Fracastoro, Girolamo

Abstract

Girolamo Fracastoro was one of the leading figures on the sixteenth-century intellectual scene. Not only is he renowned for his famous poem, dedicated to Pietro Bembo, Syphilis sive De morbo Gallico libri tres (Verona 1530), and for his recognized medical expertise, but his fame among historians of science and medicine owes much to the De sympathia et antipathia rerum, the short treatise which introduces the three books De contagione, et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione (Venice 1546).

His work is characterized by the presence of heterogeneous elements, coming from the Neoplatonic and Hermetic traditions, as well as from Lucretius. It can be seen as a solidly philosophical synthesis in which the matrix is, no doubt, Aristotelian and the rationalist imprint is evident. It is exactly within the theoretical framework of Aristotelianism that Fracastoro develops his interest in the problem of knowledge and his attention to the world of experience. His reflections confirm the lectio of the ancient philosophers, passing through Ficino’s rereading of Plato, the intellectual stimuli deriving from the writings of Giovanni and Gianfrancesco Pico Della Mirandola and the teaching of Pomponazzi. It is partly because of these research themes that Fracastoro’s works became particularly popular in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy, which privileged methodological approaches focusing on the concrete “cases” of nature.