Ingo Schütze

This article presents a nearly complete list of the portraits of the Italian Renaissance philosopher Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), ranging from the earliest gems to the engravings produced in the first half of the 19th century. Each item is described bibliographically and illustrated if the item have not been lost. The history of Cardano’s portraits is reconstructed, showing that only a few authentic portraits exits, a scarcity rooted in Cardano's fondamental critic of self-representation. Two strands of Cardano's visual representations stem from non-authentic sources, in other words, there are counterfeit engravings created to market new images of the famous author.

The theory of passions in the music was a Baroque doctrin of musical figures which has its preceding thinkers in the natural philosophy and sciences of the 16th century. The aim of this study is to reconstruct the theory of the passions in Girolamo Cardano, because he is one of the main natural philosophers and encyclopedists of the Renaissance, and to analyse his patterns in thinking the power of music for the creation of passions. In Cardano’s mathematical work De proportionibus and in his De musica, the remaining part of an unpublished work about music, he explains a physiological theory about passions as local movements of the corporal part of the soul. In De subtilitate Cardano claims that the passions are movements and variations of natural heat and he investigates the effects of passions in the human body and their benefits and dangers for health. At last Cardano excludes some passions, amor, odium and tristitia from the effects of music because sounds effect only general passions - passions without knowledge of something - and cause life, not death.