Curiosity and Artifice in Juan Eusebio Nieremberg’s Natural Philosophy

Abstract

I examine the strategies through which Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, a professor at Madrid’s Jesuit Reales Estudios, promoted the role of curiosity in natural philosophy. I argue that Nieremberg responded to anti-curiosity criticism by restating how the two primary meanings of “curiosity” in early modern sources, “intellectual desire” and “diligence”/“care”, should relate to one another. By analyzing a set of works published in both Spanish and Latin between 1629 and 1635, I demonstrate that Nieremberg advocated a form of “curiosity” (in the sense of longing for knowledge) focused on what he called “nature’s artifice”, which constituted a specific facet of God’s “curiosity” (in the sense of attention or care in creation). In 1633, Nieremberg claimed that nature is nowhere more deserving of wonder than when it imitates art, actively challenging the way we understand the art–nature divide. I show that, by contrasting a superficial or external approach to nature with one that penetrates it in search of what is “artificial” about it, Nieremberg’s efforts at defining a virtuous and legitimate form of natural-philosophical curiosity involved re-negotiating the boundaries between natural philosophy and more ambivalent competing realms, such as aesthetics, rhetoric, and the occult sciences.

1. Introduction

The news traveled fast from Madrid’s gossip hubs, or mentideros, to the pulpit and the lectern. The twins Lazzaro and Giovanni Battista Colloredo, born in Genoa in 1617, were then on tour in the city. The body of Giovanni Battista protruded from the stomach of Lazzaro, who alone was able to move and perform normal bodily functions.1 Soon the pressure mounted for Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595–1658). Fascinated by zoophytes, which were simultaneously animal and plant, and, more generally, by any creature that challenged the boundaries between species and even genera, Nieremberg was expected to cast a verdict on the controversy that had emerged surrounding the Colloredo twins: was this one individual, or rather two? How could one determine where the one began and the other ended? Had religious authorities been merely thorough in choosing to baptize them twice, or were they victims of overzealous ignorance? In other words, was Giovanni Battista Colloredo truly distinct from Lazzaro (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 74r)?

Nieremberg had little doubt that he, a professor of natural history in the Reales Estudios newly instituted by King Philip IV in Madrid and entrusted to the Society of Jesus, was qualified to weigh in on the matter.2 That was the case for reasons that exceeded any scholarly or academic credentials: wondrous and seemingly inexplicable phenomena ran through his family’s blood. “It touches me to the core”, he avowed in connection with nature’s ability to produce new and strange phenomena. One day, while pregnant, Nieremberg’s grandmother was unable to satisfy her craving for strawberries and scratched her head in frustration. As a consequence, Nieremberg’s mother was born with five bumps on her head “in the place where [Nieremberg’s grandmother] had laid her hand, of the size, shape, and color of the fruit”. Although they were removed every year, they soon grew back (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 79r–v).3

Nieremberg knew that knowledge was tied to materiality and place. He recognized that he enjoyed privileged access to the wondrous and rare because he lived at court. Lecturing in 1629, he described Madrid as “so to speak a summary of the kingdom” in which people and commodities arrived from both close and faraway places (Nieremberg 1629, fol. 6v).4 He found Madrid to be a confusing but stimulating shop, “a theater” that presented the student of nature with a steady stream of new objects and stories communicated through personal contact with scholars, courtiers, and merchants that would be hard to imagine should he conduct research elsewhere.5 The city was also home to individuals like Juan de Espina, who collected various rarities, artworks, and instruments (Reula Baquero 2019). For Nieremberg, research depended on forms of exchange that were ultimately tied to Madrid’s global and imperial reach. After all, one of Nieremberg’s aims was to disseminate knowledge about the flora and fauna of New Spain gathered by the physician Francisco Hernández (d. 1587) between 1570 and 1576 on the orders of King Philip II.6

