Ian Maclean - At the pinnacle of the mountain. Images of Cardano on his road to fame, 1534-1554

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H u m a n i s t s , f r i e n d s a n d p r i n t e r s

A t t h e p i n n a c l e o f t h e m o u n t a i n

Images o f Cardano on his road to fame, 1534-1554

b y I a n M a c l e a n

Au t h o r s are made, not born; scholars have even claimed that

the most famous of Renaissance authors are in certain crucial

ways self-made. Lisa Jardine’s recent study of Erasmus, for exam

ple, demonstrates how the Dutch humanist aspired to the inter

national renown traditionally accorded only to major ancient au-

thors and church fathers, and set about acquiring this through the

use of his connections with the world of print. At an appropriate

point in his long career, he cast himself in the image of Jerome the

scholar-saint, and supplied for himself and his nation (who felt

themselves inferior to Italy’s much longer tradition of learning) an• OJr\V-€ P<XSf " ' , |

intellectual forefather in the shape of the Dutchman Rudolph

Agricola, the fifteenth-century author of a much admired treatise

on argumentation. To achieve his ends, Erasmus ensured that he

had the services of the best publisher (Johannes Froben) in one of

the best Northern publishing centres (Basle); he found Dutch col

leagues such as Martin Dorp to help him edit and promote Agri-

cola’s works, thereby giving fiis own a respectable local pedigree;

he secured the financing necessary to protect and disseminate his

writings, and saw to it that the titlepages of his works and the por

traits which were eventually included in them provided guaran

tees of their quality and intellectual seriousness1.

In 1534, Girolamo Cardano as yet unknown and unpub

lished, aspired to a similar degree of fame. He seems to have access

II genio di Cardano 9



Perfarile eft amnt,prouerbia fcribere cimn’s.

H and negcr/cd durum eft fcribete Chiliada s,

Q ui mihi non crcdit,fariat licet ipfc peridum.

M o x fuerit ftudrjs sq uio r illc meis.

Erasmus; engraving

from the portrait by

Hans Holbein the

young in Erasmus,

Adagiorum opus,

Johann Froben, Basel

1533. Milan, Biblioteca

Nazionale Braidense

to a library which included all the

most recent publications of note; in it,

he might have seen among its most re

cent acquisitions the 1533 edition of

Erasmus’s Adages, a moral and political miscellany rather similar to the

ones which Cardano himself was to

write later in his life. On the verso of its

titlepage, there appeared a portrait of

the great humanist in his doctoral cap,

with a verse of discreet self-praise ad

dressed to his readers2. Cardano mightalso have seen the second edition of

Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s

On occult philosophy which he was lat

er to emulate. This was published in

the same year; its titlepage bore a por

trait of the author also wearing doc-• : . :*’Tk

tor’s robes, above an appbsite quotation from the Bible (Matthew10:26): «There is nothing covered that will not be revealed; and

nothing hidden, that will not be known». Cardano would have no

ticed that both works were furnished with a privilege, which en-

hanced their status as well as giving protection against illicit re

production by other printing houses. From these and other exam-

pies, Cardano realised that the most appropriate path to fame for

him would also be through the printed book3. Like Erasmus andAgrippa, he saw that he needed to promote an image of himself

and to find a way of making this and his writings known to the

scholarly public.

• rf\QV̂ . . n

By 1550, this goal had been achieved. He had had books pub

lished in Germany and France as well as Italy; he had defined him

self as an author of broad intellectual interests and practical skillswith something new to say; he had surrounded himself with the

attributes of scholarly fame. In that year he had a medal struck, al

most certainly by Leone Leoni, the famous Milanese sculptor. This

10 l’Erasmo 6



was neither a rare, nor, it seems, a particularly expensive object to, ev'c'e*~x3 ©

commission: Erasmus had done the same at the height of his ca

reer, as did many of Cardano’s Italian contemporaries4. It was

common for both literary figures and for those in public life to

send images of themselves in this form to friends and colleagues,

to patrons and clients. On one side the medal is taken up by the*P ̂ t

bust of Cardano, bare-headed and in profile, inside a circle in

scribed with his age and Latinised name. On the other side the

Greek subscript ‘oneiron (dream) appears below the image of a

mountainous countryside with a group of figures in the fore

ground walking towards a vine. This is, I believe, the representa

tion of a premonitory dream that Cardano records as occurring

some time in late October 1534. The dream began with him ac

companying a great multitude on a journey; on enquiring where

they were all going, he was told that their destination was death..

