The passage in Genesis 1,26-28 on the creation of man “in the image and likeness of God” has been object of multiple readings: an investigation of this heritage of the history of exegesis allows one to seize, between the Patristic age and Humanism, the development on the concept of the dignity of man, subsequently entering in competition with that of nature and its developments and uses between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Pier Cesare Bori directs this investigation, in collaboration with the Weltethos Stiftung of Tübingen, and plans the realization of seminars and the assignment of grants to scholars of patristic, of Pico and the post tridentine age. At the World Expo of Shanghai one presents the first translation in Chinese of the Discourse on the Dignity of Man by Pico della Mirandola.