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GONNELLI
CASA D’ASTE
70
libri di pregio e manoscritti - firenze 27 aprile 2012
it is possible and advisable to combine with this science
and medicine not only a cloak of religion but also much
of the occult science that had come down from the past:
magic and cabala, astrology and alchemy, physiognomy
and chiromancy, geometry and weather signs. Natural,
preternatural, supernatural, and things contrary to nature,
were all closely related and even confused by him. Magic
was science, and nature a mystery».
O
xford DNB
: «The first
of Fludd’s philosophical works to appear was the account of
the macrocosm and the microcosm, entitled
Utriusque cosmi
historia
. It consists in two massive folios which are copiously
illustrated with remarkable mystical emblems representing
relationships between man, the cosmos, and the godhead.
It is very likely that Fludd himself was the draughtsman of
these illustrations with their recurrent geometrical motifs of
concentric circles, triangles, pyramids, hemispheres, blazing
suns, and the interplay of areas of dark and light. The
significance of the emblems is revealed in accompanying
texts, which bring together quotations from the Bible and
hermetic lore. In these volumes Fludd expresses both his
adherence to a Judaeo-Christian interpretation of world
history based on the text of the Bible and his hostility to the
learning of the universities in the formof Aristotelian natural
philosophy and Galenic medicine. Fludd’s originality lay in
his revival of the fifteenth-century neoplatonism of Ficino
and Pico and their sources in the corpus hermeticum,
and his uniting of these with an alchemical account of the
creation based on a literal reading of the book of Genesis.
The major explanatory mechanism of the workings and
order of the world is the parallel between macrocosm and
microcosm. Man is revealed to be the
ape of nature
, imitating
and completing her work through the exercise of geometry,
music, memory, astrology, physiognomy, chiromancy, and
the mechanical arts, including cosmography, painting, and
the art of warfare; all of these are in some sense founded
on number. Fludd’s metaphysics postulates a complex
and all-embracing correspondence between the world of
spirits and the physical world; this entailed opposition to
Copernicanism. For Fludd the sun, source of heat, light, and
spirit, goes round the earth and vivifies it, just as the Holy
Spirit vivifies man».
Caillet 4042;
Cantamessa I,
1538; Casanatense
478; Craven,
Fludd
, pagine 243-
244; Duveen 222;
Ferguson I, 283;
Gardner,
Astrologica
412; Gardner,
Rosicruciana
, 217-218;
Graesse,
Magica
,
113; Houzeau/
Lancaster I, 2925,
2966; Krivatsy 4144;
Mellon, 83; Neville
I, 458; Osler, 2621-
2622; Partington
II, 325; Shaaber 163;
Wellcome, 2324;
Young, 115.
€ 11000