Terrified, he set about climbing a mountain covered with withered

vines which reflourished as he passed them; from its summit he

Cornelius Agrippa,

De occulta philosophia,

Johannes Soter,

Cologne 1533: title-

page. Rome, Biblioteca

Casanatense

Leone Leoni,

Hier<onymus>

Cardanus aetatis

an<no>XLVIIII, 1550;

medal, recto

and verso (with the

inscription oneiron).

^ H E N R I C I ^C O R N E L I I A G R .IE "

PAE ABNETTESHErMA' CONS1LIIS&ArcIiiuisIndiriariifacneC AE-

S A R E AE Maicftaiis:Dc

O C C V L T A P H I -

I O S O P H I A

LibriTrcs ,

5*H E N R I C V S C O R N E L 1 V S A G RI P P A- ,

jm tfoc cuh mto oir. m fritter .

s j * H * t S « X . j 0Cm g r n U & pmifrgio C.-tftrtf Mttitfatis t i trimm'aw.

V>V7*»-




Jacobus Philippus

Tomasini, lllustrium

virorum elogia

iconibus exomata,

Donatus Pasquardus

et Socii, Pavia 1635:

p. 54. Milan, Biblioteca

di via Senate

. , auf Hckwi’o o KKevsS ts-k. ^ __ p 1̂

caught sight of a hideous chasm which so filled him with dread,

that he fled, making his way to a rustic hut which he entered in the

company of a pale youth dressed in a grey mantle. He was to pub

lish various accounts of this dream; the first of these appeared in

his D e libris propriis of 1557, where he interprets it as a sign that hewould achieve immortal fame5. Its presence on the medal of 1550

tells us that Cardano felt that the premonition had been fulfilled.,*CKj\r*sy (

%'S*' A <OC k \ Gifi

In 15.34, however, things looked very different. Cardano’s ca

reer up till then had not been wholly straightforward. He was the

illegitimate son of a scholar of some repute; he had received a uni

versity education in philosophy and medicine, but his early training was not wholly conventional, for his father had taught him

mathematics earlier than most, but had neglected the formal hu

manist teaching of Latin and Greek, both of which Cardano had to

acquire much later. His path to international fame could therefore

not be along the royal road of humanist scholarship trodden by

many of his contemporaries; it had to be more tortuous. Cardano

developed into a fertile thinker and compulsive writer, to be sure; but he also recognised that his writings were imperfect in organi

zation and style, and he had to subject them to continuous and ob

sessive revision. By 1534, he had a number of completed or near

completed works in manuscript, on a variety of subjects: logic, as

trology and astronomy, mathematics, medicine, metaphysics, and

conjectural sciences such as chiromancy. He had not yet found an

audience for his ideas; he was living in dire poverty; he was excluded from the College of Physicians of Milan and from public med

ical practice in that city, on the grounds of his illegitimacy; his on

ly paid employment was as an occasional lecturer on geometry and

arithmetic (to which he added, in a way characteristic of his wide

interests and tendency to digress, geography and architecture).

He appears to have paid to have his first writings publishedhimself in the hope of making some money from them. He talks

of them in his autobiography as «ephemerides»; they were slim

volumes of popular prognostication written in Italian for a non-

12 l’Erasmo 6



II genio di Cardano



scholarly market. But he did not count these almanachs as serious

works; in his own eyes, he still «lacked the opportunity of being

published»6. A remedy to this predicament eventually appeared in

the shape of Ottaviano Scoto, with whom Cardano had been a fel-i COiVf •>low student in Padua in the 1520s. He was the son of a prominent

publisher of medical and philosophical books in Venice of the

same name, and had just inherited his father’s presses. In 1536,

Cardano accepted Scoto’s invitation to submit to him manuscripts

for publication. One of these (a commentary on Aristotle’s Poste

rio r A naly tic s) was lost by the publisher, but he did produce at his

own expense Cardano’s controversial book on errors in medical

practice, the D e m alo m edendi usu, to which was added a short ac

count of the noxious effects of certain widely-used remedies.

These works belonged to the tradition begun by the Ferrarese

medical humanist Niccolo Leoniceno in the 1490s of revealing er-0 CKjC i/Vt ■T t . -jgji

rors in received medical doctrine; the most recent publication of

this kind was a book by Leonhart Fuchs of Tubingen, entitled Er

rata recentioru m m edic orum , which had appeared at Hagenau near

Strasbourg in 1530. Cardano’s two texts were an attack not on

philological errors (on which both Leoniceno and Fuchs had con

centrated) but on current therapeutical practice. Although shod

dily produced, the book proved very popular, and made Scoto a

good profit. This experience encouraged him to publish other

works by Cardano on medical and moral topics, which however

had markedly less commercial success7.

