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This paper examines the production and circulation of astrological prognostications regarding the illness and death of kings, princes, and popes in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1470-1630). The distribution and consumption of this type of astrological information was often closely linked to the specific political situation in which they were produced. Depending on the astrological techniques used (prorogations, interrogations, or annual revolutions), and the media in which they appeared (private letters or printed prognostica) these prognostications fulfilled different functions in the information economy of Renaissance Italy. Some were used to legitimise the rule of a political leader, others to do just the opposite. Astrological prorogations and interrogations were often used to plan military and political strategies in case of the illness or death of a political leader, while astrological prognostications were generally written to promote certain political leaders while undermining others. While certainly often partisan to this game, astrologers, for their part, worked within a very well established tradition that gave authority to their forecasts. This paper argues that, as indicators of deeper political tensions otherwise not always explicitly manifest, these prognostications are privileged sources of information providing a better understanding of the political history of the period.

The article deals with the Dutch translation of the Fasciculus medicinae based on the Latin edition, Venice 1495, with the famous woodcuts created in 1494 for the Italian translation of the original Latin edition of 1491. The woodcuts are compared with the Venetian model. New features in the Antwerp edition include the Skeleton and the Zodiac Man, bot originally based on German models. The text also deals with other woodcuts in the Low Countries based on these Venetian illustrations. The Appendices provide a short title catalog of all the editions and translations based on the Venetian edition and a stemma.

The paper intends to prove the incidence that scientific doctrines, mostly Pietro d'Abano's astrological and medical studies, had on Giotto's painting at the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padova and his lost astrological cycle in the Sala della Ragione. It is emphasized how in no other painting of his, Giotto displayed as much intellectualism as in the Cappella degli Scrovegni. There we can note the importance of the physical representation of the sky and stars and figures' particular physiognomic characterization referable to Pietro d'Abano's theories presented in his astrological treatises and in his Compilation Phisionomiae. Even the ecceptional botanical realism displayed in the representation of plants can be probably referred to Pietro d'Abano's scientific teaching. An hypotetical reconstruction, according to Ptolomeus' theories and Pietro d'Abano's physiognomic, of Giotto's astrological cycle in the Sala della Ragione is also proposed.

The article prints the text of a document in the Archivio di Stato, Venice, comprising a list of books intended for auction, with an estimate of their value. THey constitute the private library of Alessandro Pellati (d. 1487), a Paduan doctor about whom nothing is known, except his name appears in the colophon of the first edition of a short treatise attributed to Hippocrates, the De medicorum astrologia seu de esse aegrorum, translated into Latin and published in Padua in 1483. The considerable number of astrological works in his library show that Pellati was keenly interested in the subject which, under the title of "natural magic", had assumed a significant place in medical studies at that time, particularly in Padua.

Peter of Abano is a personage belonging to history as well as to legend. In this analysis his historical physiognomy of scientist and physician is reconstructed on the basis of a better knowledge of his works in medicine and astronomy (now edited), a discipline, the latest one, in which he excelled in Medieval scientific context (The Lucidator dubitabilium astronomiae (astrologiae) can be read in the critical edition by G. Federici Vescovini, Padova, Esedra, 1992). He opposed extreme position in all fields, by styling himself 'Conciliator' of opposed tendencies. He often reconfirmed a rational concept of medicine and astronomy, which dispelled any demoniac and magic features, against the fanciful legend elaborated during the following centuries.

Marsilio Ficino, the most important philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, wrote a medical book "De vita". Its first part deals with the health of those who devote themselves to literary studies. On the basis of Galenian humoralism, Ficino argues that learned people or scholars are prone to phlegm and black bile. The excesses of them bring sickness, and particularly the excesses of black bile make scholars melancholic. Therefore they must be careful about the balance of humors. Ficino states that the insanity brought by black bile is 'divine madness', necessary to genial works. He finds the elements, which make 'sacred madness' different in quality from general madness, under the influence of the celestial world. We can find the truth by the guidance of Saturn. Black bile participates in the Saturnian quality: cold and dry, and transmits the characteristic of Saturn to us. We can understand the 'divine things' only by the Saturnian melancholy. Therefore the influence of planets is very important for the activity of scholars. Through "De vita", astrological medicine - which attributes the causes of disease to the celestial world - had a great influence on Renaissance thought, and made an important contribution to the theoretical explanation of epidemic diseases like pestilence and sphilis. Ficino's theory certified the nobility and divinity of the duties of intellectuals, and was the main theoretical source of the Renaissance characteristic view of genius.

The large room of the Paduan "Palazzo della Ragione" (The Hall of Reason) has exhibited "padua sidus preclarum": Dondi dall'Orologio and Padua of Carraresi. All the exhibition centers on the evidence of the main and irreplaceable presence which astrology had in the social life of the Middle Ages. Among other things, the show presents the faithful reconstruction of Giovanni Dondi's "astrario", a complicated astronomic-astrologic "time-piece".