The Potential of Humanity
The Renaissance was a period of innovation, where man pushed the envelope of knowledge and yearned to understand the unique aspects of humanity and its creator. Many of the greatest philosophers and artisans known to man arose during this period in history, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Among the greats was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, one of the leading intellects of the Italian Renaissance. Pico della Mirandola was a scholar who dedicated his time to the study of philosophy and theology, and was most famously known for the Oration on the Dignity of Man. This famous writing was Mirandola’s way of mitigating the importance of humanities strives to obtain knowledge, and most prominently the potentiality of human beings. Pico della Mirandola advocated that human potential was not limited or set by God himself, but was boundless and established by an individual themselves.
In the Oration of the Dignity of Man, Mirandola establishes a key aspect that human talent,…show more content… He was most famous for his work titles the Lives of an Artist, and disputed Mirandola’s argument about human potential. Vasari believed that not only was talent instilled in individuals, but was a gift from God himself, and attempted to prove it through one of the greatest individual produced by the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari quoted in his famous writing that “marvelously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired, and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human art”. Through the gifted talent of Leonardo da Vinci, Vasari advocates that the potential of a human is instilled into a person through the act of God. He showed those individuals are not given the opportunity to become whom they wish, but are gifted by the acts of the