Thishereness

Summary

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 didn’t become an angel. He didn’t get the chance. The pope thought the plan was ‘contrary to the faith, erroneous, scandalous and discordant’; Pico was questioned by a papal commission, doubled down on his problematic theses and then fled to France, where he was imprisoned and narrowly escaped a heretic’s death. It was only by the grace of Lorenzo de’ Medici that he was allowed to return to Florence and take up a quieter life. But once Il Magnifico was dead and his son Piero was in charge – with French troops bearing down on the city and Savonarola preaching in the pulpit – not even the philosophers were safe. Pico and his friend Angelo Poliziano were assassinated. Pico was 31. Their bodies were exhumed in 2007 and poisoning by arsenic confirmed (in Pico’s case, through a toenail), though the identity of their murderer remains unknown. Pico died burning up with fever; bundles of unintelligible notes were found stuffed in his cabinets. He had spent the last two years of his life lash...