On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas

by Giordano Bruno, Charles Doria (Translator), Dick Higgins (Editor)

First full tr/Bruno's last visionary work (1591)

"... A celebration to the creative impulse and the fantastic fancies that are, or should be present in all of us." - from the Foreword.

Some 400 years since his death, the Renaissance philosopher Bruno still excites interest. Thus, this modern translation of his De Imaginum Signorum et Idearum Compositione , first published in 1591, is valuable to a wide range of scholars. De Imaginum defies easy classification, combining poetry, astrology, philosophy, mythology, and science. Meditating on the nature of reality and the limits of human knowledge, Bruno anticipates modern semiology, exploring the creation and meaning of signs and images. While the editor and translator are more interested in Renaissance arcana than the history of philosophy, they have included thorough notes as well as a helpful introduction. For special collections. -- Library Journal

Giordano Bruno was a truly cosmopolitan figure of the late Italian Renaissance. Often called the Nolan after his birthplace near Naples, Bruno wandered restlessly across Europe preaching his doctrine of cosmic consciousness and publishing it in dialogues and poetry that read today like volcanic spiritual upheavals. With Tommaso Campanella, author of the utopian City of the Sun and a controversial Defense of Galileo, Bruno represents the traumatic decline of humanistic philosophy, heralding the birth of modern natural science at the hands of Galileo and Francis Bacon. His major writings, attacking the Roman Catholic Church and celebrating the poetic frenzy of creative geniuses, have inspired writers of a similar temperament down to the days of James Joyce, who drew on Bruno, as well as Giambattista Vico, for Finnegans Wake. Bruno died in 1600.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Spirituality, Mysticism

377 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1591

About the author

Giordano Bruno (1548 – February 17, 1600), born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, who is best known as a proponent of the infinity of the universe. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in identifying the Sun as just one of an infinite number of independently moving heavenly bodies: he is the first European man to have conceptualized the universe as a continuum where the stars we see at night are identical in nature to the Sun. He was burned at the stake by authorities in 1600 after the Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy. After his death he gained considerable fame; in the 19th and early 20th centuries, commentators focusing on his astronomical beliefs regarded him as a martyr for free thought and modern scientific ideas. Recent assessments suggest that his ideas about the universe played a smaller role in his trial than his pantheist beliefs, which differed from the interpretations and scope of God held by Catholicism.[1][2] In addition to his cosmological writings, Bruno also wrote extensive works on the art of memory, a loosely organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles. More recent assessments, beginning with the pioneering work of Frances Yates, suggest that Bruno was deeply influenced by the astronomical facts of the universe inherited from Arab astrology, Neoplatonism and Renaissance Hermeticism.[3] Other recent studies of Bruno have focused on his qualitative approach to mathematics and his application of the spatial paradigms of geometry to language.[4]