For it did not appear as the sister and ally
of art and psychology, but as a new form of fatalistic superstition,
and, what it may have been among the Arabs, as the rival of astrology.
The author of a physiognomical treatise, Bartolommeo Cocle, who styled
himself a 'metoposcopist,' and whose science, according to Giovio,
seemed like one of the most respectable of the free arts, was not
content with the prophecies which he made to the many people who daily
consulted him, but wrote also a most serious 'catalogue of such whom
great dangers to life were awaiting.' Giovio, although grown old in the
free thought of Rome 'in hac luce romana'--is of opinion that the
predictions contained therein had only too much truth in them We learn
from the same source how the people aimed at in these and similar
prophecies took vengeance on a seer. Giovanni Bentivoglio caused Lucas
Gauricus to be five times swung to and fro against the wall, on a rope
hanging from a lofty, winding staircase, because Lucas had foretold to
him the loss of his authority. Ermes Bentivoglio sent an assassin after
Cocle, because the unlucky metopOscopist had unwillingly prophesied to
him that he would die an exile in battle. The murderer seems to have
derided the dying man in his last moments, saying that Cocle himself
had foretold him he would shortly commit an infamous murder.
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