The Discoverie of Conjuring: Professor Pinetti and the Enlightenment

By Dana Rovang

Giovanni Giuseppe (Joseph) Pinetti (1750-1800) was a stage magician in England and Europe in the late eighteenth century. Pinetti styled his

Image in Pinetti's book, Amusemens Physique, 1791. Note the air pump and other scientific instruments.

performances as demonstrations of “natural philosophy” (now called “science”) when they really continued in a long line of performance magic and entertaining mechanics. In an instance of tragic irony that also captures the spirit of the age, Pinetti’s tricks were revealed in several publications that would eventually force him into exile in Russia. These revelatory books have an analogue with an 1584 publication by Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, which in similar fashion sought to educate readers about the tricks of itinerant magicians and save these performers from false accusations of witchcraft. Pinetti’s situation can tell us a lot about how information about the natural world was communicated during this time, as well as how authority and expertise was viewed by the general public.

Natural philosophy, popular culture, and education in eighteeth-century Europe

Towards the end of the eighteenth century in England, “natural philosophy” — what we think of now as “science” — was very much en vogue with the public. Previously, the practice of “science” had been the domain of those with the time and money to do scientific inquiry, like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Robert Boyle (1627-1691), or Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and the information was mostly held behind the hallowed walls of the Royal Society. But at this time, knowledge about the natural world was leaking out, and published through pamphlets, books, discussed in coffee houses, and taught in theaters and self-education classes. For example, Cabinets of Curiosities — artifact collections owned by the wealthy and popular in the seventeenth century — were donated and became the foundational exhibits for public museums, like the British Museum in 1759. As the public became exposed to new information about the natural world, their appetite for knowledge grew.

"Musei Wormiani Historia", the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities, 1655. Wikicommons.

Learning about the natural world moved into the realm of popular culture.(1) Questions about who could be an “authority” were also at the heart of the distribution of information. Those who were wealthy could afford tutors, university, and had the time to devote themselves to their studies. Those from other classes could rise in the ranks, like Robert Hooke, who was an instrument maker for the Royal Society, but he was never considered a “natural philosopher” in the same way as Robert Boyle, a member of the aristocracy.

We can see the importance of these distinctions in how these performers billed themselves, when they used labels like “professor” or “doctor.” These titles of expertise were meant to tap into the public’s expectation about who was an expert, and who could legitimately distribute quality information.

From Amusemens Physique, 1791, “I.I. Pinetti Willedal de merci professor and demonstrator of physics, chevalier of the Court of St. Philipe, engineer geographer and Counselor of Finance to the Prince of Linbourg Holstein. Born in Orbitelle in 1750. Lives in Tuscany.”

One of these purported experts in natural philosophy in the mid-1780s was “Professor” Giuseppe Pinneti (1750-1800). Pinetti was an Italian stage magician, or “conjurer,” who had been performing on the European Continent in the early 1780s. He billed himself in his advertisements as a “Professor of Mathematics and Physics.” While he might have had some experience as such, Pinetti was foremost a performer, and a talented one, at that. However, using the title of “professor” in a magic show tells us how important the topic of natural philosophy was at this point in time; it had entered popular culture and performers were using its trappings. Further, this shift from “conjuror” to “professor” by these performers also coincided with an Enlightenment focus on educational entertainment.

Educational entertainment was very popular in France. Before their expulsion from France in the 1760s, the Catholic Jesuits had developed a methodology for entertaining education that was widely influential. The maxim of “become all things to all men”(2)  directed educators to use what was commonplace and at hand to connect with their students. Books like the Orbis sensualium pictus (“the visible world in pictures”) written by John Amos Comenius, or the use of theatrics by Jesuit educators were widely adopted in many different circumstances. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile (1762) even used the example of a conjurer to illustrate the idea of an “opportunity of learning.” In Émile, the “tutor” uses a floating duck trick as performed by a fairground magician as an object example in a class. The tutor leads his student through the process of reverse engineering the trick, thus providing a neat lesson on natural laws and the benefits of being curious.

