Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita, and: The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1650 (review)

Marialuisa Baldi and Guido Canziani. Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita. Milan: Francoangeli, 1999. Pp. 589. L. 68,000.

William J. Bouwsma. The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1650. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 288. Cloth, $29.95.

The two books under review represent very different approaches to Renaissance philosophy. The collection edited by Marialuisa Baldi and Guido Canziani brings together an international team of twenty-two scholars to scrutinize in close detail a single figure from among the constellation of inventive Italians whose intellectual energies fuelled the Renaissance. The Waning of the Renaissance is a single-viewpoint survey of a European-wide canvas that covers England and France as well as Italy. The subject of Girolamo Cardano is a forgotten philosopher normally only remembered, if at all, by oxymoronic recognition of his brilliance as a mathematician and fame as an astrologer. William J. Bouwsma's book is a broad overview of the mainstream Renaissance. The names that fill his pages are, in the main, the luminaries of Renaissance cultural history, among whom the few philosophers of note to be cited (principally Bacon and Montaigne) are put in their place by illustrious cardinals of Renaissance literature and history such as Tasso, Shakespeare, and Cardinal Bellarmine.

Girolamo Cardano (1501-76) belongs with Pietro Pomponazzi and Bernadino Telesio as an innovator who proposed a new philosophy of nature. Born and educated in Pavia, he taught at the universities of Pavia and Bologna, until his fame as a physician took him to Scotland and England. Here his most prominent patient was the boy king Edward VI of England. Legend has it that, realizing that his patient's health was failing, Cardano cast a horoscope for him which predicted long life. By this means he bought himself time enough to leave the country without being called to account for the king's subsequent death. After arrest in Rome between 1570 and 1571 on suspicion of heresy (for casting the horoscope of Christ) he obtained release by recanting, and the patronage of Pius V. Cardano epitomizes what we have come to regard as Renaissance man: a figure accomplished in many arts and master of them all. Physician he certainly was, and philosopher, too, but neither designation adequately captures the range of his activities. For Cardano was the polymathic author of over two hundred books on a vast range of subjects: medicine, mathematics, physics, metaphysics, religion, astrology, and music. He was also a shrewd practitioner of the art of self-promotion, cultivating his own image in his autobiographical De vita propria (1575/76) and through the many versions of his De libris propriis (discussed here by Ian Maclean). His intellectual formation is a complex intertwining of seemingly contradictory strands. Cardano sits at the cusp of modernity, steeped in the thought patterns to which the Renaissance was heir, but anticipating many of the developments in seventeenth-century thought. The direct beneficiary of the humanist recovery of classical learning, and the critical evaluation of ancient thought that humanism inspired, he was a trenchant critic of Aristotle and of Galen. Most famous for his Ars magna (1545), a treatise on algebra incorporating the solution of third-degree equations, he also undertook a systematization of astrology, his De fato. Although hostile to Copernicanism, he was held in esteem by such diverse moderns as Robert Boyle and Charles Blount. His Opera omnia was printed as late as 1663.

The works Cardano himself regarded as his most important were De subtilitate (1550), De rerumvarietate (1557), De fato,and De arcanis aeternitatis. The first two of theseconstitute a massive encyclopaedia of the sciences, covering every conceivable aspect of nature and human arts, extending to human society. As Pierre Magnard explains, Cardano's concept of subtlety (subtilitas) is bipolar. On the one hand, it refers to the...