Nieremberg’s fondness for the wondrous and rare was obvious in the works he published between 1629 and 1635, and which he claimed to be representative of what he taught at the Reales Estudios. They include a public lecture printed as Prolusión (Introduction, 1629), the volumes Curiosa filosofía y tesoro de naturaleza (Curious Philosophy and Nature’s Treasure, 1630) and Oculta filosofía de la sympatía y antipatía de las cosas. Artificio de naturaleza (Occult Philosophy of the Sympathy and Antipathy of Things. Nature’s Artifice, 1633), and a treatise in Latin, Historia Naturae, maxime Peregrinae (A History of Nature, Especially of the Rare or Exotic, 1635).7

The question of the Colloredo twins was fairly representative of the problems that natural philosophy claimed to have the tools to solve. Nieremberg explained: “I was asked to satisfy the scruples of some and everyone’s curiosity, which I shall now try to accomplish” (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 74r).8 Nieremberg’s first task was to appease specific theological qualms regarding the allocation of the sacrament of baptism. Conversely, satisfying “everyone’s curiosity” pointed to a potentially more capacious course of study. Considering the title Curiosa filosofía and the prevalence of the terms “curious” and “curiosity” chapter after chapter, it is reasonable to conclude that the task of “satisfying curiosity” was central to Nieremberg’s scholarly identity. This is hardly surprising given the Society of Jesus’ continual interest in and oversight of the cultivation of curiosity (Castelnau-L’Estoile 1999).

However, as both recent and not-so-recent scholarship have pointed out, in the early modern cultural and scientific landscape, curiosity was marked by a multifaceted and elusive character (Benedict 2002; Blumenberg 1983; Daston 1995; Ginzburg 1976; Kenny 1998; Marr 2006). Curiosity could be a virtue or a vice depending on the situation and could refer to a variety of feelings and characteristics. The title Curiosa filosofía itself might seem perplexing: is it a book of philosophy for those who are “curious” or is it about philosophy on topics that are “curious”? As Neil Kenny and others have demonstrated, there was circularity in how Nieremberg’s contemporaries used the terms “curiosity” and “curious” (Benedict 2002, pp. 2–4; Kenny 1998, p. 36–37).9 Curiosity was a feature of the subject as much as of the object; thus, one is “curious” to learn about the kind of objects and phenomena that are also “curious”.

In what follows, I delve into a specific but central aspect of Nieremberg’s approach to curiosity’s intricate web of meanings. I argue that the title Curious Philosophy and the subtitle Artifice of Nature used in Nieremberg’s 1630 and 1633 publications point to a direct but complex link between the notions of “curiosity” and “artifice”, one that also involved other keywords found in the titles of Nieremberg’s books, such as the references to what is “occult” or “hidden”.

2. “Curious” and “Curiosity” in Nieremberg’s Works on Nature

When vowing to satisfy everyone’s curiosity, Nieremberg was referring to a particular form of intellectual desire and eagerness to know. In 1618, Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (first published in 1593), portrayed “curiosity” as a woman wearing a dress ornamented with ears and frogs. The former signified “the desire to hear and learn things told by others”; the latter was a reference to Ancient Egypt, where frogs’ eyes, wide open as though always in search for objects to grasp and learn about, symbolized a longing for knowledge (Ripa 1618, pp. 117–18; Benedict 2002, p. 25).10

Inspired by Pierio Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica (1556), Ripa’s connection between curiosity and frogs was destined to remain obscure. Conversely, the qualities he ascribed to curiosity were commonplace and remained so for at least most of the seventeenth century. For Ripa, curiosity transforms humans into victims of a strong, unruly force that takes hold of them, making them constantly eager to catch a glimpse of anything that hints at novelty (Ripa 1618, pp. 117–18). The connection with “novelty” tainted curiosity with ambivalence by placing it in the neighborhood of dubious and even subversive everyday social and political practices, such as reading and writing newsletters (gazzette or avvisi), or going to tell and listen to news in the places that in Nieremberg’s Madrid received the name of mentideros (Dooley 1999; Castro Ibaseta 2010). Ripa himself cast a negative and ominous light on the desire of those who long to know “more than they should” (Ripa 1618, p. 117; see also Ginzburg 1976). For him, curiosity was on the opposite edge of wisdom and was plainly wrong.

