by Dava Sobel
“This morning I learned from our steward that you find yourself ill in Florence, Sire,” she wrote on August 17, “and because it sounds to me like something outside your normal behavior to leave home when you are troubled by your pains, I am filled with apprehension, and fear that you are in much worse condition than usual.
“Therefore I beseech you to give the steward some account of your state, so that, if you do not fare as badly as we fear, we can calm our anxious spirits. And truly I never resent living cloistered as a nun, except when I hear that you are sick, because then I would like to be free to come to visit and care for you with all the diligence I could muster. But even though I cannot, I thank the Lord God for everything, knowing full well that not a leaf turns without His willing it so.”
Pope Urban VIII suddenly took sick, too. He contracted the fever that ran epidemic through Rome that summer of 1623, and was compelled to postpone his coronation until late September.
Barberini coat of arms
Even without the official ceremony, Urban had commenced the exercise of his new powers immediately upon accepting the vote of the conclave, as was his right. On the very day of his election, August 6, he issued the bulls of canonization that made saints of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, the Jesuit founders, and also Philip Neri, “the Apostle of Rome.”
Within weeks, Urban VIII began appointing his brothers and nephews to potent positions in his new regime—inviting detractors to quip that the three bees on the family escutcheon had led former lives as horseflies. The opportunistic Barberini, after all, laid no prior claim to nobility or wealth. Nevertheless, the Barberini pope now commanded the respect of all Christian princes and princes of the Church. Urban turned his married brother, Carlo, into commander in chief of the papal armies and made a cardinal of Carlo’s erudite eldest son, Francesco. This new cardinal nephew was the same Francesco Barberini who had just earned his doctorate at Pisa, having been a favored student of Benedetto Castelli and, through him, of Galileo as well. No sooner had the twenty-six-year-old graduate become His Eminence and chief lieutenant to His Holiness than he also found himself elected a member in good standing of the Lyncean Academy.
On September 29, the day of Urban’s coronation, the new pope is said to have displayed the dramatic devotional style that characterized his memorable twenty-year tenure. As he prepared to receive the white papal robes and the velvet Shoes of the Fisherman, he threw himself before the altar in the Chapel of Tears. Prostrate, he prayed for death to take him the moment his pontificate veered from the good of the Church—if such a thing should ever happen, God forbid.
Then Urban consented to be carried in the silk-upholstered sedia gestatoria, the capacious portable throne flanked by ostrich feather fans, into Saint Peter’s Basilica, where the Sacred College of Cardinals installed him according to the ancient ceremony:
Receive this tiara adorned with three crowns; know that thou art the father of princes and kings, victor of the whole world under the earth, the vicar of our Lord, Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory and honor without end.
Compared with the elderly Paul and the sickly Gregory of recent memory, the fifty-five-year-old Urban cut a youthful, almost military, figure, especially when seen riding on horseback through the Vatican Gardens. If the pope resembled a general, he showed he could strategize like one, too. Indeed, history provoked him to use this talent repeatedly over the next two decades in the waging of wars for the defense of the Italian peninsula and the integrity of the Papal States.
Urban would also battle the Protestant Reformation, which still continued to erode the power of the Roman Church, by stepping up Catholic Reform measures in his own style. He foresaw improved ecclesiastical education and networks of foreign missions radiating from a Roman base.
“This is a city upon a hill,” Urban pronounced in announcing a thorough investigation of Rome’s own religious health, “which is exposed for the whole world to gaze upon.”
Urban intended also to gild and glorify the physical beauty of the Holy See with new building projects and monuments. Their construction would employ armies of architects, sculptors, and painters—and invent Urban’s reputation as a great patron of the arts. Upon hearing that a group of admirers had expressed the wish to commission a monument in the pope’s honor during his lifetime, instead of after his death as was customary, Urban affirmed: “Let them. I am not an ordinary Pope either.”
As bookish as he was bold, Urban peopled his curia with literati. He chose for his Master of Pontifical Ceremonies Monsignor Virginio Cesarini, Lyncean, who wrote acclaimed poetry and had pursued the study of mathematics after hearing an inspirational lecture by Galileo. It was from Cesarini that Galileo had received observations of the 1618 comets, and to Cesarini that Galileo addressed his ultimate reply to the Jesuit Father Grassi in The Assayer. Immediately upon this book’s long-awaited publication in Rome in late October 1623, Cesarini began reading it aloud to Urban at mealtimes.
Urban, who had studied under the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano, could not help admiring the style with which Galileo skewered Grassi, via “Sarsi,” on his similes: “I believe that good philosophers fly alone, like eagles,” Galileo said in The Assayer, “and not in flocks like starlings. It is true that because eagles are rare birds they are little seen and less heard, while birds that fly like starlings fill the sky with shrieks and cries, and wherever they settle befoul the earth beneath them.”