In 1783, Pinetti arrived in a Paris awash in performative “edutainment.” He

From Decremps, La magie blanche dévoilée. It reads, "A professor and demonstrator of entertaining physics, who, after reducing a randomly selected card to ashes, throws the deck into the diar to make the card reappear by nailing it to the wall with a gunshot."

styled himself as a professor of mathematics and physics, and suggested that his performances were demonstrations of natural philosophy. However, one audience member seemingly took the lessons from Émile to heart: he reverse-engineered all of Pinetti’s tricks, and then he published them in a book. The book, La magie blanche dévoilée, (Natural Magic Revealed), by Parisian lawyer and amateur magician Henri Decremps, exposed all the mechanisms behind Pinetti’s act. And these weren’t simple tricks like a magnetic duck. Instead, Decremps revealed the mechanics behind the “magical nosegay” — a small tree that bloomed and grew fruit, and he revealed how a popular “bullet catch” was performed. The book, in a country primed for using entertainment to teach, was a smash hit and went into multiple editions.(3)

Pinetti felt the pinch at the box office. He tried to counter by hiring an actor to pretend he was Decremps. The actor, disheveled and appearing drunk, was castigated by Pinetti during his show in order to discredit him. No one really bought it. For his part, Descremps tried his hand at performing, but he was not on the level of Pinetti and he returned to publishing new editions and supplements to his book.

In an attempt to regain some authority, Pinetti wrote his own how-to book, Amusements Physiques, et différentes expériences divertissantes, published in May of 1784. But, it contained small “experiments” for home entertainment, and it did not reveal how he performed his stage magic. 

Pinetti’s ticket sales began to dwindle: the questions of how Pinetti performed his tricks were now all answered and the “opportunity of learning” had been accomplished. Who would come to see a magic show when the magic was now gone? Outmatched by Decremps and with dwindling book and theater seat sales, Pinetti left Paris for London in the summer of 1784, a few months after the publication of his own book.

The English magic publishing machine / “This is the Learned Man”

While the English did not have the same emphasis on entertaining education as did the French, they made up for it in sheer volume of printed output. The printing presses in London produced an avalanche of newspapers, pamphlets, and books, on all manner of subjects. 

Well-represented in this massive publication output was a long and illustrious line of books about performance magicians and magic tricks. One of the oldest of these was The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) by a country squire, Reginald Scot. A section of Scot’s book was devoted to revealing how simple magic tricks were accomplished.

A diagram of a selection of trick knives, from Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 292.

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Scot wrote his revelatory “how-to” section to educate people on how sleight-of-hand tricks were performed. In a tense atmosphere where witches were always around the corner, Scot wanted to help people keep their silver from charlatans, and also educate them so that mostly harmless itinerant magicians wouldn’t be accused of witchcraft. The infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) had been published in 1486, setting off the witch trials that rocked Europe and North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discoverie (meaning here “reveal of”) was a rational counterpoint to the witchcraft hysteria that Scot had witnessed in the courtrooms of his county.

Following Discoverie of Witchcraft, a number of “legerdemain” or “sleight-of-hand” how-to’s were published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see sources at the end for a representative list). Many of these were titled “Hocus Pocus,” which was the nom de guerre of William Vincent, the court jester to James I, but he is not considered the author of any of them. These Hocus Pocus texts spanned the 1630s through the eighteenth century, reprinted by different publishers (copyright was not yet a legal issue).

A knife like the one seen in Discoverie of Witchcraft as diagramed in the Hocus Pocus books.

The Hocus Pocus books were marketed as “sport” or “pastime” books, rather than being educational in a formal sense, or having moral value. Additionally these books poked at the idea of the expert: the inside cover for nearly all of

"Hiccius Doctius," a playful (and non sober) take on the Latin for "this is the learned man" found most Hocus Pocus books.

these books had a wood cut of an Elizabethan-dressed man with the words “Hiccius Doctius,” which was a corruption of the Latin for “This is the Learned Man” (hic est doctor), with a mashup of “Hocus Pocus”. As such, these books were marketed as texts that revealed natural explanations for those who seemed to defy natural law, perhaps even meaning to take the “authorities” down a peg. But, like Discoverie, these books seemed to suggest that natural philosophers, or “professors,” did not possess any supernatural information.

The frontispiece and title page of Hocus Pocus Junior, 1654. Anonymous, Hocus Pocus Junior, The anatomie of legerdemain (London: G. Dawes, for Thomas Vere, 1654).

