ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses selected aspects of image-making in traditional erudite Renaissance natural magic, focusing on the sixteenth-century transformation of a set of prominent theories synthesized in the last decades of the fifteenth century by Marsilio Ficino. Ficino also applies his theory of demonic illusions within another context. In his account of the retribution for sins in the next world, products of the human imagination become the decisive factor. The chapter examines one particular instance where the process of image-making becomes linked to a set of material objects – magic lamps. Ficino’s sophisticated intellectual magic, and his elaborate theories concerning the crucial role of signs and their production, were inserted by Della Porta into a context that effectively subverted Ficino’s contemplative intentions, given that Della Porta highlighted certain practical and manipulative applications of a natural magic that Ficino had sought to elide.
