Beautifully Delusional.

Erin Maglaque, last seen here in 2023 discussing Aldus Manutius, reviews several books on the Renaissance — Nine Hundred Conclusions by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (edited and translated by Brian P. Copenhaver), The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Sublime Language by Edward Wilson-Lee, and Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer — for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 18 · 9 October 2025; archived), and it’s full of good things. Some excerpts:

Giovanni Pico​, count of Mirandola and Concordia, was 23 when he travelled to Rome to become an angel. It was 1487. Christendom’s most important priests would be there; the cleverest theologians would debate him. The pope would watch. Pico was going to dazzle them all. He planned to begin with a poetic, densely allusive speech, which almost no one would understand; then he would make nine hundred pronouncements, each more cryptic than the last, e.g. ‘251. The world’s craftsman is a hypercosmic soul’ and ‘385. No angel that has six wings ever changes’ and ‘784. Doing magic is nothing other than marrying the world’ and ‘395. Whenever we don’t know the feature that influences a prayer that we pray, we should fall back on the Lord of the Nose.’ In an ecstatic trance he was going to leave behind his worthless, handsome body and ascend a mystical ladder to join with the godhead, the transcendence of his soul so absolute that his body might accidentally die. This was the Death of the Kiss. […]

Pico’s life touched much of what made the Renaissance the Renaissance. There were the people: Lorenzo de’ Medici, a Borgia pope (Alexander VI), Savonarola. There was the arcane classical scholarship: before Pico, no Christian had studied the Jewish Kabbalah. There was his reputed physical beauty: in paintings he looked like one of Botticelli or Raphael’s angels, pale and androgynous, with intricate golden curls. There was his immersion in the utterly bizarre world of Florentine Neoplatonism. He was friends with Marsilio Ficino, who taught his students to hallucinate by chewing laurel leaves while playing the lyre, who dressed up in a cape made of feathers so that he could be ‘a true Orpheus’. There were love affairs with men and women; there was intrigue and – finally – murder.

The speech with which Pico planned to open his performance in Rome is popularly known as the Oration on the Dignity of Man. The text, with its emphasis on human freedom and the intrinsic value of the individual, has been taught to generations of students as the canonical expression of the Italian Renaissance; it was ‘one of the noblest legacies of that cultural epoch’, according to the 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt, who did much to give the book its status. And yet Pico’s writings, as Brian Copenhaver has persuasively shown, are in essence medieval. […]

Pico never delivered his Oration. And it turns out that this most famous speech of the Renaissance isn’t really about the dignity of man at all. It’s about destroying personhood in pursuit of a melting with the One. It’s a script for mystical self-annihilation, the opposite of a humanist argument for man’s distinction in a secularising age. The Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think of the Renaissance this way partly because of a centuries-long misreading of it. In which case, does Pico really belong to the Renaissance? Or is our whole idea of the Renaissance hopelessly flimsy, nothing but a collection of fantasies about what it means to be modern and human?

Pico was born in 1463 in Mirandola, near Modena, to a noble family. According to family legend, a circle of flame appeared above his mother’s bed. Pico was a child prodigy in Latin and Greek, with a miraculous memory. As a young teen he went to Bologna to study canon law, and then roved the university towns of Italy and France seeking ever more esoteric knowledge. In Padua, he learned Hebrew and the philosophy of Averroes from the Jewish scholar Elia del Medigo. In Rome, he studied Arabic with the Sicilian Jew who went by the beautifully delusional name of Flavius Mithridates and who translated the Kabbalah into Latin for Pico (he was eventually arrested for murder, heresy and sodomy). When Pico arrived in Florence in 1484, Ficino had just finished, at that very hour, his translation of Plato. Ficino had a theory that the meeting was divinely ordained, and they argued over which of them was Plato reincarnated.

