DELLA PORTA, Giovan Battista.

by Giovan Battista Della Porta

£1,950 · Offered by Sokol Books

Good copy of the second vernacular edition of this handsomely illustrated, veiled defence of astrology. A scholar of natural sciences, the Neapolitan Giovan Battista della Porta (1535-1615) published extensively on subjects including agriculture, cryptography, meteorology and chemistry, and was at the centre of a wide scholarly network including Galileo. For his interest in judicial astrology not strictly concerned with heretical, occult questions, but with natural science, medicine and meteorology he founded the Academia Secretorum Naturae. Due to his theorisation of magic as an instrument for the understanding of natural phenomenology, he was investigated by the Inquisition in the mid-1580s. Della celeste fisionomia , first published in Latin in 1603 and in the vernacular in 1614, was a fake attack against the imaginary discipline of astrology which the author had apparently repudiated after being warned by the Church. Through theories drawn from ancient and medieval authorities and under the pretence of dismissing the discipline in its entirety, della Porta rejected only the foundations of traditional astrology. He provided instead a different astrological theory according to which earthly bodies were dependent on the nature and mixing of their constitutive four humours in relation to planets and not simply on the domination of planets tout court. He illustrated the influence of the humours on human temperament and physical state e.g., the unhappy Saturnine (phlegmatic) co

• Binding: Hardcover

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