However extreme, Ripa’s hostility is illustrative of the arguments against curiosity that might have plagued Nieremberg. Even more than as a professor of natural philosophy, Nieremberg became known as the author of best-selling works of religious piety. When writing about nature, he was conscious that the practice of natural philosophy had to confront a traditional, centuries-long mistrust of curiosity that far predated the term’s associations with early modern news markets. Nieremberg’s awareness that he needed to justify intellectual desire is obvious from the opening of Historia Naturae, which summarizes the arguments against curiosity advanced by the theologian Augustine of Hippo (354–430). In the intellect’s habit of hunting for new objects of learning, Augustine glimpsed the danger of forsaking the love of God in exchange for earthly and, therefore less worthy, matters. Yet, even worse than its obvious and dangerous power to distract humans, was curiosity’s indifference to the good and the beautiful. Curiosity was the counterpart to sensory desire, but at least the eye and the ear rejoice only in objects that are inherently pleasant. What can one say of curiosity, which finds delight even in learning about that which is unpleasant, ugly, and bad (Saint Augustine of Hippo 1981, pp. 182–86, §10.34–35; see also Walsh 1988)?

In what follows, I will describe Nieremberg’s strategies to advocate a pious and useful approach to natural-philosophical inquiry by drawing on ideas of which Augustine himself might have approved.11 Nieremberg rehabilitated curiosity by dissociating it from superficiality and novelty for its own sake, and by dissecting curiosity in search of a version of it that might lead to harmony between theology with natural philosophy.

To vindicate curiosity, Nieremberg enlisted the notion of artifice. In order to understand how curiosity and artifice relate to one another in Nieremberg’s works, one must first become familiar with the spectrum of meanings associated in those with the noun “curiosity” (curiosidad) and the adjective “curious” (curioso/a). When applied to natural philosophy, for Nieremberg, curiosity entails longing for the causes of seemingly obscure natural phenomena and processes (Nieremberg 1630, fols. 1v–2v, 54v). Understandably, Nieremberg often introduces himself as being intent on satisfying his reader’s “curiosity”, as he provides reasoning for phenomena that, in the eyes of lay people, seem to lack explanation (Nieremberg 1630, fols. 73v–74r). In doing so, he is able to appease (sossegar) what otherwise feels like an itch or endless wandering of the mind (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 137). In 1599, José Rocamora y Torrano (d. 1612), a member of the Royal Academy of Mathematics (Academia Real Matemática, which was later absorbed by the Reales Estudios where Nieremberg taught), described the certainty afforded by mathematics as a process through which the mind eventually rests and finds peace (Rocamora y Torrano 1599, fol. 4r; also Esteban Piñeiro 2002, p. 14). The language of movement was common in early modern accounts of intellectual activity. As the physician Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529–1588) noted in 1575, Hippocrates described thought as “the soul’s promenading” (Huarte de San Juan 1989, p. 345). Curiosity was movement, and the opposite of calm: it launched the mind into a quest for answers.

Managing curiosity was a matter of the utmost importance when defining the relationship between author and reader, as well as that between reader and research topic: it was up to the practitioners of natural philosophy to either quench or elicit the reader’s thirst or curiosity about any object or phenomenon. As a collective, interpersonal venture, scholarship impacted the community and the state of learning in noticeable ways. Indeed, while the author’s curiosity seeks answers that might satisfy the reader’s curiosity, both might occasionally cooperate to further beget curiosity. For example, Nieremberg argued that the publication of the treatise on magnetism included in Curiosa filosofía (1630), by coinciding with that of works on the same topic by fellow Jesuits Niccolò Cabeo (Philosophia magnetica, 1629) and Cristoforo Borri (preserved only in manuscript, but communicated with Nieremberg while Borri was in Madrid) would “double” curiosity among the public (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 215v).12 In fact, reading Gilbert’s influential De magnete (1600) had rendered Nieremberg suddenly “curious [to have] more light and more particular reasons” to explain the lodestone’s behavior, insisting “on several experiments” that would lead him to understand it better (Nieremberg 1630, fols. 150v–151r).

