ABSTRACT
The most meteorlike, and in some ways the most unusual, of Lorenzo’s large company of scholars was Pico della Mirandola, although, in the last resort, it is his attitude and his promise that are remembered more than his actual achievements. Pico’s romantic character and extraordinary comeliness — in an age when male physical beauty was greatly esteemed — won him many friends. Platonism represented one half of Pico’s interests; the other half consisted of sterner religious doctrines. Pico spent the rest of his life in Florence and the Villa Querceto near Fiesole became his home. In some ways Pico exemplifies the limits to the progress which the New Learning had made in the course of the century, but his attack on the alleged occult influence of heavenly bodies was influential. The great question for Renaissance philosophers was the harmonisation of Platonism and Christianity, and in this dispute Pico’s great learning was used to good effect.
