Galileo's Daughter

by Dava Sobel

  Certainly Galileo owed a great debt to the intervention of young Ferdinando de’ Medici. He began to repay it with the special compliment of dedicating the Dialogue to the grand duke in a verbal bow—immediately preceding the crucial “Preface to the Discerning Reader” that Father Riccardi had stipulated.

  “These dialogues of mine revolving principally around the works of Ptolemy and Copernicus,” wrote Galileo to Ferdinando,

  it seemed to me that I should not dedicate them to anyone except Your Highness. For they set forth the teaching of these two men whom I consider the greatest minds ever to have left us such contemplations in their works; and, in order to avoid any loss of greatness, must be placed under the protection of the greatest support I know from which they can receive fame and patronage. And if those two men have shed so much light upon my understanding that this work of mine can in large part be called theirs, it may properly be said also to belong to Your Highness, whose liberal munificence has not only given me leisure and peace for writing, but whose effective assistance, never tired of favoring me, is the means by which it finally reaches publication.

  Meanwhile, the exhaustive process of printing the Dialogue wore on. By mid-August, when one-third of the pages had piled up, Galileo told friends in Italy and France that he hoped to see the rest finished by November. But it took even longer, so that a total of nine months passed from the start of printing to the book’s completion in February 1632. Its wordy title filled a page:

  Dialogue

  of

  Galileo Galilei, Lyncean

  Special Mathematician of the University of Pisa

  And Philosopher and Chief Mathematician

  of the Most Serene

  Grand Duke of Tuscany.

  Where, in the meetings of four days, there is discussion

  concerning the two

  Chief Systems of the World,

  Ptolemaic and Copernican,

  Propounding inconclusively the philosophical and physical reasons

  as much for one side as for the other.

  No written words of encouragement from Suor Maria Celeste sped Galileo through this last leg of publication—simply because father and daughter now lived in such proximity that they found no reason to write. A short walk took him from his front door to her parlor grille in minutes, and if he was too busy or too troubled by his pains, he could send La Piera with news and a basket of something. After Suor Maria Celeste addressed her last letter to Galileo at Bellosguardo on August 30,1631, she may have imagined she need never write to her father again. But his move did not end their correspondence. It merely introduced a pause that lasted almost one and one-half years—until early in 1633, when the shock wave initiated by the Dialogues publication boomeranged and shattered Galileo’s peace in Arcetri.

  At first, everything augured well for the book, which met with immense and immediate success. Galileo presented the first bound copy to the grand duke at the Pitti Palace on February 22, 1632. In Florence the book sold out as quickly as it entered the shops. Galileo also sent copies to friends in other cities, such as Bologna, where a fellow mathematician commented, “Wherever I begin, I can’t put it down.”

  Frontispiece of Galileo’s Dialogue; the three figures represent, from left to right, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Copernicus

  The copies destined for Rome, however, were held up until May on the advice of Ambassador Niccolini, who apologized that current Roman quarantine regulations required all shipments of imported books to be dismantled and fumigated—and no one wanted to see the Dialogue subjected to such treatment. Galileo got around this obstacle by sending several presentation copies into Rome via the luggage of a traveling friend, who distributed them to various luminaries including Francesco Cardinal Barberini. Galileo’s longtime confrere, Benedetto Castelli, now “Father Mathematician of His Holiness,” read one of these copies.

  “I still have it by me,” Castelli wrote to Galileo on May 29,1632, “having read it from cover to cover to my infinite amazement and delight; and I read parts of it to friends of good taste to their marvel and always more to my delight, more to my amazement, and with always more profit to myself.”

  A young and as yet unknown student of Castelli’s named Evangelista Torricelli* wrote Galileo in the summer of 1632 to say he had been converted to Copernicanism by the Dialogue. The Jesuit fathers with whom he had formerly studied, he told his new idol, had also taken great pleasure in the book, though naturally they could not corroborate the opinions of Copernicus.

  Some Jesuit astronomers, however, especially Father Christopher Scheiner, the “Apelles” who claimed to have discovered sunspots before Galileo, reacted violently to the Dialogue. Scheiner’s own latest book, the long-delayed Rosa Ursina, which finally appeared in April 1631, had lambasted Galileo with offensive language. Now Scheiner was living in Rome, having learned to speak Italian, and he harangued Father Riccardi to have the Dialogue banned. On top of the anger he had apparently stewed in his breast since the sunspot debate two decades earlier, Scheiner felt newly annoyed by what he inferred to be a fresh personal slander against him in Galileo’s book.

  Soon the Dialogue provoked Pope Urban’s ire as well. It came to his attention at a most inopportune moment, when his profligate spending on war efforts was well on its way to doubling the papal debt, and when his fears of Spanish intrigue against him had reached new heights of paranoia. At a private consistory Urban had held with the cardinals on March 8,1632, the Vatican ambassador to Spain, Gaspare Cardinal Borgia, had openly censured the pontiff’s failure to back King Philip IV in the Thirty Years’ War against the German Protestants. The pope’s behavior, Cardinal Borgia charged, evinced his inability to defend the Church—even his unwillingness to do so. Hasty efforts by Urban’s family cardinals to silence the Spanish sympathizer almost came to physical blows before the Swiss Guard entered the chamber to restore order.