Pico was in his early twenties, tall, good-looking and a genius. He was also rich. He ate off silver plate. His hubris was staggering even in an age and a city known for its swagger. Pico thought he could prove that all of the world’s philosophical and religious traditions were, in fact, one. He would show the secret concord between Aristotle and Plato, long debated but never demonstrated; and he would go further, to show that these ancient philosophies shared essential truths with the Kabbalah and Christian scripture. He read everybody – the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages, the Arabic philosophers, the Greeks, the Platonists, the Kabbalists, the Zoroastrians – but defended no particular school, and extracted the best from each. In 1486, he published his Nine Hundred Conclusions, he wrote the Oration, and he set off for Rome. He also issued a challenge, printed at the back of the Conclusions. ‘The Conclusions will not be disputed until after Epiphany. Meanwhile they will be published in all the schools of Italy. And if any philosopher or theologian from the furthest parts of Italy wants to come and debate, this lord himself – the one who will dispute – promises to pay travel expenses.’

In the Oration, Pico mapped the path to mystical absorption in the godhead. […] His speech was intended as high Renaissance performance art, but that’s not to say it was secular, humanist or modern – rather, it was profoundly weird.

Most of the Conclusions are elliptic; Pico thought secrecy was the point. To put their meaning on the surface would be to ‘cast pearls before swine’. Some in his audience might recognise which were drawing on Aquinas, or on Plato, or Aristotle, or Plotinus, but no one would be able to follow the compressed, allusive trains of logic derived from the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, or Pico’s references to the foundational text of the Kabbalah, the Sefer ha-Zohar. More than six decades ago, Frances Yates wrote that Pico’s Conclusions are ‘absolutely fundamental … for the whole Renaissance’, and yet it is only now, with the appearance of Copenhaver’s edition and translation, that we have a modern, usable English version of the text. Pico’s enigmatic theses come in at under 17,000 words; Copenhaver uses 158,000 to explain them. This is a feat of scholarship. If you wanted to discover exactly why Pico included the propositions ‘253. Every soul sharing in Vulcan’s intellect is sown in the moon’ or ‘254. From the foregoing conclusion I gather why all Germans are stoutly built and pale in colour,’ Copenhaver makes it possible. (Together they constitute a joke, drawn from a web of references, including to Proclus, Porphyry, Caesar and Tacitus, about astrological influences on geography and character.) But it’s also possible to read the Conclusions in a trance-like state, as a swine grubbing at pearls, perhaps. Piled up they begin to make a certain aphoristic sense […]

Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Grammar of Angels takes up Pico’s interest in ecstatic states. It’s not a biography of Pico (too bad, since we could do with a fresh one in English) but a wide-ranging cultural history of mesmeric sound, from Plato to the Renaissance, loosely organised around Pico’s work. We are reminded of Plato’s just-so story from Phaedrus. Those who encountered the music and dance of the Muses were so enraptured that they forgot to eat, and subsequently died. The Muses transformed them into cicadas, creatures which make hypnotic, incantatory noise from birth to death. And then there is Poliziano’s libretto for Orfeo, an opera which ends with a group of bloodthirsty women tearing Orpheus limb from limb while chanting nonsensical dithyrambs to Dionysus. Wilson-Lee argues that Pico was intellectually intrepid, asking questions about the nature of the created universe – and about how to alter the fabric of one’s own existence – that others hadn’t dared ask; that his experiments with self-annihilation, especially by means of manic speech, magic and music, were audacious beyond those of his most imaginative contemporaries. But Pico himself proves elusive, and flickers in and out of view.

The quest for dissolution led Pico to the Kabbalah. […] The Kabbalah offered its own magic. When God created the universe, he spoke Hebrew. Hebrew letters – their shapes, lines, correlation with numbers – could form the subject of mystical contemplation: ‘388. There are no letters in the whole Law that do not exhibit secrets of the ten numberings in forms, ligatures, separations, twisting, straightness, defect, excess, smallness, greatness, crowning, closing, opening and sequence.’

