Introduction
GIOVANNI PICO DELLA Mirandola (1463–94) lived deep and sucked all the marrow out of life. There was nothing that did not interest and excite him. Having mastered Latin and Greek at an unfeasibly young age, he went on to study Hebrew and Arabic in Padua while still in the first flower of youth and became an expert on Aristotelian philosophy, canon law, and the mysteries of the Kabbalah before he was out of his twenties. Surrounded by the art of Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Piero della Francesca in Florence and Ferrara, he became a close friend of many of the most glittering stars of his day. A cousin of the poet Matteo Maria Boiardo, he was an intimate acquaintance of the enormously wealthy litterateur Lorenzo de’ Medici, the classical scholar Angelo Poliziano, the Neoplatonic trailblazer Marsilio Ficino, and the firebrand preacher Girolamo Savonarola. He was, moreover, a writer and a thinker of breathtaking originality. Quite apart from penning a multitude of charming verses, he dreamed of uniting all the various branches of philosophy into a single, inspiring whole and longed to bring the religions of the world together.
In many senses, Pico is the paradigmatic example of the Renaissance man. In the course of his brief life, he captured the essence of a period in Italian history—covering the years ca. 1300–ca. 1550—that is commonly perceived as having been defined by an unparalleled explosion of cultural inventiveness and dominated by artistic and intellectual brilliance. A true uomo universale (universal man), he seems to have looked on the world with an unbounded sense of curiosity and excitement, and appears to have drawn on the art and literature of classical antiquity with every bit as much enthusiasm as he sought to craft a new and more glittering future for mankind that was filled with boundless hope and possibility. He conversed with artists who seemed to be reaching for the stars, he mingled with rich and powerful patrons who seemed to live for art and culture, and he hungrily sought out new knowledge from different cultures and peoples.
It is perhaps no surprise that Pico’s greatest work—the Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486)—has come to be seen as the unofficial manifesto of the Renaissance as a whole. A succinct summary of Pico’s entire philosophical project, it had at its heart an unquenchable belief in man’s potential. “I have read in the records of the Arabians,” he began,
that Abdala the Saracen, when questioned as to what on this stage of the world, as it were, could be seen most worthy of wonder, replied: “There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than man.” In agreement with this opinion is the saying of Hermes Trismegistus: “A great miracle, Asclepius, is man.”
Man, Pico believed, was indeed a miracle. In his eyes, mankind possessed a unique capacity for reaching beyond the bounds of this earth and ascending to something altogether higher, better, and more extraordinary, through poetry, literature, philosophy, and art.
When one stands in any of the great centers of the Renaissance, it is hard not to be seduced by the feeling that Pico captured the spirit of the age with unusual precision. In Florence alone, the artworks that have come to be so indelibly associated with the period seem to testify to a truly miraculous flowering of the human soul. Michelangelo’s David, Brunelleschi’s dome, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and Masaccio’s Trinity all appear to suggest that life was touched with beauty, that patrons and artists aspired to something more than the petty concerns of everyday existence, and that the horizons of the imagination were becoming broader and more exciting with every passing day. Indeed, so intense is the sense of wonder that such works are inclined to inspire that it is sometimes difficult not to believe that their creators were not somehow more than merely human. So removed do they seem from worldly trivialities that they are apt to appear rather forbidding, almost godlike. “Miraculous” is certainly the word that often springs to mind.
Yet if Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man offers a neat summary of the luster that the Renaissance has accrued in the popular imagination, his life also contained a hint that something else was at play in this most remarkable of periods. Although Pico had his head in the clouds, he was also a man with visceral urges and a fondness for the seamier side of life. Not only was he arrested on suspicion of heresy following his forays into religious syncretism, but he also got himself embroiled in a host of rather sticky situations as a result of his unquenchable lust. Shortly after his first visit to Florence, he seduced the wife of one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s cousins, and, after being caught trying to elope with the love-struck woman, was horribly wounded and thrown into jail for a while. No sooner had he recovered than he leaped into something new, albeit of a rather different character. Finding that they had more than a little in common, Pico began a passionate friendship with Angelo Poliziano that blossomed into a smoldering sexual relationship. Even after they were poisoned—perhaps on the orders of Piero de’ Medici—the bond between them was commemorated by their being buried side by side in the church of San Marco, despite the Church’s strict injunctions against homosexuality.
