History of Western Astrology

History of Western Astrology

The investigation of the heavenly bodies, in the forms that are now distinguished as astrology and astronomy, began in the European world at the beginning of Greek civilization. The word “astrology” comes from the Greek astron, meaning “star,” and logos, meaning “study”). The study of the stars had both scientific and religious purposes. The rhythms of the stars provided the basis for calculating calendars. The stars also represented a kind of natural watch in a clockless age and provided spatial reference points, important for such practical matters as navigation.

Berosus, a Chaldean priest from Belus who settled in Cos to teach, probably in the early fourth century b.c.e., is traditionally regarded as having introduced astrology to Greece. The Greeks were interested in the study of the stars much earlier, however. The pre-Socratic philosopher Thales (c. 625-c. 547 b.c.e.), who founded the Ionian school, and Pythagoras of Samos (c. 580–500 b.c.e.), founder of Pythagoreanism, had already devoted attention to the stars and speculated about the nature and constitution of the heavenly bodies. The fourth century b.c.e. was particularly fertile for the proliferation of astrology. Plato and Aristotle had a unified view of the universe (Aristotle even spoke of connections between the heavenly bodies and the sublunar world), reflecting Greek culture’s Eastern heritage.

Astrology also influenced the study of medicine, as is evident in the work of Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 377 b.c.e.), who lived on the island of Cos. Hippocrates defined the four humors, which are based on the status of blood (warm and moist), yellow bile (warm and dry), black bile (cold and dry), and phlegm (cold and wet), and set forth a correspondence of the humors with the planets. In 140 b.c.e., Hipparchus of Bythnia catalogued 1,081 stars, while a few decades later the Syrian Posidonius of Apamea spread his knowledge of magic and astrology in the school he founded in Rhodes, where both Romans and Greeks studied. Marcus Manilius was probably influenced by Posidonius of Apamea when he wrote his verses entitled “Astronomica.”

The Romans, who had an indigenous form of divination traditionally practiced by augurs, received astrology in the second century b.c.e. from Greeks living in the colonies of southern Italy. The Romans adopted the Greek system of the zodiac, naming the planets after Roman-Latin deities (names that are still in use) and naming the seven days of the week after the corresponding planets and deities. This tradition also influenced the English names of the days of the week, which still reflect the ancient connection (e.g., “Saturn-day,” “Sun-day,” and “Moon-day”). In about 270 b.c.e., judicial astrology and medical astrology were mentioned in the poem “Diosemeia” by the Greek Aratus of Soli. Aratus’s poem was translated into Latin and influenced the Romans.

In ancient Rome judicial astrology survived the years of the Republic despite antiastrology efforts by such famous intellectuals as Cato and Cicero (De divinatione). In 139 b.c.e., after the unrest of the slaves and the lower class in Rome, astrologers were expelled from the city and from the Roman borders of Italy. Despite this opposition, astrology gradually came to be accepted among intellectuals toward the end of the first century b.c.e., largely as a result of the spread of Stoicism (which had adopted astrology as part of its system). Although during the imperial age astrology was several times forbidden as a private practice, astrologers continued to be consulted by the court. As the empire became Christianized, the Christian church began to officially oppose certain kinds of astrology in the fourth century c.e. (for example, in the writings of the Council of Laodicea).

During Hellenistic times, astrology began to bloom in Egypt through the Alexandrian school, where Babylonian and Egyptian astrological lore mingled with Greek philosophy. The earliest Greek Hermetic literature, in the second century b.c.e., focused on astrology. Fragments of these texts, among which are the Salmeschiniaka and the textbook of Nechepso and Petosiris, have survived in the Catalogus codicum astrologum Graecorum, as quotations in some Arabic works of the ninth century, and in later Latin writings. Within the Hermetic tradition, iatromathematics, or medical astrology (through which the various anatomical parts are associated with planets, herbs, and minerals), also developed, deriving its name from the Greek iatromathematikos. A poem on astrology, “Astronomica,” of which five books still exist, was composed in the early first century c.e. by Manilius. He compiled contemporary knowledge of this science, often in contradictory forms and under the influence of the Stoicist vision of cosmic sympathy and correlation between macrocosm and microcosm. In the second century c.e., Vettius Valens, an Antiochian intellectual operating in Alexandria, Egypt, compiled the Anthology, a work on astrology that shows the new concept of this field as a secret art learned through initiation.