Charmed, Urban declared himself all eagerness for Galileo to come to see him. But the great Florentine philosopher remained ill through the autumn, and in the winter the harsh weather restrained him. While Urban awaited Galileo’s arrival, he continued to have Galileo’s words read aloud at table: “The crowd of fools who know nothing, Sarsi, is infinite. Those who know very little of philosophy are numerous. Few indeed are they who really know some part of it, and only One knows all.”
Pope Urban found his favorite passage from The Assayer in Galileo’s parable about the song of the cicada, which demonstrated the boundless creativity of God in the bounty of Nature. “Once upon a time, in a very lonely place,” this story began,
there lived a man endowed by Nature with extraordinary curiosity and a very penetrating mind. For a pastime he raised birds, whose songs he much enjoyed; and he observed with great admiration the happy contrivance by which they could transform at will the very air they breathed into a variety of sweet songs.
One night this man chanced to hear a delicate song close to his house, and being unable to connect it with anything but some small bird he set out to capture it. When he arrived at a road he found a shepherd boy who was blowing into a kind of hollow stick while moving his fingers about on the wood, thus drawing from it a variety of notes similar to those of a bird, though by quite a different method. Puzzled, but impelled by his natural curiosity, he gave the boy a calf in exchange for this flute and returned to solitude. But realizing that if he had not chanced to meet the boy he would never have learned of the existence of a new method of forming musical notes and the sweetest songs, he decided to travel to distant places in the hope of meeting with some new adventure.
As the man roved, he encountered songs made by “a bow . . . sawing upon some fibers stretched over a hollowed piece of wood,” by the hinges of a temple gate, by “a man rubbing his fingertip around the rim of a goblet,” and by the beating wings of wasps.
And as his wonder grew, his conviction proportionately diminished that he knew how sounds were produced; nor would all his previous experiences have sufficed to teach him or even allow him to believe that crickets derive their sweet and sonorous shrilling by scraping their wings together, particularly as they cannot fly at all.
Well, after this man had come to believe that no more ways of forming tones could possibly exist . . . he suddenly found himself once more plunged deeper into ignorance and bafflement than ever. For having captured in his hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise either by closing its mouth or stopping its
wings, yet he could not see it move the scales that covered its body, or any other thing. At last he lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw some thin hard ligaments beneath; thinking the sound might come from their vibration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But nothing happened until his needle drove too deep, and transfixing the creature he took away its life with its voice, so that he was still unable to determine whether the song had originated in those ligaments. And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created he used to answer tolerantly that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable.
This section of The Assayer delighted Urban with its graceful language and poetic conceit, and even more because it expressed his own philosophy of science. To wit: As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic—that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension.
[ X]
To busy myself
in your service
Galileo’s summertime illness of 1623 is the first of his infirmities to be documented in the surviving letters from his daughter. Although these offer no good clue, unfortunately, to the specific nature of Galileo’s disorder, they demonstrate clearly Suor Maria Celeste’s familiarity with his indifferent health, and how it preoccupied her. She hung on word of him, which arrived now from the steward, now from her uncle Benedetto Landucci. The first week of Galileo’s stay in Florence she prepared him a treat of marzipan shaped like little fish, and the second week, hearing he could hardly eat a bite of anything, she found four fresh plums to tempt his appetite. After he returned to Bellosguardo in September, she willingly helped him with his correspondence.
Galileo’s affliction compromised his handwriting, so that his extant papers include many documents penned in a small, cramped hand, with the lines on a steep slant up or down the page, as though their author were working lying down. (Galileo’s followers used his changeable penmanship as a clue to help establish chronological order among the welter of his undated papers, relying also on ink color, for he purchased different types in different cities, and any special characteristics of paper, such as the distinguishing rhinoceros watermark from the end of his Paduan period.)
Although Suor Maria Celeste often sacrificed neatness for speed in her own writing, she readily lent her stylish script to Galileo, as well as to the mother abbess, for whom she did not merely copy letters from drafts but composed them from scratch.
To begin, she enlarged the first letter of the first paragraph’s first word, as in an illuminated manuscript, and festooned the capital with loops and tails, turning her pen to vary the width of her strokes from a hair’s breadth to a broad ribbon. As her sentences flowed along to the right, she bent all the lowercase ds back over themselves in the opposite direction, hiding each small d circle beneath a huge canopy that might shade an entire word. Where the tip of a tall right-tilting letter met the top of a left-slanting d, she joined them in a pointed arch. Occasionally she decorated the heads of pages and the ends of paragraphs with flourishes, inserted extra ripples of squiggles into salutations and sign-offs, and on her envelopes she drew, more than wrote, the neighborhood— Bellosguardo—or city name—Rome, Florence, Siena—that sufficed for an address.
“Here is the copied letter, Sire,” Suor Maria Celeste complied with Galileo’s request on September 30, “along with the wish that it meet with your approval, so that at other times I may again be able to help you by my work, seeing as it gives me such great pleasure and happiness to busy myself in your service.”
