Jerome Cardan | Page 2

antiquity and distinction.
He prefers a claim of descent from the house of Castillione, founding
the same upon an inscription on the apse of the principal church at
Gallarate.[2] He asserts that as far back as 1189 Milo Cardano was
Governor of Milan for more than seven years, and according to
tradition Franco Cardano, the commander of the forces of Matteo
Visconti,[3] was a member of the family. If the claim of the Castillione
ancestry be allowed the archives of the race would be still farther
enriched by the name of Pope Celestine IV., Godfrey of Milan, who
was elected Pope in 1241, and died the same year.
Cardan's immediate ancestors were long-lived. The sons of Fazio
Cardano, his great-grandfather, Joanni, Aldo, and Antonio, lived to be
severally ninety-four, eighty-eight, and eighty-six years of age. Of
these Joanni begat two sons: Antonio, who lived eighty-eight years, and
Angelo, who reached the age of eighty-six. To Aldo were born Jacopo,
who died at seventy-two; Gottardo, who died at eighty-four; and Fazio,
the father of Jerome, who died at eighty.[4]

Fazio, albeit he came of such a long-lived stock, and lived himself to be
fourscore, suffered much physical trouble during his life. On account of
a wound which he had received when he was a youth, some of the
bones of his skull had to be removed, and from this time forth he never
dared to remain long with his head uncovered. When he was fifty-nine
he swallowed a certain corrosive poison, which did not kill him, but left
him toothless. He was likewise round-shouldered, a stammerer, and
subject to constant palpitation of the heart; but in compensation for
these defects he had eyes which could see in the dark and which needed
not spectacles even in advanced age.
Of Jerome's mother little is known. Her family seems to have been as
tenacious of life as that of Fazio, for her father Jacopo lived to be
seventy-five years of age. Of his maternal grandfather Jerome remarks
that he was a highly skilled mathematician, and that when he was about
seventy years of age, he was cast into prison for some offence against
the law. He speaks of his mother as choleric in temper, well dowered
with memory and mental parts, small in stature and fat, and of a pious
disposition,[5] and declares that she and his father were alike in one
respect, to wit that they were easily moved to anger and were wont to
manifest but lukewarm and intermittent affection for their child.
Nevertheless they were in a way indulgent to him. His father permitted
him to remain in bed till the second hour of the day had struck, or
rather forbade him to rise before this time--an indulgence which
worked well for the preservation of his health. He adds that in after
times he always thought of his father as possessing the kindlier nature
of the two.[6]
It would seem from the passage above written, as well as from certain
others subsequent, that Jerome had little affection for his mother; and
albeit he neither chides nor reproaches her, he never refers to her in
terms so appreciative and loving as those which he uses in lamenting
the death of his harsh and tyrannical father. In the Geniturarum
Exempla[7] he says that, seeing he is writing of a woman, he will
confine his remarks to saying that she was ingenious, of good parts,
generous, upright, and loving towards her children. Perhaps the fact
that his father died early, while his mother lived on for many years, and

was afterwards a member of his household--together with his
wife--may account for the colder tone of his remarks while writing
about her. She was the widow of a certain Antonio Alberio,[8] and
during her marriage had borne him three children, Tommaso, Catilina,
and Joanni Ambrogio; but when Jerome was a year old all three of
these died of the plague within the space of a few weeks.[9] He himself
narrowly escaped death from the same cause, and this attack he
attributes to an inherited tendency from his mother, she having suffered
from the same disease during her girlhood. There seems to have been
born to Fazio and Chiara another son, who died at birth.[10]
Jerome Cardan was born on September 24, 1501, between half-past six
o'clock and a quarter to seven in the evening. In the second chapter of
his autobiography he gives the year as 1500, and in De Utilitate, p. 347,
he writes the date as September 23, but on all other occasions the date
first written is used. Before he saw the light malefic influences were at
work against him. His mother, urged on no doubt by the desire to
conceal her shame, and persuaded by evil counsellors, drank a potion of
abortive