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GALILEO
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GALILEO
∂
WATCHER OF THE SKIES
DAVID WOOTTON
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
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Page iv
Copyright © 2010 David Wootton
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of
Oliver Baty Cunningham of the Class of 1917, Yale College
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond
that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.
For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:
U.S. Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.com
Europe Office: [email protected] www.yaleup.co.uk
Set in Arno Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Wootton, David, 1952–
Galileo: Watcher of the Skies/David Wootton.
p. cm.
ISBN 097–8300125368 (cl:alk. paper)
1. Galilei, Galileo, 1564–1642 2. Astronomers—Italy—Biography.
I. Title.
QB36.G2W66 2010
520.92—dc22
[B]
2010027620
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Alison
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Page vi
. . . For, all the night,
I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,
Star to faint star, across the sky.
Rupert Brooke, ‘The Jolly Company’ (1908)
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Page vii
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
ix
xi
Introduction: Conjectural history
1
Part one: The mind’s eye
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
His father’s son
Florence
Galileo’s lamp
Eureka!
Seeing is believing
A friend in need
Juvenilia
The Leaning Tower
Inertia
Nudism
9
14
18
22
25
30
33
36
43
46
Part two: The watcher of the skies
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
Copernicanism
Money
Fields of fire
The experimental method
The telescope
Mother
The Starry Messenger
Florence and buoyancy
Jesuits and the new astronomy
Sunspots
The Catholic scientist
51
67
70
76
87
93
96
106
114
125
132
vii
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Page viii
CONTENTS
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Part three: The eagle and the arrow
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
Copernicus condemned
Comets
The death of Gianfrancesco Sagredo
Urban VIII
Family Ties
Permission to publish
Alessandra Buonamici
A river floods
Publication
The Dialogue
137
157
171
176
182
191
201
203
206
208
Part four: Prisoner to the Inquisition
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
Maria Celeste and Arcetri
Trial
The Two New Sciences
Vincenzo, son of Galileo
Galileo’s (un)belief
The cosmography of the self
215
218
229
235
240
251
Coda: Galileo, history and the historians
259
Notes
Bibliography
268
308
viii
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Page ix
Frontispiece Portrait of Galileo by Domenico Crespi da Passignano
(1559–1638), 1624. Private Collection.
1 Frontispiece of Niccolò Tartaglia’s New Science, 1537. The Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
2 Ptolemaic universe, in Mattei Mauro’s commentary on the Sphere, 1550.
The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
3 Copernican system, in Thomas Digges’s Prognostication Everlasting, 1596.
Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology.
4 Geometric and military compass. Institute and Museum of the History of
Science, Florence.
5 Sketch from Thomas Seget’s Liber Amicorum. By permission of the
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. All rights reserved. Vat. lat. 9385 p. 79.
© 2010 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
6 Peter Paul Rubens, Self-Portrait in a Circle of Friends from Mantua, c.1604.
Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln.
7 Galileo’s notebook. By kind permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le
Attività Culturali della Repubblica Italiana/Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,
Florence. All rights reserved. Gal 72 fol. 166v.
8 & 9 Galileo’s telescope. Institute and Museum of the History of Science,
Florence.
10 Moon illustration from Galileo’s Starry Messenger, Venice, 1610, f.10v.
Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology.
11 Moon illustration from pirated version of Starry Messenger. The Thomas
Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
12 Lodovico Cigoli, The Immaculate Virgin, 1612, Rome, Santa Maria
Maggiore. Photography by Alessandro Vasari, Rome.
13 Francesco Villamena, engraving of Galileo, frontispiece to Galileo’s Assayer,
1623. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
14 Francesco Villamena, engraving of Cardinal Bellarmine, 1604. © Trustees
of the British Museum.
15 Pietro Facchetti, Prince Federico Cesi. Photograph courtesy of the
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
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Illustrations
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Page x
I L L U S T R AT I O N S
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16 Attributed to Leandro Bassano, painting of Gianfrancesco Sagredo,
‘Procurator of San Marco’. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
17 Francesco Furini, Astronomy Shows Cosimo I the Satellites of Jupiter,
Florence, Casino Mediceo. © 2010. Photo Scala, Florence.
18 Justus Sustermans, portrait of Cosimo II with his wife and son. Florence,
Galleria degli Uffizi. © 2010. Photo Scala, Florence, courtesy of the
Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali della Repubblica Italiana.
