Giovan Battista Della Porta and the Reinvention of Nature. Philosophy, Experience, Artifice

This book examines how Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1615) reworked his understanding of nature through the encounter between inherited philosophical principles, experience, and artifice. Rather than interpreting his natural philosophy as a transitional stage from Renaissance magic to modern science, it investigates the changing configurations of a cosmological framework whose fundamental principles remained remarkably persistent. Drawing on Della Porta’s writings from the *Magia naturalis* (1558) to the *Phytognomonica* (1588), the expanded *Magiae naturalis libri XX* (1589), the *Villae* (1592), the *Coelestis physiognomonia* (1603), and his later works, the study explores how particular phenomena prompted the reconsideration of established explanations of natural causation. Through six interconnected investigations, the volume addresses the cosmological foundations of natural powers, the relationship between music and mathematical order, the changing interpretation of magnetism, the status of astrological images, the mechanical explanation of artificial wonders, and the reformulation of celestial prediction through physiognomy. These cases reveal how experience and experimental inquiry could modify the scope, boundaries, and explanatory functions of inherited concepts without necessarily displacing the cosmological principles upon which they depended. The book proposes the notion of *reinvention* to describe this continuing, non-linear process of conceptual reconfiguration. Philosophy, experience, and artifice emerge not as separate dimensions of Della Porta’s intellectual activity, but as interconnected elements through which natural phenomena were investigated and rendered intelligible. In doing so, the volume offers a new interpretation of Della Porta’s natural philosophy and contributes to broader debates concerning the historical transformation of concepts of nature, natural knowledge, and experimental practice in Renaissance philosophy and science.