Ptolemy, one of the most influential intellectuals in the history of Western astrology, also lived in Alexandria in the second century. His main works were the Almagest (Greek, meaning “greatest”) and the Tetrabiblos (Quadripartitum in Latin). The Almagest was an astronomy work that taught how to predict celestial phenomena, mostly through the use of mathematics. The Tetrabiblos became a major text for astrologers and occultists in the western world for several centuries. Ptolemy gathered the knowledge of Egyptian and Chaldean astrology and interpreted it in the light of Greek philosophy, Stoicism in particular. The Stoic idea that all matter is bound together in a cosmic sympathy became a rational explanation for the relationship between the changes in the universe (macrocosm) and in man (microcosm). Magic and such traditions as number symbolism, chiromancy, and geomancy became attached to astrological divination, although these did not change the basic principles of astrology.

Ptolemy’s work was authoritative for centuries, particularly in Constantinople (Byzantium), the capital of the eastern part of the empire, where Greek remained the spoken language. In 500 c.e., Rhetorius introduced, among other new elements, the division of the signs of the zodiac into triplicities, corresponding to the four classical elements (still used in modern astrology). Although some theological schools in Byzantium accepted astrology, several Christian emperors (such as Constantius, Teodosius, and Valerianus) began to proscribe astrology and threatened astrologers with exile. Earlier, in the fifth century, in the Platonic Academy of Athens, the last bulwark of the Greek pre-Christian culture, Proclo (410–485) had commented on the Tetrabiblos with regard to the stars as a “secondary cause of earthly events.” But in 529, the emperor Justinian (527–565) closed the academy, claiming it was a center of pagan thinking, and many of the scholars from Athens fled to Persia and Syria.

The Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum shows the large amount of astrology literature that had been produced in Byzantium, although most of the extant manuscripts belong to the twelfth century. In this same century, despite the opposition of the church, there was interest in astrology—sometimes even within the church itself—although the stars were now considered to be signs rather than causes of events.

In the western world the study of the stars, called astronomy, was one of the seven artes liberales comprising the education curriculum of the time (along with grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, and music). The fathers of the Latin church condemned astrology as magic and as pagan. Augustine, referring to astrology in De civitate Dei (The City of God), asserted that it was mere superstition. The fundamental astrology text, the Tetrabiblos, was not yet known to the Latins, who had only a few sources on astronomy (such as a chapter on astronomy in The Marriage of Mercury and Phylologiae by Martianus Capella, the Commentary by Macrobius in the fourth century, and the works of Isidore and Bede during the seventh century).

In the sixth century, astronomy was defined by Cassiodoro (490–583), secretary at the court of Teodoricus, the Ostrogoth king of Italy, as the science that examines the heavenly bodies and their relation to one another and to Earth. It was not until the early seventh century that an effort was made to distinguish between astronomy and astrology—in the Etymologiae of Isidore, bishop of Seville. The definitions in the Etymologiae show how in antiquity it was impossible to consider as independent two arts considered as complementary as these. The study of the stars and the computus (the art of computing the calendar) were also part of monastic education, as a tool for calendrical reference to the course of time through the year.

A reawakened interest in astrology in the Western world began under the influence of the Arabs, who had been settled in Spain and Sicily since the eighth century. The Arabs were the heirs of the philosophy and culture of Hellenistic Greece—a heritage they blended with Syrian, Indian, and Persian cultures—and this knowledge began to spread to the schools of northwestern Europe. Although in Islamic culture astrology was generally opposed for many of the same reasons as in Christianity, scientific and intellectual interest in the movements of the stars persisted in the work of such Muslim astrologers as Masha’allah, al-Kindi, Abū Ma’shar, and al-Battani. The works of these scholars were eventually translated into Latin. Al-Kindi and Abū Ma’shar (ninth century) especially provided philosophical underpinnings for astrology, under the influence of Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, Neopythagoreanism, and Stoicism.

