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“... translation of early Hermetic manuscripts, published in 1471, was a key text. Another Florentine, Giovanni Picodella Mirandola, reworked the ancient Jewish occult tradition, the Kabbalah or Cabala. Other strands were revivalist remodellings of alchemy, astrology and Pythagorean mathesis. Renaissance magic was a ...”

“... and so on. Magi set their gaze on every discernible thing. The Neapolitan polymath Giambattista della Porta wrote comic plays as well as natural philosophical treatises and once devised an experiment to create artificial thunder, which boomed impressively and harmlessly. Magic, he wrote in Magia naturalis (1558), could be good or bad: his own was, of ...”

“... founded in late antiquity, preserved in Byzantium and brilliantly developed by Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Picodella Mirandola in the 15th century. But Kircher lived in an age dominated by Bacon, Descartes and Galileo, who believed that the moderns had already surpassed the ancients and would do so again in the ...”

“... transgressed too far, he would be darling no longer. You might in youth propose to yourself Giovanni Picodella Mirandola, the Phoenix of the wits, as the model of the pious layman – though less attracted by his speculations than was Colet. You might translate Lucian, the witty mocker of forms in religion ...”

“... Giovanni Pico​, count of Mirandola and Concordia, was 23 when he travelled to Rome to become an angel. It was 1487. Christendom’s most important priests would be there; the cleverest theologians would debate him. The pope would watch. Pico was going to dazzle them all ...”

“... classified. Was a button a button if there was no buttonhole? ‘Forbidden patterned cloth,’ Giovanni Villani complained, ‘the women wanted striped cloth and foreign cloth, sending as far as Flanders or Brabant for it, regardless of cost.’ Belts, handbags and hairstyle designs suggest how advanced Florence was in the production of luxury goods and ...”

“... Aldus’s wild venture fail. By 1490, he was in Venice. His friend, the neo-Platonist philosopher Pico dellaMirandola, sent the first-ever printed edition of Homer to Aldus that year. But it’s one thing to enjoy the technical accomplishment of a printed Homer, and quite another to decide you’d like to have a go at ...”