The text is a notice clarifying that the author is sharing invaluable fragments of Rubens' studies, although two chapters on cabalistic principles were excluded for being unintelligible and unrelated to the main subject. The document acknowledges the importance of great artists who mix design with mystical concepts. Comparable efforts by other historical figures, like Cardan and Durer, are also recognized.
NOTICE
He noted down, for his own instruction, the precepts and knowledge he could gather, whether from nature or from the various authors he read, to embellish his memory with what he found most remarkable.
However, as all that comes from a great artist must be precious for those who follow the same career, I decided to share with the public these fragments of Rubens' studies, as I found them in his manuscript. I have only removed two chapters on cabalistic principles; one on the properties of numbers applied to chemical operations, the other on the primitive formation of man, first created as hermaphrodite, then divided into two sexes; on the marriage of the sun and the moon; and other reveries drawn from hermetic philosophy, which seemed to me unintelligible and incoherent, and which are also foreign to the main subject, as well as useless and absurd.
Moreover, Rubens is not the only great artist who thought of combining the principles of design with the mysteries of chemistry and the reveries of judicial astrology. The subtle Cardan, Albert Durer, and Jean-Paul Lomazze, who wrote on the proportions of the human figure, as well as Vincent Scamozi, and Juste Aurele Meyssfonier, in their idea of an architecture