November 5, 2020 37
Thinking Outside the ‘Pico Box’
Anthony Grafton
Magic and the Dignity of Man:
Pico della Mirandola and His
Oration in Modern Memory
by Brian P. Copenhaver.
Belknap Press/Harvard University
Press, 682 pp., $55.00
Learned men in the Renaissance loved
oratory as deeply as politicians did in
the nineteenth century, and they prac-
ticed it with skill and dedication. They
wrote speeches to open church coun-
cils, to advertise university courses,
and to praise everything from an-
cient disciplines they hoped to revive
to great teachers who had just died.
Working from scraps of evidence, they
composed the lost speeches of histor-
ical figures, such as the emperor He-
liogabalus’s oration to the prostitutes
of Rome. They wrote satirical eulogies
of flies and dogs, gout and debt, beer
and drunkenness. In the most famous
of these, The Praise of Folly, Erasmus
brought a personified Folly onstage to
praise herself, as she explained why
human society could not exist without
the illusions she spread. Sometimes,
they had the chance to present their cre-
ations to an audience: Lorenzo Valla,
for example, recited his oration in
praise of Thomas Aquinas on the saint’s
feast day, at Santa Maria sopra Minerva,
one of the churches of the great philoso-
pher’s Dominican order. It was not well
received, perhaps because Valla made
no secret of his view that the Fathers
of the Church were more eloquent and
useful than scholastics like Aquinas.
But the most famous speech of the
Renaissance, the one that thousands of
modern students read every year, was
never recited, and the debate that it
was intended to open never took place.
In 1486 a young philosopher named
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–
1494), famed for his memory, his poly-
glot learning, and his daring, decided
to hold a public disputation in Rome.
Participants would argue about nine
hundred theses that Pico had crafted, de-
rived from dozens of authors in as many
disciplines. Before the games began, he
planned to deliver a long speech that
would lay out his intellectual program.
Pico was not a master of impulse
control. Earlier in 1486, his decision to
run away with the wife of a local official
had ended in capture and humiliation.
Fifteenth- century Italian authorities
tolerated a wide range of opinion on
many touchy subjects, such as the
power of the stars to control human
life. But several of Pico’s theses went
too far. In December 1484 Innocent
VIII, the reigning pope, had issued a
bull that strongly supported the witch-
hunting activities of Heinrich Kramer
and Jacob Sprenger. This text, drafted
by Kramer and Sprenger, stated clearly
that witches renounced the Christian
faith, committing their terrible crimes
on behalf of “the Enemy of the Human
Race.” It was incorporated in the Mal-
leus Maleficarum, the manual of witch-
hunting that the two men compiled,
when it appeared in print in 1486 –1487.
Innocent’s Curia was not the place
to assert that no disciplines could give
greater assurance of the divinity of
Christ than magic and Kabbalah—as
one of Pico’s more contentious theses
did. The debate was forbidden. A com-
mittee was empaneled to scrutinize the
theses. Pico, pressed to defend himself
and required to return his borrowed
books to the Vatican Library, fled to
France early in 1488. After negotia-
tions he wound up in Florence, where
Lorenzo de’ Medici protected him.
Though suppressed, Pico’s speech
was printed, again and again. It begins
with an interlocking set of statements
about human nature, as mysterious as
they are sonorous:In Arab memorials, Most Rever-
end Fathers, I have read about Ab-
dala, a Saracen: when asked what
was the most astonishing sight to
be seen on this stage of the world—
so to speak—he answered that
there was nothing to see more as-
tonishing than man. Supporting his
opinion is that saying of Mercury:
Man is a great miracle, Asclepius.Pico goes on to describe man as “an in-
terval between fixed eternity and flow-
ing time and (as the Persians say) the
bond—no, the wedding- knot—of the
world, a little lower than the angels, ac-
cording to David,” and to evoke man’s
power—unique among the creatures of
the universe—to admire and love the
orderly splendor of God’s creation and
to rise above that to union with God.
