The True Magic and Astrology of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Abstract

Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola stands out in fifteenth-century Italy as a precocious, idiosyncratic, controversial yet accomplished and influential humanist and philosopher. He was a great networker, corresponding with poet and humanist Angelo Poliziano, Ficino’s patron Lorenzo de’ Medici, and preacher reformer Girolamo Savonarola among others.1 He knew Ficino well as he was attracted to the Platonism and Neoplatonism newly revived by the Florentine philosopher. At 19 years of age while studying in Padua, Pico requested a copy of Ficino’s Platonic Theology following its publication in 1482. He moved to Florence to study with Ficino and remained there for a year.2 But Pico was critical of Ficino’s interpretations of Platonic philosophy particularly his own translation of the Enneads.3 The issues raised by Pico against Ficino’s methods have been referred to by scholars as ‘controversies’. The first of these is Pico’s view of Ficino’s interpretation of Plato’s Symposium on Love as being too materialistic; the second is his rejection of the metaphysical and theological interpretation of Parmenides; the third is finding problematic Ficino’s application of astral causation to particular events and individuals.4 Nevertheless, both philosophers played an integral role in developing an early modern syncretic episteme that reconciles Aristotelian causation, Platonic universal animation and Neoplatonic emanationism, to which Pico specifically introduced Jewish mysticism or more specifically Kabbalah.5