November 5, 2020 39
the Latin texts that Flavius confected
for him. He follows the twists and turns
of Pico’s etymologies, numerology, and
angelology with admirable precision
and as much clarity as any mystagogue
could hope for in an interpreter.
Pico, he shows, deliberately bobbed
and weaved as he drafted his presenta-
tion of his project. He was offering an
esoteric message—the Jews themselves,
Pico noted, allowed no one under forty
to study the Kabbalah—and he intro-
duced it in an esoteric way. The brilliant
rhetoric of his opening pages—so often
seen and cited as the core of an optimis-
tic message—turns out to have been an
invitation, to those with the rare gifts to
accept it, to turn away from the desires
and sins that so often determined indi-
viduals’ fates (a precept that he him-
self would soon adopt). Humans, Pico
held, were free to rise or fall, to climb
the universe’s gorgeous hierarchy of
things and beings or to descend it. The
truly virtuous would use this special
opportunity in one way only: to reject
the earthly passions of ordinary human
nature, to study and debate all philoso-
phies, and—at the end—to master the
techniques embedded in the Kabbalah.
Pico’s project—whose pathos Co-
penhaver brings out elegantly in his
conclusion—was as strange as it was
magnificent. He hoped to charm and
mystify an audience of Christian schol-
ars, so that a few of them might join his
effort to create a radically new version
of an ancient Jewish enterprise, a phi-
losophy that offered not only truths but
also a special way of life to those who
fol lowe d it. No wonder t hat when it c a me
time, in the oration, to describe and
summarize the Kabbalah, Pico dodged
again, and provided instead a history
of its creation—a patchwork, like the
oration as a whole, of traditions, some
transmitted accurately and some torn
from their original contexts and misin-
terpreted, perhaps deliberately. It was a
tour de force—but it was also an offer
that no listener could have understood
in full, much less accepted, even if Pico
had been allowed to give his speech.
To the extent that Pico actually be-
lieved in the dignity of man, it was in
a particular sense, one for which he
probably found inspiration in Augus-
tine and other Fathers of the Church.
As created, man had no special dignity,
no worth at all: a cosmic chameleon,
he could become as devoid of thought
and emotion as a crustacean or a stone,
or burn with the celestial love of an
angel, but until he made his decision
he was the being without qualities. In
one sense, though, man did have a spe-
cial dignity: the dignity of his potential.
Angels and animals could not change
position. But man was a shape- shifter,
and if the shift was violent and serious
enough to take him out of his original
self, he could realize a destiny that no
other being possessed.
The idea that Pico’s oration has
something to do with human dignity is
not solely a modern anachronism. The
edition of Pico that I use every day is a
vellum- bound folio, printed in Reggio
Emilia in 1506. Because it is incom-
plete, I was able to buy it in a book
barn, long ago, for $37.50. A correc-
tor—the period term for the poor dev-
ils of literature who marked up texts
for composition, read proofs, and drew
up indexes—equipped the oration with
marginal notes in Latin. Many of them
simply call attention to the names that
Pico dropped, which strew the whole
text like autumn leaves in Vallombrosa.
But other notes offer summaries. The
two on the first page of the speech read
“Hominis dignitas” (dignity of man)
and “Voluntas libera in homine” (free
will in man). This corrector made no
claims to originality, and his marginal
notes came from an earlier edition—
perhaps the Venice 1498 edition of Pi-
co’s works, where they appear in the
same form. But in their humble way,
he and his colleague, I suspect, were
reading the text as I’ve just suggested,
as an assertion of human potential, and
he may have grasped Pico’s intentions.
Copenhaver has cut through gener-
ations of misguided commentary and
shown us how to read this complex, baf-
fling text. Yet much remains to be done.
Jews were not expel led f rom centra l a nd
northern Italy in the fifteenth century.
But Bernardino of Siena and others
preached against them. Monti di Pietà
(savings and loan institutions) were cre-
ated to stop them from lending money
at interest to Christians. And they were
forced to wear identifying signs: yellow
circles, for example, for men, and ear-
rings for women. A decade before Pico
composed his oration, a Christian boy
named Simonino was found dead and
mutilated, just before Easter, in Trento.