In the early 1100s Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos was translated, possibly by Plato of Tivoli, from an Arabic edition that also contained information on Persian and Indian astrology. It became attractive for Western Latin intellectuals to study the astrological system of the Arabs, with its new terminology and complexity, alongside Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos and Almagest. Also, the discovery of Aristotle’s Physics, among other works, was instrumental in the following centuries in supporting the validity of astrology in understanding natural science (medicine, alchemy, and meteorology). The intellectual milieu in which this new literature was accepted—the only intellectual milieu of the time before the first universities were founded in the thirteenth century—was that created by the Church. In Europe, paganism had disappeared and the superstitious aspect of astrology, which had been such a cause of concern for Saint Augustine, was now no longer an issue. The scientific aspect of astrology (its relation to alchemy, medicine, and meteorology) was still of interest in this environment.

With the founding of Oxford University (in 1249), astronomy was included in the liberal arts curriculum for its contribution in understanding medicine, meteorology, and alchemy. Judicial astrology, however, was explicitly opposed in the writings of Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln and chancellor of Oxford University, on the basis of Augustine’s position (that astrology denies the will of God). The opposition of the Church to astrology also surfaced in 1277 in the list of statements of condemnation by the bishop of Paris, Stephen of Tempier, who condemned astrology and authors who connected astrology with the sublunar world. Some scholastic theologians (who were influenced by Saint Augustine and later by Aristotelianism), including Albertus Magnus of Cologne (Albert the Great, 1206–1280), accepted the influence of the planets on the lower world. Nevertheless, they denied planetary influence over the human will, because they believed the soul is the image of God. Albertus Magnus recommended the Almagest for the study of astronomy and the Tetrabiblos for astrology (in their Latin translations). Thomas Aquinas (1255–1274), Magnus’s pupil and one of the greatest scholastic theologians, declared, in Summa theologica that heavenly bodies indirectly influence the human intellect and thus astrologers can make true predictions. In De sortibus and De judiciis astrorum, however, he expressed his opposition to horoscopes and election of propitious days.

Although Church intellectuals of the thirteenth century were opposed to the superstitious aspects of astrology, Roger Bacon (1214–1294), the greatest scientist of his time, fully accepted medical astrology. In the following century also, intellectual churchmen were using astrology as an instrument for further understanding science (and for interpreting the Scriptures). Judicial astrology, however, is not even mentioned by such authors as Thomas Bradwardine (archbishop of Canterbury) and Henry of Langestein. The “scientific” application of astrology is reflected in the efforts of the University of Paris to explain the Black Death epidemic that ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1350; contemporary intellectuals were more inclined to attribute the plague to conjunctions of the stars rather than to conduct physical and medical investigations. At the University of Bologna, founded in 1119 for the education of a lay public and less influenced by the Church (though still under its control), students of medicine were required to undertake a four-year program in astrology, which culminated with the Tetrabiblos and the Almagest. Guido Bonatti, one of the most famous astrologers of the 13 th century, was professor at this university and author of De Astronomia.

There were a number of other famous astrologers in this period. Michael Scot was court astrologer for Frederick II in Sicily and wrote the Liber introductorius as a student manual. Campanus of Novara, one of the few good mathematicians of the time, according to Bacon, wrote the Sphaera and the Theorica planetarum. In 1327, during the Inquisition, Cecco d’Ascoli was burned at the stake as a heretic. He was an astrologer and magician who had lectured at the University of Bologna and applied astrology to the birth and death of Christ. Although there were undoubtedly political factors behind Cecco’s execution, the charge of heresy nevertheless reflected the concern of the Church over astrological matters.

Following the discovery of Arabic texts, the Church absorbed astrology and disapproved of it only when it seemed to imply fatalistic determinism (as in the case of Cecco d’Ascoli), which contradicted man’s free will and God’s omnipotence. Also, the writings of intellectuals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as Nicole d’Oresme, Peter d’Ailly, and Jean Gerson, show that astrology was still part of contemporary science, and few doubts about its validity appear.

