CORTI MATTEO

HIERONYMI CARDANI - DE EXEMPLIS CENTUM GENITURARUM

XIV

  CORTI MATTEO (1475-1542)

1)- introduction

CORTI (Curti, Curtius, Curte, Court), Matteo. - He was born in Pavia in 1475 by noble but not rich family; so he had to deal with many problems to keep up to his studies. He soon revealed an exceptional disposition for the study of medicine; He graduated in that discipline in Pavia in 1497 and was immediately called to teach at that university from the same year in 1497. He read Greek doctors and scholastic philosophers (since 1499 he had been reading ordinary logic for many years); he remained in Pavia - except for some untraceable absence - until 1512, when he was also among the promoters of the laureates. He became famous in his medical doctrine, he was called to Pisa, where he also taught his brother Francesco, a well-known juristic consultant; here began teaching from November 1515, with the prestigious wage of 400 ducats annually, until 1524, when he gave the insistence of the Provvidenza to the Studio of Padua, whose offers had refused seven years before preferring to stay in Pisa. In that year Brother Francis, French-speaking, lost all his possessions and was also imprisoned following the Battle of Pavia; before his death in 1531, he obtained, by virtue of C., the restitution of the goods and of the chair. Meanwhile, in Padua, C. continued his medical teaching (in recent years also anatomical) for seven years, with a salary of 600 ducats, which in 1529 rose to 800. In 1530 he began to lecture on the Anatomy of Mondino de ' Liuzzi, which will then be collected and reworked later in his greatest work. But the following year, invited by Pope Clement VII to Rome, he left office to Francesco Frigimelica. He thus became a Pope's personal doctor with the salary of a thousand golden ducats and the usufruct of a house in the Ponte district, inhabited first by the bishop of Terracina Giovanni Copis and then by the bishop of Caserta, Giovan Battista Bonciani, whose heirs they cried with C. a lite, a source for him with no hesitation. He was actively involved in the literary and scientific discussions promoted by the Pope: for example, a lecture by the German scientist Alberto Widmannstadt on the Copernicus system, which was attended by C. in 1533. There was no criticism of his doctor's work by opponents such as Andrea Turini ; in fact, its poor consistency was known: a strong supporter of the Greek or Galenic method in the treatment of pleurisy, when he suffered from such illness, allowed his caring physicians to use the first blatant Arab method. 

 In Mundini Anatomen explicatio, 1550

 
As a Pope's personal physician and dietician, he had to accompany him on his journeys; when he went to Marseille (1533) for the wedding of the great-granddaughter Caterina de 'Medici with Enrico, son of the King of France Francis I, C. advised him not to interrupt his care based on the waters of the Tiber, a certain amount with himself. But the pope proved inadmissible to C.'s medical prescriptions, on the contrary, it seemed to him that he had used the habit of dinning with excessive abundance. When he died, in September of the following year, serious accusations were made against the work of C .; more than all by Cardan, who was considered his pupil and was so considerate of having an honor to argue with him (he is grateful to have indicated him as his worthy successor to the Bolognese chair); Well, it was Cardan himself to accuse him, in his Theonoston, of having killed the pope with wrong medication, not having prescribed it, for example, a better cooking of food.
Despite the defenses of physicians such as Andrea Bacci, C.'s reputation had to be hit hard, if he decided to leave Rome shortly after the Pope's death, to go first to Pavia and then to Bologna (from 1538) where he was a reader of medicine at the university until year 1541, in place of Francesco Bergomas, with the salary of 1,200 shields. Cosimo de 'Medici called him as a personal physician and entrusted him, at the same time, from 1544 to the chair of theoretical medicine at the University of Pisa. His twenty-year teaching in this city acquired a solid fame, which attracted him to listen to scholars and students from various cities. No one knows of his marriage, except that he had a son named Raffaele, whom the pope granted some ecclesiastical anniversaries and died in 1545. In Pisa, the C died about 1564, probably because of a gastric disorder, and was buried in monumental campus with a praiseworthy praise dictated by Cosimo I. There are some uncertainties about the actual date of death that someone anticipates in 1545 or 1542.

2) the geniture

 
the theme of Cardano is ambiguous. Indeed, it specifies 4h15 a meridie whereas the natal chart is obviously constructed post meridie, for about 5:15 PM...
There is also a doubt about the death of Curtius : 1542 or 1564... But there is a note by Nancy Siraisi :

On Corti (1475-1544), see Vivian Nutton, "'Qui magni Galeni doctrinam in re medica primus revocavit': Matteo Corti und der Galenismus im medizinischen Unterricht der Renaissance," in Der Humanismus und die oberen Facultaten, ed. Gundolf Keil (Weinheim, 1987), pp. 173-84, and A. De Ferrari, "Corti (Curti, Curzio, de Curte, de Corte), Matteo," Dizionario biografico degliitaliani 29 (Rome, 1983): 795-97. I give the death date as corrected by Nutton.

Conversely, Cardano was very respectful of physicians of European fame — especially perhaps those from outside Italy — whom he knew via their writings. In the same letter, he ranked leading contemporaries. Leonhart Fuchs, Janus Cornarius, and Antonio Musa Brasavola were all undoubtedly
distinguished, on the basis of their numerous and widely read works. He was considerably less appreciative of Matteo Corti, one of the most famous Italian physicians of his generation, whom "I would not have dared to put in the same category if I had not heard him lecture [nisi audisse non auderem his adnumerare]. The judgment on Corti, an enthusiastic proponent of Renaissance Galenism, undoubtedly had personal as well as scientific elements. Corti, who came from Pavia, had
been Cardano's teacher at Padua. He thought well enough of the young Cardano to recommend him for a professorship of medicine at the University of Pisa, even though the two had quarreled over a debt. When Cardano looked back on the episode at the end of his life, he took pride in remembering that it had never caused him to deny Corti's erudition ("non eruditioni eius invidi"). In a horoscope for Corti published in 1547 (after the latter's death), Cardano characterized him as a famous medical practitioner and professor of medicine, with great knowledge of things, but envious and full of suspicion. He also expressed the opinion that Corti's mistaken dietary recommendations had hastened the death of Pope Clement VII. Envy and suspicion seem to have been the hallmarks of this professional relationship, perhaps on both sides but certainly on Cardano's. [The Clock and the Mirror, Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine, Nancy Siraisi, pp. 31-32, Princeton University Press, 1997]

•  ASC LEO (but (I) recovers VIRGO) ; so ruler SU (DSC) and ME (VI).
• MC TAURUS (ruler VE, ARIES in (VIII))
• JU // MO
• VE VIII

 Morinus gives SA for ALMUTEN. Note that VE, JU are detrimental.

- HYLEG : not SU none MO ; 
- ANAERETES : SA, VE (+)
- ALCOCODEN : ME

3)- primary directions

a)- SU # VE

 We find a counter-parallel SU # VE (1545).

 D Placidus (0.4). None fictitious.

b)- C VE conj ME

 C Placidus (0.4).