Giovan Battista Della Porta was a restless conductor of experiments who embodied the contradictions but also the intellectual diversity of his epoch in a very specific way like few other intellectuals. Della Porta was not only the inventor of the telescope and an improved, almost cinematic vision of the camera obscura; he was also one of the most famous physiognomists of his epoch. An influential playwright, he probably wrote close to thirty plays, of which fourteen comedies and three tragedies have survived. Even in sixteenth-century perception, Della Porta was an exceptional writer because he published in an astonishing number of different literary and scientific genres. Della Porta was a prolific writer (with chronic difficulties in getting his books through the ecclesiastical censors) and, from the 1590s onwards, one of the most prominent figures in contemporary European intellectual life. His works were printed well into the eighteenth century.1

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, a manuscript written in Greek and attributed to a Horapollo—the Hieroglyphica—was discovered on the island of Andros. This text, probably written in the third century or even later, contained an interpretation of the meaning of about 200 images as they were allegedly used in the scriptures of the priests in ancient Egypt. The Hieroglyphica became immensely popular during the following couple of centuries, and it was printed countless times in translations that were sometimes also lavishly illustrated.2 In the following, the changing role of a set of these hieroglyphs is examined for the first time in a synopsis of Della Porta’s key works, and with regard to his ideas about natural magic: the Magiae naturalis libri IV (1558); the cryptography (De furtivis litterarum notis vulgo De ziferis libri IV [1563]), The Art of Memory (L’arte del ricordare [1566, Latin 1602]); De humana physiognomia (1584, 1602); the second, expanded edition of the Magiae naturalis libri XX (1589); Phytognomonica (1588); and Villae (1592). Over the course of his long life as a publicist Della Porta became increasingly aware of the Hieroglyphica by Horapollo. Della Porta also 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. I will argue 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. In tandem with this, hieroglyphs were 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.

Della Porta’s Europe-wide reputation was largely founded on his two texts on natural magic (first published 1558, and then in a greatly expanded version in 1589). Both texts develop a general theory of magic, which Della Porta takes predominantly from Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ Mirabilia, Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonic magic, and Agrippa von Nettesheim (see Verardi 2018, 83–115). The major part of both versions of the Magia, however, consists of collections of more (or less) practical recipes for seemingly completely heterogeneous subjects, for example, the grafting of fruit trees and the cross-breeding of animals, the production of monsters, the making of mirrors, beauty recipes, cooking, distillation, hydraulics, metallurgy, and the use of drugs. There are also a large number of instructions for magic tricks and practical jokes. In contemporary understanding, Della Porta thus published as a professore dei segreti (professor of secrets) (see Eamon 1994; 2010).

Della Porta’s Magiae naturalis libri IV immediately became a European bestseller. In 1558, the date of the first publication, the author was obviously still unfamiliar with the text of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica. Della Porta mentions Egypt, en passant and in connection with gems and rings. He explains that such objects are engraved with images of scorpions, and he recommends them as talismans against the scorpion’s sting, or in conjunction with other images that channel the stellar power of a planet.3 Such recipes and their underlying theoretical assumptions had become the object of polemics against Egyptian magic, and its characters, the hieroglyphs, animated talismans and statues of the gods as early as the end of the fifteenth century, especially following the publication of Marsilio Ficino’s De vita coelitus comparanda (1489), perhaps the most sophisticated and certainly a formative text for natural magicians of the sixteenth century.4

Yet, images from the Hieroglyphica are nor more than tangentially present in the first version of the Magia, for example when Della Porta writes that a wild bull becomes tame the moment it is tied to a fig tree. The reference to the text of the Hieroglyphica is quite imprecise here, namely when it speaks of a bull “garlanded” with figs becoming tame. Perhaps Della Porta got this idea from Pliny; perhaps it was directly copied from Agrippa von Nettesheim’s famous encyclopedia of magical arts, De occulta philosophia. There, as in the Magia, the example comes in a chapter on secret sympathies and antipathies between animals, plants, and stones: for he claims that these forces are the precondition for the foundation of the practice of natural magic.5