In Nieremberg’s writing, the meaning of “curious” ranged from a transitory state of mind to a way of approaching knowledge and life in general. Nieremberg called “curious” those who devoted themselves to the study of nature, including the Portuguese naturalist García da Horta and the unnamed “contemplator of nature” who showed Nieremberg a new species of cinnamon when they met in Madrid (Nieremberg 1630, fols. 21v, 29r). The attribution of “curiosity” to these individuals implied a commitment to a serious and thorough investigation of the truth, thus connecting “curiosity” as intellectual desire to curiosity’s supposed etymon, the Latin word cura or “care” (Kenny 1998, pp. 35–37). For instance, Nieremberg called those who traveled to places in order to ascertain the truth of rumored wonders “curious”. These were dedicated scholars, “careful” to know the truth (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 161v). Nieremberg also praised the thoroughness of Giambattista della Porta’s and William Gilbert’s experiments on the lodestone as “curious”, and he applied the same adjective to Cabeo’s work (Nieremberg 1630, fols. 117v, 168v, 213v). With the same idea in mind, he remarked that the astronomer Tycho Brahe did not spare “any cost or curiosity” in the research of truth (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 178r).

However, curiosity also sounded some alarms. Consider the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that, as Nieremberg wrote, “killed” Pliny the Elder’s curiosity—and Pliny himself, one might add—in 79 CE (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 117r). Although curiosity might be dangerous at times, its absence denoted disrespect for, or at least lack of interest in, nature and God its creator, as Nieremberg claimed about the scholars of earlier periods who gave little attention to magnetism and thus failed to invent the compass (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 124r). Nieremberg subscribed to the idea that curiosity, understood as a thoroughness in research shared by a class of individuals devoted to learning, could be considered a characteristic of the period in which he lived, during which the passion for knowing the truth about nature had reached new and unprecedented levels.13

Nieremberg acknowledged that “curiosity” could also refer to a desire to know tangential or superfluous aspects of a problem, with the mind taking (perhaps) too much pleasure as it wanders out of focus (Nieremberg 1630, fols. 64r, 88r, 101v). In fact, if curiosity is linked to attention or care (Latin cura), it could become a form of at least partially misdirected or unnecessary care for that which does not deserve it. This might be understood by analogy to what early modern rhetoricians, based on ancient Greco-Roman models, called κακόζηλον, a vice that led to ridiculous results because of excessive and fruitless care in curating style.14 Especially in the plural, Nieremberg often paired “curiosities” with “accidents” and other terms denoting unimportant or unessential components, which were nonetheless useful to bear in mind in case further research on a topic suddenly rendered them pertinent.15

In summary, Nieremberg portrayed curiosity as a passion that, at times, could fall short of the virtuous, but was indispensable for its role as a goad to advance knowledge of nature and God, its creator. Aware of conventional, critical views of curiosity inspired by Augustine, Nieremberg articulated a defense of at least certain forms of it—specifically, those that focused on the study of “nature’s artifice”.

3. Curiosity and Artifice

According to the author of best-selling romanzi Giovanni Battista Manzini (1599–1664), the artificial “is more sympathetic and agreeable to humans, who are curious by nature, than the natural” (Manzini 1652, pp. 102–3; see also Patiño Loira 2024, pp. 56–73).16 The statement, contained in a volume of poetic criticism entitled Delle meteore rettoriche (1652), is interesting for two reasons. First, Manzini argued that “curiosity” was the characteristic that inclines humans to prefer the artificial over the natural. Second, he claimed, paradoxically, that it is nature that creates humans with a taste for that which is less than natural. Suspecting that the statement would shock a few readers, Manzini rushed to support it with evidence. He cited Plutarch (ca. 45–ca. 120 CE), writing of a boy who, when presented with a piece of bread shaped like a loaf and another in the shape of a dove, immediately picked the latter (Manzini 1652, pp. 102–3). In Plutarch’s example, forming dough into a loaf is what occurs by default, “naturally” or automatically, in contrast to carefully fashioning it into a specific, “artificial”, or non-obvious shape. Artifice was the result of care (cura), which justifies in some way, even if certainly a twisted one, the link between “artifice” and “curiosity”: humans are “curious” because they love objects that are also “curious”, the products of care.17

