he Count of Mirandola, and took early to scholarship,
spending his time among philosophies as other boys among games or
S. Antonio at his devotions, but by no means neglecting polished life
too, for we know him to have been handsome, accomplished, and a knight
in the court of Venus. In 1486 he challenged the whole world to meet
him in Rome and dispute publicly upon nine hundred theses; but so
many of them seemed likely to be paradoxes against the true faith,
too brilliantly defended, that the Pope forbade the contest. Pico
dabbled in the black arts, wrote learnedly (in his room at the Badia
of Fiesole) on the Mosaic law, was an amorous poet in Italian as well
as a serious poet in Latin, and in everything he did was interesting
and curious, steeped in Renaissance culture, and inspired by the wish
to reconcile the past and the present and humanize Christ and the
Fathers. He found time also to travel much, and he gave most of his
fortune to establish a fund to provide penniless girls with marriage
portions. He had enough imagination to be the close friend both of
Lorenzo de' Medici and Savonarola. Savonarola clothed his dead body
in Dominican robes and made him posthumously one of the order which
for some time before his death he had desired to join. He died in
1494 at the early age of thirty-one, two years after Lorenzo.

Angelo Poliziano, known as Politian, was also a Renaissance scholar
and also a friend of Lorenzo, and his companion, with Pico, at
his death-bed; but although in precocity, brilliancy of gifts,
and literary charm he may be classed with Pico, the comparison
there ends, for he was a gross sensualist of mean exterior and
capable of much pettiness. He was tutor to Lorenzo's sons until
their mother interfered, holding that his views were far too loose,
but while in that capacity he taught also Michelangelo and put him
upon the designing of his relief of the battle of the Lapithae and
Centaurs. At the time of Lorenzo and Giuliano's famous tournament
in the Piazza of S. Croce, Poliziano wrote, as I have said, the
descriptive allegorical poem which gave Botticelli ideas for his
"Birth of Venus" and "Primavera". He lives chiefly by his Latin poems;
but he did much to make the language of Tuscany a literary tongue. His
elegy on the death of Lorenzo has real feeling in it and proves him to
have esteemed that friend and patron. Like Pico, he survived Lorenzo
only two years, and he also was buried in Dominican robes.