Pico della Mirandola Giovanni (1463–94), Italian philosopher who, in 1486, wrote a series of 900 theses which he hoped to dispute publicly in Rome. Thirteen of these were criticized by a papal commission. When Pico defended himself in his Apology, the pope condemned all 900 theses. Pico fled to France, but was briefly imprisoned there in 1488. On his release, he returned to Florence and devoted himself to private study. He hoped to write a Concord of Plato and Aristotle, but the only part he was able to complete was On Being and the One (1492), in which he uses Aquinas and Christianity to reconcile Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about God’s being and unity. He is often described as a syncretist, but in fact he made it clear that the truth of Christianity has priority over the prisca theologia or ancient wisdom found in the hermetic corpus and the cabala. Though he was interested in magic and astrology, he adopts a guarded attitude toward them in his Heptaplus (1489), which contains a mystical interpretation of Genesis; and in his Disputations Against Astrology, published posthumously, he rejects them both. The treatise is largely technical, and the question of human freedom is set aside as not directly relevant. This fact casts some doubt on the popular thesis that Pico’s philosophy was a celebration of man’s freedom and dignity. Great weight has been placed on Pico’s most famous work, On the Dignity of Man (1486). This is a short oration intended as an introduction to the disputation of his 900 theses, and the title was invented after his death. Pico has been interpreted as saying that man is set apart from the rest of creation, and is completely free to form his own nature. In fact, as the Heptaplus shows, Pico saw man as a microcosm containing elements of the angelic, celestial, and elemental worlds. Man is thus firmly within the hierarchy of nature, and is a bond and link between the worlds. In the oration, the emphasis on freedom is a moral one: man is free to choose between good and evil. E.J.A.