19 Jacopo Zucchi, fresco of the Villa Medici. Author’s photograph.
20 Title page of Assayer, 1623. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library,
University of Toronto.
21 Maffeo Barberini, engraving in his Poemata. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book
Library, University of Toronto.
22 Andrea Sacchi, Divine Wisdom, 1629–33. Photograph courtesy of John
Beldon Scott.
23 Frontispiece to Galileo’s Dialogue, 1632. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book
Library, University of Toronto.
24 Title page of Melchior Inchofer’s Summary Treatise, 1633. The Thomas
Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
25 Illustration depicting bone thickness, from Galileo’s Two New Sciences,
1638. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
26 Illustration concerning structural failure, from Two New Sciences. The
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
27 Illustration investigating equilibrium, from Two New Sciences. The Thomas
Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
28 Nineteenth-century construction of Galileo’s pendulum clock, based on
drawings by Vincenzo Viviani. Science Museum/SSPL.
Folio
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Acknowledgements
Numerous Galileo scholars, historians of science and historians of the late
Renaissance have responded to my enquiries, amongst them Ugo Baldini, Silvio
Bedini, Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Mario Biagioli, Christopher Black, Horst
Bredekamp, Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota, Linda Carroll, Miles
Chappell, David Colclough, Pietro Corsi, Nicholas Davidson, Peter Dear,
Simon Ditchfield, Germana Ernst, Dinko Fabris, Federica Favino, Maurice
Finocchiaro, Steve Fuller, John Henry, Michael Hunter, Mary Laven, Peter
Machamer, Ian McLean, Edward Muir, Ronald Naylor, Paolo Palmieri, Isabelle
Pantin, Pietro Redondi, Eileen Reeves, Jürgen Renn, John Beldon Scott,
Richard Seargentson, Michael Shank, Michael Sharratt, William Shea, A. Mark
Smith, Roberto Vergara Caffarelli and Nicholas Wilding. I thank them for their
patience. I also thank Rick Watson of W. P. Watson for generously lending me
his copy of Giovanni Battista Stelluti’s Scandaglio.
I am also grateful for a number of opportunities to try out my ideas before an
audience: to the British Association for the History of Philosophy meeting in
York; to David Cram and Robert Evans of the History Faculty of the University
of Oxford; to Jim Bennett and Stephen Johnston of the Oxford Museum of the
History of Science; to David Lines of the Centre for Renaissance Studies at the
University of Warwick; to Knud Haakonssen of the Centre for the History of
Ideas at the University of Sussex; and to the Renaissance Society of America
meeting in Venice in 2010.
Paula Findlen, Peter Machamer, Alison Mark, Paolo Palmieri, Pietro
Redondi, Mordechai Feingold, Michael Shank, Michael Sharratt and Nicholas
Wilding were kind enough to read various drafts. My text has been greatly
improved as a result of their suggestions. My copy-editor Laura Davey did a
remarkable job catching at least some of the remaining errors.
Alison Mark, the University of York and the Leverhulme Foundation have
generously supported this research – I thank all three for the pleasures of a year
of research leave. Thanks to Matthew Patrick who has discussed the problems
of biography with me interminably.
xi
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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Finally, I would like to acknowledge a debt to Stillman Drake. Many years
ago (in 1981, I think), when I was a young scholar starting out in academic
life, Stillman Drake spent an afternoon showing me his wonderful collection
of Galileo books. I am delighted to have an opportunity to record this
kindness now.
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Page 1
Our knowledge of Galileo’s life we owe largely to three people. One of these is
Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703), his last student, who was sixteen when he met
Galileo and not yet twenty when his master died.2 Viviani wrote Galileo’s first
biography (which was not published until 1717), preserved his papers, and
planned an edition of his complete works. When Viviani died, his property
passed first to his nephew and then, in 1737, to the nephews of his nephew.
These last did not share their great-uncle’s preoccupation with Galileo – despite
the fact that 1737 was the year in which Galileo finally became respectable
enough to be given an honourable tomb in a Florentine church. They emptied
the cupboards in which Viviani had stored Galileo’s manuscripts, and turned
them to what seemed to them a far better use: storing the household linen.