  Fearing poison, Urban secluded himself at Castel Gandolfo, a lakeside papal vacation retreat thirteen miles southeast of Rome. He suspected Spanish-controlled military maneuvers in Naples of being aimed at him, and he imagined that the grand duke of Tuscany, any day now, would sail his navy into the papal ports of Ostia and Civitavecchia, in retribution for Urban’s appropriating Medici holdings in Urbino.

  Although Florentine himself, Urban had encroached on Medici property early in his pontificate, in 1624, by laying unlawful claim to land Ferdinando was due to inherit from the elderly and infirm Francesco della Rovere, the duke of Urbino. Pope Urban decided that the duke’s death would leave Urbino a vacant fief, which he could annex to the states of the Church. But Ferdinando’s aunt Caterina de’ Medici, formerly the duchess of Urbino, had long ago left the territory to Ferdinando’s family in her will. Also Ferdinando’s bride-to-be, to whom he had been betrothed when he was twelve and she an infant in arms, was Vittoria della Rovere, the granddaughter and only heir of the aging duke. The primary purpose of the couple’s long-standing engagement had been to secure the Duchy of Urbino for the House of Medici. These particulars, however, did not stop Urban from marching the papal troops into Urbino, poised to take possession. After Francesco della Rovere finally died in 1631, Ferdinando and Vittoria (still a child living in the Florentine convent of the Crocetta) had lost the land to Pope Urban.

  When Galileo’s book arrived in Rome in the summer of 1632, Urban could take no time to read it. Anonymous advisers judged it for him, however, as an egregious insult. Galileo’s enemies in Rome, whose number was legion, saw the Dialogue as a scandalous glorification of Copernicus. And the pope, already loudly accused of flagging Catholic zeal on the battlefronts of Europe, could not allow a new affront to go unpunished.

  In August His Holiness, stung by inflammatory remarks insisting Galileo had played him for a fool by allowing Simplicio to espouse Urban’s philosophy, convened a three-man commission to reexamine the text of the Dialogue. “We think that Galileo may have overstepped his instructions by asserting absolutely the Earth’s motion
and the Sun’s immobility, thus deviating from hypothesis,” these commissioners said in their September report to the pope. “One must now consider how to proceed, both against the person and concerning the printed book.”

  Ambassador Niccolini and the grand duke’s secretary of state, who kept up a flurry of secret diplomatic correspondence during these developments, agreed morosely that “the sky seemed about to fall.” “I feel the Pope could not have a worse disposition toward our poor Signor Galilei,” the ambassador wrote on September 5, recounting the results of a papal audience conducted "in a very emotional atmosphere,” during which Urban had “exploded into great anger” and then railed on “with that same outburst of rage.”

  “When His Holiness gets something into his head, that is the end of the matter,” wrote Niccolini, speaking from unpleasant experience, “especially if one is opposing, threatening, or defying him, since then he hardens and shows no respect to anyone. . . . This is really going to be a troublesome affair.”

  Before the end of September, an official order reached the inquisitor at Florence, announcing that the Dialogue could no longer be sold (though it was already sold out) and demanding that the author appear before the Holy Office of the Inquisition during the month of October.

  Galileo applied for leniency to Francesco Cardinal Barberini, his most powerful friend, although these harsh commands had actually issued from the pope’s brother Antonio, called Cardinal Sant’ Onofrio. Would Urban VIII please excuse the aged, unwell Galileo from traveling to Rome—especially now that plague was breaking out again in Florence? And, given the fact that the Dialogue had gone through proper channels to receive official approval from all the relevant authorities, couldn’t Galileo respond in writing to any objection now raised against it?

  No. And no. The most the angry pontiff would concede was that Galileo might travel to Rome in comfort and at his own pace, but come he must. And soon. Already, delays caused by his jockeying for appeals had swallowed the whole month of October, and Galileo would lose at least another twenty to forty days quarantined at some midway point—Siena perhaps—before being allowed into Rome.

  November found Galileo sick in bed, however, too ill to go anywhere. The pope fumed, especially as the illness wore on into December, when the Florentine inquisitor paid a house call on Galileo at Arcetri. There, a panel of three prominent doctors, including Galileo’s friend and personal physician Giovanni Ronconi, signed an affidavit on December 17, listing a long series of ailments: intermittent pulse indicating the general weakness of declining years, frequent vertigo, hypochondriacal melancholy, weakness of the stomach, diverse pains throughout the body, serious hernia with rupture of the peritoneum. In short, to move him would put his life in jeopardy.

  The inquisitors dismissed the report in disbelief. Galileo could come to Rome of his own free will, they decreed, or he could be arrested and dragged there in irons. Grand Duke Ferdinando, powerless to oppose the will of the pope in this case, eased Galileo’s way by once more lending him a litter and a servant to attend him on his journey.