As we shall see, Della Porta will use the hieroglyph again and again over the following decades, developing it into a key trope that reflects important and different aspects of his magia naturalis. Bull and fig have highly sexualized connotations, the connection between animal and plant pointing to the universal sympathies and antipathies that pervade the entire cosmos.6 Renaissance natural magic as erotic magic is essentially based on the exploitation of these erotic powers.7 Della Porta uses the “fig-bull” as an example of those hidden forces of repulsion and attraction that are inherent in all things, and which the learned magician knows how to channel in order to produce those mirabilia which are the main goal of natural magic.8

Thus the “fig-bull” resurfaces more than three decades later, in the second edition of the Magia, this time in the context of a brief cooking-recipe. Here, the reader learns that she can save a lot of firewood by cooking the stems (caules) of the wild fig (caprificus) with beef, because the meat then becomes tender more quickly, which Della Porta attributes to the occult antipathy between fig trees and bulls. (Considering that Della Porta had postulated the pacification of the animal by the plant, this thesis seems incoherent, by the way: one would much rather assume sympathy). Della Porta also explains that he endorses the popular opinion according to which the bull tied to a fig tree becomes so tame that it can be touched and yoked without danger. The source of these ideas is probably two passages that appear close together in Pliny’s Historia naturalis that recount a wide variety of different recipes with the wild fig as an ingredient.9 Yet—and crucially—to the information from Pliny he adds one of Horapollo’s hieroglyphs:

This passage provides a revealing view of the structure of Della Porta’s argumentative operations: the occult antipathy between plant and animal is proven here (a) from folk belief, (b) from Pliny’s cooking recipe, and (c) from hieroglyphics, i.e., from testimonies of different provenance and different content. Two recipes for dealing with living animals or their meat, one description of a human being’s mental and social state: these elements are condensed into a set of stories designed to confirm each other and, conversely, to prove the postulated antipathy of fig and bull. The threefold iteration of one and the same occult relation is characteristic of Della Porta’s forms of argumentation in his texts on magic.11 It is also a general characteristic of recipes: they have to be repeated, wanting to be enacted, as it were. The “hieroglyphic” representation of the “fig-bull” thus condenses a literary topos that is useful as a visual memory aid to recollect a set of recipes, practices, and ideas surrounding the hieroglyph. The importance of this visual aspect is also indirectly documented in contemporary illustrated editions of the Hieroglyphica (see Fig. 1).12

Figure 1 – Ori Apollinis Niliaci, De Sacris Aegyptiorvm notis… Libri Dvo, Iconibvs illustrati, & aucti. Paris: Johannes Ruellius, 1574, fol. 80v, 6.4 × 6.4 cm. Courtesy of the University Library of Vienna. Ph. Sergius Kodera.

This visual aspect also entails that the “fig-bull” may resonate with other, cognate images. Thus, the second version of the Magia introduces a “bull-cow,” another of Horapollos’ hieroglyphs.

Like the “fig-bull,” so the “bull-cow” hieroglyph encodes a practical procedure.13 Yet, and unlike Horapollo, Della Porta frames this “hieroglyph” with the act of copulation and the position of the bull after the act, and hence to an image that is not the subject matter of the hieroglyph. For Horapollo says that the bull’s looking to the left signifies that he himself will father a heifer, and that his looking to the right will result in a bull-calf, while these two hieroglyphs denote mothers of daughters and sons respectively.14 Figure 2 shows that contemporary illustrations are in line with Della Porta’s idea.

Figure 2 – Ori Apollinis Niliaci, De Sacris Aegyptiorvm notis… Libri Dvo, Iconibvs illustrati, & aucti. Paris: Johannes Ruellius, 1574, fol. 63v, 5.5 × 5.5 cm. Courtesy of the University Library of Vienna. Ph. Sergius Kodera.

Della Porta’s marked interest in the sexual aspect of this hieroglyph is echoed in the sadistic instruction to tie off testicles. In the Magia the image of the “bull-cow” illustrates and bolsters the creed that one could regulate the sex of future offspring, and at the same time legitimizes the credibility of a special breeding technique. Even though Della Porta does not explicitly recommend the practice of tying off testicles to determine the sex of the offspring, this method of breeding selection is presented in an uncannily transferable way. Actually, Della Porta exploits the ambiguity of Horapollo’s “bull-cow” in yet another respect: as the image may denote mothers of daughters or sons respectively it blurs the line between human beings and animals.

