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It is the counterpart, though certainly the feebler counterpart, of that practical truce and reconciliation of the gods of Greece with the Christian religion, which is seen in the art of the time; and it is for his share in this work, and because his own story is a sort of analogue or visible equivalent to the expression of this purpose in his writings, that something of a general interest still belongs to the name of Pico della Mirandola, whose life, written by his nephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, that great lover of Italian culture, among whose works this life of Pico, Earl of Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he calls him, may still be read, in its quaint, antiquated English.
"And Jenny shall give us a capital cup of coffee," said Mirandola; "it is the only hospitality that I can offer my friends. Give me a light, my general; and now, how are things?" "Well, at the first glance, very bad; the French have left Rome, and we are not in it." "Well, that is an infamy not of today or yesterday," replied Mirandola, "though not less an infamy.
In these halcyon days at this hospitable table Michael Angelo met such men as Massilio Ficino, the interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of erudition; Luigi Pulci and Angelo Poliziano—the latter is supposed to have incited Michael Angelo to carve the bas-relief now in the Casa Buonarroti, called by Condivi "The rape of Deianeira and the battle of the Centaurs."
How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be his men, Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it.
Often it is a twig, a flower, a glass of water, a fire-steel, or something else, in appearance of no importance, which they employ as a means of compassing their intent. It is true that unions of this sort often turn out exceedingly happily, as in the case of two priests, mentioned by Prince della Mirandola, who spent forty years of the happiest possible wedlock with a spirit of this description.
Much has been said of the rapidity with which she worked, and one story relates that on a certain day the Duchess of Brunswick, the Duchess of Mirandola, and the Duke Cosimo de Medici, with other persons, met in her studio, and she sketched and shaded drawings of subjects which they named to her, with a skill and celerity which astonished and delighted her guests.
Picas de la Mirandola, who believed in astrology, says, "I have no doubt truly, 'Astra influunt, non cogunt." But would it have been a real proof of the truth of astrology, if Farsetti had been assassinated on a Friday? In my opinion, certainly not.
They continued intimate till the death of the latter in 1494; it was his nephew, Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, who afterwards wrote the Life of Savonarola. From Reggio the friar went to Genoa; and by this time his fame as a prophet in the north of Lombardy was well established. Now came the turning-point in his life.
Pico della Mirandola tells that the mere sound of the monk's voice, startling the stillness of the Duomo, thronged through all its space with people, was like a clap of doom; a cold shiver ran through the marrow of his bones the hairs of his head stood on end while he listened.
There was the mystic poet Girolamo Benevieni hastening, perhaps, to carry tidings of the beloved Frate's speedy coming to his friend Pico della Mirandola, who was never to see the light of another morning. There were well-born women attired with such scrupulous plainness that their more refined grace was the chief distinction between them and their less aristocratic sisters.
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