Alexius Pedemontanus
Alessio Piemontese, also known under his Latinized name of Alexius Pedemontanus, was the pseudonym of a 16th-century Italian physician, alchemist, and author of the immensely popular book, The Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont. His book was published in more than a hundred editions and was still being reprinted in the 1790s. The work was translated into Latin, German, English, Spanish, French, and Polish.
Also recorded as Alessio Piemontese
Alexius Pedemontanus
- Died
- 1566
- Occupation
- cartographer · scholar
- Languages
- Italian
VALÉORINE Encyclopedia
VALÉORINE documentary reading
Documentary summary
Alessio Piemontese, also known under his Latinized name of Alexius Pedemontanus, was the pseudonym of a 16th-century Italian physician, alchemist, and author of the immensely popular book, The Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont. His book was published in more than a hundred editions and was still being reprinted in the 1790s. The work was translated into Latin, German, English, Spanish, French, and Polish.
Admitted source layer · organised and presented by VALÉORINE
Reference Check
Propose documentary evidence for Alexius Pedemontanus. A contribution is never written directly as fact: identity, source, rights and evidence gates still decide.
Sign in to contribute
Documentary evidence
Documentary basis
Authority files
wikidata · Q3610568 · wikipedia · Alexius Pedemontanus
In this article
Works
The work unleashed a torrent of 'books of secrets' that continued to be published down through the eighteenth century. Piemontese was the prototypical 'professor of secrets'. His description of his hunt for secrets in the preface to the Secreti helped to give rise to a legend of the wandering empiric who dedicated his life to the search for natural and technological secrets. The book contributed to the emergence of the concept of science as a hunt for the secrets of nature, which pervaded experimental science during the period of the Scientific Revolution. It is generally assumed that Alessio Piemontese was a pseudonym of Girolamo Ruscelli (Viterbo 1500 — Venice 1566), humanist and cartographer. In a later work, Ruscelli reported that the Secreti contained the experimental results of an 'Academy of Secrets' that he and a group of humanists and noblemen founded in Naples in the 1540s. Ruscelli's academy is the first recorded example of an experimental scientific society. The academy was later imitated by Giambattista Della Porta, who founded an ‘Accademia dei Secreti’ in Naples in the 1560s.
• De' secreti del reuerendo donno Alessio Piemontese, Venice, 1555 (Italian) • --- 1562 edition • --- Les secrets de reverend Alexis Piémontois, Anvers, 1557 (French) • --- The Secretes of the Reverende Maister Alexis of Piermont, 1558 (English, translated from the French version) • --- Kunstbuch Des Wolerfarnen Herren Alexii Pedemontani/ von mancherleyen nutzlichen unnd bewerten Secreten oder Künsten, 1616 (German) • --- Aleksego Pedemontana Tajemnice - included as a part of Herbarz to iest ziół tutecznych postronnych y zamorskich opisanie: co za moc maią a iako ich używać tak tu przestrzeżeniu zdrowia ludzkiego iako ku uzdrowieniu rozmaitych chorób: Teraz nowo wedle herbarzow dzisieyszego wieku y inych zacnych medyków poprawiony, 1568 (Polish)
Experimental reconstruction
Researchers at Aalto University in 2020 followed instructions from the De Secreti to transform white fur to more expensive or desirable leopard or panther fur using litharge and quicklime. The mixture successfully produced dark spots on the fur where lead oxide is deposited on the hair.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.De' secreti del reuerendo donno Alessio Piemontese, prima parte, diuisa in sei libri, In Venetia: per Sigismondo Bordogna, 1555.
- 2.W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
- 3.W. Eamon, "Science as a Hunt", Physis 31 (1994), 393-432.
- 4.Gaetano Melzi. Alessio Piemontese, in Dizionario di opere anonime e pseudonime di scrittori italiani o come che sia aventi relazione all'Italia. Milano, L. di G. Pirola, 1848. vol. I (A-G), p. 32 https://books.google.com/books?id=d7IYAAAAIAAJ&q=editions:0ItC1xdPCPk_yCNTiDnnUiM&pg=PA32.
- 5.G. Ruscelli, Secreti nuovi (Venice, 1567).
- 6.W. Eamon and F. Paheau, “The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli: A Sixteenth Century Italian Scientific Society,” Isis 75 (1984): 327 42
- 7.Sophie Pitman, "Experiment in focus: Imitation of fur", Paula Hothi, Refashioning the Renaissance: Everday day dress in Europe, 1500–1650 (Manchester, 2025), pp. 101–106.
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
reference work
Secondary witnessreference work
Secondary witness
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 16 August 2026.
Elsewhere in Maps and atlases
1,180 published records in this field, each with its sources named.
- Alexandre VuilleminAuthor
- Alexey NagayevAuthor
- Alexey PostnikovAuthor
- Alexis Hubert JaillotAuthor
- Alfons GabrielAuthor
- Alfred EdmondsAuthor
- Alojz KnafelcAuthor
- Alonso Álvarez de PinedaAuthor
Best supported in this field
For owners
Own a work by Alexius Pedemontanus?
A specialist will read what you send and tell you what the house can establish, what it cannot, and whether the object is suited to sale. There is no charge and no obligation. The object stays with you throughout; nothing is shipped to us unless it is arranged in writing beforehand.