Giambattista della Porta – Natural Magic and the Academy of Secrets
On February 4, 1615, Italian scholar, polymath and playwright Giambattista della Porta passed away. Besides occult philosophy, astrology, alchemy, mathematics, meteorology, and natural philosophy, della Porta worked on cryptography and also on optics. He claimed to be the inventor of the telescope although he does not appear to have constructed one before Galileo [4]. “Having observed the forces of all things natural and celestial and having examined by painstaking investigation the sympathy among…
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