In addition to the Hocus Pocus books, audiences could see magic acts throughout the Haymarket theatre district, Piccadilly, and on Cockspur Lane, a short, nearby alley that contained a number of entertaining acts. A new spate of magicians such as Breslaw, Comus, Jonas, and Katterfelto had arrived in the late 1770s and early 1780s, revving up renewed interest in stage magic.

Like Pinetti who styled himself as a “professor,” some of these new magicians,

An advertisement for Dr. Katterfelto who performed in nearby Picadilly rooms. One of the first references to his Solar Microscope. (Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser (London, England), Saturday, April 28, 1781; Issue 3727.)

like Dr. Gustavus Katterfelto, also capitalized on the burgeoning interest in natural philosophy: Katterfelto had a “solar microscope” in addition to a number of other “philosophic” specialties, Philip Breslaw had hot air balloons, and Comus (Nicolas-Philipe Ledru), from France, gave demonstrations on electricity and automatons—robots that wrote letters or played instruments independently. The London crowd was enchanted, and hungry for more.

Enter here, then, Pinetti, fleeing Paris where all his tricks had been revealed…in a book.

Pinetti vs. the London magic machine

Exactly two hundred years after Discoverie of Witchcraft was published, Pinetti arrived in London in the autumn of 1784. It could be said that both eras carried similar sentiments: in the earlier, educational books countered the growing fever of witchcraft accusations. But in the eighteenth century, the London publishers were looking for new educational content to feed the growing fever for scientific knowledge.

An advertisement for Signor Pinetti, "Professor" and "Natural Philosopher" performing at the Royal Theater in the Haymarket area. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Tuesday, September 21, 1784; Issue 3622.

For the last few months of 1784, “Signor Pinetti, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy,” enjoyed crowds at the Royal Theatre in Haymarket. But, he wasn’t sitting still. He soon produced a translation of, Amusements Physiques, et différentes expériences divertissantes, which was published in December of that year by Thomas Moore under the title Physical Amusements and Diverting Experiments. As mentioned above, the book contained small illusions or “experiments” that could be done by oneself at home, such as changing the color of a rose, or creating an etching on an egg shell. In truth, Pinetti’s book was more at home in England in a culture that promoted magic as a “sport” or “pastime,” rather than as an “opportunity of learning.”

Pinetti likely hoped it could be another money-maker while he was there, but it also could have been an attempt to get ahead of what he knew was coming, namely an English translation of Decremps’s La Magie Blanche Dèvoilèe.

He was right, and in early 1785, two different English translations of Descremps’s book were published. The first came in March of that year, entitled Natural Magic: or Physical Amusements Revealed, with London circus founder, Philip Astley, listed as the author. (See below, left.) The second followed a month later in April, titled, The Conjurer Unmasked; Or, La Magie Blanche Dèvoilèe, which was published by Thomas Denton who had a bookshop business in Haymarket, the theater district. (See below, right.) Denton’s publication gave the authorship to Henri Decremps. In the other translation, Philip Astley claimed sole authorship for Decremps’s text.

On the frontispieces of the books below you can see a new woodcut for Astley's that says "Inspect and Judge." For Denton's book, there is a faithful reproduction and translation of Decremps's plate from his edition.

What happened next was a magician battle-by-proxy between the London publishers. Moore accused Astley and Denton of copyright infringement and republishing Pinetti’s book. Astley couldn’t reply that the work was Descremps’ because actually he did pirate the text. But Denton had attributed the work to Descremps, and so he took out a full page advertisement rebutting Moore’s allegations. With that, the matter seemed to have been settled, and Denton and Moore published future editions of their respective translations.

While this publishing scandal played out like a ping pong match in the newspapers, it became a devastating rolling catastrophe for Pinetti. Despite the relative warmth for stage magicians in London, Pinetti eventually pulled up stakes in 1785 for Germany and eastern Europe. However, wherever he went, he was hounded by translations of Descremps’s text in each new location he performed. He eventually moved on to Russia, where it was said that he befriended the Russian Tsar, who became the godfather to his children, and Pinetti — like most magicians in this period of time — turned to hot air ballooning, dying in Russia in 1800.

Conclusion

This tension between education and entertainment (and who could reliably be considered an authority to do either, or both) was a percolating undercurrent throughout the eighteenth century. But this tension shows up dramatically in the story about Pinetti and the revelatory literature around magic books. One the one hand, as in Discoverie of Witchcraft, the reader is informed in order to protect innocent people from accusations of associating with the devil, and on the other hand, the reader is informed in order to protect the populace from someone saying they are an expert in natural philosophy, when they are not. This kind of policing of scientific authority (who could be considered one, and what counts as experimental natural philosophy), would grow and expand in the coming century as more moments like these looked to answer the question, “Who is the Learned Man?”

