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Updated: June 7, 2025
The old thrift and simplicity gave way to extravagance and ostentation; the old faith gave way too, but that was not wholly the effect of Lorenzo's natural inclination towards Platonic philosophy, fostered by his tutor Marsilio Ficino and his friends Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, but was due in no small measure also to the hostility of Pope Sixtus, which culminated in the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478 and the murder of Giuliano.
He was mindful that there should be a thing called the Renaissance in Italy; and must attend to what claims Pico di Mirandola and others should make on him for spiritual food.
"No, by my faith," said the Pope. "I thought as much," said Pico della Mirandola. We have blind men, one-eyed men, squint-eyed men, men with long sight, short sight, clear sight, dim sight, weak sight. All that is a faithful enough image of our understanding; but we are barely acquainted with false sight. There are hardly men who always take a cock for a horse, or a chamber-pot for a house.
At Mirandola, where he faced the papal armies, he laid a scheme to take the Pope himself. A snowstorm kept the fiery Julius in his tent, and Bayard lost him. A few days afterward the pontiff's life was in his hands. A traitor offered, for a purse of gold, to poison the Pope's wine.
Here Marsilio Ficino's Platonic Academy used to meet, in the loggia and in the little temple which one gains from the cloisters, and here Pico della Mirandola composed his curious gloss on Genesis.
He was called Giovanni at baptism; Pico, like all his ancestors, from Picus, nephew of the Emperor Constantine, from whom they claimed to be descended; and Mirandola, from the place of his birth, a little town afterwards part of the duchy of Modena, of which small territory his family had long been the feudal lords.
At any rate Bacon seems to have given the coup de grace to allegory in England. Under the influence of Pico della Mirandola it was resurrected from its tomb by Henry Reynolds; but it was a much less moral allegory and a more mystical. Prose is the proper vehicle of moral doctrine and should have been employed by Spenser.
Yet, knowing what lay between Sforza and Borgia, it may have seemed to Pico too extraordinary a coincidence that Giovanni should have been so ready at hand to defend the honour of the House of Mirandola. But he asked no questions. He was content in his philosophy to accept the event and be thankful for it on every count.
From a pensioner at Chelsea he had learnt the use of the broadsword. He afterwards made an attempt, in which, however, he does not seem to have persevered, to become a performer on the national instrument of his forefathers, the harp. Ambition of such various attainments reminds us of what is related concerning the Admirable Crichton, and Pico of Mirandola.
But there was no fear of that; indeed, he had no thought of the kind. Leaving the dangerous ground behind him, he glided easily and naturally into impersonal subjects. From Italy he began to talk of Florence, of Pico della Mirandola, and the painters of the Renaissance.
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