Della Mirandola Research Articles

Gods in the Garden: Visions of the Pagan Other in the Rome of Julius ii

This essay 1 explores the reception of Pope Julius ii’s statuary deities in his Cortile del Belvedere through the poetic works of two humanists, papal courtier Evangelista Maddaleni de’ Capodiferro and Savonarolan philosopher Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola. The construction of the Cortile animated a lively querelle on the state and mission of the Catholic Church, as it allowed the pagan idols of antiquity to re-enter the holy grounds of the Vatican. Through the analysis of two divergent poetic receptions of the Belvedere gods, this article will explore the Cortile del Belvedere and Julius ii’s Rome, as a space of spiritual dialogue and religious hybridism.

Praenotio, Prisca Haeresis, and Astrology: Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola between Savonarola and Giovanni Pico

This article considers the place of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s ideas within the astrological debates that arose in Renaissance Italy after the publication of the Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco Pico’s famous uncle. Published posthumously in 1496, the Disputationes incited a rigorous discussion of the status of astrology in various intellectual circles in Renaissance Italy. Gianfrancesco Pico was the editor of his uncle Giovanni Pico’s Opera, and the younger Pico was also known as one of Girolamo Savonarola’s most ardent followers. This article will focus on Gianfrancesco’s two main anti-astrological treatises, the De rerum praenotione and the Quaestio de falsitate astrologiae. Gianfrancesco’s writings reveal his own elaborate ideological agenda and the ways in which he used, in a controversial manner, both his uncle’s and Savonarola’s arguments in consequent philosophical and astrological discussions.

Tearing Plato to Pieces: Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonism

This article considers Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s understanding of the history of Platonism in his Examen vanitatis. It analyzes his sources and methods for understanding the history of philosophy—genealogical source criticism, historiographical analysis, and comparative history—and argues that his approach is shaped by anti-Platonic Christian apologetics. It documents how Gianfrancesco Pico closely studies Marsilio Ficino’s and his uncle Giovanni Pico’s understandings of Platonism and its history, and how his contextualization of their work within the broader history of Platonism is part of a larger endeavour to turn the page and even close the book on this chapter of the Quattrocento. Although neither Ficino nor Gianfrancesco finds universal agreement among ancient Platonists, Ficino explains their history as one of inquiry and interpretation, in which Platonism and Christianity are inexorably united, whereas Gianfrancesco characterizes it as a history of lies and disagreements that threaten Christianity. In trying to protect sacred history, Gianfrancesco Pico helped develop the tools that would eventually critique it.

Written in Blood: Blood Devotion in Gianfrancesco Pico’s Staurostichon

This article aims to provide an analysis of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s hymn Staurostichon in view of other examples of Savonarolan blood devotion. Staurostichon describes a supernatural event that took place in Germany between 1501 and 1503, when unusual rainfalls started to mark people’s bodies and garments with shapes of red crosses and other symbols generally connected to Christ’s Passion. Often interpreted as a rain of divine blood, the Kreuzwunder gave free rein to the imagination of many historians, astrologers, and prophets of the time. Deeply engrained with Savonarola’s devotion to Christ’s blood and wounds, Gianfrancesco Pico’s Staurostichon seeks to provide a biblical and prophetic explanation of the event: an explanation that is soaked in the gory events of the sacred Scriptures and the lives of the saints.

Fabulae and Imaginatio in Gianfrancesco Pico’s Thought

In Renaissance philosophy, the term fabula is often used to mean a poetic or fantastic tale that conceals the truth beneath metaphorical language. This article will focus on a rather different concept of fabula found in Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s works. To the younger Pico, the entire tradition of Greek and Latin poetry is a fabula: that is, a false and immoral narration inspired by demons. In the first part of this article, I will trace the origin of this use of fabula to the early Christian apologists. I will argue that Gianfrancesco’s intention was to build on this idea through an interpretation of ancient thought that differed from the historiographical model of prisca theologia proposed by Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico. In the second part, I will show the close relationship, in Gianfrancesco’s philosophy, between fabula and imaginatio.

Learned Credulity in Gianfrancesco Pico’s Strix

In 1522–23, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola was involved in trials that executed ten accused witches. Soon after the trials, he published Strix, sive de ludificatione daemonum, a meticulous defence of witch-hunting. A humanistic dialogue as heavily dependent on classical literature and philosophy as on Scholastic demonology, Strix is unusually candid about the logic of witch-hunting. A convicted witch among its four interlocutors makes Strix unique among witch-hunting defenses. Moreover, it devotes less attention to maleficia or magical harm than to seemingly peripheral questions about sacraments and the corporeality of demons. It attempts to demonstrate that witches’ interactions with demons happen in reality, not in their imagination, thereby vindicating the truth of Christian demonology and explaining the current surfeit of evils. Strix explicitly reverses Gianfrancesco’s earlier stance on witchcraft in De imaginatione (1501) and supplements the defence of biblical truth he undertook in Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium (1520).