As Cardano’s fortunes gradually improved, he thought about

having a book printed in Milan, where he could oversee its pro

duction and avoid the embarrassment of poor proof-reading and

erroneous Latin. He could also package the book in an appropri-* €

ate manner, just as Erasmus and Agrippa had done for their own

works. Cardano had two works he wished to publish to hand: one,

a short compilation of texts on astrological and horoscopical top

ics (the Lib elli duo)-, the other, a much more extensive account of

the practice of arithmetic, containing an introduction to the rudi

ments of the art together with a wide variety of loosely related ma- mfraS o *)~e IcyUowide

l’Erasmo 6



terial, including the means of computing the ancient Roman cal

endar, the mystical properties of numbers, and mercantile mathe

matics (rents, letters of credit, interest, profit and loss, weights and

measures); it also contains a set of questions to allow the reader to

test how well he had understood the art. Cardano employed a Mi

lanese printer (Giovanni Antonio Castellione) for both works, andfound a local sponsor (Bernardino Calusci) for the longer work

which he entitled Pra ctica arithm etice. Calusci paid him ten

crowns for this piece: Cardano then shrewdly spent some money

on protecting the book from piracy by a local privilege. He did this

not so much, as I now believe, because he feared that other pub

lishers would reproduce his work in the duchy of Milan to his dis-

benefit; rather, because the privilege gave him the opportunity toadvertise the titles of thirty-four clearly listed manuscripts await

ing publication8.

At the same time, he ensured that the other elements of the

book corresponded to the best practice of self-presentation. He

commissioned a friend (Annibale della

Croce) to write a flattering liminary poem

in humanist Latin; he announced in his preface that the work was but first version

of a much more comprehensive account of

mathematics; he dedicated the work to a

prominent Milanese patient, Gian-

francesco Gadio, the prior of the Augus-

tinian friars in the city. Just as Erasmus

and Agrippa had done, he also furnishedthe titlepage with a portrait of himself

wearing the robes of a doctor; it depicts

him in profile, with his eyes studiously

cast down, inside an oval frame which

bears the device ‘no man is a prophet in

his own country’. Just as Agrippa had

done, Cardano adapts a text of the NewTestament (Luke 4:24) for his own pur

poses; and indeed, he had every justifica

Gerolamo Cardano,

Practica arithmetice,

Calusci, Milan 1539:

title-page. Milan,

Biblioteca Nazionale

Braidense

H I E R O N I M IC.CARDAN1 MEDICI MEDIOLA NE NSIS,PRACTICA ARITH,

m e t i c e , S i Menfurandi fingularis.ln qua

qucprcter alias eosm cntut.m fa pagi ru oemonfhabit*




tion in thinking at that time that he had not been properly appre

ciated by his fellow Milanese. His name appears as ‘Hieronymus

Castellioneus Cardanus’ in the privilege and on the titlepage, as it

had on the works published by Scoto. Cardano had been told by£><*. pC* * . .. i., U> '

his father that the Cardanos were related to the much more dis-

tinguished Castiglione family, and he sought to enhance his stand

ing as an author by reference to this connection, much as Erasmus

had provided himself with an intellectual forebear in the shape of

Rudolph Agricola. A few years later, his friend and patron Filippo

Archinto made him issue a public apology for the unauthorised

use of this name to enhance his own, although he still refers to the

Castiglione family as "though they were connected to the Cardanos

much later in his career as a writer9.

The privilege in the Practica arith m etice did the job for

which it was designed, and acted as a very effective advertisement.

It attracted the attention of Andreas Osiander, the agent for the

prestigious alchemical, astrological and mathematical publisher

Johannes Petreius of Nuremberg. Osiander was a reformed the

ologian and a humanist mathematician in his own right; Petreius

was to entrust him in 1543 with the task of writing an introduc

tion to Copernicus’s D e revolu tio nib us orbiu m coelestium. Osian

der noticed both the list of works in the privilege and the reference

to a much longer work on mathematics in Cardano’s preface, and

got in touch with him, offering the possibility of publication with

a leading international publisher based in Germany. The first of

Cardano’s works produced by Petreius was an expanded reprint of

the astrological and horoscopical pieces printed in Milan. It ap

peared in 1543, and bore a copy of the portrait of 1538/9 with a

different motto inscribed in the oval frame (see D e sapie ntia,

1544). It is a quotation in the original Greek from Euripides’s H e

len, which might be loosely translated as ‘always look on the bright

side of life’10. Cardano had by this time acquired Greek, but it may

have been his humanist publisher who supplied the quotation.

