GALILEO GALILEI

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Nonfiction
Behold, the Medici moons

GALILEO GALILEI: The Tuscan Artist

By Pietro Greco, translated by Giuliana Giobbi

383 pp. Springer

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

If you want to know every minuscule detail about Galileo, down to his friends, correspondents, doubters, believers, acolytes and enemies – in the sixteenth century everybody who was anybody had blatant enemies – Pietro Greco is your man. If you want an easy read, look elsewhere.

The book suffers from a spectacularly bad translation from Italian. It required some nimble re-translation as I read – becoming accustomed, for instance, to use of the word “realize” to mean “fabricate” or “develop,” as in, to realize a scientific instrument. Or to malapropisms like “the emergency of a new science.”

Greco is an Italian science writer, educated as a chemist, editor of Scienza & Societáand active in science education in Italy. The translator’s English is better than my Italian, but it appears she worked with a dictionary at her elbow and minimal experience in spoken English. A fluent editor would have improved this book mightily.

Once past the linguistic barrier, I learned a lot. Who knew the famous astronomer was an artist and an accomplished musician? That he termed himself “philosopher” rather than physicist or scientist? That he was really, really wrong about the nature of comets and the cause of tides?

The thing we do know about, Galileo’s conflict with the teachings of the Catholic Church, is here in excruciating detail. Galileo did not invent the telescope, but he polished his own lenses, refining the instrument to reveal new detail.  By the end of 1609 he had a 30-power “eyepiece.” He is credited with discovering the moons of Jupiter, although – as was usual at that time – somebody else came forward and claimed credit for himself.

It takes almost a hundred pages to get to the interesting part. Greco knows a lot about Galileo’s father, Vincenzio Galilei, an accomplished musician. He includes it all, down to Vincenzio’s preference for single-voice melodies and his rejection of polyphony, all the publications he published, and his feud with his enemies who foolishly clung to it – and their publications.

The first revelation the lenses gave Galileo came from a close-up of the moon, which had been considered smooth as a ball. Galileo saw that it had crags and valleys, and that it rotated in such a way that it showed somewhat more than half its face to earth. Subsequent observations of the sky found points of light near the planet Jupiter; their location varied from night to night, and sometimes there were as many as four. Being a mathematician, he calculated that they were in orbit around the planet and deduced that they must be moons like our own. Obsequiously, he dubbed them the Medici moons.

His skill at drawing came in handy; he could reproduce what he observed in the sky on paper. Greco avers repeatedly that Galileo was Italy’s greatest writer, expounding his theories with “elegance…crystalline clearness…a subtle irony and an educated banter.”

The astronomer would not have been disciplined by the Church if he had only kept quiet. But he couldn’t. A good Catholic as well as a man of science, Galileo knew that Church doctrine was Truth, and he was sure the old tenets would be modified to square with what he saw empirically as true. He did not see how anybody could deny the evidence of his own senses. He was convinced that the arbiters of Church doctrine, once they used his telescope, would revise the doctrine to square with science. He sent first-quality lenses to princes, churchmen, and other scientists so they could see what he saw.

Galileo was blindsided by a pope he thought was his friend and churchmen who he thought were cultured and intelligent. Not so. The Jesuit brothers wrote him corroborating every point he claimed, without giving an inch of ground in Church belief. Church dogma held that all truth was found in the Bible. Behind that argument was the unspoken fact that ceding knowledge meant ceding power.

Tactfully, Galileo had presented his theories in Dialogues, in which three conversationalists argue for three theories: Aristotle’s, Ptolemy’s, and Copernicus’s. Galileo’s discoveries offered the first scientific proof for the radical ideas of Copernicus: that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe. It was not a new concept; a Greek philosopher had proposed it 18 centuries earlier. Yet for similar ideas Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.

For trying to be obedient to Rome, Galileo was spared Bruno’s fate. But he was condemned to house arrest for the rest of his life, forbidden to teach or disseminate his ideas.

Greco fails to provide us with the end of the story, the date on which the Catholic Church accepted heliocentrism. Wikipedia says Galileo’s Dialoguesremained on the Index of
Forbidden Books until 1835.

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Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up. Her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.