The
reviver of chiromancy, Antioco Tiberto of Cesena, came by an equally
miserable end at the hands of Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, to whom he
had prophesied the worst that a tyrant can imagine, namely, death in
exile and in the most grievous poverty. Tiberto was a man of
intelligence, who was supposed to give his answers less according to
any methodical chiromancy than by means of his shrewd knowledge of
mankind; and his high culture won for him the respect of those scholars
who thought little of his divination.
Alchemy, in conclusion, which is not mentioned in antiquity till quite
late under Diocletian, played only a very subordinate part at the best
period of the Renaissance. Italy went through the disease earlier, when
Petrarch in the fourteenth century confessed, in his polemic against
it, that gold-making was a general practice. Since then that particular
kind of faith, devotion, and isolation which the practice of alchemy
required became more and more rare in Italy, just when Italian and
other adepts began to make their full profit out of the great lords in
the North. Under Leo X the few Italians who busied themselves with it
were called 'ingenia curiosa,' and Aurelio Augurelli, who dedicated to
Leo X, the great despiser of gold, his didactic poem on the making of
the metal, is said to have received in return a beautiful but empty
purse.
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