Abstract: Tropes, like splendour, are modes of knowledge for Cardan. The scholar takes up the neo-Platonic model of illumination but adapts it so as to explore the dark areas of human life. As figures of subtle doubling, metaphors turn experience into a discourse and appear like figures of knowledge produced by an artisan who offers them to the hermeneute reader. In the diffractions of their prism, natural variety takes the figure of ordered representation.
