Abstract

This article investigates the power and scope of the imagination in Giambattista Vico’s philosophy by focusing on the role played by the mind of the giants in their attempts to extricate themselves from the chaotic continuity of liquid and pervious matter and in their endeavour to reconstruct reality in post-diluvian nature. In Vico’s account, through the imagination’s efforts to mediate self-terror, self-consciousness and self-delusion, the monstrously ungainly and misshapen bodies of the giants, emotionally electrocuted by the lightning bolt of chemically active matter, became the natural laboratory – the corpolentissima fantasia – in which the human mind could test its original attempts at representing reality and avoiding self-deception.