The Way Philosophers Pray: Hymns as Experiential Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Beginning with the work of Marsilio Ficino through the poems of Michele Marullo, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Pierre Ronsard, Edmund Spenser and others, this essay discusses the revival and fortune of philosophical hymns in Quattrocento Italy and the diffusion of this genre in Early Modern Europe. In doing so, we will attempt at framing this phenomenon in the context of Early Modern religious pluralism and interpret it as an instance of experiential knowledge.

Enactive becoming

The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on human becoming as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film Blade Runner. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming.

Cross and Crucible: Alchemy in the Theology of Paracelsus

Paracelsus was not only a reformer of medicine with a preference for medical alchemy, but also emerged as a radical church reformer. However, he only rarely used the imagery of alchemy as a parable for theological salvation. Fire as the driving force for every alchemical process was also suitable as an image for the purification of souls. A central idea of alchemy, to transfer a substance from its still impure original state into the purified final state, was very much in line with Paracelsus’s doctrine of the Last Supper, according to which the mortal human who had descended from Adam is to be brought to a new birth through baptism with the Holy Spirit. As an alchemist, Paracelsus was keenly interested in the transfiguration of Christ, which he first explained alchemically, but later magically, probably according to the model of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

The Genealogy of ‘Human Dignity’: A New Perspective

ABSTRACTThis article considers the history of the concept of human dignity from its origins in the Bible and in Stoic philosophy down to the twentieth century. The major thinkers who contributed to the development of the idea are examined, including Pico della Mirandola, Pufendorf, Kant, and Broch. Similarly, the views of contemporary philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and Martha Nussbaum are considered. The central thesis in this argument, which diverges from the standard view, is that Goethe occupies a pivotal role in this tradition. Goethe’s creation of an organic, holistic and self-reflective view of human dignity established a new paradigm. This innovative concept of dignity as an expression of human growth and self-realization found its way into the UDHR and German Basic Law. It is a position adopted by the German Constitutional Court in several important rulings; and it continues to find an echo in the writings of contemporary philosophers.

ЭКЗИСТЕНЦИАЛЬНЫЙ СМЫСЛ ПРОЕКТОВ КОНСТРУИРОВАНИЯ ЧЕЛОВЕКА

The idea of human design rests in the heart of European humanist project. The existential meaning of the idea of human design is analyzed. A piece of the work by J. Pico della Mirandola is interpreted as a prophecy expressing the fate of the New European era (by M. Heidegger). Several aspects could be distin-guished in this prophecy: the throwing of man into the world without his place, form and purpose, the right and demand to define both place and form and raison d 'être by reason. Historically, special exper-iments of solving the fundamental mystery are considered - what it means to be human from Descartes to modern transhumanistic projects of human self-construction? The meaning of the New Time era is de-fined through J. Pico 's proposed existential task. It is emphasized that at every historically special stage of subjugation of the nature of man, the dream of almighty condensed in the strange topos of about-being. Faced with the impossibility of defeating death, and without abandoning new projects of its sub-jugation, the modern era generates existential substitution. Suffering is put on the scene of death as the main representative of evil. The result is euthanasia technologies that view death not just as a lesser evil compared to suffering (pain), but as the most radical mean of achieving the new goal - radical pain relief. A thought experiment is being conducted to demonstrate the possibility of self-destruction of mankind motivated by the desire to solve the difficult problems of mankind in the way of its euthanasia.

Astrological Debates in Italian Renaissance Commentaries on Aristotle’s Meteorology

Abstract From the time of Albertus Magnus, medieval commentators on Aristotle regularly used a passage from Meteorology 1.2 as evidence that the stars and planets influence and even govern terrestrial events. Many of these commentators integrated their readings of this work with the view that planetary conjunctions were causes of significant changes in human affairs. By the end of the sixteenth century, Italian Aristotelian commentators and astrologers alike deemed this passage as authoritative for the integration of astrology with natural philosophy. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, however, criticized this reading, contending that Aristotle never used the science of the stars to explain meteorological phenomena. While some Italian commentators, such as Pietro Pomponazzi dismissed Pico’s contentions, by the middle of the sixteenth century many reevaluated the medieval integration. This reevaluation culminated in Cesare Cremonini, who put forth an extensive critique of astrology in which he argued against the idea of occult causation and celestial influence, as he tried to rid Aristotelianism of its medieval legacy.

Meaning of Human Dignity in Works of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

The article analyses the Renaissance influence on the development of the concept of human dignity and illustrates the importance of human dignity through the eyes of the Renaissance author Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In this regard, the article indicates the latest findings in human dignity research and infers that while discussing the Renaissance influence on its development it should be considered that this concept consists of two fundamental dimensions, initial and realized dignity. The author implies that the origins of such an interpretation of human dignity were already present in the writings of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In the latter, the (hidden) beginnings of the individualization process in connection with human dignity can also be recognized. These beginnings sank into oblivion in the later historical periods, although nowadays the elements of individualization are present more extensively than ever before. The article suggests that the concept of human dignity might be regarded as a Renaissance construct.

