Pico della Mirandola

The tragedy of Pico’s death, as well as the memory of his brief, incandescent life, has been revived in recent years. In 2007, his remains, together with those of the man who may have been his lover, the scholar-poet Angelo Poliziano, were disinterred from the Dominican Convent of San Marco, in Florence. Both contained toxic levels of arsenic. The results confirmed the suspicions of the doctors who examined the bodies in 1494 (poison was the murder weapon of choice, the digestible bullet, in Renaissance Florence) and brought Pico’s name back into circulation. His death has become the subject of a Florentine murder mystery: a five-hundred-and-twenty-year-old cold case. Who killed Pico della Mirandola? And why?

In December, 2013, Italy’s self-styled leading art detective, Silvano Vinceti, called a press conference in Florence with what he claimed were new findings. Vinceti was the head of the committee that had exhumed the bodies, six years earlier. At the press conference, Vinceti proposed a solution to the mystery, set in a political shadow world at the intersection of Medici power, papal authority, and fundamentalist religious hysteria. Pico, in Vinceti’s view, was assassinated on the orders of Piero de Medici, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Even without the whodunit speculation, the bare facts of Pico’s death are harrowing. He took almost two weeks to die. The king of France, Charles VIII, who was marching from Pisa to Florence at the time (he would take the city on the day of Pico’s death) dispatched his own physicians to tend to the great mind of the age. They arrived too late. Pico fell into a kind of accepting swoon, calm and tranquil. “He asked also all his servants’ forgiveness, if he had ever before that day offended any of them,” Thomas More wrote in 1504, in his brief life of the young Count.

[...] Last year, the scholars Giulio Busi and Raphael Ebgi poured more oil on the coals of the Pico controversy in a new book, “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Mito, Magia, Qabbalah” (“Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Myth, Magic, Kabbalah”). The work concentrates on Pico’s intellectual and moral range—his challenge to the Church, his relationship with Savonarola, his interest in Platonism and Kabalistic theories, his philosophical interest in beauty—and on his search for esoteric meanings hidden beneath the surface of Old Testament narratives. He spent his days and nights truffling through texts for symbols, much like a semiotician. “Pico is contradictory and must be accepted as a cultural agitator,” Giulio Busi, the director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Free University of Berlin, says. “He was much more transgressive than we are usually willing to admit.”

[...] It is unlikely, though, that Pico had in mind the modern form of individualism. In his fragmentary speeches, letters, and tracts, he was forging a kind of humanism saturated in spirituality. He was on a mystical, otherworldly ascent, very typical of both the Kabbalah and Plato, his two intellectual passions. “Let us spurn earthly things; let us struggle towards the heavenly,” he writes.

This drift of thought sensitized Pico to the fulminations of Girolamo Savonarola, the “mad monk,” and it may have contributed to his death.

At his 2013 press conference, Silvano Vinceti claimed to possess a witness chronicle “passed over in silence until now.” It was the diary of Marino Sanuto, a Venetian historian, begun in 1496. By that year, the French king had been and gone; Naples was his final destination. Piero de Medici (dubbed “the Unfortunate”) and his clan were in exile. Moving swiftly to fill the power vacuum left behind, Savonarola took control of Florence. Fearful that Piero de Medici would make a push to regain power, he initiated an anti-espionage sting, arresting a number of nobles with Medici connections. Five were beheaded. Among those hauled in for interrogation was a man named Christopher, from Casalmaggiore. When questioned, he confessed, among other things, that two years earlier, in 1494, he had “hastened the death of his master by poisoning.” His master was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

Vinceti is convinced that Piero de Medici despised Pico because he had “chosen to plead the cause” of his enemy, Savonarola, and that he had him killed. Scholars such as Giulio Busi do not regard Silvano Vinceti highly; he is neither a scientist nor an academic historian. The scientific tests on Pico’s remains were done by scientists from the University of Bologna, the University of Pisa, and the University of Lecce, under Vinceti’s management. His theory of revenge, Medici style, is inflected with the allure of a freshly discovered antique journal, chanced upon in a cobwebbed attic, its pages yellowed, its leather-bound cover coated in dust. In fact ,the diary of Marino Sanuto has long been in print, and the Medici theory is at least a century old. The French writer and Italian expert Léon Dorez aired it as far back as 1898.

At the same press conference, Vinceti offered a few more possibilities. Savonarola had other powerful enemies with long arms, among them the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. There is also a suggestion that Pico’s Kabbalistic enthusiasms and his open legitimation of “natural” magic—the mystical and esoteric side of his shtick—opened him up to accusations of witchcraft. Giulio Busi, more soberly, believes that “Pico’s death is destined to remain shrouded in mystery”.

Tanti possibili sospetti, dunque. Ma probabilmente la verità è meno romanzesca. L’ipotesi è che i due umanisti siano stati tra le prime vittime del morbo gallico descritto di lì a qualche decennio, nel 1530, da Gerolamo Fracastoro: ossia la sifilide, importata secondo la tesi prevalente dai marinai di Cristoforo Colombo. Una lettera del senese Antonio Spannocchi, datata 29 settembre 1494, racconta la fine di Poliziano poco dopo la morte di un ragazzo da lui amato, e con i medesimi sintomi. Anche lui nelle ultime due settimane era stato preso da una febbre violenta e aveva cominciato a delirare proclamandosi Cristo. Mentre un amico che venne a trovarlo si sentì apostrofare come San Pietro. Chi era? Il conte Pico...