In the early Renaissance, various cultural and historical factors contributed to the development of interest in astrology. First, the technological improvement of printing techniques favored the production of ephemerides, almanacs, charts and calendars, and so on. In 1474, the first ephemeris, Ephemeris ad XXXII annos futuros, by Regiomantanus (Johann Müller, 1436–1476), eminent mathematician and astronomer, was printed in Nuremberg, and a second edition in Venice in 1484. In 1489, the Introductorium in astronomia by Abū Ma’shar was translated into Latin from Arabic.

Another important factor in the new interest in astrology was increased appreciation of the rediscovered classical authors of antiquity, beginning with the first humanists at the end of the fourteenth century. One reason for the new interest in the ancients was the siege of the city of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, which forced Greek scholars to flee from the city (taking with them their literature) to Italy, a country that had already shown a renewed interest in the classics of the ancient world. Some Greek scholars were already settled in Italy before the siege of Constantinople. Manuel Chrysoloras, whose nephew, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), was one of the most important figures in the history of occultism during the Renaissance, went to teach Greek in Florence in 1396. The Florentine court of Cosimo de’ Medici was also one of the first cultural centers to offer refuge to the Greeks and, as a consequence, to develop an interest in astrology.

At the Medici court, Ficino and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) worked as the translators of Plato’s writings (thus rediscovering Neoplatonism). Ficino also wrote the Pimander, a hermetic work full of astrological elements. A physician as well as an intellectual, Ficino also wrote De vita libri tres, a medical treatise on the health of the intellectual; in the third part of the book, “De vita coelitus comparanda,” he describes his vision of astrology and planetary influences on one’s health.

The intellectuals of the early fifteenth century could read the Picatrix, an Arab compilation translated into Spanish (in 1256), which dealt largely with astrological magic and influenced Ficino and his student Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). The application of astrology to medicine (iatromathematics) received attention from Paracelsus (Bombast von Hohenheim, 1493–1541), who considered astrology a means of understanding one’s innate physical disposition and allowing better control of one’s life. Medical astrology was also the focus of the Amicus medicorum, written in 1431 by Jean Ganivet and in use for the following two centuries throughout the Western world.

Although court astrologers continued to enjoy their position as consultants to kings and princes, their way of doing astrology was the object of an ongoing intellectual debate. The astrology of natal charts and forecasting the future, called judicial astrology, was considered superstitious by the intellectuals of the period. This kind of astrology was contrasted with iatromathematics, the study of the influence of the planets on the physical body. Ficino always disapproved of the use of judicial astrology for divinatory purposes, but devoted the entire third chapter of De vita to medical astrology. According to Ficino, however, the planets have an influence only at the moment of birth, while the balance of one’s life is determined by one’s own will.

The debate over judicial and medical astrology was especially animated after the publication in 1496 of Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes contra astrologiam. In this work the author attacked judicial astrology, demonstrated it to be fallible and arbitrary, lacking consensus on its basic principles, and ruled by a materialistic determinism. He argued that astrology cannot be true because it requires an accuracy that is impossible to obtain in interpreting the movements of the stars. But the accusation he leveled against astrologers concerned their use of unclear and contradictory Latin sources in place of Ptolemy, whose work on astrology Pico did consider to be accurate. He was thus not attacking astrology itself. His Disputationes became an important work for its influence on the debate over astrology.

A response soon came from Pico’s contemporary, Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1524), a teacher in various Italian universities, who found Pico’s observations unscientific and took apart his arguments against astrology. In 1508, Luca Gaurico, author of Tractatus astrologicus, published the Oratio de inventoribus et astrologiae laudibus to defend astrology. About the same time, the German occultist Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), in his De occulta philosophia, connected astrology with other magic arts, such as palmistry and alchemy, and laid the groundwork for the future development of astrology in the occultist milieu that arose during the Enlightenment.

One of the most prominent astrologers from Italy in the sixteenth century, the Dominican Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), wrote six books on astrology free of the superstitious aspects caused by Arabic and Jewish influence and concordant with the teachings of Church theologians (i.e., disapproving of astrological determinism). He also wrote a defense of Galileo, Apologia pro Galilaeo (1616). He was twice imprisoned on charges of heresy.