The link between “artifice” and “curiosity” was not unique to Manzini, nor did it require understanding artifice in terms of shape. Mateo Alemán’s (1547–1614) picaresque narrative Guzmán de Alfarache (1599) described a procession marching through the streets of a city. Near the end, Untruth sat comfortably on top of a triumphal chariot built with “admirable artifice and great curiosity” (“admirable artificio y extrema curiosidad”) (Alemán 1987, vol. 1, p. 432). The link between artifice and deceit— after all, Alemán’s description revolved around Untruth’s triumphal chariot—became central when Baltasar Gracián rewrote Alemán’s allegory in his treatise Arte de ingenio (Art of Ingenuity, 1642) and, even more clearly, in its revised and expanded version, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Acuity and Art of Ingenuity, 1648). Gracián’s two publications sought to provide a method for the invention of rhetorical conceits, intricate arguments that resorted to a trope in order to arouse wonder in the reader by connecting otherwise unrelated facets of reality. Gracián described rhetorical conceits as instances of “artifice”, and he resorted to Alemán’s anecdote to justify why humans were no longer satisfied with truth-oriented uses of language. As Matteo Peregrini explained in Delle acutezze (1639), truth-oriented statements are “natural”, unlike rhetorical conceits, which are “artificial” (Peregrini 1639, pp. 42–43). Spelling out one of the possible meanings of “artifice”, Gracián stated that, in order to compete with Untruth, Truth “opted for the use of artifice. Since then, she […] uses roundabout ways, wins through stratagems, paints what is near as if it were far away, […] aims here in order to hit there […] and, through ingenious circumlocution, she always reaches the target” (Gracián 2010, p. 396).18

Firmly grounded within the realm of rhetoric, Gracián’s interpretation of “artifice” takes us from shape to indirectness. If we use Gracián’s lens to read Alemán’s juxtaposition of “admirable artifice and great curiosity”, curiosity becomes a reference to a kind of “care” that, by going beyond usefulness and functionality, pursues a form of ornamentation that is attractive to the beholder because of the beholder’s nature. Alemán’s passage allows Gracián to justify using tropes that cater to the intellect of postlapsarian humans, who, unlike the perfect beings placed by God in the garden of Eden, are no longer attracted by truth and need indirect, circuitous forms of speaking. Gracián argues that, in order to compete against Untruth, Truth adopts artifice and, in doing so, takes “Taste” or “Flavor” as the “go-between” or mediator with humans, who no longer appreciate her in a naked, unmediated, or direct manner (Gracián 2010, p. 395).19

Nieremberg also employed metaphors of taste and flavor to link artifice and curiosity. What he understood by “artifice” and “curiosity”, however, was largely at odds with Plutarch’s dove-shaped bread, and was not exactly the same as Gracián’s indirect, circuitous ways. Interestingly, Nieremberg’s interest in artifice fell almost exclusively on “nature’s artifice”, a seemingly strange and paradoxical notion that was nonetheless central to his understanding of both nature and the study of nature.

In Nieremberg’s view, the Colloredo twins prompted the intellect to consider that there was more in nature than meets the eye. By breaking with the norm, the twins aroused wonder, described as “the flavor of thought and the salt of the intellect, which is greater where ignorance is greater” (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 2r).20 Nieremberg’s psychology, outlined in Curiosa filosofía, implied that humans rarely experience any interest in “a vulgar truth”. They have a taste for far-fetched explanations and news, which they usually seek in lies and fiction. If natural philosophy wants to arouse “curiosity” in humans and keep them away from reading romances and novels, it needs to present them with a view of nature that also focuses on what is rare and far-fetched. Just as Gracián’s poets and orators use rhetorical conceits because they know that humans only pay attention to artifice, God has created nature “artificially”, in a way that caters to the desire that humans feel for novelty in order to stir in them a process of thought and wonder.

Despite God’s intentions, however, humans often settle for lesser forms of enjoyment and miss the point about God’s art. With Augustine’s criticism in mind, Nieremberg established a distinction between more and less legitimate objects of curiosity in nature. He advocated for training one’s taste or gusto in order to direct the intellect toward knowledge of “the excellence of things” (Nieremberg 1633, fol. 113r). In the study of nature, only its artifice is a worthy and appropriate object of “curiosity”. The twins Lazzaro and Giovanni Battista Colloredo deserved to become a topic of investigation not because they were evidence of nature’s ability to produce variety, but rather because, under the appearance of a mistake, they provided the intellect with a path to investigate God’s underlying plan, which natural philosophy discovers by peering into the correspondences that comprise “nature’s artifice” (Nieremberg 1630, fol. 73v).

