It was characteristic of the man that among all the gay, profligate scholars of the Italian Renascence he chose as the object of his admiration the disciple of Savonarola, Pico di Mirandola.
Free-thinker as the bigots who listened to his daring speculations termed him, his eye would brighten and his tongue falter as he spoke with friends of heaven and the after-life.

When he took office, it was with the open stipulation "first to look to God, and after God to the King." In his outer bearing indeed there was nothing of the monk or recluse.

The brightness and freedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the young scholar with his gay talk, his winsomeness of manner, his reckless epigrams, his passionate love of music, his omnivorous reading, his paradoxical speculations, his gibes at monks, his schoolboy fervour of liberty.

But events were soon to prove that beneath this sunny nature lay a stern inflexibility of conscientious resolve.

The Florentine scholars penned declamations against tyrants while they covered with their flatteries the tyranny of the house of Medici.