The short, blazing life of Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola

Of all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. “He wins one on,” as the Victorian essayist Walter Pater put it, his life having “some touch of sweetness in it”. An Italian aristocrat who dabbled in magic and escaped from prison after eloping with the wife of a Medici lord, his books were burned on the orders of the pope. Edward Wilson-Lee’s new biography brings us the events of Pico’s short, blazing life, but also what is most strange and attractive about him: the wonder of a scholar who felt himself on the verge of being able to commune with angels.

The basic facts are straightforward. Born in northern Italy in 1463, he was a child prodigy with astonishing powers of memory. (He is said to have been able to recite the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy backwards.) The story of Pico’s education has something of the feel of a video game, a tour through the great universities of Europe – Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Paris – completing some branch of knowledge – law, medicine, the classical languages – before moving on to the next level.