Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Difference between revisions

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>

 

 

===Education===

** 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.

* 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'.

 

==Sources and further reading==

* 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.&nbsp;65–100. {{ISBN|978-0801897399}}.

* Borchardt, Frank L. "The ''Magus'' as Renaissance Man." ''Sixteenth Century Journal'' (1990): 57–76. {{doi|10.2307/2541132}}.

* {{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}}

 

{{Authority control}}

[[Category:1463 births]]

[[Category:1494 deaths]]

[[Category:15th-century writers in Latin]]

[[Category:15th-century Italian philosophers]]