732 william eamon
the activities of Venice’s scientific underworld.86 Fioravanti’s books are
populated with alchemists such as Jacomo Torellis, a distiller who worked
in the Bear pharmacy; decio Bellobuono, who operated a distillery in the
campo dei Frari, where he made medicinal waters; and Giovandomen-
ico di Fabii, “a man of great doctrine and wisdom in the arts of natural
philosophy and distillation” whose inventions included a distilled water
to nourish a tree whose leaves, eaten daily, restored health and vigor.87
Fioravanti’s companions included potters, instrument makers, lens grind-
ers, pharmacists, glassblowers, and countless others.
Mainly craftsmen, they had an intimate knowledge of materials, because
they experimented with them every day. Torellis was said to have under-
stood perfectly the properties of more than 2000 different plant, mineral,
and animal substances.88 Such an impressive body of knowledge could
only have been gained by the sort of close-up empirical observation that
was part of the artisan’s everyday experience.89 Passionately devoted to
experiments, Fioravanti and his companions were all part of a thriving
but practically invisible scientific underworld. in one way or another, they
were all professors of secrets, like alessio Piemontese.
To the professors of secrets, alchemy was the science of sciences.
Fioravanti defined alchemy as the art of transmutation: “that is, transmut-
ing one thing into another.”90 By that he meant imitating how things are
made in the workshop, such as, for example, when the dyer makes a fast
dye for wool. Such matters were “secrets” that craftsmen knew by long
practice but were entirely new to renaissance readers. To the professors
of secrets, alchemy symbolized what experimentation could accomplish.
although Fioravanti praised alchemy as a “divine art,” he disassociated
himself from gold-making, which he regarded as a fruitless enterprise.
Tommaso Garzoni, who first dubbed these avid experimenters the
“professors of secrets,” asserted that “professing” secrets necessarily meant
publishing them.91 Fioravanti revealed the ones that he and his Vene-
tian companions discovered in his book Compendio de i secreti rationali
86 William eamon, The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in
Renaissance Italy (Washington, d.c., 2010).
87 leonardo Fioravanti, Capricci medicinali (Venice, 1561), p. 178; Fioravanti, Dello
specchio di scientia universale (Venice, 1567), b7r.
88 leonardo Fioravanti, La cirurgia (Venice, 1570), p. 26v.
89 Smith, Body of the Artisan.
90 leonardo Fioravanti, Compendio de i secreti rationali (Venice, 1564), p. 75r–v.
91 Tomasso Garzoni, Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, ed. Paolo
cherchi, 2 vols (Venice, 1588; Turin, 1996), p. 324.