Galileo's Daughter

by Dava Sobel

  FROM SAN MATTEO, THE 10TH DAY OF DECEMBER 1633.

  Your most affectionate daughter,

  Here she was rushing to get her last letter to her father into the hands of Signor Francesco Lupi, Suor Maria Vincenzia’s brother-in-law, before his litter rumbled off to Rome by way of Siena. Although the Niccolinis could not accompany Galileo back to Arcetri as they had intended, Galileo indeed returned by the end of the week. Grand Duke Ferdinando came in person to II Gioiello to welcome him back and stayed to visit for two hours. They spoke of life and honor, and how Galileo had preserved his against formidable odds, to become even more esteemed in his patron’s eyes. If Ferdinando’s fidelity to Galileo had fluttered briefly during the trial in response to Urban’s threats, the future would find him a more steadfast friend.

  On December 17, Galileo wrote a formal letter of thanks to his most highly placed supporter in Rome, Francesco Cardinal Barberini:

  I have always taken special note of how affectionately Your Eminence has empathized with me in the events that befell me, and I especially recognize the value of your intercession in ultimately securing for me the grace of my being allowed to return to the quiet of my villa, precisely as I wanted to do. This and a thousand other kindnesses, all originating from your benign hand, confirm in me the wish, no less than the obligation, to always serve and revere Your Eminence, whenever it may please you to honor me with your command: not having such an order from you at the moment, I render the requisite thanks for the favor received, which I so fervently desired; and with the most respectful love I bow to you and kiss your robe, wishing you every happiness this most holy Christmas.

  In truth Galileo was not so much home now as under perpetual house arrest. Later he would dateline his letters, “From my prison in Arcetri.” He was forbidden to receive any visitors who might discuss scientific ideas with him. Nor could he go anywhere except to the neighboring convent, where the private reunion with his daughters revealed the true emotional cost to Suor Maria Celeste of the long, anxious separation. She had been frequently ill, he discovered, but had paid too little attention to herself.

  Galileo might have expected her to regain her stamina now in the relief of his repatriation and the sudden respite from responsibility for his affairs. But instead she grew weaker.

  “Most of all I am distressed by the news of Suor Maria Celeste,” Niccolo Aggiunti wrote from Pisa when Galileo told him of her condition. “I know the fatherly and daughterly affection which exists between you; I know the lofty intellect, and the wisdom, prudence, and goodness with which your daughter is endowed, and I know of no one who in the same way as she remained your unique and gentle comforter in your tribulations.”

  Unsigned, undated portrait thought to be of Suor Maria Celeste

  For months she had dropped all talk of entering the other life, to focus only on having her father return to his home and their life together. But now it seemed that both those prayers might be answered simultaneously.

  In the weakened state she had described so often, Suor Maria Celeste easily succumbed to one of the many contaminants in the food or water supply. Toward the end of March 1634, she fell gravely ill with dysentery. From the moment she took sick, Galileo walked from II Gioiello to San Matteo every day, trying to hold on to her with love and prayer. The disease cursed her with intense, unremitting abdominal pain. Her inflamed intestines evacuated fluids indiscriminately, some blood along with the vital water, until she became dehydrated. The tiny amounts of broth she could swallow would not revive her, and finally the whole balance of her body tipped against her heart. Despite the best efforts of Doctor Ronconi and Suor Luisa to save her, she died during their vigil on the second night of April.

  Galileo’s grief felled him. For months he sought his only solace in reading religious poems and dialogues.

  “The death of Suor Maria Celeste still tears at my heart,” the ambassadress Caterina Niccolini said in condolences sent from Rome on April 22, “like the love I bore her on account of her most virtuous nature, as well as those traits she inherited from Your Lordship, with whom I sympathize completely in this torment and in all else you have suffered.”

  The archbishop of Siena apologized that he could find no words to console his friend on the loss of such a daughter, but he tried to nevertheless, and he counseled Galileo to summon all his forbearance and strength for this current trial. “I have known for a long time that she was the greatest good Your Lordship had in this world,” the archbishop wrote, “and of such towering personal importance as to merit more than paternal love. But her having employed her spirit in the service of the next life now grants her the privilege of that singular charity, enabling her to transcend our human plight, so that she deserves to be envied rather than pitied.”