One day in the spring of 1750, Giovanni Battista Nelli (1725–93), a
Florentine man of letters, made a detour to buy some cold meat from a butcher
he did not normally frequent. The excellent mortadella was to be his contribution to a picnic. When, out in the countryside with his friends, he unwrapped the
meat, he noticed that the waste paper it was wrapped in appeared to be something written by Galileo. Returning with all possible haste to the butcher
(but taking the precaution of concealing his discovery from his friends), he
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Introduction: Conjectural history
Now the past, by virtue of being past, remains forever inaccessible to us, it is
no more, we cannot reach it and it is only from its traces and remains, from its
debris which are still present – works of art, monuments, documents which
have escaped the ravages of time and of mankind – that we attempt to reconstruct it. But objective history, the history men make and suffer, is not
concerned – or hardly – with the history of historians: it allows the survival of
things of no value to the historian and mercilessly destroys the most important
of documents, the most beautiful of works, and the most impressive of monuments. What it leaves, or has left behind, are mere fragments of what we should
need. Accordingly, historical reconstructions are inevitably fragmentary,
uncertain, even doubly uncertain – poor little conjectural science, so has Paul
Valéry described history.
Alexandre Koyré (1961)1
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GALILEO
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eventually traced the butcher’s waste paper to its source: a large bin overflowing
with documents in Viviani’s old house. His grand-nephews were selling off the
paper in small parcels as wrapping paper, but were happy to sell the whole bin
to Nelli.
Nelli used his treasure trove to write a life of Galileo, and the papers he had
acquired eventually ended up in the Florentine archives.3 There they were to be
used by the greatest of all Galileo scholars, Antonio Favaro, who produced what
is known as the National Edition of Galileo’s works (1890–1909), in twenty
volumes printed in twenty-one large tomes (volume iii spans two separate
tomes). Favaro was meticulous and indefatigable, and almost everything about
Galileo that we know now, Favaro already knew.4 But Favaro was not an impartial scholar – nobody is. He laboured to defend Galileo’s reputation as a scientist, as a man, and as a pious Catholic; inconvenient details were buried, brushed
aside, or put in the best possible light. But they were never suppressed.
When Galileo died in 1642 he had been living in Florence for more than
thirty years, accumulating letters and papers. But when he moved from Padua to
Florence in 1610, at the age of forty-six, he must have packed his clothes, books,
papers, telescopes and lens-grinding machinery to be loaded onto the backs of
donkeys or mules – and he presumably threw a great deal away. In Favaro’s
edition of the Opere the letters to, from and about Galileo occupy nine volumes.
One of these, volume x, contains all the letters for the first forty-six years of his
life; another, volume xv, contains the letters for the single year 1633 – the year
of Galileo’s trial. This imbalance is particularly frustrating in that Galileo made
no major scientific discoveries after the age of fifty – and yet the vast bulk of the
evidence that survives comes from the last decades of his life. In addition, when
Galileo went blind in 1637 he lost control over his own papers: things he would
once have thrown away were now faithfully kept.5
Thanks to Viviani, Nelli and Favaro we know a great deal about Galileo, and
it is easy to be overwhelmed by the bulk of this knowledge. It is also easy to
forget that our most important source consists of a bin full of papers. We have
no way of knowing how many documents had already been extracted from the
bin and used to wrap meat. Unfortunately that is not our only problem. All the
documents in the bin had first been through the hands of Viviani. From Galileo’s
death in 1642 until his own death in 1703 Viviani was engaged in a campaign to
restore his master’s reputation, blighted by the Inquisition’s condemnation of
him in 1633. He wanted to see Galileo (who the Church had insisted should be
buried without a funerary monument) given a proper burial under a tomb
worthy of his status as a great scientist; he wanted to see his works, including his
scientific correspondence, published. Because he could achieve neither of these
objectives he turned the facade of his own house into a monument to Galileo,
recording at length and in stone all his scientific achievements, but making no
mention either of Copernicanism or of the Inquisition trial and condemnation.