Cardano considered Petreius as his friend, and wrote a warm trib

ute to him after his death in 1550; by that time the Nuremberg

l’Erasmo 6



H I E R . O N Y H I C A R D A N 1Me dici Medialanenfis,

DE SAPIENTIA’Libri quincgv

Eitifdem de Corrfolatione libri tres,alias ccdilij,

fed nuncabeodem auchore rtcogniti.

Eiufdcm, de Libris prop rijsjiber unus,

Oinnia loaipleti indicedecoms,.

€M)

publisher had seen several of Car

dano’s works through his presses, in

cluding the D e sapie ntia , the first edi

tion of the D e libris propriis (which

Cardano wrote in imitation of Eras

mus’s own guide to his writings and

which marks his growing confidence

in his international reputation), the

Ars m agna, a highly innovative ac

count of algebra, and, just before the

publisher’s death, the copiously illus

trated D e subti li ta te , which was Car

dano’s most successful work, and one

of his most ambitious. In it he sets out

to offer an encyclopedic account of

the subtle workings of the physical

and spiritual worlds designed to re

place that of Aristotle and Plato, and

to explain a wide range of other subtle phenomena, including a

num ber of his ingenious inventions.

The last name which ought to be mentioned in this account

of Cardano’s road to fame is that of Sebastian Gryphius, a celebrat

ed humanist publisher of German extraction living in Lyon. He it

was who published Cardano’s D e im m ortalitate anim orum in 1545.

The titlepage bears no portrait, and the dedication (to Giacomo

. YyO &- ' €<r Filippo Sacco, President of the Senate of Milan) offers no clue as to

how this work came to be produced in Lyon; nor does Cardano re

veal this to us in any of his accounts of his publications. The sub

ject matter was contentious; the Italian scholar Pietro Pomponazzi

had produced a treatise on the subject which he had had to defend

vigorously against accusations of heterodoxy some thirty years be

fore. Cardano was aware both of this debate and of its theological

implications, for he twice makes the point that he is writing to de

fend the notion of the immortality of the individual soul by using

natural reason alone, as the papal bull of 1516 had enjoined all

3 f /« •

Gerolamo Cardano,

Desapientia,

Johannes Petreius,

Nuremberg 1544: title-

page. Rome, Biblioteca

Nazionale Vittorio

Emanuele




philosophers to do11. But that alone would not explain why Petreius

and Scoto did not publish the work. It may be that the Lutheran Pe

treius was aware of the use made by Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s

close colleague in the University of Wittenberg, of psychology as a

bridging discipline between theology and natural philosophy, anddeclined to involve himself in a debate which was particularly sen

sitive to reformed theologians. For his part, Scoto might have re-*P

fused to publish the work because it touched on the issue of the au

tonomy of medicine vis-a-vis theology which preoccupied Italian

university professors of medicine at the time12. Gryphius, perhaps

less concerned about either of these sensitivities, may have been

glad to add a rising star to his portfolio of authors. He went on to publish Cardano’s important Contradicentia medica, which Scoto

had first produced in Venice in 1545; and he was probably also the

person through whose mediation Cardano found a French pub

lisher for the D e subtil itate in 1550.

We have now reached the year 1550, the year of Cardano’s

medal, and have seen Cardano’s works produced in three majorEuropean centres of publication. His skill as a medical practition

er had also come to the attention of his readers; because of it, he

was invited by the Archbishop of St Andrews to undertake a jour

ney to Scotland, which allowed him to visit much of Europe. On

his return journey he passed through Basle, the place of publica

tion of Erasmus himself, and there he cemented his international

reputation by arranging for a second edition of the D e subtil ita te

to be published as well as his commentary on Ptolemy’s Tetrabib-

los. The latter was produced by the great humanist publisher Hein

rich Petri, who would continue to publish Cardano’s writings un

til his death. He must have given one of his Leoni medals to his

Basle printer and publisher, for an engraving based on it, inscribed

with the date 1553, appears on the first two works he had pub

lished in that city. The portrait shows Cardano without doctoralrobes and cap: he no longer needs these trappings of scholarship

to enhance his reputation. He appended some lines of verse to his

portrait, which are reminiscent in tone of those which Erasmus

l’Erasmo 6



added to his portrait in the Adages: «Earth will not hide me, but

raised to the heavens, I’ll live and be praised in the mouths of

learned men. Whatever Phoebus looks down on in future years, he

will recognize the Cardanos, and even perceive my own name»13.

