London, February 7 : Forensic scientists say that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a mystical and mercurial philosopher at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici, was poisoned with arsenic.
The suggestion coming from a team of researchers at the universities of Bologna, Pisa and Lecce is significant, given that Pico’s demise has been one of Italy’s most enduring murder mysteries for 500 years.
Ever since Pico suddenly became sick and died in 1494, it has been rumoured that foul play was involved. He died aged 31, two years after Lorenzo, together with a man who might have been his lover, Antonio Ambrosini.