Francesco Giorgi and De harmonia mundi: the Cosmos as Music

In 1525 the Venetian printer Bernardino de Vitali issued a large volume entitled De harmonia mundi totius. Its author was Francesco Giorgi, or Zorzi, born in Venice in 1466 into a patrician family and an Observant Franciscan friar at the convent of San Francesco della Vigna. The book proposed a grand vision: the whole universe, from the celestial spheres to the human body, is built according to numerical and musical proportions, like an immense concert composed by God.

A Book Built Like a Composition

The very structure of the work is musical. De harmonia mundi is divided into three “canticles”, subdivided in turn into “tones” and chapters, as if the reader had to make his way through a score. The first canticle deals with God and creation, the second with Christ and redemption, the third with man and his ascent towards divine harmony. Each part takes up and varies the themes of the previous ones.

Giorgi's sources are extremely wide. Alongside the Bible and the Church Fathers appear Plato's Timaeus, the Pythagorean tradition of numbers, the Hermetic writings translated by Ficino, Pico's theology and numerous Kabbalistic texts. Giorgi knew Hebrew and drew directly on Jewish sources, something still rare among Christians of his time. The result is one of the richest syntheses of Christian Kabbalah.

Numbers, Music and Architecture

For Giorgi the proportions governing musical intervals, such as the octave, the fifth and the fourth, are the same ones that govern the cosmos. The world, the temple and the human body are three images of the same harmony. This idea, of Pythagorean and Platonic origin, had practical consequences, because it suggested that architecture too should follow numerical ratios able to mirror the divine order.

A document of 1535 bears witness to this. When Jacopo Sansovino designed the new church of San Francesco della Vigna, Doge Andrea Gritti asked for Giorgi's opinion, and the friar wrote a memorandum on the building's proportions. He proposed measurements derived from Pythagorean musical intervals, so that the church would be a visible image of the harmony of the world. The text is one of the documents most studied by historians of Renaissance architecture.

Between Venice, England and the Index

Giorgi was also involved in high politics. Around 1530, when Henry VIII of England was seeking arguments to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the Venetian friar was consulted as an expert on biblical and Hebrew texts and gave an opinion favourable to the king. In 1536 he published the Problemata, a collection of questions on Holy Scripture.

After his death in 1540, Giorgi's works were subjected to censorship and placed on the Index pending correction. This did not halt their circulation. In 1578 De harmonia mundi was translated into French by Guy Le Fèvre de La Boderie, and it circulated among readers interested in Kabbalah and cosmic harmony.

Agrippa knew and used Giorgi's work in the final version of the Occult Philosophy, above all in the pages devoted to numbers and to the harmony of soul and body. The Venetian friar represents the most harmonious and contemplative face of Renaissance magic: a vision in which number, music and prayer merge, and in which to know the world means to listen to its secret music.