The promise of the dream had now been fulfilled; Cardano stood

at the pinnacle of the mountain, not yet aware of the disasters -

the execution of his son, the imprisonment in Bologna - which

awaited him in later life.

We are now in a position to say something about Cardano’s

path to fame, and the image of himself which he promoted. Al

ready in 1534, Cardano knew himself to be a more than very com

petent mathematician, a good practical doctor, an astrologer, a

moralist, an inventor o f gadgets, a logician, a metaphysican, and a

student of nature in its broadest Sense; all these areas of expertise

were represented in his early publications, enabling his wide read-

Hieronymi Cardani [. .. ]

in Cl. Plotomaei

pelusiensis IIII

de astrorum iudiciis,

Henricus Petri, Basilea

1554: title-page.

Milan, Biblioteca

di via Senato

Gerolamo Cardano,

De Subtilitate,

Henricus Petri, Basilea

1582: author's portrait.

Milan, Biblioteca

di via Senato

H I E R O N YM I C A R D A N I

Mediolanenfis Mcdici & Philofophi pra>ftantifsimi, in C l . I1 T o l e m a e i p e l v s i e n s i s

I I I I dcAftrorumIudicijs,aut,utuulgouocant.Quadr/particeConrf{iruiftionisltbros common taria,qu.T non folumAlironomisSc

Aflrologis, fed ctiamomnibusphilofbphixftudio*fis plurmrom aduimenti adfcrrc poccrunt.

Nunc primum in luccmxdita.

P R A E T E R E A ,

Eiuftlem Hier. Cardani GeniturarumX M , C T A V D I T V M I R A B I L I A F. T N O -<au iiligiu,& a d li.inc fcif nnj m rriSccxciiriid.iniohrcruatu mill.l.cxcinp h.Aiqu i

alia multa, qu r imcrrogationsbus & clc-Sionibus preda te fau iunt.u i-n ip a ucris rc i iS fcccrnuitr. A cdcniq: Eclipfcos.cjuim gra-

uiliiina pciiisfubfccuta eft, rxrmplum.

•iWr»n

B A S I o 0 A E

A V T H O R I S C A R M E N ,

Non me tend teget, ccclo fed raptut in dto lUuftrKuitiatn do{l<t per ora uirtim:

Quicquiduenturis ftettabit Pbcebws in annis, Cardanos nofcet, nometi e r ttfy meum.




ership appreciate different facets of his genius. The English, he tells

us, saw him mainly as an astrologer, the French as a moralist, the

Italians as a medical writer, and the Germans as a mathematician14.

When he came to divide his work into categories (which grew in

number, from five in 1557 to eleven in 1576), they reflect these areas of competence; but he had to add a final category of miscella

neous writings to catch those compositions which lay beyond this

map of disciplines.

Cardano could never aspire to be a distinguished humanist

reader of texts; he had had to learn to write reasonable Latin (in

deed, his enemies claimed that he never truly mastered the language), and although he incautiously attempted to correct the re

ceived Greek text of Hippocrates in later life, he never completely

mastered that language either15. His was a productive modern

mind, whose strength lay in its grasp of empirical issues, its abili

ty to argue from first principles of its own making, and to gener

ate provisional taxonomies which opened up new vistas of knowl

edge. It is no coincidence that he most often uses ‘invention’ tomean not the recovery of the learning of the ancients but rather

the discovery of something new. It is this restless productivity

across the whole'1range of human conjecture which led him to

compose so many and so varied a set of writings before his forti-• ̂ r ‘

eth birthday, and to dare to compare himself with Plato, Aristotle,

Theophrastus, Galen, Plutarch, Cicero, Varro and Celsus16. Later

still, as Nancy Siraisi has shown, he comes to look upon Hip pocrates as a model intellect17; but in 1554, he had achieved the act

of self-invention which Erasmus had achieved before him. His

works were produced by the best European publishers in the most

prestigious printing centres; he enjoyed the adulation of many of

his readers; even his fellow Milanese had marked their esteem for • SR iucj/ , ' ' h

him by coming out to greet him on his return to their city in that*/fj * .

year. He was for a time able to bask in the sun of his own poly-mathic reputation; as his subsequent French publisher Guillaume

