Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) Commentary by Kirk R. MacGregor, Quincy University

Considered the “Manifesto of the Renaissance,” Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) is a defining text in Renaissance humanism and the syncretism that characterized it. Serving as both a freestanding treatise and the introduction to Pico's 900 Theses on religion, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and magic, the Oration proposed that human beings, by virtue of their formation in the image of God, possessed the unique capacity among all earthly creatures to freely change themselves. Historically perceiving that governments and worldviews continually exist in flux, Pico (1463-1494) regarded the human power of self-transformation as the only unchangeable earthly reality. Further, the Oration's assertion that all human creative endeavors symbolize divine realities and participate in those realities revolutionized the fine arts, as it lifted authors, painters, sculptors, and musicians out of their previous status as craftspeople and up to the...