In particular, Della Porta seems to have been interested in everything concerning the reproduction and artificial generation of life, interbreeding between species, and their artful manipulation.15 The impression arises here (which will be corroborated in what follows) that hieroglyphs, unlike in Plotinus, are not perceived as ingenious abbreviations of the noumenal, or, as with Iamblichus, as signs with a specific inherent theurgical power.16 Rather, for Della Porta, hieroglyphs denote actions; they are recipes that have coagulated into images, in which occult properties of animals, plants, and other things confirm and relate to the practice of the natural magician. This set of ideas connects Renaissance hieroglyphics with the literary genre of fable. In the guise of animals, fables speak about the actions and behavior of men and women; like the recipe, “fable is a metaphorical action […] Fable is invented to form a conception in the image of an action.”17 This is especially interesting when we consider that Della Porta also advocated the close connection of the physical traits and habits of animals with the mores and appearance of human beings.

Della Porta’s selection of hieroglyphs is thus often guided by their sexual connotations, just as Horapollo’s selection is already exceedingly rich in such suggestions. Another example (already briefly touched upon in the first Magia) is the spontaneous procreation of mice, frogs, and snakes born from the mud of the Nile.18 The second edition of the Magia again mentions Egypt in connection with the spontaneous procreation of living beings from mud.19 However, now Della Porta refers in particular to Diodorus, who says that in Thebes, after the rain, animals emerge from the mud, some fully formed while some are only half formed and still are united with the earth (Diodorus Siculus 1, 10). Della Porta also writes of mice begotten from rain and mud, emphasizing the abundance with which these animals appear in the rotten earth.20 Our author is visibly fascinated by Diodorus’ descriptions of intermediate stages: namely, that the animals appeared half-finished, only up to the breast, and were, so to speak, halfway between life and death. Another example borrowed from Diodorus (though not from the Hieroglyphica) is the procreation of chicks without a hen. Again, Della Porta had already treated the subject in the first version of the Magia (Della Porta 1561, 79r, lib. II, cap. 24), but the second edition is more detailed.21 This leads him to introduce an invention of his own: he describes how to build a chicken incubator (Della Porta 1650, 232–34, lib. IV, cap. 26). In a similar vein, in the first version of the Magia, Della Porta had described his own—albeit highly fantastical—experiments for the creation of monsters, probably developed from the fables about mud-frogs. One ingredient in these esoteric recipes is the legendary hippomanes, the mare poison used in ancient love spells.22

To sum up: (a) hieroglyphs from Horapollo are not directly mentioned in the first edition of the Magia naturalis, yet (b) images from the Hieroglyphica are already present here (“mud-toad” “mud-mouse” “fig-bull”); (c) Della Porta uses these sexually charged images as confirmation of his theories and practices in natural magic, expanding them to other species (eggs bred without a hen); (d) the extended version of the Magia testifies to a more profound knowledge of Renaissance hieroglyphics; and at the same time (e) it recycles ideas from the first Magia. Della Porta indeed must have acquired quite extensive knowledge of hieroglyphics soon after the publication of the first Magia, which the following section will demonstrate, as we shall see such Egyptian images gradually acquire the function of topoi that also structure Della Porta’s ideas in other areas of knowledge.

Half a decade after the first version of the Magia, Della Porta’s knowledge of the hieroglyphic tradition must have expanded fundamentally. His book on cryptography, De furtivis litterarum notis vulgo De ziferis libri IV (1563), conveys a rather well-informed, synthetic account of the contemporary understanding of hieroglyphics. He explains that the Egyptians concealed the deepest mysteries within these “imagines ridiculae vel fabulosae” (“ridiculous or legendary images”). Della Porta also maintains that hieroglyphs were used by prisci philosophi, the ancient sages and poets, to veil supernatural mysteries within fables in order to protect them from profanation, and as a medium to communicate their knowledge about secret and forbidden things under the protective cloak of hieroglyphic codes.23 This form of esotericism accommodates Della Porta’s general tendency to present himself as a master of secret, spectacular sciences and arts, and corresponds to his immediate concern, namely to present rules for ciphers.

