Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola (1470–1533) was an Italian nobleman and

philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

, the

nephew In the lineal kinship system used in the English-speaking world, a niece or nephew is a child of the subject's sibling or sibling-in-law. The converse relationship, the relationship from the niece or nephew's perspective, is that of an ...

of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. His name is typically truncated as Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola.

Biography

Gianfrancesco was the son of

Galeotto I Pico Galeotto I Pico della Mirandola (3 August 1442 - 9 April 1499) was an Italian condottiero and nobleman, Signore of Mirandola and Concordia. He was noted by contemporaries for his tyranny. The son of Gianfrancesco I Pico, Galeotto initially allie ...

lord of Mirandola The Lordship, then County, Principality and finally Duchy of Mirandola ( it, Ducato della Mirandola) was a state which existed in Northern Italy from 1310 until 1711, centered in Mirandola in what is now the province of Modena, in Emilia-Romagn ...

, and Bianca Maria

d'Este The House of Este ( , , ) is a European dynasty of North Italian origin whose members ruled parts of Italy and Germany for many centuries. The original House of Este's elder branch, which is known as the House of Welf, included dukes of Bavaria ...

, the daughter of Niccolò III d'Este. Like his uncle he devoted himself chiefly to philosophy, but made it subject to the Bible, though in his treatises, ''De studio divinæ et humanæ sapientiæ'' and particularly in the six books entitled ''Examen doctrinæ vanitatis gentium'', he depreciates the authority of the philosophers, above all of Aristotle. He wrote a detailed biography of his uncle, published in 1496, and another of Girolamo Savonarola, of whom he was a follower. Having observed the dangers to which Italian society was exposed at the time, he sounded a warning on the occasion of the Lateran Council: ''Joannis Francisci Pici oratio ad Leonem X et concilium Lateranense de reformandis Ecclesiæ Moribus'' (Hagenau, 1512, dedicated to

Willibald Pirckheimer Willibald Pirckheimer (5 December 1470 – 22 December 1530) was a German Renaissance lawyer, author and Renaissance humanist, a wealthy and prominent figure in Nuremberg in the 16th century, imperial counsellor and a member of the governing City ...

). He died at Mirandola in 1533, assassinated by his nephew Galeotto, along with his youngest son, Alessandro. His other son Giantommaso was ambassador to Pope Clement VII. Charles B. Schmitt wrote:

Whereas
Giovanni Pico Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (24 February 1463 – 17 November 1494) was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when, at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, ...
had often argued that all philosophies and all religions have attained a portion of the truth, Gianfrancesco said, in effect, that all religions and all philosophies – save the Christian religion alone – are mere collections of confused and internally inconsistent falsehoods. In holding such a view, he sided not only with Savonarola, but with certain of the Fathers and with the Reformers as well. On this point, he was insistent. Christianity is a self-subsistent reality and it has little if anything to gain from philosophy, the sciences and the arts. This central thesis diffuses itself through nearly the whole of Gianfrancesco’s literary output. He writes not to praise or extend the realm of philosophy but to demolish it.

Selected works

* ''De studio divinae et humanae philosophiae'' (1496) *
Ioannis Pici Mirandulae Vita
' (1496) * ''De imaginatione'' (1501) * ''De providentia Dei'' (1508) * ''De rerum praenotione'' (1506-1507) * ''Quaestio de falsitate astrologiae'' (ca. 1510) * ''Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium, et veritatis Christianae disciplinae'' (1520) *
Libro detto strega o delle illusioni del demonio
(1524) * ''Opera Omnia'' (1573)

Sources

* * Burke, Peter. (1977). "Witchcraft and Magic in Renaissance Italy: Gianfrancesco Pico and His ''Strix,''" in Sydney Anglod, ed. ''The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft,'' pp. 32-48. London. * Herzig, T. (2003). "The Demons' Reaction to Sodomy: Witchcraft and Homosexuality in Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola's Strix." ''The Sixteenth Century Journal'', 34, 1, 53. * Kors, Alan Charles and Edward Peters. (2001) ''Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History.'' Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (Excerpts from the Pico's ''Strix'', pp. 239-44) * Schmitt, C. B. (1967). ''Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469-1533) and his critique of Aristotle.'' The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. * Pappalardo, L. (2015). "Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola: fede, immaginazione e scetticismo" (Nutrix, 8), Turnhout: Brepols Publishers.

References

External links

* *
Giovan Francesco Pico: Biographic overview at the Centro Internazionale di Cultura "Giovanni Pico della Mirandola"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Francesco 1470 births 1533 deaths Giovanni Francesco Italian philosophers 16th-century philosophers Demonologists Assassinated Italian people Witchcraft in Italy 16th-century murdered monarchs Murder in 1533