  Geri Bocchineri rued the irony that Suor Maria Celeste, truly worthy of living for centuries, had followed the all too human course of dying young. “A father who turns his tender love toward a most virtuous, most reverent daughter,” Signor Geri wrote Galileo, “cannot deny himself the full expression of his loss at her departure; of necessity, his tears must fall. But Your Lordship can cherish the hope that a maiden so good and holy will make her way straight to the Lord God, and pray for you there before Him, and so you may reconcile yourself to that encounter, and be consoled, rather than rail against the death that has placed her in Heaven, for I believe we will need to entreat her far more than she will ever need our prayers. Always have I admired and esteemed her, and never once did I leave her presence without feeling edified, moved, contrite. Surely blessed God has already gathered her into His arms.”

  As Galileo received the comfort of these words, he still suffered the effects of his physical frailties, including the aggravation of his hernia. These problems mixed with his unhappiness to produce an irregular pulse and heart palpitations.

  “I feel immense sadness and melancholy,” Galileo confided to Signor Geri at the end of April, “together with extreme inappetite; I am hateful to myself, and continually hear my beloved daughter calling to me.”

  Galileo’s son, Vincenzio, chose this difficult moment to make his own pilgrimage to the Casa Santa in Loreto, and from there to assume a series of law clerkships outside Florence, against his father’s objections.

  “I do not think it proper that Vincenzio should leave me for his travels,” the bereft father complained to Signor Geri, “since from one hour to the other something might happen which would make his presence useful, because in addition to all this [mourning and sickness] a perpetual sleeplessness makes me afraid.”

  In July, in a letter to Elia Diodati in Paris, Galileo explained Suor Maria Celeste’s death in the context of his punishment and limited future:

  I stayed five months at Siena in the house of the archbishop; after which my prison was changed to confinement to my own house, that little villa a mile from Florence, with strict injunctions that I was not to entertain friends, nor to allow the assembling of many at a time. Here I lived on very quietly, frequently paying visits to the neighboring convent, where I had two daughters who were nuns and whom I loved dearly, but the eldest in particular, who was a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me. She had suffered much from ill health during my absence, but had not paid much attention to herself. At length dysentery came on, and she died after six days’ illness, leaving me in deep affliction. And by a sinister coincidence, on returning home from the convent, in company with the doctor who had just told me her condition was hopeless and she would not survive the next day, as indeed came to pass, I found the Inquisitor’s Vicar here, who informed me of a mandate of the Holy Office at Rome that I must desist from asking for grace or they would take me back to the actual prison of the Holy Office. From which I can infer that my present confinement is to be terminated only by that other one which is common to all, most narrow, and enduring forever.

  Into Galileo’s morbid house at this juncture, his widowed sister-in-law, Anna Chiara Galilei, brought
three daughters and her youngest son, Michelangelo, only to perish there with them during a brief reprise of the plague in 1634. Then Galileo, in his loneliness, invited another son of Anna Chiara’s to stay with him—Alberto, Suor Maria Celeste’s “adorable little Albertino,” who now worked as violinist and lutenist to the elector in Germany. The two men comforted each other for a time at II Gioiello until Alberto went back to Munich to marry.

  Now there was nothing for Galileo to do but lose himself in his work. In August he resumed active correspondence with fellow mathematicians, and in the autumn he reopened the unfinished manuscript for Two New Sciences.

  [XXXII]

  As I struggle

  to understand

  The experience of resuming with Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio— at age seventy—the topics that had engaged him since his first awakening as a philosopher doubly challenged Galileo. On the one hand, his ever-accumulating wisdom helped him regard certain ancient concepts in fresh ways, and this delayed his bringing the long unfinished work to closure even now. “The treatise on motion, all new, is in order,” he wrote to an old friend in Venice, “but my unquiet mind will not rest from mulling it over with great expenditure of time, because the latest thought to occur to me about some novelty makes me throw out much already found there.”

