In search of Pico della Mirandola, the quintessential Renaissance Man

Edward Wilson-Lee writes rather chin-strokey, erudite books for the half-educated general reader with a strong taste for big ideas and the ever-so-slightly weird –which is to say people exactly like me and very possibly like you. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library (2018); A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History (2022): autodidact catnip. He’s a gifted chronicler of the odd, the interesting and the esoteric. Think non-fiction Umberto Eco.

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It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that he’s now got round to writing about the Renaissance Man’s Renaissance Man, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: a genius aristocrat with a taste for the arcane who lived a life almost too fantastic to be true. Indeed, if Pico hadn’t existed, Wilson-Lee, or someone like H.P. Lovecraft, would have had to have invented him. Pico does, indeed, get a passing mention in Lovecraft’s post-humously published The Case of Charles Dexter Ward;and he remains a firm favourite among both serious scholars and spiritual seekers with an interest in things like the Kabbalah, western esotericism and angelology.

In The Grammar of Angels, Wilson-Lee seeks to recover the story of what he rightly describes as a ‘tumultuous’ life, lived at the ‘precipice of the thinkable’, which is neither a comfortable place to be nor an easy place to think. Pico was born near Modena in 1463 into a noble family, and his prodigious talents soon became apparent. Even as a child, hearing any lines of poetry once, ‘he was able to repeat them ever after, both forwards and backwards’, which seems not so much a gift as a double misfortune.