The debate over astrology became intense during the sixteenth century, fueled by Copernicus’s (1473–1543) postulation of heliocentrism (and continued into the next century as a result of Galileo’s advocacy of that theory). The sixteenth century was also the time of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation, when the Church was particularly sensitive to heresies. In 1533, at the Council of Trent, the Church condemned judicial astrology. In 1586 and again in 1631, a bull was issued condemning astrology, and at the end of the century the Church officially disassociated itself from it. Galileo was denounced for his Letters on the Solar Spots (1613) and was condemned by the Church in 1632 for his heliocentrism.

In the same period the English scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) demonstrated the invalidity of astrology as commonly practiced, and suggested a system purified of all superstitious elements and in agreement with basic scientific principles. According to Bacon, astrology cannot be applied to the individual but can help to predict mass changes and movements of heavenly bodies or people. Although Bacon attacked all superstition, as a scientist of the seventeenth century he still accepted astrology as a divinatory system.

Astrology still survived in the academic milieu as iatromathematics in the seventeenth century. But with the progress of medicine as an empirical science, medicine ultimately became a distinct field of investigation. At the same time, the slow process of the evolution of astronomy as a descriptive science, which had begun with the new Copernican tables (1551), gradually widened the gap between divinatory astrology and scientific astronomy.

Astrology continued to be practiced throughout the sixteenth century in various parts of western Europe. In France, another member of the Medici family, Catherine, previously in contact with the astrologer Luca Gaurico, contributed to the spread of astrology in that country. She married Henry II and, after many years without children, consulted astrologers. The birth of her first child strengthened her faith in astrology. Among the astrologers invited to work at her court was Nostradamus (Michel de Nostredame, 1503–1566), an astrologer who became notorious for his prophecies written in quatrain in the poem called Centuries (1555). Working at Henry Il’s court, Nostradamus became known throughout the whole country, publishing almanacs and medical works that advocated the use of astrology for medical purposes.

While Copernicus’s heliocentrism was gradually introduced into England through the works of Thomas Digges and Thomas Bretnor, lay societies of professionals, not necessarily tied to the universities or to the Church, began to organize to discuss the new science. In England the Royal Society of London was chartered in 1662 by Charles II. At the time, England and Holland were the only two countries in Europe to offer freedom of thought during a period of strict censorship by both the Catholic and Protestant churches in all the other European countries. Astrology was not included among the principal subjects discussed by the Royal Society, but some of its members were practicing it.

In the seventeenth century, astrology was no longer debated in European universities. Also, there is little in the historical record regarding astrologers in the 1700s and 1800s. Astrology did not die during this period; it was merely neglected in academic and scientific debate. Modern thought, which began with the Enlightenment, excluded astrology as an empirical science. It was not included, or even mentioned, in the entry on astronomy in Diderot and d’Alembert’s extensive Encyclopedia in 1781.

Astrology and its symbolism survived the Enlightenment, however, in esoteric circles. Various occultists revived the magic writings of the Picatrix and the Corpus hermeticum of the Renaissance and kabbala to give a new, more esoteric interpretation, of the movements of the stars. Precursors of this “modern” vision of astrology were Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and Franz Anton Mesmer (1733–1815). The European astrological revival in the nineteenth century began in England. Francis Barrett, who wrote The Magus (1815), an important synthesis of magical lore, and Nicolas Culpepper, an astrologer, had already devoted their time to the study of occultism. But interest in astrology reawakened with the publication of certain books on the subject. In 1816, James Wilson wrote A Complete Dictionary of Astrology, and a few years later Robert C. Smith (1795–1832), whose pen name was Raphael, wrote the Manual of Astrology and compiled his Ephemeris. New works on astrology followed, such as Ely Star’s Les mystères de l’horoscope in 1887. Also important was Eliphas Lévi (1810–1875), the modern magician, who synthesized ancient esotericism and developed a new form of magic. A relevant work on astrology was written in 1915 by Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), a famous English occultist. He was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a magical society founded by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, who was learned in kabbala and magic. Crowley wrote Astrology in 1915, in which he taught a scientific astrology that reinterpreted the science of the stars in light of the discovery of the last two planets, Neptune (1846) and Uranus (1781).