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I N T R O D U C T I O N : C O N J E C T U R A L H I S T O RY
An essential element in Viviani’s campaign to recuperate Galileo’s reputation
was his insistence that Galileo was a good Catholic who had acknowledged his
error in advocating Copernicanism and obediently submitted to the Church’s
decree. Galileo was portrayed by Viviani as being dismayed by the publication
of his works abroad after 1633, in defiance of the Inquisition: the evidence to the
contrary, which was and is incontrovertible, was quietly suppressed.6 It has been
suggested that Viviani genuinely believed that Galileo’s Copernicanism represented a tragic intellectual error, yet the evidence rather suggests that, as
Galileo’s faithful disciple, he skilfully combined outward conformity to the
requirements of the Church with private dissent.7
How far did Viviani’s single-minded preoccupation with Galileo’s reputation
amongst Italian Catholics lead him to falsify the historical record? That he falsified
it to some degree we can be sure. He planned to publish an exchange of letters
between Galileo and Élie Diodati (a Genevan who was nominally a Protestant but
had close relations with a number of unbelievers) on the subject of measuring
longitudes, telling Diodati that he would alter or omit some sentences that might
provoke hostility to Galileo and make it difficult to obtain a licence to publish.8
What did he plan to leave out? We do not know. Viviani separated out thirteen
letters on longitude, so that they survived to be published in 1718, at which point
they were destroyed. We cannot tell how extensively they would have been revised
if Viviani had been able to publish them – although there is another case in which
we can catch Viviani in the act of rewriting a letter to protect Galileo’s reputation.9
Viviani had in his possession, as far as we can tell, around a hundred letters
between Galileo and Diodati. None of these survive; forty are completely lost, and
the rest are preserved only in partial copies made by Viviani, or in the edition of
1718, or, in two cases, in copies made by Pierre Dupuy – we do not know how far
those copies censor and falsify the originals (even the edition of 1718 appears to
be marred by some deliberate omissions).10 It is theoretically possible that every
one of the letters that did not survive until 1718 went to wrap mortadella, but it is
more likely that they were destroyed by Viviani himself because they contained
proof that Galileo had advocated Copernicanism after 1633.11
The charge is a serious one: if Viviani was prepared to falsify the record then
we must assume that he destroyed any evidence which cast doubt on Galileo’s
Catholic piety. On 24 July 1673 he wrote to the scientist and diplomat Count
Lorenzo Magalotti in Flanders saying that he had heard that an edition of Paolo
Sarpi’s letters was shortly to be published in Amsterdam, and that some letters
between Galileo and Sarpi might appear in it. Sarpi – who had been a close friend
of Galileo’s – was notorious throughout Europe as the author of the History of the
Council of Trent (1619), widely regarded as the most effective piece of antiCatholic propaganda to have been published since the days of Luther and Calvin.
The publication of such a correspondence, even if it was concerned only with
scientific matters, would, Viviani felt, be fatal to Galileo’s reputation.
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GALILEO
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In the 1656 edition of Galileo’s works, published in Bologna (which omitted
the Dialogue condemned in 1633 and much else), the censors had required that
a passing reference to Sarpi be excised on the grounds that Sarpi had died
excommunicate. There was thus no doubt that Viviani would be prevented from
publishing any letters between Sarpi and Galileo. But this does not prepare us
for his instructions to Magalotti: he must try to get hold of the originals of these
letters, if they exist, and of any copies; if printing has begun he must buy up the
printed sheets – Viviani will provide the funds. No evidence of such a correspondence must be left in untrustworthy hands. Viviani says absolutely explicitly that
publication must be prevented at all costs; he does not say that the letters should
be destroyed – rather that he is sure Magalotti will be enraged and will know
what to do. ‘I do not know what I am saying’, he continues, ‘Have pity on me as
a faithful disciple.’12 It is clear that Viviani was prepared to go to any lengths to
protect Galileo’s reputation. Not surprisingly, only two early and innocuous
letters from Sarpi to Galileo survive, and only two (which never fell into
Viviani’s hands) from Galileo to Sarpi, although it was said in 1616 that they
were known to be corresponding.13
History has to be written from the documents that survive – we cannot
recover those sold as wrapping paper or those destroyed by Galileo’s ‘faithful
disciple’. But we will do a better job if we bear in mind that the gaps in our
knowledge may be the result not just of happenstance but of deliberate destruction. Even if we had every document that was available to Viviani, we would have
no straightforward way of knowing if there were things that Galileo thought but
never said, and things that he said but never put in writing. For we can be sure
that whenever Galileo put pen to paper he was aware – as every Italian intellectual of his day was aware – that an inquisitor, searching for evidence of heresy,
might one day read what he had written. What hope, then, have we of getting
past the layers of censorship that came between Galileo’s private thoughts and
the texts that survived to appear in the Favaro edition? The answer is simple: we
must pay particular attention to those sources that bring us closest to Galileo’s
conversation with his disciples, and to those texts (the margins of books, for
example) that Galileo least feared would be read by anyone else. We may not be
able to speak with the dead, but we can sometimes listen in on their conversations, and even catch them thinking aloud.14 In this book I deliberately give such
snatches of overheard conversation much greater weight than they have had in
previous studies of Galileo.