From a contemporary perspective, it was hardly surprising that De furtivis litterarum notis contains an entire chapter on hieroglyphs, since the connection between Egyptian pictorial signs and cryptography had been well established since at least the beginning of the sixteenth century.24 Della Porta mentions Horapollo, Valeriano, and Paolo Giovio as the creators of imprese, that is, the popular and elaborate image–text combinations that not only decorate the shields of princes but also, for example, printers’ marks.25 De ziferis describes one of the most famous imprese, namely the anchor and dolphin. Della Porta explains that hieroglyphs are called “chimeras” in volgare and “emblems” in Alciati, and that these images serve as decorations for walls, carpets, doors, ceilings, vaults, or helmets (“parietes, peristromata, lacunaria, fores & clypei ornantur”). Moreover, hieroglyphs may be used to convey the hidden “intentions of the soul.”26 These ideas are neither particularly new nor original.27 Della Porta explains that Egyptian signs are a sub-genre of metaphorical speech, in which different things are actually compared (or collated: “collatus”) (Della Porta 1563, 14). In the light of the simultaneously developing debate on the semantics of imprese and emblems, however, the intellectual level of Della Porta’s account is rather modest (see Klein 1957; and Drysdall 1992). Overall, the impression is that De ziferis reflects an already widespread knowledge of the period. It seems that the contextualization of hieroglyphics is fundamentally different from that of the two editions of the Magia: De furtivis litterarum notis does not mention “fig-bulls” or “mud-toads,” yet the Minotaur, that spectacular human–bull crossbreed engineered by Daedalus, figures as impresa.28

However, Della Porta discusses only two images from the Hieroglyphica in greater detail, namely the dove and the hippopotamus. Of them, Horapollo says that the young males drive the father away from the mother as soon as they are physically able to do so, and even kill the father. Both animals are therefore images of ingratitude. The pigeon also has another outstanding characteristic: it lacks gall, and this makes its flesh the only medicine against the plague.29 Here, too, De ziferis does not spread any news, for in fact the scandal of the hippopotamus had already enjoyed some attention in antiquity, for instance in Plutarch, and the hieroglyphic dove and hippopotamus were also popular among Della Porta’s contemporaries.30

One might think that Della Porta is simply using the crassness of the theme associated with these two animals to show how incest and patricide conceal divine mysteries. But this is by no means the case.31 Nor does he make any direct reference to the idea that the communication of incest or patricide in hieroglyphic coding might be quite effective, for instance in diplomatic correspondence. (This could have been very appropriate for the project of a theory of secret writing.) As with the “fig-bull” and the “bull-cow” in the Magia, the specific selection of examples from Horapollo in De ziferis rather highlights that highly occult properties and eccentric breeding techniques are important topics in the Magia naturalis.

There are thus continuities in Della Porta’s interest in hieroglyphs: as in the two versions of the Magia naturalis, so our author points to the practical potestates occultae in De ziferis. In the theory of secret writing, however, these are antidotal pigeon meat rather than quickly cooked bull meat, incest and patricide rather than the spontaneous or artificial procreation of monsters from mud. For we have already come to know the author as a practitioner of the artificial creation of monsters, with a marked interest in all that concerns the bringing forth of living creatures, and noted the obvious fascination for interbreeding between animal species that goes with it (Kodera 2015). Moreover, the theme of incest and patricide is one that our author deals with in his theater, where Oedipus looms large.32

This interest in scandalous images is related to Della Porta’s conviction that they are better and more clearly imprinted in the memory than images of virtues. In fact, he maintains that sexual fantasy is an ideal tool in the art of memory, to be discussed in the following section. We may speculate that De ziferis gave Della Porta insight into the usefulness of hieroglyphs as topical arguments resonating with his general outlook as a natural magician. It was not so much that these images are signs with an inherent power; rather, hieroglyphs helped to organize, confirm, and recollect a specific mind-set (and related recipes). Yet this is not a one-way street: for in Della Porta’s mnemonics, generative imagination fulfills an important function.

Three years after the De ziferis Della Porta’s treatise on mnemonics appeared, first published in volgare.33 Hieroglyphic writing plays a theoretical role, as Della Porta uses it to model his method for developing an artificially structured memory. The art of memory, a technique handed down from antiquity that was part of the orator’s training, experienced a heyday in the early modern period. Essentially, the technique consisted of associating the text to be memorized with an architectural structure. To do this, the rooms of a large building (loci), furnished with unusual and memorable objects (imagines), must be visualized in the memory. The rhetor walks through these imagined temples or palaces in order to remember the structure of the speech through the loci, and the content (memoranda) through the sight of the imagines. The most important (and the most challenging) task in the art of memory is not to confuse this matrix of imagined architectures and images. The virtual edifices must not become disordered, and the objects or creatures placed in them must remain in place, so that the contents of the speech may be recalled in the correct order. For Della Porta, the art is essentially based on an adaptation, i.e., a similarity between imagines and memoranda. Hence, hieroglyphs may be useful in mnemonics:

Crucially, the Ars reminiscendi enumerates virtually all the hieroglyphs mentioned by Horapollo that are associated with bulls, yet without tying them to recipes or other explanations. The images are here merely the material for organizing the memory. Or so it seems.

Moreover, the semantic field opened up by the imago of the bull is even wider where the images are not tied to particular recipes. Ars reminiscendi emphasizes the value of these signs for cultivating one’s individual memory: Della Porta explains that these images are a matrix from which one may invent ones own imagines agentes deriving from such a series of hieroglyphs.

This process is of course modeled on the technique of inventio, which is an important topic in early modern rhetoric. Yet, let me add that this technique also indicates how Della Porta transferred the organic and procreational aspects of his natural magic to his concomitant choice of hieroglyphs. The images themselves generate new images by combination, in a form of mental cross-breeding, that generates marvelous new entities. The creation of marvelous appearances of things unheard of, figments of the imagination yet unseen, is the goal of natural magic; and at the same time they are also useful as memory aids.

It is thus not surprising that other chapters, particularly of the Arte della memoria, recommend scandalous subjects as imagines agentes because we remember them more easily and thus more accurately than virtuous ones. This is because such graphic images create the most powerful memory images. Bulls are again looming large here, for example the rape of Europa by Zeus, and even more shockingly Della Porta cites the example of Pasiphaë having sex with the bull, or the Roman woman who allows herself to be satisfied by the hero Lucius in donkey form in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Della Porta explains that such sexually charged imagines can be linked to much larger amounts of data to be remembered than heroic deeds and events. This argumentation follows the consideration that the more offensive an image, the more massive the somatic reaction to it, and the greater the imprint on the memory (Kodera 2019). Here the impression arises (not at all unfounded) that these erotically charged imagines are also particularly agents to form new mental image combinations that anchor themselves deeply in the memory as visual bastards and monsters. There, these images develop a life of their own, an effective power with which they influence the body and habit of the person.34

Della Porta’s book on human physiognomy was among his most popular texts. This art compares animals with human beings, with the aim of translating visual features into habitual mental dispositions that apply both for animals and humans. Each translation contains an implicit practical instruction for action: namely, to identify an individual with certain positive or negative character traits, habits, or inclinations. In eroding the boundaries between humans and animals, the art of physiognomy implies that human beings are only superficially formed by culture. Within its own historical context, physiognomonics was viewed as a scientia universalis, a rational science as good as, or perhaps even better than, the new anatomy, since it could be used for universal description and as a means to identify character traits (see Paolella 2015). It is thus hardly surprising that bulls appear in Della Porta’s De humana physiognomia (Fig. 3).

Figure 3 – Giovan Battista Della Porta, De humana physiongnomia libri VI. Naples: Tarquinio Longo, 1602, 83. Courtesy of the University Library of Vienna. Ph. Sergius Kodera.

