9.35-36

della Porta, Giambattista (c. 1535 - 1615)

Italian natural philosopher, crytographer, and dramatist

After a period of study and travel throughout Europe, Porta returned to his native Naples where he published his Magia naturalis (1558; translated as Natural Magick, 1658). An immensely successful work (some twenty-seven editions are known), it distinguished between the magic of sorcery, which della Porta rejected, and natural magic. Under this latter term he included familiar yet mysterious phenomena taken from such fields as magnetism, hydraulics, optics, and chemistry, and sought to explain them in terms of attractions, sympathies, fascinations, and antipathies. The book also contains one of the earliest descriptions of the camera obscura. More original, although less well known, is his De furtivis literarum (On Secret Writing; 1563), a work of cryptography in which he provided solutions to a number of simple polyalphabetic ciphers. His Phytognomonica (1589) expounds the doctrine of signatures. Della Porta was also a leading figure in two early scientific societies. He helped to establish in Naples in 1560 the Academia secretorum naturae, the first such modern society, and in 1610 he became a member of Cesi's Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. In addition, from 1589 onwards, della Porta also published some twenty plays in prose and verse, some of which were translated in England and France.

Market House Books Encyclopaedia of the Renaissance, © Market House Books Ltd 1987