THE SCHOOLMEN wrote a life of him, holding him up as a model of piety for the layman Pico did, indeed, make a pious end When, after the Medici had been expelled from Florence, Savonarola turned the city into a religious republic, Pico became one of his followers, and considered becoming a friar But before he could carry out this plan, he died at the age of 31 At his death he was working on a volume reconciling Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics Renaissance Aristotelianism In the 1490s, while the Platonists were showing an irenic spirit towards Aristotle, a vigorous revival of Aristotelianism was under way at Padua This took two forms, Averroist and Thomist In 1486 the Dominican order had replaced the Sentences of Peter Lombard with the Summa Theologiae of St Thomas as the basic text to be lectured on in their schools, and this initiated a Renaissance revival of Thomism But at Padua, initially, the Averroist faction was dominant The two leading lecturers, Nicoletto Vernia (d 1499) and his pupil Agostino Nifo (1473–1538), both produced editions of Averroes’ commentary, and maintained the Averroist position that there is only a single immortal intellect for all individual human beings In 1491, however, there arrived in Padua one of the greatest Thomists of all time: the Dominican Thomas de Vio, known always as Cajetan, from the Latin form of Gaeta, the town where he was born and of which he later became bishop Cajetan commented on several works of Aristotle, including the De Anima, but he is best known for his commentaries on St Thomas, beginning with one on the De Ente et Essentia written at Padua in the early 1590s, and including a commentary on the whole Summa Theologiae Though not always easy to read, these are highly valued by Thomists to this day Particularly inXuential was a small tract on analogy, which systematized and classiWed the diVerent kinds of analogy to be found in scattered remarks in Aristotle and St Thomas Between 1495 and 1497 Cajetan held the post of professor of Thomist metaphysics at Padua.22 Though a sympathetic commentator, Cajetan was not afraid to disagree with St Thomas, and he came to believe 22 A chair of Scotism had also been founded in Padua, held at this time by the Franciscan Antonio Trombetta 111