Thus, for instance, Della Porta identifies Cesare Borgia as typically taurine and hence as a virile and masculine man, capable of decapitating a raging bull in the arena with a single blow.35 Yet “fig-bulls” and “bull-cows” are not mentioned in the Humana physiognomia. Let me suggest that this is because such hieroglyphs were not directly related to the topic at hand, human–animal resemblances. For “physiognomonics”, however, it is not a matter of deciphering a hidden meaning from dissimilar images, as in hieroglyphics, but, on the contrary, of stating the similarity between the shared mores of animals and human beings (and vice versa).36

Yet, Della Porta’s art of physiognomonics was not limited to animals. His Phytognomonica (1588) describes such affinities everywhere, from plants and animals to the bodies and faces of humans, and even further up the ontological scale to the appearance of the planets (see Müller-Jahncke 1990). Like De ziferis, the Phytognomonica mentions Horapollo together with a list of examples from the Hieroglyphica (Della Porta 1589, 231–32, lib. V, cap. 27). Scattered through different books of the Phytognomonica, many passages explain that even plants have a sort of behavior, and that such mores are caused by sympathy and antipathy (Della Porta 1589, 25–6, lib. I, cap. 16). Human beings, thanks to the divine order, may decipher this language because it relies on the universal figurative similitudes. Comparing such images to the hieroglyphs of the Egyptian sages,37 Della Porta calls this idiom “pictura loquens” and claims it to be more powerful (“valentior”) than all other systems of signs and even spoken words. He also explains that illiterate people use such images, which allows them to gather some knowledge of the hidden properties of things, for instance to find medicines. Importantly, he claims that38:

Here, as in his Art of Memory, Della Porta points to the potential of inventio by means of a recombination of a set of signs. Yet the present context is not mnemonics, but what the author called sciences: the interpretation of dreams, agriculture, and astrology. These arts are not foreign to the agenda of the Hieroglyphica: George Boas, for example, has pointed to the formative influence of Artemidorus’ Interpretation of Dreams (Oneirokritika) on Horapollo’s text (Boas 1950, 25–7).

Phytognomonica distinguishes between male and female plants. The “fig-bull” is an example that supports this claim, because it highlights the difference between the sweeter, softer, and moister (and hence female) fruit of the fig tree and the (male) wild fig. Della Porta explains:

In this context, the topos of “fig-bull” is here used to bolster one of Della Porta’s most cherished botanical theories: as an example demonstrating that male and female gender stereotypes are transferable to the life and mores of plants. The “fig-bull” is mentioned again in a similar context and with similar intent in another passage of the Phytognomonica, where Della Porta explains that he believes that only the wild fig has the power to calm a raging bull, because only the stems of the wild fig have the power to soften bull meat, thus making it possible to cook using less firewood, as Pliny had claimed. Again, Della Porta refers to the “fig-bull” in Horapollo, and he recounts that the ancient Egyptians represented a man struck by sudden ill luck with the image of a bull tied to a fig tree. We have analyzed these elements and their reciprocal uses as arguments, but the hieroglyph is here inserted into a botanical context where Della Porta employs the topos of the “fig-bull” to classify plants and to explain their special magical properties as deriving from their male or female sex. And he adds that the bull’s blood has a special fibrous quality, which he claims to be the reason why bulls are the fastest animals to achieve an erection and why they ejaculate semen most quickly. Della Porta refers to yet another of Horapollo’s hieroglyphs: the image of the bull with an erect penis. It denotes “fortitude” because the animal’s penis is so hot that it does not have to move inside a cow’s vagina to ejaculate; moreover, a bull would gravely hurt a cow if his member penetrated some other part of her body. At the same time the hieroglyph signifies temperance, because a bull will not mount a pregnant cow.41 Della Porta adds that bull’s blood is poisonous if you drink it.42 Yet, there are exceptions: for Pliny says that some priests in Aegyra drink bull’s blood during ceremonies of geomantic divination, and Della Porta adds that this strong sympathy is caused either by religion or by the qualities of the specific place where these ceremonies happen. We also learn that Dioscorides recommends a sip of bull’s blood as medicine against flatulence caused by drinking the milky juice of the wild fig.43