A revival of astrology also took place within the Theosophical movement, started by Madame Helena Blavatsky in 1875 in the United States. Astrology became the focus of the Astrological Lodge of the Theosophical Society (which publishes Astrology Quarterly), founded in 1915 by Alan Leo (1860–1917), an important author in the British revival of astrology. Leo was initiated into theosophy by his friend W. Gorn Old (1864–1929), whose pen name was Sepharial, a man learned in astrology and kabbala. From the theosophical movement and the Astrological Lodge—where another famous astrologer, Charles Carter, was trained in astrology—the Faculty of Astrology and the Astrological Association were founded in England a few decades later. Leo’s work also influenced the German Uranian system (Hamburg Astrology School, founded by Alfred Witte and Friedrich Sieggrün in the 1930s), cosmobiology (a scientific school of astrology founded by Reinhold Ebertin in the 1930s that averred the existence of a physical connection between the movements of the stars and human behavior), and the Dutch Ram School. Within the theosophical milieu, Alice Bailey (1880–1949), founder of the Arcane School, devoted the third volume of the trilogy A Treatise on the Seven Rays to astrology. According to D. K., the Tibetan master channeled by Alice Bailey, astrology was the most occult science. Bailey’s work contributed to the revival of astrology in the twentieth century.

Astrology also developed in France through the symbolist school. It drew upon the depth psychology of famous psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875–1961), who explained astrology via his notion of synchronicity. For Jung, astrology embodied some of the archetypes that play an important role in the development of the human mind. The French symbolist school, in the same way, aimed at freeing astrology from its rigid mechanistic structure to enable a more descriptive approach to personality through the understanding of astrological symbols.

Under Jung’s influence, astrology was also revived for application to psychology in humanistic astrology as the North American counterpart of the French symbolist school. As such, astrology’s focus is not centered on events but on the person. Humanistic astrology was initially formulated by Dane Rudhyar, whose benchmark work in the field was The Astrology of Personality: A Reformulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy (1936). Rudhyar was particularly influenced by the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow.

An effort to use a scientific approach, based on the application of statistical methodology, to astrology was carried out in the early twentieth century by Paul Choisnard and Karl Krafft. Their studies convinced them that “astrology exists.” In 1950, Michel and Françoise Gauquelin again applied statistics to the study of astrology, testing a large number of individuals (approximately 25,000) according to profession. They found a correlation different from the traditional astrological one. The resulting controversy polarized modern astrology into humanistic astrology (which opposes the mechanical determinism of the scientific school) and scientific astrology (which claims to be empirical).

The French astrologer André Barbault wrote De la psychanalyse a l’astrologie (1961), in which he demonstrated the similarity between the psychological determinism of certain contemporary trends of psychoanalysis and the cosmic determinism of ancient astrology. Barbault was also the first to design a computer program that enabled astrologers to cast horoscopes. While Barbault’s work continued the tradition of scientific astrology, a British astrologer, Sybil Leek (1923–1983), strengthened the occultist aspect of this ancient art. Leek moved to the United States later in her life, and through her several books, many of them on astrology, she contributed to the spread of witchcraft (she was a “white” witch) and astrology.

More recently, a revival of astrology has occurred within the subculture referred to as the New Age movement. The New Age began in the late 1960s in the United States and arrived in Europe soon afterward. The New Age, which was originally called the Age of Aquarius, is conceived of in terms of astrological symbolism. The New Age movement also draws upon a holistic vision of reality that is reminiscent of the unified vision of the cosmos of the ancients. The unity and correspondence of microand macro-cosmo legitimizes the use of an ancient art that, for the scientific milieu and for mainstream religion, is mere superstition. Today, astrological horoscopes are included in a great majority of popular magazines and other “checkout counter” literature. Periodical publications specializing in astrology are published all over Europe and in the United States for all kinds of audiences, from the most popular to the most sophisticated Although astrological charts are no longer cast for princes and kings, and astrology is no longer used to interpret major historical and natural phenomena, it still plays a large role in modern society. Today, astrology is the tool of individuals for the interpretation of their everyday life, from business to love affairs. In this form, astrology seems certain to survive into the future.

—Isotta Poggi

Sources: