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Fig-bulls, Bull-Cows, and Other Animals: The Vicissitudes of Renaissance Hieroglyphs in Giovan Battista Della Porta’s Natural Magic

  • Sergius Kodera

Over the course of his long life as a publicist Della Porta became increasingly aware of the Hieroglyphica by Horapollo. Della Porta developed a peculiar way of using hieroglyphic images to develop, confirm, propagate, and memorize his ideas about, and practice of, natural magic. He took a thoroughly idiosyncratic view of hieroglyphs, one that was directed towards his practical goals as experimenter and natural magician. This chapter argues that Della Porta conceived of hieroglyphs as abbreviations or memory aids for recipes for practices in his natural magic, and as visualizations of instructions for action. Hieroglyphs function simultaneously as testimony of the foundations of natural magic—of universal sympathies and antipathies—and as their emblematic confirmation. In tandem with this, and over the years hieroglyphs became convenient rhetorical topoi that lent credibility to some of the key tenets of Della Porta’s natural magic, and in ever new combinations they were useful in organizing the memory. This essay treats key texts by Della Porta, Magiae naturalis libri IV (1558); De furtivis litterarum notis vulgo De ziferis libri IV (1563), L’arte del ricordare [1566); De humana physiognomia (1584, 1602); the second, expanded edition of the Magiae naturalis libri XX (1589); Phytognomonica (1588); and Villae (1592).

  • Keywords:
  • Hieroglyphic,
  • experimentalism,
  • experience,
  • natural magic,
  • art of memory,
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Sergius Kodera

University of Vienna, Austria - ORCID: 0000-0003-3119-2749

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  • Publication Year: 2025
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  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
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  • Publication Year: 2025
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Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Fig-bulls, Bull-Cows, and Other Animals: The Vicissitudes of Renaissance Hieroglyphs in Giovan Battista Della Porta’s Natural Magic

Authors

Sergius Kodera

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0836-9.05

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2025

Copyright Information

© 2025 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Hunting Secrets

Book Subtitle

Giovan Battista Della Porta and the Invention of Experimental Magic

Editors

Donato Verardi

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

168

Publication Year

2025

Copyright Information

© 2025 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0836-9

ISBN Print

979-12-215-0835-2

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-0836-9

eISBN (epub)

979-12-215-0837-6

Series Title

Knowledge and its Histories

Series ISSN

3035-5974

Series E-ISSN

3035-5923

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