In 1484, appeared in the Florentine circle the beautiful and brilliant Pico della Mirandola, a man who through his exceptional gifts, his varied learning, and the charm of his personality, exercised a very wide influence over his generation, and who may possibly be accepted as at once the type and the flower of the Renaissance. Pico studied at Bologna, and later at Paris. He printed, in 1489, in defence of his philosophical theories, certain theses which were condemned as heretical by Innocent VIII. In 1493, the ban of heterodoxy was renewed by a brief of Alexander VI. Pico’s enquiring mind and scholarly ardour covered a wide range of research, including the philosophy of the Platonists, the mysteries of the Cabbala, and the system and theories of Aquinas, Scotus, Albertus Magnus, and Averrhoes, and he proposed to devote his learning and his life to the task of reconciling classical traditions with the Christian creeds. Didot quotes the following characteristic sentence from a letter written by Pico, February 11, 1491, to Aldus Manutius: “_Philosophia veritatem quærit, theologia invenit, religio possidet_.” (Philosophy seeks truth, theology discovers it, religion possesses it.) Pico died at the age of thirty-one, before the book had been written in which he proposed to demonstrate these positions. He was able, however, to render a great service to Italy and to Europe in securing for his friend Aldus the aid required for the establishment of the Aldine Press in Venice. The details of the relations of the two men are given in the chapter on Aldus. Other noteworthy members of the literary circle which surrounded Lorenzo de’ Medici, were Christoforo Landino, Leo Battista Alberti, and Angelo Poliziano. Landino edited _Horace_ and _Virgil_ and translated Pliny’s _Natural History_, and in 1481 published an edition of _Dante_, and Battista Alberti, (whose comedy of _Philodoxius_, which passed for an antique, was published by the Aldi, in 1588, as the work of Lepidus Comicus), wrote three treatises on painting, and several volumes on architecture. Alberti was more distinguished as an artist, architect, and musician, than as an author. It was characteristic, however, of the men of this group to be universal in their genius. Symonds speaks of Poliziano as emphatically the representative of the highest achievements of the age in scholarship, and as the first Italian to combine perfect mastery over Latin and a correct sense of Greek, with splendid genius for his native literature. His published works included annotated editions of _Ovid_, _Suetonius_, _Statius_, _Pliny_, and _Quintilian_, translations of _Epictetus_, _Galen_, and _Hippocrates_, a series of _Miscellanea_, and most important of all, the edition, printed from the famous Amalfi manuscript, of the _Pandects_ of Justinian.