At first glance, this seems to jar somewhat with Pico’s image of man as a miraculous source of wonder and to compromise his own prestige as the archetypal Renaissance man. Yet all is not what it seems. Buried within the Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico offered an insight that explained both his otherworldly sophistication and his all-too-earthy desires.
Only a little way into his discourse, Pico pictured God addressing His creation with an unusual frankness. At first, the divinity’s words seem to reinforce Pico’s belief in humanity’s extraordinary capacities. Although “the nature of all other beings is limited and constrained” by divine law, God tells man,
you, constrained by no limits, in accordance with your own free will, in whose hand We have placed you, shall ordain for yourself the limits of your nature. We have set you at the world’s center that you may from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you shall prefer.
But just at the moment when He seems to exalt mankind most fully, Pico’s God turns this gift of free will into the core of a potent paradox. Rather than preordaining Renaissance man to untrammeled glory, God informs him:
You shall have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish [and] you shall have the power, out of your soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.
Although man did indeed have the capacity to ascend to the heights of heavenly beauty—Pico seems to suggest—he was also capable of plumbing the ugly depths of depravity. In fact, the two sides of human nature were closely interrelated. Angels and demons lived side by side in man’s soul, locked in a strangely captivating symbiotic relationship. It was impossible to reach for the stars unless you also had feet of clay.
In this, Pico not only explained the apparent contradictions of his own character but also expressed a vital truth about the Renaissance more generally. However tempting it may be to succumb to the temptation of viewing it as a period of cultural rebirth and artistic beauty during which men and women were impossibly civilized and sophisticated, the achievements of the Renaissance coexisted with dark, dirty, and even diabolical realities. Corrupt bankers, greedy politicians, sex-crazed priests, religious conflict, rampant disease, and lives of extravagance and excess were everywhere to be seen, and the most ghastly atrocities were perpetrated under the gaze of the statues and buildings that tourists today admire with such openmouthed adoration. Indeed, as Pico himself exemplified, it would have been all but impossible for the greatest monuments of the Renaissance to have come into being had its foremost artists, writers, and philosophers not been mired in every kind of depravity and degradation. The one depended upon the other. If the Renaissance was an age of cultural angels, it was also a period of worldly demons.
Yet precisely because it is so very easy to be seduced by the beauty and elegance of the art and literature of the Renaissance, the uglier side of the period is all too easily forgotten and overlooked. Perhaps by virtue of the Romantic aura that surrounds its cultural achievements, the titillating private lives of its artists, the sordid concerns of its patrons, and the superabundance of intolerant hatred in its streets are regularly swept under the carpet and glossed over with the illusion of unblemished perfection. At the level of historical accuracy, this tendency is unfortunate merely because it introduces a somewhat artificial separation between high culture and social realities. But at a much more human level, it is also unfortunate because it robs the period of its excitement, its vividness, and its true sense of wonder. For it is only by appreciating the seamier, grittier side of the Renaissance that the extent of its cultural achievements really becomes clear.
This book is a conscious effort to redress the balance. Looking at the hidden story behind the paintings that have come to dominate perceptions of the Renaissance in Italy, it seeks to examine anew three of the most important features of the Renaissance “story,” all of which are readily apparent in the life of Pico della Mirandola, and each of which reflects a different component in the creation of the art and culture of the age. Examining the brutal social universe of artists, the dastardly concerns of their patrons, and the unexpected prejudices that accompanied the “discovery of the world,” it shows that the Renaissance was much “uglier” than anyone might like to admit and—for precisely that reason—all the more impressive. And by the end of the journey, the Renaissance will not just appear to have been populated by angels and demons; it will never seem the same again.