Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, after studies in Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, and Pavia, had gone in 1484 to Florence, where Marsilio Ficino has converted him to Neoplatonism.
Pico is twenty-three in 1486 when he publishes Conclusiones nongentae in omni genere scientiarum (“900 Conclusions in Every Kind of Science”), covering logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, theology, ethics, and the Kabbalah.
The same year, he produces his Oration on the Dignity of Man, a humanist attempt at philosophical syncretism.
He attempts, in his eclectic thought, to reconcile Judaism, Christianity, and Greek philosophy, classifying all things in three categories: super-celestial, God and the angels; the celestial, the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars; and the terrestrial, material things below the Moon.
The mediator of all categories is humankind, "the Divine Masterpiece," whose special dignity is in its freedom and its power to shape its own destiny.
Pope Innocent VIII forbids a proposed disputation, in which Pico is to defend his theses, when thirteen of them are declared heretical.
Pico flees to France, where he will be briefly imprisoned in 1488; he will later return to Florence.