Rouille wrote to him, he had become «an author most famous in

every branch of knowledge»18.

l’Erasmo 6



SOMMARIO

Un progetto acutamente perseguito da Gerolamo Cardano fin dagli anni giovanili

fu quello di «promuovere la propria imm agine» e rendersi noto a u n vasto pubbli-

co, no n solo italiano. Le opere di Erasm o da Rotterdam e di Cornelio Agrippa, cui

aveva accesso, in volum i che riproducev ano in ap ertu ra i ritratti dei loro auto ri, fu-

rono uno stimo lo e un ’ispirazione per questa operazione. Che puo dirsi felicemen-

te conclusa a meta del secolo, quando, ormai noto, Leone Leoni incise una meda-

glia col suo profilo.

Tutto il precedente progetto editoriale di Cardano appare come un’ appassionata e

affannosa ricerca per accreditare la prop ria opera. I volumi po rtan o sui frontespizi

il suo profilo in varie fogge e con m otti significativi, fra i quali quello evangelico del

N em o propheta in patria-, vi contribuiscono editori in Italia e nei maggiori centri

europei, come Johannes Petreius di Norim berga e Sebastian Gryphius di Lione. An-

che in cio, come in tutta la sua attivita, la mente di Cardano si rivela perspicace e

mode rna, alia ricerca del nuovo.

Erasm us, Ma n o f Letters, PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton 1993.: The verse reads: Perfacile est aiunt,

proverbia scribere cuivis. / Haud

nego, sed durum est scribere Chili-

adas. / Qui mih i non credit, faciat

licet ipse periclum. / M ox fu erit

studijs tequior ille meis.

3 He began the treatise on fatewhich he wrote in 1533 by addressing «all those who hope that, bywriting, glory may come to them»; De libris propriis (1557), in Opera, ed. Charles Spon, Huguetan andRavaud, Lyon 1663,1, p. 62.4 Alois Gerlo, Erasme et ses por-

traitistes, de Graaf, Nieuwkoop1969, pp. 17-19.5 J. Graham Pollard, Medaglie ita-

liane del Rinascimento, Museo delBargello, Florence 1983, pp. 1236-1237; De libris propriis (1557), inOpera, I, p. 64. Cardano had experi

ences earlier prompting to fame: hereports in the De libris propriis of1562 (Opera, I, p. 96) that he beganto think about ways of immortalising his name while he was studying

mathematics and Latin as a youngman.6 De propria vita, ch. 25, in Opera, I,

p. 16; De libris propriis (1562), inOpera, I, p. 102 .7 Ibid., I, pp. 103-104.8 For a transcription of this privilege, see Ian Maclean, “Cardano andhis publishers 1534-1663”, in Giro

lamo Cardano, Philosoph, Natur-

forscher, Arzt, ed. Eckhard Kessler,Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1994, pp.337-338.9 See Contradicentium medicorum

liber, Scoto, Venice 1545, dedicatoryletter; De uti litate ex adversis capien- da, Petri, Basle 1561, pp. 439-444.10 Es to pherteron tithei to mellon ho

ti genesetai: Euripides, Helen, 346f.11See Martin Pine, Pietro Pompon-

azzi, radical philosopher of the Re

naissance, Antenore, Padua 1986.12 See Ian Maclean, Naturalisme et

croyance personnelle dans le discours medical a la fin de la Renaissance,

“Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies”, 6 (1998), pp. 177-179.

13 Non me terra teget, ccelo sed raptus in alto / Illustris vivam doctap er ora

virilm. / Quicquid venturis spectabit

Phcebus in annis, / Cardanos noscet,

nomen et usque meum.

The ‘Cardanos’ which the sun willlook upon in future years may also

be an allusion to the family coat ofarms, which displays a black eaglewhich Cardano construes as a rebus

by analogy with that of the Castig-ilione family, whose arms consist ofa castle and lion: see De propria

vita, ch. 33, in Opera, I, p. 25.14 De libris propr iis (1557), in Opera,

I, p. 70.15See Nancy Siraisi, The clock and

the mirror: Girolamo Cardano and

Renaissance medicine, PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton 1997, p. 135.16 De libris propriis (1544), in Opera, I, p. 55.

17Siraisi, The clock and the mirror, cit., pp. 119-124.18 De methodo medendi, Rouille,Paris 1565, dedicatory letter.

Documents

Ian Maclean - At the pinnacle of the mountain. Images of Cardano on his road to fame, 1534-1554