It wasn’t surprising that, to the pope, the Conclusions stank of heresy. Pico had ‘dredged up the errors of pagan philosophers long since abolished’ and the pope asked him to defend his propositions in front of a commission. Pico was furious. He published an Apology which was nothing of the sort. […] ‘I must change my way of speaking,’ Pico sneered. ‘I’m talking to barbarians, and as the proverb neatly puts it, stammerers understand only those who stammer.’ This was not the wisest strategy when being investigated for heresy. The Conclusions was the first book to be banned by the papacy, more than fifty years before the creation of the Index of Prohibited Books. […]

In Inventing the Renaissance, Ada Palmer tries to identify what was distinctive about the period. Or, as she puts it, what was the ‘X factor’ that explains the transformations we perceive as unique to the age? She combines multiple approaches, circling through the period fifteen times, exploring the way 19th and 20th-century historians created myths of Renaissance exceptionalism; the way contemporary historians have systematically taken apart these myths; the way individual life stories, such as those of Alessandra Strozzi, or Machiavelli, or Michelangelo, or Poliziano, trouble some of the central assumptions underlying the idea of a Renaissance golden age; and – in the most persuasive section of the book – she examines the way debates about Renaissance humanism help us see what, exactly, was new in Italy in the 15th century.

By the end we are not left with much of a Renaissance at all. Palmer wants to ‘scrape off the glitter’, and she does. Her insistence that historians are always in the process of making history – her shorthand for historiographical debate is ‘the History Lab’ – works to undermine any sense that the distinctiveness of the Renaissance can be attributed to one big idea, such as the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, or capitalism, or individualism, or classicising art, or atheism. The Italian Renaissance had nothing that medieval Italy didn’t already possess: ‘All the key qualities were there, currents of trade, art, thought, finance and statecraft, but add some Ever-So-Much-More-So and the intensity increases, birthing an era great and terrible.’ Great, because of all the art and glitter; terrible, because of the endless violence and instability across the peninsula.

Palmer makes the historiography intelligible; she introduces a wide range of characters and anecdotes and lesser-known details, and because of this, the book is a useful introduction to the period. But I found it unbearable to read. The writing is often patronising and silly: from the epithets (calling the Florentine Priori ‘Nine Dudes in a Tower’) to the made-up dialogue (‘Machiavelli: WTF?!?!’) to the use of the word ‘badass’ to describe the mercenary Federico da Montefeltro. Sometimes she is simply confusing, as when she tries to ‘ground’ us in historical time by mapping Renaissance chronology onto modern, so we get unhelpful sentences such as ‘Pope Paul’s death in 1471 = 1971 saw the rise of Sixtus IV (Battle Pope!), so the political turmoil around the Pazzi Conspiracy corresponds to Watergate’ – which prompts a surreal image of a Medici bleeding to death on the steps of a DC hotel. There are many, many exclamation marks (Michelangelo’s David is ‘super naked!!!’) and dollar signs and theatrically spelled words (‘The Renaissance was … loooooong’; scholasticism was ‘increeeeeeeeedibly booooooring’ – I counted the vowels). There are spoiler alerts for things that happened five hundred years ago. There are flights of fancy that veer into farce, as when Palmer imagines Machiavelli weeping at Florence acquiring Unesco protected status and then imagines herself weeping for Machiavelli weeping. Throughout, she writes about herself in a cloying third person, most notably in a chapter titled ‘Why did Ada Palmer start studying the Renaissance?’ Readers surely deserve less excruciating forms of enthusiasm for the subject. […]

When humanists wrote about revivifying ancient virtue, did they really mean it? Or were they merely jobbing scholars who would write whatever their patrons asked them to? Was it all just glitter? ‘Would we want to know what was in their hearts,’ Palmer asks, and if we could know, would it matter? She encourages us to pay attention to Ficino’s account of Cosimo de’ Medici’s dying days, as related to his grandson Lorenzo. On his deathbed Cosimo had called Ficino to his side: ‘Even till the last day when he departed from this world of shadows to go to the light, he devoted himself to the acquisition of knowledge. For when we had read together from Plato’s book … [he] soon quitted this life.’ Cosimo died listening to Ficino reading from Plato. Maybe there isn’t a there to the Renaissance, no single ‘X factor’, but the orchestration of such a scene – in life and in literature – is distinctive; it is the turning of experience into a particular kind of art.

I confess I have little tolerance for aristocrats and rich kids who think they’re entitled to do anything they want (or of writing that is patronizing and silly), but I do love this kind of examination of intertwining lives and what helps define a cultural period. And Nine Hundred Conclusions is a great title; it should perhaps be published together with R.A. Lafferty’s Nine Hundred Grandmothers.