What exactly is “nature’s artifice”, however, and how is it both similar to and different from what Manzini, Alemán, and Gracián implied by “artifice”? Nieremberg’s comparison between human and divine art—that is, between artworks and nature—is extensive. He argues that, when presented with excellent and skillful artworks, some people only pay attention to color, size, variety, or precious materials. Only a few “appreciate, and even recognize art’s excellence and fantasy” (Nieremberg 1633, fol. 113r–v).21 Art’s excellence is elusive and escapes all but those who know where to look for it. When the painter Apelles of Kos shared works with the populace, some praised the colors, others the portrayal of dress, shoes, and “whatever appeared most conspicuous”. Those with knowledge of the art, however, looked at less obvious marks of talent, such as “some vivid gesture” or “the expression of feelings” (Nieremberg 1635, pp. 14–15).22 Only education and training enable people to appreciate both human and divine art. Natural philosophy has the task and the tools to teach humans how to apply their senses and their intellect to nature. Nieremberg, like Manzini decades later, believed that humans are naturally “curious”, and consider objects “curious” whenever they see them as “artful” or “artificial”. However, only the learned know what constitutes evidence of art in the case of nature. Only curiosity directed to divine art rightly understood becomes a legitimate pursuit.

Nature’s artifice was the object of Nieremberg’s Curiosa filosofía and, more explicitly, of Oculta filosofía, a work in which the author clarified what he meant by “nature’s artifice” through a distinction between a superficial, exterior appreciation of nature and one that looks “inside” it:

Although the contemplation of nature is peaceful and pleasant even at first sight, when one considers only the bark of it—for it is painted with certain hues that force us to admire the trace of its author, which we see there—it is far more delightful and agreeable when one penetrates its secrets and enters the depth of its mysteries. […] We will violate its innermost retreat.23

(Nieremberg 1633, fol. 1r)

Nieremberg advocated a practice of natural philosophy that looked “inside” for a more pleasant and accurate experience of nature.24 Looking inside was the path to understanding how the parts that compose the whole of nature are tied to one another. Nieremberg used “artifice” in the sense of composition or structure, defined as the articulation of a whole’s interconnected constituent parts, arranged in a way that denotes a plan. He explained that, taken just in themselves, the parts of a whole offer a “crude” and “rough” object for contemplation, especially in comparison with considering “the fitting and artifice” of them linked with one another and “the harmony” that they make together (Nieremberg 1633, fol. 123r).25

Intent on fully addressing the objections raised by anti-curiosity literature, Nieremberg characterized the harmony of a whole—its artifice—by drawing on views deeply associated with curiosity’s fiercest detractor, Augustine. Nieremberg’s argument repeated Augustine’s anti-Manichean interpretation of the book of Genesis, in which the theologian claimed that whatever good and beauty there may be in each of the parts compares unfavorably to the harmony that they form in a whole (Gronewoller 2021, pp. 63–67). Nieremberg likened nature to a clock, which strikes wonder in everyone even if the contemplation of its gears in isolation leads only to indifference (Nieremberg 1633, fol. 123r–v). Like a clock, nature is a whole made up of jointed and coordinated parts that reveal the artificer’s art to anyone who knows how to see and understand it.