She soon found another way to assist him, by sewing a set of table linens her father could use on his trip to Rome—for carrying food or spreading over tables at inns along the way—even though the press of her convent duties left her little if any free time. In addition to praying the Divine Office (the Liturgy of the Hours), the major daily occupation of the cloistered nuns, the Poor Clares at San Matteo worked long hours to sustain their ever-struggling economy. They grew a few fruits and vegetables to feed themselves, did all their own cleaning and cooking, and also produced articles for outside sale, such as fine embroidered handkerchiefs, lace, herbal medicines, and bread in the summertime, when it was too hot for anyone else to bake. The rough brown habits they wore, with black linen veil and knotted cord belt, never showed the dirt of their menial labors.
Maria Celeste’s letter of August 31, 1623
Suor Maria Celeste, muscially talented like most members of her family, also directed the choir from time to time and taught the novices how to sing Gregorian chant. In her capacity as the convent’s apothecary, she assisted the visiting doctor, fabricated remedies in pill or tonic form, and nursed the sick nuns in the infirmary, where Suor Arcangela often occupied a bed. Although Suor Maria Celeste, who spoke for both of them in her letters, never directly accused Suor Arcangela of malingering, she sometimes alluded to a hysterical component in her sister’s complaints. The younger daughter’s moodiness and taciturnity may have characterized her nature from childhood. Or the traits may have developed in reaction to cloistered life, which had been her father’s choice and not her own.
The arduous existence of the Poor Clares was described baldly by a contemporary of Suor Maria Celeste’s and Suor Arcangela’s— Maria Domitilla Galluzzi, who entered the house of the Clarisses in Pavia in 1616, and later wrote her own interpretation of the Rule of Saint Clare.
“Show her how we dress in vile clothing,” Maria Domitilla counseled any nun introducing a candidate for admission to the sisters’ way of life, “always go barefoot, get up in the middle of the night, sleep on hard boards, fast continually, and eat crass, poor, and lenten food, and spend the major part of the day reciting the Divine Office and in long mental prayers, and how all of our recreation, pleasure, and happiness is to serve, love, and give pleasure to the beloved Lord, attempting to imitate his holy virtues, to mortify and villify ourselves, to suffer contempt, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and other inconveniences for his love.”
Although the Council of Trent had specifically denounced the once common practice of forcing young women to take the veil, the percentage of patrician girls entering convents in Florence actually rose through the remainder of the sixteenth century and continued to increase on into the seventeenth. Whether or not Galileo’s daughters walked willingly into San Matteo, Suor Maria Celeste found her place there. The same cannot be said with certainty of Suor Arcangela. If she ever wrote a letter to her father, it has not been preserved.
On top of all her appointed tasks, Suor Maria Celeste voluntarily took up the sort of domestic work she would have performed for her father and brother had she lived in their home on Bellosguardo. Despite her distance, she insinuated herself between the two of them, always placating her father while pleading Vincenzio’s point of view in matters large or small.
“Vincenzio stands in dire want of new collars,” she informed Galileo in an undated letter,
even though he may not think so, as it suits him to have his used ones bleached as the need arises; but we are struggling to accommodate him in this practice, since the collars are truly old, and therefore I would like to make him four new ones with lace trim and matching cuffs; however, since I have neither the time nor the money to do this all by myself, I should like for you to make up what I lack, Sire, by sending me a braccio of fine cambric and at least 18 or 20 lire to buy the lace, which my lady Ortensa makes for me very beautifully; and because the collars worn nowadays tend to be large, they require a good deal of trimming for properly finishing them; moreover, seeing as Vincenzio has been so obedient to you, Sire, in always wearing his cuffs, I maintain, for that reason, he deserves to have handsome ones; and therefore do not be astonished that I ask for this much money.
The wide white collars Suor
Maria Celeste sewed, washed, and bleached for her father and brother frame Galileo’s face in every formal portrait painted of him. At home alone, however, tending his experiments or his grapevines, the shirtsleeved Galileo donned an old leather apron.
“I am ashamed that you see me in this clown’s habit,” he reportedly said to a group of distinguished visitors who arrived one afternoon to find him in his garden, in his work clothes. “I’ll go and dress myself as a philosopher.”
But he must have been jesting, for when the men asked Galileo why he didn’t hire someone to take over his manual labor, he replied: “No, no; I should lose the pleasure. If I thought it as much fun to have things done as it is to do them, I’d be glad to.”
This outdoor recreation tempered the concentration of Galileo’s scholarly work and kept him close to Nature. Though the time he spent in his kitchen garden, his orchard, and his vineyard restored his spirits, the hours took their toll on Galileo’s well-worn work garment, which he periodically sent to Suor Maria Celeste for repair.
MOST ILLUSTRIOUS AND BELOVED LORD FATHER
I AM RETURNING the rest of your shirts that we have sewn, and the leather apron, too, mended as best I could. I am also sending back your letters, which are so beautifully written that they have only kindled my desire to see more examples of them. Now I am tending to the work on the linens, so that I hope you will be able to send me the trim for borders at the ends, and I remind you, Sire, that the trimmings needs to be wide, because the linens themselves are rather short.