1. Science as a term for the practice of “scientific inquiry” was not widely used until the 19th century. From Aristotle to the enlightenment era, the term “natural philosophy” was used to describe the systematic practice of examining the natural world. See here for more.

2. Adapted from Paul in 1 Corinthians, 9:22 “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.” See the original by St. Ignatius.

3. Perhaps even more devastating to a populace craving new information, “Professor Pinetti” was exposed as performing magic tricks that were long in the magician’s repertoire: The “magical nosegay” was a redux of the early English magician Isaac Fawke’s blossoming apple tree created by clockmaker Christopher Pinchbeck in 1730. And one of the illusions, a pigeon decapitated by a shadow, is a variation on the oldest illusion we have record of being performed, created by the Egyptian magician Dedi, royal magician to the Pharaoh Khufu (c. 2589–2566 BC).

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Dana Rovang, PhD, is the founder and editor of Obscure Histories. Her dissertation was called "Conjuring Science: Performance Magicians, Natural Philosophy and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1770-1800" (Chicago, 2013). She also works as a writer and producer of visual media, trying to make information useful and interesting in the spirit of Enlightenment magicians.

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Primary sources

Descremps, Pinetti, Denton, & Astley, chronological order

Henri Decremps, La magie blanche dévoilée, ou, Explication des tours surprenants qui font depuis peu l'admiration de la capitale & de la province : avec des réflexions sur la baguette divinatoire, les automates joeurs d'échecs, &c. &c., 4th Edition, (Paris: 1784, 1792, 4th ed.).

Giovanni Giuseppe Pinetti Amusemens physiques, et différentes expériences divertissantes, composées & exécutées tant à Paris que dans les diverses cours de l'Europe (Paris:  chez Mourer, 1784, 1785)

Giovanni Giuseppe Pinetti, Amusemens physiques, et différentes expériences divertissantes (Paris: Gattey, 1791).

Giovanni Giuseppe Pinetti, Physical Amusements and Diverting Experiments (London, T. Moore, 1784).

Philip Astley, Natural magic: or, physical amusements revealed, (London: P. Astley, 1785).

Henri Decremps, The conjuror unmasked; Or La magie blanche dévoilée, (London: T. Denton, 1785).

Henri Descremps, Supplément a La magie blanche dévoilée (Paris: Chez J.F. Desoer, 1792).

Primary Sources

Early Magic Books, chronological order

Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584).

Thomas Ady, Candle in the Dark (1655)

Anonymous, Hocus Pocus Junior, The anatomie of legerdemain, London: JD for RM, 1633, 1638).

Anonymous, Hocus Pocus Junior, The anatomie of legerdemain (London: G. Dawes, for Thomas Vere, 1654).

Anonymous, Hocus Pocus Junior, The anatomie of legerdemain (London: G. Purflaw for Thomas Vere, 1671).

Anonymous, Hocus Pocus Junior, The anatomie of legerdemain (London: J. Deacon, 1683).

John White, Hocus pocus: or, a rich cabinet of legerdemain curiosities, natural and artificial conclusions (“sold at the Ring,” 1715)

Richard Neve, Hocus Pocus; the cabinet of legerdemain (London: H. Tracy, 1721)

Henry Dean, Hocus Pocus; or The Whole Art of Legerdemain, in Perfection, By which the meanest capacity may perform the whole without the help of a teacher. Together with the Use of all the Instruments belonging thereto. (London, A. Betteworth, 1722).

Philip Breslaw, Breslaw's last legacy; or, the magical companion: containing all that is curious, pleasing, entertaining, ...  (London: T. Moore, 1784).

Giuseppi Pinetti, Pinetti’s Last Legacy; Or, the Magical Cabinet Unlock’d, (London: T. Moore, 1785).

Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-aéronaute, Tome I (Paris: Chez L’auteur, 1831).

Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-aéronaute, Tome II (Paris: Chez L’auteur, 1833).

Other Primary Sources

Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum  (1482).

John Amos, Orbis sensualium pictus (1658).

Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Émile (1762).