Nieremberg’s portrayal of art in general and “nature’s art” in particular materialized in a story about the statue of the goddess Athena sculpted by Phidias in the fifth century BCE. Nieremberg was so fond of the anecdote, first recorded in pseudo-Aristotle’s De mundo, that he repeated it, with little variation, in three different publications (Harrison 1966, p. 108). The version contained in Oculta filosofía reads as follows:

Anyone who saw separately the pieces of which Phidias’ statue of Athena was made would give them little consideration. However, once put together and attached to one another, they struck wonder in everyone, especially so if one paid attention to the art with which they came together in the shield of the goddess, in which the face of the artificer was portrayed.26

(Nieremberg 1633, fols. 123v–124r)

As Nieremberg clarified when he retold the story in Historia naturae, a tradition held that Phidias had sculpted his face at the center of the shield, along with a mechanism that caused every piece of the statue to come apart should the sculptor’s face be removed (Nieremberg 1635, p. 14).27 Nature was like a statue sculpted by God that allows humans to admire how each part is linked to the whole, and to each of the rest, “responding to one another in a thousand ways” (Nieremberg 1633, fols. 123v–124r; Marcaida 2011, pp. 41–42).28 Just like in Athena’s shield, nature’s creations relate to one another so that, at its union, one could see “a face of God as if enameled, the likeness of its artificer”. It was like reading “God made me’ (Deus me fecit)”, as one would read a painting’s signature (Nieremberg 1633, fol. 124r).29 Noticing a whole’s fitted composition or union leads the intellect to realize that it is the work of some artificer or author. In the case of nature, it is the intellect’s path to God.

Anticipating the views of Gracián and Manzini, Nieremberg’s comparison between nature and art underscores the centrality of humans as perceiving agents:

In art, excellency and admiration depend on its imitation [of nature], for art becomes admirable in proportion to its ability to imitate nature. Yet I do not know how, suddenly the tables are turned, and that which is most admirable about nature seems to be that which imitates art: I mean nature’s artifice and plan […] for if art is counterfeit nature, then nature is natural, or divine art. What is most likely to arouse wonder about the world is not the immensity of the skies nor the number of its lights or the appearance of its forms, but its ingenuity, its plan, its structure, its order, its correspondences. To put it briefly, its art is its most beautiful aspect […] in the knowledge of its artifice, I think, lies the most conspicuous knowledge and science of nature.30

“God’s curiosity was meant to elicit curiosity”, Joanna Picciotto has argued in connection with William Derham’s 1713 Physico-Theology (Picciotto 2010, p. 197). Similarly, Nieremberg believed that God’s care in the creation of nature could be appreciated superficially in its colors and shapes, its abundance and variety; yet well-directed curiosity should focus instead on nature’s artifice, the correspondence that its parts make with one another.

In a chapter of Oculta filosofía entitled “El mundo con qué arte está fabricado” (“What is the art with which the world has been created?”), Nieremberg declares that “the world’s artifice and nature’s art” demonstrates that God created the universe “with a plan and ingenuity, and so [nature] is God’s artificial whole, a divine machine and artifice” (Nieremberg 1633, fol. 122r).31 Nieremberg’s approach to the parallel between the natural and the artificial underscored God’s motivation: he created nature with ostentation in mind, seeking to be known. As humans’ creator, God knows how to appeal to them (Nieremberg 1633, fol. 113r). “Nature’s artifice” is God’s attempt at exciting curiosity. When humans look at nature from inside, they find “its architecture”, which is “what is subtle and delicate about its work” (Nieremberg 1633, fol. 113r–v).32

However, the description of God’s or nature’s artifice became less clear in the passage from Oculta filosofía (1633) to Historia naturae (1635). Among the additions that Nieremberg included in the later work, there was the claim that “what is more ornamented and artificial suggests divinity” (Nieremberg 1635, p. 14).33 In contrast with the emphasis on the composition of the parts—so-to-speak visible only from the inside—that we find in Oculta filosofía, Nieremberg’s mention of ornament complicated the distinction between the appreciation of nature’s “external” and “internal” assets, seemingly contradicting his insistence that one should direct attention to nature’s inner correspondences.