The local authorities—including the
bishop—blamed the local Jews. Tor-
ture made some of them confess that
they had killed the boy so that they
could use his blood to make matzo for
Passover. Executions followed.
The pope opposed these horrors,
but his representative arrived too late
to prevent them. And from Trento, a
borderland city, the ritual murder ac-
cusation, long more or less dormant,
spread into the Holy Roman Empire.
Scurrilous images were printed, more
trials were held, more Jews were killed.
Eventually a campaign began to con-
fiscate and destroy all Jewish books in
the empire. What did Pico’s program,
and his collaboration with Mithridates,
mean to these two men at a time when
Italian Jews were being marked and
separated from other Italians and the
blood libel was coming back to life?
Pico himself was no milk- and- water
philo- Semite. In the oration and in the
self- defense that he wrote after it, he
made clear that he was trying to use
the genuine revelations of pious ancient
Hebrews, who had lived before the Sav-
ior came, to combat the errors of mod-
ern Jews as well as to offer Christians a
new path to the one true form of self-
realization. The knotted stories of Pico
and Flavius, and of Pico and his other
Jewish interlocutors, have been eluci-
dated in recent years by scholars like
Saverio Campanini and Michela An-
dreatta, who interpret these encoun-
ters with great learning and subtlety.
But we will need to know much before
we can follow with full understanding
these cultural dramas of attraction and
repulsion, alliance and opposition, phi-
lology and forgery. Brian Copenhaver’s
learned and lively book traces the his-
tory of scholarship to eradicate wide-
spread errors and plunges the reader
into the network of puzzling texts that
ensnared and ravished Pico in 1486,
and the complex ways in which the phi-
losopher worked them into a system.
He will be the best of guides, as learned
as Flavius Mithridates and a great deal
more dependable, for all who try to go
farther. QAND
If you would like to know more about this listing,
please contact [email protected]
or (212) 293-1630.AND
A CURRENT LISTINGMarlborough Gallery
545 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001; (212) 541-4900
http://www.marlboroughnewyork.com
Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM–6PMMAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ
Figure in Iron House, 1989–1990
Burlap, resin and iron
58" x 43" x 35"Alexandre Gallery
724 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10019
(212) 755-2828
alexandregallery.com
TOM UTTECH
NEW PAINTINGS
October 24–November 28Tom Uttech
Nind Ombisse, 2020
oil on linen, 31" x 37" 1/8"
including artist’s painted frameLewAllen Galleries
Railyard Arts District
1613 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 988-3250
[email protected]
http://www.lewallengalleries.comWOODY GWYN
Contact gallery for available works.The Drawing Room
55 Main Street, 2nd Floor
East Hampton, NY 11937
http://www.drawingroom-gallery.com
(631) 324-5016
Friday through Sunday, 11–5 PM
& by appointmentDOROTHY RUDDICK
Selected Fiber Works
1970s & 1980sOctober 30–December 20, 2020Untitled VÀEHURQOLQHQ[Swann Auction Galleries
104 East 25th Street
New York, NY 10010
(212) 254-4710; swanngalleries.comUpcoming Auction: Modern & Post-War Art, December 3
This fall will see Swann Auction Galleries expand our port-
IROLRRIÀQHDUWRIIHULQJV2Q'HFHPEHU6ZDQQZLOORIIHU
WKHKRXVH·VLQDXJXUDOVDOHRI0RGHUQ 3RVW:DU$UWZLWKD
IRFXVRQ0RGHUQLVWSDLQWLQJVGUDZLQJVDQGVFXOSWXUHXSWR
and including works from 1946 through the contemporary
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'DYLG+DUH,UHQH5LFH3HUHLUDDQGPDQ\PRUHAzul, 2020Esteban Vicente, Primavera Series:
Lena, oil and paper collage on canvas,- Estimate $25,000 to $35,000.