- Hunting Secrets
- Edited by Donato Verardi
Sound and Chaos in Della Porta’s Natural Magic
- Rebecca Cypess
- © 2025 Author(s) |
- CC BY 4.0
- DOI: 10.36253/979-12-215-0836-9.08
Given the encyclopedic nature of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s Natural Magick, it may seem surprising that the volume devotes so little attention to sound, a field explored at length by other natural philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The bulk of Della Porta’s statements about sound occupies about four pages of the final book of Natural Magick, titled “Chaos” – a catch-all category that, the author explained, lacks the systematic organization of the rest of the volume. I argue that Della Porta’s “Chaos” is designed to elicit a certain kind of response in his reader – in particular, to encourage the metaphorical thinking that would link one epistemic field to another. In this respect, his approach mirrors that of the numerous other early modern natural philosophers who, as Wendy Beth Hyman has discussed, used literary metaphors as a means of creating new disciplines and unearthing new discoveries. The “Chaos” served to juxtapose sound and the other senses—a sensory-scientific manifestation of the paragone among the arts that was theorized by Italian humanists and artists from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. Della Porta’s “Chaos” reenacted the stories of creation recorded by Plato, Ovid, and the Hebrew Bible, in which all matter was originally unified and unformed, and the divine Artisan sought to disentangle one kind of matter from another. By deploying this image of chaos before creation, Della Porta reaffirmed the connection between the magus and the Creator, and he also invited his reader to participate in the development of a theory of sound as a component of his natural magic. Indeed, through the rhetorical framing of chaos, Della Porta presented sound as a question – as an invitation to further exploration.
- Keywords:
- Music,
- Sound,
- Chaos,
- Natural Philosophy,
- Experiment,
- Experience,
- Paragone,
- Rhetoric,
- Creation,
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Chapter Information
Chapter Title
Sound and Chaos in Della Porta’s Natural Magic
Authors
Rebecca Cypess
Language
English
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0836-9.08
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2025
Copyright Information
© 2025 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
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
Metadata License
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