[[Category:Counts
[[Category:House of Pico|Giovanni]]
[[Category:Italian occult writers]]
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