In fifteenth-century Florence, under the patronage of the Medici, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola gathered a circle of scholars and friends devoted to reconciling Plato with Christianity. It was from within their conversations that Pico wrote his Oration on the Dignity of Man, a work often received as a founding charter of the Renaissance humanist imagination.
“I have placed thee at the centre of the world, that thou mayest the more easily look about thee and behold whatsoever is therein.”
— PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
