Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was born to the small counts of Mirandola near Modena, began studying law at Bologna at fourteen, and went on to read Aristotle, Plato, Kabbalah, and Arabic–Hebrew philosophy together at Ferrara, Padua, Paris, and Florence. In November 1486 he travelled to Rome and asked Pope Innocent VIII for permission to defend in public his nine hundred theses — the Conclusiones DCCCC. The opening address he wrote for the disputation would later be known as De hominis dignitate (On the Dignity of Man).

Its central image is famous. Having finished the universe, God speaks to Adam: he has given him no fixed place, no fixed form, no fixed task, because he has placed him not above all things but at the centre of them. Adam is neither wholly angel nor wholly animal; he may grow in any direction. 'No bounds of nature have been laid down for you; you will draw your own with your own will.' Later centuries would read the passage as the founding text of humanism, of freedom, and of self-creation.

The pope found thirteen of the 900 theses heretical and forbade the public disputation; the Oration remained unpublished and was printed only in 1496, two years after Pico's early death — probably by poisoning. Today the Oration is read as the most audacious Renaissance claim made on behalf of the human; it is also a distant but clear forerunner of nineteenth-century existentialism and of modern theories of freedom.