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Updated: June 18, 2025
Craftsmen are counted excellent, not by their skill in their art, but by reason of their garish work and of the valueless approbation of the mob. Wherefore one must needs either incur God's displeasure or live in misery, despised and persecuted by men." These words, though put into his mother's mouth, are manifestly an expression of Cardan's own feelings.
The rough sketch of a great master often performs its task more thoroughly than the finished painting, and Cardan's autobiography is a fragment of this sort.
He writes: "This matter, forsooth, gave a ready handle to Cardan's rivals, and especially to those who were sworn foes of astrology; so that they were able to jibe at him freely because, neither in his own horoscope, nor in that of his son Giovanni Battista, nor in that of Aymer Ranconet, nor in that of Edward VI., king of England, nor in any other of the schemes that he drew, did he rightly foresee any of the events which followed.
He left many of Cardan's letters unanswered; but at last he seems to have found too strong the temptation to say something disagreeable; so, in answer to a letter from Cardan containing a request for help in solving an equation which had baffled his skill, Tartaglia wrote telling Cardan that he had bungled in his application of the rule, and that he himself was now very sorry he had ever confided the rule aforesaid to such a man.
Two wheels in two pulleys at the end of the rudder corrected this defect, and compensated, to some extent, for the loss of strength. The compass was well housed in a case perfectly square, and well balanced by its two copper frames placed horizontally, one in the other, on little bolts, as in Cardan's lamps.
It has already been noted that Cardan's claim to some past knowledge in the successful treatment of chest diseases had weight with the Archbishop and Cassanate, and the result of his visit surely proved that their confidence was not ill-placed; his boasting may have been a trifle excessive, but it was based on hope rather than achievement; and if proof can be adduced that it was not prompted by any greed of illegitimate fame or profit, it may justly be ranked as a weakness rather than as a serious offence.
But he was put right in the sight of the world by the sharp censure pronounced by the Senate upon those busy-bodies who had ventured to speak in its name. Cardan's last days in Milan were cheered with a brief gleam of good fortune.
Estienne and Gessner would hardly have felt acute sorrow at a flout put upon Julius Cæsar Scaliger. Crooked-tempered as he was, Cardan, compared with Scaliger, was as a rose to a thistle, but there were reasons altogether unconnected with the personalities of the disputants which swayed the balance to Cardan's advantage.
There was in Cardan's nature a strong vein of melancholy, and up to the date now under consideration he had been the victim of a fortune calculated to deepen rather than disperse his morbid tendencies.
Tomasinus, Gymnasium Patavinum. THE estimates hitherto made concerning Cardan's character appear to have been influenced too completely, one way or the other, by the judgment pronounced upon him by Gabriel Naudé, and prefixed to all editions of the De Vita Propria.
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