For generations, as Brian Copen-
haver shows in Magic and the Dignity
of Man, historians have cited Pico’s
speech as Exhibit A when making thecase that in the Renaissance, humanity
became conscious of its own creative
powers. Textbooks on Western civiliza-
tion and Renaissance history almost al-
ways cite it. Their authors refer to it as
Pico’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man,”
though he himself did not give it that
title and used the term “dignity” only
twice in it, neither time in connection
with man. These textbooks juxtapose it
with other creations of the same period
that seem to embody a similar view
of the beauty and power of humanity:
Don atello’s bronze David, for example,
or Brunelleschi’s dome for the Floren-
tine cathedral. Often, a few lines from
the speech appear in what Copenhaver
nicely calls a “Pico Box”—an inset in-
troduced by a headline that forecloses
any question about what the text might
mean: “Pico della Mirandola States the
Renaissance Image of Man.”
The textbook summaries of what Pico
said are highly labile. As edition suc-
ceeds edition, “the Renaissance Image
of Man” becomes “the Renaissance
image of mankind,” and that in turn be-
comes the image “of humanity.” But no
new iteration is more concrete or mean-
ingful than the version it replaces. The
speech has “become a meme,” as Co-
penhaver writes: a pill- sized summary
of the meaning of the Renaissance.
Formulations of its message mutate not
because the author of the textbook in
question has rethought Pico’s text but
because it must now be summarized in
language that better reflects the social
and political concerns of the day.Since 1974 I’ve been teaching courses
on the intellectual history of the Re-
naissance. In them, students read the
whole text of Pico’s speech, in English,
and their first reaction has usually been
bafflement. They come to the work
expecting a paean to human creativ-
ity, only to encounter something com-
pletely different: a detailed argument
that humans achieve the true end of
their being not by sculpting gorgeous
marble nudes or by composing se-
ductive love songs, but by following
an ascetic regimen of study and self-
discipline that enables them to rise to
unity with God. Equally surprising and
even less appetizing is Pico’s long enu-
meration of the many writers whose
works he had collected, mastered, and
drawn on: ancient Persians, Chaldeans,
and Greek Neoplatonists, medieval
scholastics and the Jewish sages whose
oral revelations were collected, accord-
ing to Pico, in the Kabbalah.
And even these lists of names, each
characterized by an adjective or two
that reveal little to students, are not as
off- putting as the mysterious kernels
of wisdom that Pico draws from them.
He quotes Pythagoras, for example, ad-
vising young men never to make water
while facing the sun, never to cut their
nails during a sacrifice, and “to feed the
cock.” True, Pico glosses these injunc-
tions: the one about making water, for
example, actually tells us that we must
void “our eager floods of overflowing
pleasure with morality.” But they re-
main confusing, and no visible line con-
nects such ancient advice to Donatello
and Lorenzo de’ Medici. It takes a lot
of professorial commentary, starting
with the incorrect title and winding up
with the Kabbalah, to make clear that
his endlessly ramifying vision of the
chain of being, the nine orders of an-
gels that occupied places on it, and the
possibility that humans could ascend to
the levels of the angels and beyond was
far too complex to fit in any Pico Box.
Copenhaver has translated a number
of volumes of forgotten lore from hard
Latin into accurate, readable English,
and he has written pioneering studies
of premodern philosophy. In this mas-
sive, lively, and learned book, he car-
ries out two tasks, one of demolition
and one of construction. He explains
how and why historians decided to put
this Renaissance philosopher and his
ideas not only in a box, but in the wrong
one. And he reveals the real structure
of Pico’s speech—which, he argues,
has never been properly understood,
chiefly because Pico wrote in a deliber-
ately esoteric way.
The first ten chapters lay out a long
and depressing story of scholarly error.
Moving deftly across barriers of space
and time that would daunt most schol-
ars, Copenhaver shows that many
thinkers have found ways to bend, fold,
and mutilate Pico’s rhetoric. German
Enlightenment philosophers like Chris-
tian Thomasius and Jacob Brucker de-
nounced Pico. They held that he had
argued, falsely, that philosophers with
radically divergent views had actually
agreed. Worse still, he had succumbed,
credulously, to the delusions of magic
and Kabbalah. Voltaire—less erudite
than the Germans, though more soGiovanni Pico della Mirandola; portrait by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, 1560sGalleriadegli^Uffizi,^ Florence/HeritageImages/GettyImages