PICO DELLA MIRAN`DOLO

   a notable Italian champion of the scholastic dogma, who challenged all the learned of Europe to enter the lists with him and controvert any one of 900 theses which he undertook to defend, a challenge which no one, under ban of the Pope, dared accept; he was the last of the schoolmen as well as a humanist in the bud, and was in his lifetime, with an astonishing forecast of destiny, named the PHOENIX (q.v.) (1463-1494).