 In the first few pages of the Oration—pages read more often than any other product of Renaissance Latin humanism—God tells Adam that he, alone of all creatures, can make himself what he wants to be. Fascinated by this stirring prelude to a longer speech, Tennemann, and many readers after him, have taken Pico’s oratorical prelude as evidence of a morality grounded, like Kant’s, in human freedom and dignity. Having gathered strength during the nineteenth century, and having acquired a romantic patina, this view of Pico—and, by implication, of Renaissance humanism—reached its peak with the great Neo-Kantian of his age, Ernst Cassirer. When Cassirer and Paul Kristeller, also a Kantian, came to the United States, they brought their Kantian Pico with them, launching his long career in university textbooks of ‘Western Civilization’ after World War II. Meanwhile, Eugenio Garin had published what is still the most important book on Pico in the Fascist Italy of 1937, just before the racial laws were put into force.