Agostino Nifo (1470? –1538)

Abstract

Nifo produced commentaries and translations for major Aristotelian treatises. His medical activities as a practising doctor and university professor of medicine bring to his commentary on De generatione animalium the perspective of the medical tradition at Padua in the late fifteenth century. The Expositio of de generatione animalium is largely a section-by-section paraphrase of the text, with occasional points of difference raised by later commentators. Nifo begins his commentary with a summary of the themes of each of the five books of De generatione. He touches on a number of questions which we have already met, including the role of spiritus and heat in generation, the sense in which the seed or conceptus is ensouled, the generation of the mens. Nifo argues that sexual and spontaneous generation, though the mechanism by which they operate is different, are parallel and equivalent processes. All he could say was that similar effects (i.e. generation) must have had similar causes (similar measures of heat). It may well be that these differences in the kinds of explanation which were acceptable to Renaissance doctors and natural philosophers had more profound effects in determining their approach than the simple division into ‘Aristotelians’ and ‘Galenists’.