Quote by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: “We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff. You are your own moulder.”

God is imagined here telling humanity that unlike animals or angels, humans have no fixed nature. You are not predetermined. The terrifying and exhilarating consequence is that you are responsible for what you become. This is the Renaissance's most daring claim: the self is a work in progress, made by its own choices.

Pico wrote his Oration in 1486 as a 23-year-old wunderkind who had proposed debating 900 theses in Rome — a project that was ultimately condemned by Pope Innocent VIII. His text was written in the Florentine Platonic Academy's atmosphere of wild intellectual ambition, where the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy and classical philosophy were being aggressively tested.

Italian Renaissance philosopher born in 1463, best known for his Oration on the Dignity of Man, written in 1486 as a preface to a grand philosophical disputation he proposed in Rome. The Oration is considered the manifesto of the Renaissance humanist vision of human potential and dignity. He died young at 31, possibly poisoned.