KEY POINTS:
Two of the great murder mysteries of the Renaissance may soon be solved.
The remains of two of 15th century Florence's weightiest intellectuals have been exhumed from the grave they shared in the church of St Mark's. Within months they are expected to yield the secret of their deaths.
Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Ambrogini were two of the geniuses of the court of Lorenzo de' Medici. Both died young, Pico the philosopher at only 31, Ambrogini the poet, better known as Poliziano, at 40.
The end came for both men within a few weeks of each other late in 1494, two years after the death of Lorenzo, their patron. Rumours quickly circulated: they had both been poisoned, they had both been killed by the epidemic of syphilis that Christopher Columbus's sailors were blamed for importing into Italy.
By the end of next month the truth should finally become clear. The remains have been taken from Florence to Ravenna where they will be subjected to a battery of tests.
Poliziano was one of the first poets to claim for Italian a place of honour alongside Latin and Greek. He wrote elegies, odes and epigrams in the classical languages, and translated several books of the Iliad into Italian.
Mirandola, the father of philosophical humanism, formulated the revolutionary idea that man's uniqueness consists in his ability to be and do what he chooses: the central Renaissance insight that has propelled every subsequent movement of Western philosophy and art.
The first hint of something untoward about the way the men died came from Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican zealot and scourge of Renaissance humanists.
In a sermon after Mirandola's death he commented that the philosopher's soul would not be going straight to heaven on account of some sins he had committed. Savonarola had an obsessive hatred of homosexuality, and it is believed that this is what he was referring to.
Both men belonged to Florence's open-minded circle of Neoplatonists led by the philosopher Marsilio Ficino.
Silvano Vinceti, head of Italy's National Committee for the Valutation of Historical and Cultural and Environmental Assets, the organisation behind the research, said: "The latest hypothesis on the death of Pico is that Ficino was involved in it. As well as being the guiding light of Neoplatonism, he was one of the closest friends both of Pico and the poet."
- INDEPENDENT