Nieremberg seems to have struggled to let go of the charms of ornament, a hypothesis partially confirmed by the use in Historia naturae of analogies that, to contemporary readers, might have conveyed specific aesthetic and rhetorical implications. Consider yet another parallel between human and divine art: “expert painters”, Nieremberg claimed, “paint edges in a way that suggests the remaining part of a form” (Nieremberg 1635, p. 14). Nature’s works, he argued, also hint to that which is not there, offering a spectacle that expects beholders to actively conjecture about the artificer who is responsible for the work.34 Interestingly, the analogy returned, now in allusion to rhetorical conceits, in the pseudonymous Censura de la elocuencia (1648) by the Jesuit José de Ormaza (1617–1676), a work published more than a decade later. Painters, Ormaza explained, paint shoulders in a way that “suggests” the back of the figure, which remains out of sight. He compared that to the preacher’s ability to insinuate, through a trope that speaks indirectly, that which remains unsaid. Ormaza argued that the preacher thus offers the audience the opportunity to feel vanity’s guilty pleasures as they reconstruct meaning “by themselves” (Ormaza 1648, p. 63; see also Patiño Loira 2024, p. 112). Nieremberg’s reference to “ornament”, coupled with his use of analogies that seventeenth-century contemporaries associated with aesthetic pleasure and active reception in rhetorical contexts, suggest that despite his insistence that only composition was appropriate as the object of natural-philosophical curiosity, reality was more complicated. As Brian Gronewoller has demonstrated in a book about none other than Augustine (Gronewoller 2021), notions such as composition and economy, which entailed a relationship among parts, had imminently rhetorical origins. As Nieremberg’s case clearly shows, attempts at portraying natural-philosophical curiosity as serious and “deep” ultimately rested on aesthetic foundations and processes that rhetoric explained better than demonstrative logic and dialectic. As Gracián—and also Nieremberg—knew well, it was all about flavor or taste—Truth’s “go-between” with humans.

In addition to its vicinity with rhetoric, by defending natural-philosophical curiosity’s focus on nature’s artifice and correspondences, Nieremberg also had to negotiate its relationship to analogous but less than orthodox intellectual alternatives. Neil Kenny argues that Jerome’s fourth-century Vulgate translation of Scripture used the notion of “curiosities” (curiositates) in connection with the occult sciences (Kenny 1998, p. 37). Similarly, starting with the reference to the “occult” and “hidden” in the title of Oculta filosofía, Nieremberg played a card that was not without risk. Nieremberg’s curiosity, conceptualized as eagerness to grasp nature’s artifice, presented itself as a sanitized and religiously orthodox alternative to three disciplines that he viewed as fostering curiosity about nature’s artifice from the fringes: Kabbalah (which interprets nature in terms of numbers), Metoposcopy (which seeks meanings in lines), and Magic (which aims to exploit nature’s underlying consonances or correspondences). Nieremberg sought to replace Kabbalah, Metoposcopy, and Magic with “a general, pure, and truthful science that considers cleanly” what the others addressed “superstitiously”, constituted by three counterparts: Arithmetic, Geometry, and Music (Nieremberg 1633, fols. 122v–123r).35

4. Conclusions

Nieremberg’s works sought to rehabilitate natural-philosophical “curiosity” by defining it as intellectual desire for God’s “curiosity” or care in the creation of nature. However, a problem with God’s “curiosity” is that he has painted the world with such colors, shapes, abundance, and variety that the intellect becomes easily distracted from “nature’s artifice”. The articulation of nature’s parts into a functional and meaningful whole, made up of occult or hidden correspondences, is, for Nieremberg, the true manifestation of God’s care and the object of natural philosophy. The task of the latter was to redirect curiosity from meaningless to meaningful novelty, from artifice wrongly understood as ornament to artifice rightly understood as composition. Only curiosity for the articulation of nature’s parts with each other is justifiable, because it alone provides the intellect with sensus (“meaning”). The beauty of composition was, compared to that of each part taken in isolation, just as “understanding” (intelligere) a book was compared to merely “reading” (legere) it. Nieremberg boasted a well-trained and educated taste by avowing that he, personally, only found pleasure in the contemplation of how the parts came together; the rest struck him as insulsum, “insipid” or “lacking salt” (Nieremberg 1635, p. 15). Still, occasional word choices and analogies give readers a hint that Nieremberg’s attempts at narrowing the scope of natural-philosophical “curiosity” occurred against the background of rhetorical and aesthetic foundations that contemplated a broader range of meanings for “artifice”, and amidst a competition between university disciplines and the world of the occult, which he condemned as “superstitious” but was hardly able or even willing to entirely silence.