The new set of ideas in the sign of “bull-fortitude” illustrates how over the years Della Porta was elaborating the set of recipes, theoretical claims, and practices within a group of bull- hieroglyphs. This allowed him to create new resonances and refer to more and more hieroglyphs with cognate meaning. In this case, the Phytognomonica imbricates a discussion of the medical and gastronomic efficacy of figs, with the hieroglyphs of the “fig-bull” and “bull-fortitude,” with the lethal (or manic) properties of bull’s blood in connection with geomancy,44 and the medical use of small quantities bull’s blood against flatulence caused by the juice of the wild fig (which implicitly testifies to the antipathy between wild fig and bull). Like a deck of cards or a gallery of mnemonic images, these series of topoi are the male and female forces in the universe: in short his erotic, if not outright sexual, magic. Like both versions of the Magia, Phytognomonica is an assemblage of extraordinarily heterogeneous quotations that are accommodated to topoi in order to prove a given claim (in our example, the mores of the wild fig). Yet, a reader who wonders why the blood of the bull is so special must look for an explanation in a completely different part of the Phytognomonica. Here she learns that it has a spiky, stinging, fibrous quality (“quaedam corpuscula, pilorum imagine oblongas”), which causes the animal’s fierceness. The information comes next to another instance where Della Porta mentions the “fig-bull.”45 In the context of yet another recipe Phytognomonica also mentions the “bull-cow”: Pliny says that if a pregnant woman eats the veal of a young bull (vitulus) that is cooked in bulbs of aristolochia (“birthwort”), she will give birth to a boy.46 We also encounter “mud-frog,” this time with tales of the spontaneous generation of ducks and similar birds from sea-shells in the British Isles.47

In Villae (Estates) Della Porta presented a summa of ancient and modern forestry, agriculture, and horticulture as it had been known and practiced in Europe. Villae is organized in a scenic manner, “an imaginary round tour through an open-air theater.”48 The reader is guided through the diverse zones of an imaginary vast country estate. Emphasizing first-hand experience, Della Porta’s Villae focuses on plants cultivated in Puglia and the Capitanato, the province surrounding Naples. Even though Villae was not a big success, it implicitly catered to a way of life that took its inspiration from Cicero’s ideal of an independent life. This was well matched with a trend in Della Porta’s day among the ruling classes to move to the countryside, which also resulted in the construction of some of Andrea Palladio’s most impressive rural villas. In general, Villae betrays an implicit astrological agenda as Porta conceives of plants as recipients of celestial influx. Villae was innovative in several respects: it was the first text to dedicate an entire treatise to the cultivation of olives, as well as containing one on grafting. This latter topic is especially interesting because it demonstrates the extent to which Della Porta’s ideas on agriculture intertwine with his ideas on natural magic.

Villae has a brief chapter on the wild fig and a longer one on the fig tree, both chapters mentioning “fig-bull” (Della Porta 1592, 171–73, lib. II, cap. 17; 300–27, lib. V, cap. 16). Della Porta describes the qualities of the tree as marvelous miracles of nature (prodigiosa naturae miracula) (Della Porta 1592, 303), mentioning the recipe for the softening of meat; yet the recipe is new: it is not beef that is cooked with stems any more. Here Della Porta quotes almost verbatim a long passage from Plutarch’s Table Talk, according to which freshly slaughtered poultry becomes tender when hung from a fig tree. Plutarch attributes this to the special nature of fig juice.49 Like Plutarch, Della Porta maintains that the acrid nature of its most abundant juice, manifest also in the smoke produced by burning the wood of the tree, is an especially strong halitus and spiritus50 that irritates the lungs, that the ashes are a most powerful detergent lye, and that milk is curdled by the fresh juice of figs. Another “miracle of nature” is that the wild fig is even shunned by the heavens, because no flash of lightning will strike a wild fig: an occult property that the fig tree shares with seals and hyenas. Again, this is caused by the bitterness of the fig tree’s juice.51 Plutarch’s explanations for the special power of the fig tree are similar to the one Della Porta had given for the special nature of bull’s blood. In the chapter on the wild fig, Della Porta furthermore stated that this immunity to lightning strikes makes the tree holy to haruspices (diviners who interpreted animal entrails, wonders, and lightning), who believe that this phenomenon is praeter-natural (i.e., demonic). Well in accordance with his general approach to cross-breeding, Della Porta also reports that that wild fig trees may change into fig trees and vice versa, just as trees producing black figs may change and produce white fruit.52 Accordingly, in Villae Della Porta does not seem to be as convinced as he had been in Phytognomonica that only the wild fig has these properties. In Villae he again adapts his kaleidoscope of hieroglyphic images to a slightly different position, the assemblage of familiar images catering to yet another set of practices, while the elements of this mannerist machinery of invention remain untouched—just as the cosmos remains a safely closed set of elements.53

