Jerome Cardan: A Biographical Study

by W. G. Waters

CHAPTER XIII

After the accusation brought against him at Milan in 1562, Cardan had been prohibited from teaching or lecturing in that city, and similar disabilities had followed his recent imprisonment at Bologna. At Rome no duties of this kind awaited him, so he had full time to follow his physician's calling after taking up his residence there. He records the cure of a noble matron, Clementina Massa, and of Cesare Buontempo, a jurisconsult, both of whom had been suffering for nearly two years. The circumstances of his retirement from Bologna would not affect his reputation as a physician, and he seems to have had in Rome as many or even more patients than he cared to treat; and in writing in general terms concerning his successes as a healer, he says: "In all, I restored to health more than a hundred patients, given up as incurable in Milan, in Bologna, and in Rome." Of all the friends Cardan had in this closing period of his life, none was more useful or benevolent than Cardinal Alciati, who, although he had been secretary to Pius IV., contrived to retain the favour of his successor. This piece of good fortune Alciati owed to the protection of Carlo Borromeo, who had been his pupil at Pavia, and had procured for him from Pius IV. a bishopric, a cardinal's hat, and the secretaryship of Dataria. Another of Cardan's powerful friends was the Prince of Matellica, of whom he speaks in terms of praise inflated enough to be ridiculous, were it not for the accompanying note of pathos. After celebrating the almost divine character of this nobleman, his munificence and his superhuman abilities, he goes on: "What could there be in me to win the kindly notice of such a patron? Certainly I had done him no service, nor could he hope I should ever do him any in the future, I, an old man, an outcast of fortune, and prostrated by calamity. In sooth, there was naught about me to attract him; if indeed he found any merit in me, it must have been my uprightness."

Powerful friends are never superfluous, and Cardan seems to have needed them in Rome as much as in Bologna. In 1573 he again hints at plots against his life, but almost immediately after recording his suspicions he goes on to suggest that his danger had arisen chiefly from his ignorance of the streets of Rome, and from the uncouth manners of the populace. "Many physicians, more cautious than myself, and better versed in the customs of the place, have come by their death from similar cause." The danger, whatever its nature, seems to have threatened him as a member of the practising faculty at Rome rather than as the persecuted ex-teacher of Pavia and Bologna. Rodolfo Sylvestro was not the only one of his former associates near him in his old age, for he notes that Simone Sosia, who had been his famulus at Pavia in 1562, was still in his service at Rome.

In reviewing the machinations of his enemies to bring about his dismissal from the Professorship at Bologna, Cardan indulges in the reflection that these men unwillingly did him good service, that is, they procured him leisure which he might use in the completion of his unfinished works, and in the construction of fresh monuments which he proposed to build up out of the vast store of material accumulated in his industrious brain. The literary record of his life in Rome shows that this was no vain saying. He was at work on the later chapters of the De Vita Propria up to the last weeks of his life; and, scattered about these, there are records of his work of correction and revising. While telling of the books he has lately been engaged with, he wanders off in the same sentence to talk of the dream which urged him to write the De Subtilitate, and of the execution of the Commentarii in Ptolomæum, during his voyage down the Loire. In 1573 he seems to have found the mass of undigested work more than he could bear to behold; for, after making extracts of such matter as he deemed worth keeping, he consigned to the flames no less than a hundred and twenty of his manuscripts.[239] Before leaving Bologna he had put into shape the Proxenata, a lengthy collection of hints, maxims, and reflections as to everyday life; he had re-edited the Liber Artis Magnæ, and had added thereto the treatise De Proportionibus, and the Regula Aliza. He also took in hand two books on Geometry, and one on Music, and this last he completed in 1574. On November 16, 1574, he records that he is at that moment writing an explanation of the more abstruse works of Hippocrates, but that he is yet far from the end of his task.

In the De Libris Propriis he gives a list of all his published works, and likewise a table of the same arranged in the order in which they ought to be read. He apologizes for the imperfect state in which some of them are left, and declares that the sight of his unfinished tasks never fails to awaken in his breast a bitter sense of resentment over that loss which he had never ceased to mourn. "At one time I hoped," he writes, "that these works would be corrected by my son, but this favour you see has been denied to me. The desire of my enemies was not to make an end of him, but of me; not by gentle means, in sooth, but by cruel open murder; to let me fall in the very blood of my son." It is somewhat remarkable that in this matter Cardan was destined to suffer a disappointment similar to that which he himself brought upon his own father by refusing to qualify himself to become the commentator on Archbishop Peckham's Perspectiva. He next gives the names of all those who had commended him in their works, and finds a special cause for gratification in the fact that, out of the long list set down, only four or five were known to him personally, and these not intimately. There is, however, another short list of censors; and of these he affirms that a certain Brodeus alone is worthy of respect. Of Buteon, who criticized the treatise on Arithmetic, he says: "Est plane stultus et elleboro indiget." Tartaglia's name is there, and he, according to Cardan, was forced to eat his words; "but he was ashamed to do what he promised, and unwilling to blot out what he had written. He went on in his wrong-headed course, living upon the labour of other men like a greedy crow, a manifest robber of other men's wealth of study; so impudent that he published as his own, in the Italian tongue, that invention for the raising of sunken ships which I had made known four years before. This he did, understanding the subject only imperfectly, and making no mention of my name. But men of real learning also attacked me: Rondeletius, and Julius Scaliger; and Fuchsius, in the proem of his book, says that my work Medicinæ Contradictiones should be avoided like deadly poison. Julius Scaliger has been fully answered in the Apologia in the Books on Subtlety."[240]