The first proper book Galileo published was The Starry Messenger (1610), in
which he announced the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, a discovery which
provided new evidence in favour of Copernicus’s bold hypothesis that the earth
moves and is not fixed at the centre of the universe. A few months after it
appeared the poet John Donne published The First Anniversary, in which these
lines are to be found:
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I N T R O D U C T I O N : C O N J E C T U R A L H I S T O RY
We know Donne had read The Starry Messenger – he referred to Galileo in
Ignatius His Conclave, written around the same time, where he made clear his own
support for Copernicanism. Donne writes in The First Anniversary as someone
who understands at once the logic of Galileo’s position. What are the alternatives
to the old philosophy of Aristotle and Ptolemy? The denial of any difference
between the superlunary and sublunary worlds (this is what Donne means when
he writes, ‘The element of fire is quite put out’ – the sphere or element of
fire marked the boundary between the superlunary and sublunary worlds);
Copernicanism (‘The sun is lost, and th’earth’); atomism; egalitarianism; individualism (Galileo did indeed think of himself as a phoenix); the unending quest
for the new.15 In 1610 Galileo had only cautiously committed himself to the first
two of these, but Donne apparently saw at once the scale of his ambition and the
direction in which he was heading. Nobody else grasped, as Donne did, the true
extent of the revolution implied by Galileo’s first publication.
How did Donne come by this extraordinary insight? There is good evidence
that he had been in Venice in 1605 and perhaps 1606, staying with the English
ambassador Henry Wotton. It seems that he met Paolo Sarpi, who had – or was
certainly soon to have – close links to Wotton.16 Galileo and Sarpi were close
friends, and there were a number of English-speaking students in Padua who
knew Galileo.17 One particular student was giving Wotton especial cause for
concern through much of 1605: Thomas Seget, a Scot, had been thrown into a
Venetian dungeon for having sex with a nun, and had then faced further charges
trumped up by her relatives. Seget’s timing was exceptionally unfortunate:
during the year in which he was held, the Venetian authorities introduced new
legislation making it a capital offence to be in a nunnery without good reason.18
They were in no mood to accept Wotton’s account of Seget’s behaviour as a
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And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again t’his atomies.
’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that there can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
This is the world’s condition now . . .
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GALILEO
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youthful indiscretion. Wotton nevertheless campaigned tirelessly for Seget to be
released into his custody, and in October his efforts were at last successful. If
Donne was in Venice at the time one can hardly doubt that he would have taken
an interest in Seget’s case, and he may well have been present in the embassy
when Seget (as we may conjecture) said goodbye to his good friends – one of
whom was Galileo – before Wotton arranged, as he had promised, for Seget to
depart from Venice and its territories for ever. It is perhaps to these meetings
that we should attribute Wotton’s own interest in Galileo: in 1610 he managed
to acquire a copy of The Starry Messenger and sent it to James I, even though the
book sold out within a few days of publication.
So Donne probably met Galileo; and if not he may have learned from Sarpi or
from Wotton or from Seget about the new philosophy, atomist and irreligious,
that Sarpi and Galileo had in common. Such conversations would have been
confidential – Protestants such as Wotton and Donne had no desire to get their
Catholic allies into trouble. When Donne read The Starry Messenger he already
knew what Galileo thought – hence the confidence with which he went beyond
anything that was to be found in the text. Indeed it is likely that Donne knew
Galileo better than we ever will because he had heard him talk frankly about his
private beliefs. Our task – our impossible task – is not just to read what Galileo
wrote, but also to rediscover what he thought. To do so we need to catch the
echoes of long-lost conversations. Galileo’s conversation with Donne is echoed,
perhaps, in The First Anniversary; fortunately, there are other conversations that
we know more about. If we pay attention to the conversations between Galileo
and his friends, we soon find a very different Galileo from the pious Catholic
described by Viviani and Favaro.
Folio
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