Meaning of Human Dignity in Works of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

The article analyses the Renaissance influence on the development of the concept of human dignity and illustrates the importance of human dignity through the eyes of the Renaissance author Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In this regard, the article indicates the latest findings in human dignity research and infers that while discussing the Renaissance influence on its development it should be considered that this concept consists of two fundamental dimensions, initial and realized dignity. The author implies that the origins of such an interpretation of human dignity were already present in the writings of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In the latter, the (hidden) beginnings of the individualization process in connection with human dignity can also be recognized. These beginnings sank into oblivion in the later historical periods, although nowadays the elements of individualization are present more extensively than ever before. The article suggests that the concept of human dignity might be regarded as a Renaissance construct.

El aristotelismo de Giovanni Pico della Mirandola y la concordia entre Platón y Aristóteles

En este trabajo sostengo que el programa de la concordia entre Platón y Aristóteles que Pico della Mirandola desarrolla es una buena herramienta para entender, no sólo su relación con el platonismo, sino su aristotelismo. Para ello, (1) presento las aproximaciones recientes sobre el tema de la concordia entre Platón y Aristóteles en los trabajos de Pico; (2) analizo la forma en que se puede hablar del aristotelismo de Pico desde un enfoque recepcional; (3) presento el programa de la concordia entre Platón y Aristóteles en la Antigüedad Tardúa y su recepción piquiana. Concluyo que el aristotelismo de Pico puede ser caracterizado como una actitud explícita de valoración positiva y como un uso de sus tesis para defender la concordia frente a los platónicos.

From Sinai to Athens: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s philological quest for the transmission of theological truth

ABSTRACTIn the summer of 1486, Pico came into possession of what he regarded as the original Chaldean text of the Chaldean Oracles, whose Greek text thus came to appear to him as an incomplete and flawed translation. The now-lost purported original Chaldean Oracles were a back translation infused with kabbalistic elements produced by Flavius Mithridates. In his Conclusiones nongentae (Rome, 1486), however, Pico devoted to them fifteen conclusions. Through an overall analysis of these conclusions, the first part of the article points out the kabbalistic themes and symbols that Pico descried in the original Chaldean Oracles. In the second part, an in-depth analysis of one of these conclusiones demonstrates that Pico’s reading of the oracle quoted therein implied that the Greek translator had missed the kabbalistic purport of the original. The article shows that Pico’s Conclusiones aimed at pointing out that the transmission of kabbalah to Zoroaster and from Zoroaster (although not without misinterpretations) to the Greek world – in other words, the existence of a divinely revealed prisca theologia transmitted through the ages – could be demonstrated on the basis of philological analysis and that, according to Pico, insofar as they provided a philological reconstruction of that science and its transmission, the Conclusiones should be reckoned as the culmination of the studia humanitatis.

Poisoning histories in the Italian renaissance: The case of Pico Della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano were two of the most important humanists of the Italian Renaissance. They died suddenly in 1494 and their deaths have been for centuries a subject of debate. The exhumation of their remains offered the opportunity to study the cause of their death through a multidisciplinary research project.Anthropological analyses, together with documentary evidences, radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA analysis supported the identification of the remains attributed to Pico. Macroscopic examination did not reveal paleopathological lesions or signs related to syphilis. Heavy metals analysis, carried out on bones and mummified tissues, showed that in Pico's remains there were potentially lethal levels of arsenic, supporting the philosopher's poisoning theory reported by documentary sources. The arsenic concentrations obtained from analysis of Poliziano's remains, are probably more related to an As chronic exposure or diagenetic processes rather than poisoning.

Reformation, Renaissance and Hermeticism: Contexts and Interfaces of the Early Reformation Movement

ABSTRACTThis article contextualizes three theological currents that emerged on the eve of the Reformation and traces their interdependence: first, Luther's anti-Pelagian Augustinianism and the sola scriptura principle; second, the Florentine project of linking Hermeticism and the Christian Cabbala, exemplified in the works of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Attempting to link a new concept of magic with prisca theologia, both sought to harmonize contemporary forms of worship using Hermetic sources to advance the notion of common Christian origins and an optimistic anthropology alien to Luther's soteriology. The third current relates to magic, as delineated in Heinrich Kramer's Malleus maleficarum. Directed against Florentine Hermeticism, the book's Augustinian imprint, demonology, and view of witches bore significant parallels to Luther's theology. This aspect remains largely unexamined. Developing the premise that sixteenth-century Wittenberg was receptive to Florentine ideas, this article shows that Luther's early Christocentrism must arguably be seen as an alternative to those of others.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Astrology (1486–1493): FromScientia Naturalisto theDisputationes adversus astrologiam

Previous articleNext article No AccessGiovanni Pico della Mirandola and Astrology (1486–1493): From Scientia Naturalis to the Disputationes adversus astrologiamOvanes AkopyanOvanes AkopyanUniversity of Innsbruck Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance Volume 21, Number 1Spring 2018 Published for Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/697034 Views: 186Total views on this site © 2018 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johanan Alemanno, al-Ghazālī's The Niche of Lights

This is the first of two articles describing the influence of al-Ghazālī (d. 1111 c.e.) on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494) and his associate Johanan Alemanno (d. after 1504). The first article concentrates on the influence of Ghazali's The Niche of Lights (Mishkāt al-Anwār), including discussion of its unpublished Hebrew translations.