There is a passage from De Thou's History of his Own Times, affixed to all editions of the De Vita Propria,[241] in which is given a contemporary sketch of Cardan during his residence at Rome. "His whole life," De Thou writes, "has been as strange as his present manners, and he, in sooth, out of singleness of mind or frankness, has written about himself certain statements, the like of which have never before been heard of a man of letters, and these I do not feel bound to unfold to any one, let him be ever so curious. I, myself, happening to be in Rome a few years before his death, often spoke to him and observed him with astonishment as he took his walks about the city clad in strange garb. When I considered the many writings of this famous man, I could perceive in him nothing to justify his great renown. Wherefore I am all the more inclined to turn to that very acute criticism of Julius Cæsar Scaliger, who exercised his extraordinary genius in making a special examination of the treatise De Subtilitate Rerum. He, having carefully noted everywhere the unequal powers of this writer, decided that he was one who, in certain subjects, knew more than a man could know, while in others he seemed more simple than a child. In the science of Arithmetic he worked hard and made many discoveries; but he was subject to strange and excessive aberration of mind, and was guilty of the most impudent blasphemy, in that he was minded to subject to the artificial laws of the stars the Ruler of the stars Himself, for this thing he did in the horoscope of our Saviour which he drew."

Another witness of his life in Rome is François d'Amboise, a young French nobleman, who was engaged on his book De Symbolis Heroicis. He says that he saw Cardan, who was living in a spacious house, on the walls of which, in place of elegant paintings or vari-coloured tapestries, were written the words, "Tempus mea possessio."

In his later writings there are farther indications that he was wont to conjure up omens and portents chiefly at those times when he was in danger and mental distress. In the case which is given below, the omen showed itself in a season of trouble, but Cardan, in describing it later, treats it as if he were a modern scientist. The distressing memories of the imprisonment had faded, and writing in ease and security at Rome he begins to rationalize. In the dialogue between himself and his father, written shortly before his death, Fazio calls his son's attention to certain of the omens and portents already noticed; and, after discussing these, Jerome goes on to tell for the first time of another boding event which, as he affirms, distressed him even more than the loss of his office and the prohibition to publish his books. On the day of his incarceration, on two different occasions, he met a cow being driven to the slaughter-house, with much shouting and beating with sticks and barking of dogs. The explanation of this event which he puts in Fazio's mouth is entirely conceived in the spirit of rationalism. What was there to wonder at? There was a butcher's shop in the street, and animals going to slaughter would naturally be met there. Why should a man fear to meet a cow? If it had been a bull there might have been something in it. Then with regard to the shaking of a window-casement; this might easily have been occasioned by the flight of a bird.[242] He was certainly less inclined to put faith in the warnings of the stars and in the lines of his hand. His line of life was very short and irregular, intersected and bifurcated, while the rest of the lines were little thicker than hairs. In his horoscope was a certain malefic influence which threatened that his life would be cut short before his forty-fifth year. "But," he writes in the year before his death, "here I am, living at the age of seventy-five."[243] The one supernatural idea which seems to have deepened with old age and remained undisturbed to the end was his belief in his attendant genius. In what he wrote during his last years his mood was almost entirely introspective, contemplative, and didactic, yet here and there he introduces a sentence which lets in a little light from his way of life and personal affairs, and helps to show how he occupied himself, and what his humour was. He tells how one day, in 1576, he was writing about the fennel plant in his treatise De Tuenda Sanitate, a plant which he praised highly because it pleased his palate. But shortly afterwards, when he was walking one day in the Roman vegetable market, an old man, shabbily dressed, met him and dissuaded him from the use of the plant aforesaid, saying: "In Galen's opinion you may as readily meet your death thereby as by eating hemlock." "I answered that I knew well enough the difference between hemlock and fennel, but the old man said, 'Take care, I know what I am saying,' and went on murmuring something about Galen. Whereupon I went home and found in Galen a passage I had not hitherto noticed, and, having changed my former views, I added many fresh excerpts to my treatise."

Although his faith may have been shaken in the ability of the stars to govern his own fortunes, he records a case in which he himself filled the post of vates, and which came to a sudden and terrible issue. Cardan was present at a supper-party, and in the course of conversation let fall the remark, "I should like to say something, were I not afraid that my words would disturb the company," to which one of the guests replied, "You mean that you would prophesy death to one of us here present." Cardan replied, "Yes, within the present year," and in the next sentence he tells how on the first day of December in that same year a certain young man, named Virgilius, who had been present at the gathering aforesaid, died, and he sets down this event as a fulfilment of his prophecy.