PICO, Giovanni, of Mirandola (1463-1494), was the youngest son of Giovanni Francesco Pico, prince of Mirandola, a small territory about 30 Italian miles west of Ferrara, afterwards absorbed in the duchy of Modena. The family was illustrious and wealthy, and claimed descent from Constantine. From his childhood Pico was remarkable for his quick and tenacious memory, and gave promise of his future distinction as a scholar. In his fourteenth year he went to Bologna, where he studied for two years, and was much occupied with the Decretals. The traditional studies of the place, however, disgusted him; he was eager to know all the secrets of nature, and devoting himself wholly to speculative learning he spent seven years wandering through all the schools of Italy and France and collecting a precious library. Like most men with brilliant faculties of acquisition and assimilation, Pico was constitutionally an eclectic; and he owes his place in the history of learning and thought to the indefatigable spirit of inquiry which left him dissatisfied with current teaching and drove him to studies then new and strange. Besides Greek and Latin he knew Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic; and his Hebrew teachers (Eliah del Medigo, Leo Abarbanel, and Jochanan Aleman—see L. Geiger, Johann Reuchlin [1871], p. 167) introduced him to the Kabbalah, which had great fascinations for one who loved all mystic and theosophic speculation. His learned wanderings ended at Rome, where he set forth for public disputation a list of nine hundred questions and conclusions in all branches of philosophy and theology. He remained a year in Rome, but the disputation he proposed was never held. He was an object of envy to many for the range of attainments, which earned him the title of the Phoenix of his age, and ...