 The Pico of that Life is a Savonarolan saint who came almost too late to salvation but finally rejected the world, the flesh and the devil. This is not the Pico who traveled to Rome a few years before to take on the whole world in a failed philosophical extravaganza; nor the Pico who bungled an attempt to carry off a married woman whose husband was named Medici—no less; nor the Pico with whom Ficino bantered about his missteps and misfortunes in letters loaded with astro-mythological allusions. It may be that the disasters of 1486–7 chastened the young nobleman enough to explain the muffling of Kabbalah in the Heptaplus and the jarring recantation that we find in the Disputations. But since the editor of the Disputations, Gianfrancesco Pico, also edited the letters that he selected to underwrite a tendentious Life of his uncle, and since Gianfrancesco himself was not just a devout fideist but also a prodigiously productive scholar and an original thinker, we should not dismiss the possibility that the Disputations ought to be read more as a pendant to the nephew’s Life of Pico than as proof of penitence in a final phase of his uncle’s meteoric career.