CARDANO, Girolamo. De subtilitate libri XXI. Nunc demum recogniti atq[ue] perfecti.

Demonology, Cryptography, and Leonardo’s Flying Machines

CARDANO, Girolamo. De subtilitate libri XXI. Nunc demum recogniti atq[ue] perfecti. Basel: Ludovicus Lucius. 1554.

Folio. Recased in eighteenth-century vellum over boards, later red morocco lettering-piece, edges sprinkled blue; pp. [xiv], 561, [1], bound without final 2 blank ff.; woodcut printer’s device to title-page, woodcut portrait of Cardano to title verso, numerous in-text woodcut illustrations and diagrams, 5- and 8-line historiated woodcut initials; extremities very lightly rubbed; light, variable spotting, very light dampstaining to outer lower corner of first two books; early interlinear notes and reading marks to contents and to p. 489, occasional early underlining.

Second edition, expanded and corrected, of Cardano’s encyclopaedia of sciences, with over one hundred woodcut diagrams and illustrations in the text.

Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) was a mathematician, physicist, and astrologer from Pavia in northern Italy. A friend of Leonardo da Vinci and an early follower of Paracelsus, he gained fame for his algebraic studies and numerous inventions, including the universal joint, the combination lock, and Cardano’s rings. Arguably his magnum opus, De subtilitate is a vast and audacious encyclopaedia of the ‘subtle’: those things that elude the senses and pose a challenge to the intellect. A veritable ‘mine of facts, both real and imaginary’ (DSB), the work ranges across an astonishing array of subjects: from cosmology and mechanics to cryptology and demonology. Its twenty-one books cover: 1) matter and its natural motion; 2) the elements; 3) the heavens; 4) light; 5) mixtures and compounds; 6) metals; 7) stones; 8) plants; 9–10) animals; 11–12) humans, their form and temperament; 13) the senses; 14) soul and intellect; 15) ‘miscellaneous or useless subtleties’; 16) sciences; 17) arts; 18) miracles; 19) demons; 20) angels; and 21) God and the universe.

First published in Nuremberg in 1550, De subtilitate was an immediate and controversial success, with further editions issued in Paris and Lyon within the same year. The present second edition – corrected and expanded, and widely regarded as the most complete – followed in 1554; a third edition appeared in 1560, preceded by a French translation by Richard Le Blanc in 1556. The book includes groundbreaking sections on the hydrodynamics of river water, the ‘new’ stars observed by Amerigo Vespucci during his voyages to the Americas (p. 104), and Leonardo’s failed attempts to build a working flying machine (p. 452). He also provides a description of the his important invention for writing secret messages, the Cardan grille, a sheet of parchment, metal, or paper with cut-out holes placed over a blank page; the secret text is written within the cut-outs, and once the grille has been removed, the rest of the page can be filled with ordinary text (p. 456).

De subtilitate also addresses theological questions, such as the nature of God: ‘You ask, then, what He is? If I knew, I would be God, for no one knows God … except God alone’ (p. 560, trans.). Such passages fuelled accusations of heresy and the suspicion of atheism. In 1570, Cardano was arrested by the Inquisition in connection to this and other works (including a horoscope of Christ) deemed irreverent toward the Church, and was compelled to recant. He was later rehabilitated by Pope Gregory XIII. De subtilitate was the subject of Scaliger’s 1557 Exotericarum exercitationum liber XV de subtilitate ad Hieronymum Cardanum, a point-by-point critique of Cardano’s work.

BM STC German, p. 182; USTC 601653; VD16 C-932; Adams C-670; Brunet I, cols 1572–3; Graesse II, p. 45; Wellcome I 1291; this edition not in Durling (cf. nos 847-50); see Thorndike V, pp. 71, 148, and 419.

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