The brilliant and audacious Humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 31.

His life had been exceptional. A child prodigy who had left home at fourteen to study church law, Pico turned to philosophy after the death of his mother in 1480. In addition to the traditional languages expected of any scholar of the Renaissance, Latin and Greek, he studied Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. In 1485, he traveled to Paris, where he began composing his 900 Theses—a work composed of that number of philosophical and theological arguments, which he intended to present to the world and defend in public debate across Europe with the intellectual establishment of the time.

In Florence he befriended the scholar and poet Angelo Poliziano, as well as the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola, who would later become notorious for disobeying the pope and presiding over the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497, at which his supporters publicly burned thousands of luxury items, including works of art by Botticelli and Michelangelo, furniture, mirrors, and pagan books—to protest not only the decadence of the rich and powerful but the Renaissance project of seeking new knowledge. (He would be hanged and burned by the Church in 1498.) Pico also met the great neoplatonist  Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo de’ Medici, who ruled the Florentine Republic and supported many of the great artists and scholars of the day; Lorenzo took a liking to Pico, supported his work and provided protection when the Church took issue with his challenging philosophy.

His personal life was no less dramatic. He, perhaps unwisely, pursued an affair with the wife of one of Lorenzo’s cousins, attempting to run off with her; only Lorenzo’s intervention saved him.

He began to delve into mystical works: Chaldean philosophy, the Kabbalah, and the works of Hermes Trismegistus, developing an eclectic syncretism that attempted to harmonically fuse the ideas in these texts with the Christian Bible, Church teaching, Plato, Aristotle, and Islamic thinkers such as Averroes and Avicenna.

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