  Fully cognizant of the gravity of his circumstances, the sixty-eight-year-old Galileo made out his will and wrote a long, rueful letter to his friend Elia Diodati in Paris shortly before leaving Arcetri. “I am just now going to Rome,” this letter of January 15, 1633, said in part,

  whither I have been summoned by the Holy Office, which has already prohibited the circulation of my Dialogue. I hear from well-informed parties that the Jesuit Fathers have insinuated in the highest quarters that my book is more execrable and injurious to the Church than the writings of Luther and Calvin. And all this although, in order to obtain the imprimatur, I went in person to Rome and submitted the manuscript to the Master of the Sacred Palace, who looked through it most carefully, altering, adding, and omitting, and, even after he had given it the imprimatur, ordered that it should be examined again at Florence. The reviser here, finding nothing else to alter, in order to show that he had gone through it carefully, contented himself with substituting some words for others, as, for instance, in several places, “Universe” for “Nature,” “quality" for "attribute,” “sublime spirit” for “divine spirit,” excusing himself to me for this by saying he foresaw that I should have to do with fierce foes and bitter persecutors, as has indeed come to pass.

  PART FOUR

  In Care of

  the Tuscan

  Embassy,

  Villa Medici,

  Rome

  [XXI]

  How anxiously

  I live,

  awaiting word

  from you

  There was only one trial of Galileo, although legends—even experts and encyclopedias—often speak of two, erroneously counting Galileo’s 1616 encounter with Cardinal Bellarmino as a preliminary trial, leading up to the second, more sustained interrogation of 1633 that left Galileo kneeling before his inquisitors, or in a dungeon by some accounts, or even in chains.

  There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand—the suppression of science by religion, the defense of individualism against authority, the clash between revolutionary and establishment, the challenge of radical new discoveries to ancient beliefs, the struggle against intolerance for freedom of thought and freedom of speech. No other process in the annals of canon or common law has ricocheted through history with more meanings, more consequences, more conjecture, more regrets.

  The confusion over Galileo’s trial—whether one or two actually took place, and when—derives from the abstruse nature of the trial itself. There was only one trial of Galileo, in the spring of 1633, but at least half of the evidence and most of the testimony involved contested events of 1616.

  The trial testimony, which survives thanks to careful recording at the time, accentuates the alienation between accuser and accused by its very choice of language: The transcript summarizes the prosecutor’s inquiries in Latin in the third person, so that the questions on paper assume a quasi-historical cast (“By what means and how long ago did he come to Rome?”), while the defendant’s responses ring small and meek in first-person Italian (“I arrived in Rome the first Sunday of Lent and I came in a litter”). Thus, although the recitative is marked Q and A throughout, the two parts refuse to blend. The text of the courtroom drama continually jars the reader by presenting two speakers staged as though to engage one another, while each pursues his own stream of consciousness.

  After Galileo left Arcetri for Rome on January 20, 1633, he spent nearly two weeks traveling and then passed another two weeks detained near Acquapendente in quarantine—in uncomfortable quarters, with nothing to eat but bread and eggs with wine—so that he entered the Holy City on Sunday night, February 13.

  Urban could have had him jailed immediately, but instead, in a respectful gesture to Grand Duke Ferdinando and in deference to Galileo’s frail health, the pope allowed him to stay at the Tuscan embassy, next door to the Church of the Trinita del Monte, where he had lodged comfortably during previous visits. His hosts, Francesco and Caterina Niccolini, welcomed Galileo as their honored guest and tried to mitigate the gravity of his circumstances with the warmth of their hospitality.

  Rome in 1596

  Ambassador Niccolini had been intimately involved in the prelude to Galileo’s current predicament, having pled his case with Father Riccardi, with Francesco Cardinal Barberini, and on several occasions with Pope Urban at the peak of his spleen. The ambassador had succeeded in learning as much as could be expected, given the fact, as he explained to his superiors in Tuscany, that “we are dealing with the Congregation of the Holy Office, whose goings-on are so secret and none of whose members opens his mouth because of the censures that are in force.”

  Now, with Galileo in his house awaiting God only knew what fate, Niccolini continued visiting various cardinals and trying to help his old friend in every way he could imagine. Galileo did not go along on these excursions but stayed at the embassy, under orders from Cardinal Barberini to seclud
e himself for his own protection. The only person who called on Galileo was a certain Monsignor Lodovico Serristori, a consultant to the Holy Office.

  The Villa Medici in Rome

  “The latter has come twice,” Niccolini observed at the end of Galileo’s first week in residence, “claiming to be acting on his own and to want to visit; but he has always mentioned the trial and discussed various details, and so I believe one may be certain he has been sent to hear what Signor Galilei says, what his attitude is, and how he defends himself, so that they can then decide what to do and how to proceed. These visits seem to have comforted this good old man by encouraging him and giving him the impression that they are interested in his case and in what decisions are being taken. Nevertheless, sometimes this persecution seems very strange to him.”

  Niccolini, whose ingenuous, meticulous letters to the Tuscan secretary of state over the next two months constitute a summary of the pretrial hearings, told his houseguest everything he knew. From the files of the Holy Office, an ominous document had surfaced that some considered sufficient to ruin Galileo. The paper dated from his visit to Rome of December 1615 through June 1616—long before Ferdinando had become grand duke, before Niccolini had been named ambassador, before Urban was elected pope.