Della Porta’s ideas on and use of hieroglyphs began to develop in the context of talismanic magic. Over the years, he integrated these images into sets of highly flexible rhetorical topoi covering a wide range of purposes. Hieroglyphs serve as imagines agentes for the organization of the memory; as ciphers; as sedes argumentorum to bolster the credibility of some more or less amazing recipe; and hence as another example testifying to the truth of natural magic in general, as a source of wonder, a spectacle of nature, and last but not least as a rich source to enhance and fertilize the life of the imagination. These kaleidoscopic permutations, accompanied and at the same time generated by the recombination of a set of relatively few visual elements, make good reads, as they are simultaneously containers and signifiers of wonders. Raphaële Garrod has argued (in a slightly different context) that early modern readers perceived descriptions in the genre of natural history not merely as sources of information, but as aesthetic phenomena, especially when they rendered vivid (figures of enargeia, hypotyposis) descriptions of marvelous phenomena. Undoubtedly Pliny’s Natural history was the model for such accounts that catered to the development of modern literary taste (see Garrod 2018, 7, 15). Della Porta’s approach to and use of hieroglyphs exemplified in this paper seems to confirm these claims: his accounts of meraviglia were intended as good reads, just as the human imagination, not least in its capacity to influence one’s own body in amazing ways, was the hotbed for all sorts of magic.

Let me therefore suggest reading Phytognomonica and Villae alongside the Magiae as collections of implicit instructions for action, as books of recipes. In this format, theoretical explanations are not obligatory: on the contrary, recipes usually do not explain why something works, they rather tell you how to make something work. The recipe is a genre in which concrete instructions for action are conveyed, and the systematic context—philosophically religious, or social—is usually only implicit. The recipe is hence a formidable device to elide any direct reference to potentially heterodox theoretical claims about magic, divination, or religion.54 The topological nature of these recipes also entails that the related image may surface several times in the text; that it may be be associated there with different arguments.

Boas has pointed to the formative influence of Artemidorus’ Interpretation of Dreams on Horapollo’s text (Boas 1950, 25–7). Artemidorus understands dream images as translations, metaphors, which have an inherent prognostic capacity. Della Porta left no interpretation of dreams: with him, the prognostic and thus action-guiding dimension of such images is shifted to physiognomonics and to mnemonics. But he embraces the method, even ascribing to it the potential to invent new things. In Della Porta’s other writings discussed here, this aspect is also expressed in the important function of meraviglia, of astonishment: namely, in both versions of the Magia in a practice of artful, indicative display of bodies, all of which can be translated into extraordinary, often hidden, qualities and powers (qualitates, virtutes occultae). This is mostly located in the (explicitly or implicitly) sexual. Horapollo’s collection of Egyptian imagines is a rich source for sexually explicit content, for there mothers are slept with, fathers are murdered or repressed, and mice and other creatures are born from the mud. Della Porta expands this set of scandalous images: in his work, bull testicles are tied, incubated in a retort and from dirt, bred and cross-bred. In his mnemonics, Della Porta emphasizes the power of such images in the human imaginary: they are astonishing, secular miracles that imprint themselves deeply on the memory and shape the individual. Hieroglyphs thus function simultaneously as testimony of the foundations of natural magic—of universal sympathies and antipathies—and as their emblematic confirmation.

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