  On the other hand, his accumulated years hampered the alacrity of his thought. “I find how much old age lessens the vividness and speed of my thinking,” Galileo wrote Elia Diodati while completing Two New Sciences, “as I struggle to understand quite a lot of things I discovered and proved when I was younger.”

  But where and how would he publish the product of all this effort? Certainly not in Rome or Florence. Shortly before Galileo returned to Arcetri, Pope Urban had issued a companion warning to the banning of the Dialogue, outlawing the reprinting of any of Galileo’s earlier books. This action ensured that Galileo’s works would gradually die out in Italy, where the Holy Office exerted its greatest influence.

  “You have read my writings,” Galileo complained of the prohibition against him to another correspondent in France,

  and from them you have certainly understood which was the true and real motive that caused, under the lying mask of religion, this war against me that continually restrains and undercuts me in all directions, so that neither can help come to me from outside nor can I go forth to defend myself, there having been issued an express order to all Inquisitors that they should not allow any of my works to be reprinted which had been printed many years ago or grant permission to any new work that I would print . . . a most rigorous and general order, I say, against all my works, omnia edita et edenda [everything published and everything I might have published in the future]; so that it is left to me only to succumb in silence under the flood of attacks, exposures, derision, and insult coming from all sides.

  Galileo’s friend Fra Fulgenzio Micanzio, theologian to the Venetian republic, thought he could get around the pontifical warnings to see Two New Sciences published in the more liberal atmosphere at Venice. Fra Micanzio soon discovered in preliminary conversations with the Venetian inquisitor, however, that Galileo faced the same obstacles there as in any other Italian duchy or papal state— that even the Credo or the Lord’s Prayer might well be refused a printing license if Galileo were the one to seek it.

  There ensued a multinational effort among Galileo’s supporters to find a printer somewhere who could translate and safely publish Two New Sciences. Geneva-born Parisian Elia Diodati hoped at first to see this happen in France, in the city of Lyons, the home of Galileo’s distant relative Roberto Galilei, a businessman who facilitated all French correspondence with the Italian scientist. However, Galileo soon had another offer of publication help in 1635 from an Italian engineer working for the Holy Roman Emperor and eager to have Two New Sciences printed in Germany. Grand Duke Ferdinando voluntarily lent his aid to this plan commissioning his brother Prince Mattia, who was conveniently just leaving for Germany on a military mission, to hand-deliver sections of the contraband manuscript to Galileo’s contact there. Alas, Father Christopher Scheiner, the Jesuit astronomer formerly known as “Apelles,” had returned to Germany by this point, strengthening the anti-Galileo feelings in that country and making the licensing of the new book there highly unlikely.

  Engraving of Galileo by Francesco Zucchi

  At the end of various intrigues, Diodati found Galileo a Dutch publisher, Louis Elzevir, who visited him at II Gioiello in May of 1636 to settle their agreement. (Although Galileo was now technically forbidden to receive visitors, Elzevir numbered among several distinguished foreign callers, including philospher Thomas Hobbes, who came after reading an unauthorized English translation of the Dialogue, and poet John Milton.*) Fra Micanzio in Venice, who knew both parties to the publishing contract, volunteered to serve as conduit between Arcetri and Holland; this gave the old theologian the pleasure of reading Two New Sciences in installments as each finished part reached him.

  “I see that you took the trouble to transcribe these in your own hand,” Fra Micanzio once remarked with surprise upon receipt of certain pages, “and I don’t see how you can stand it, for to me it would be absolutely impossible.”

  While Galileo refined the main themes, he also expanded the content of the book to include some seemingly unrelated sections. After all, who knew when he would ever secure another opportunity to publish anything?

  “I shall send as soon as possible this treatise on projectiles,” Galileo promised in December 1636 while finalizing Day Four of Two New Sciences, “along with an appendix [twenty-five pages long] on some demonstrations of certain conclusions about the centers of gravity of solids, found by me at the age of 22 after two years of study of geometry, for it is good that these not be lost.”

  In June of 1637, Galileo sent off the last pieces of dialogue for Two New Sciences, which ended with Sagredo’s hopeful allusion to other discussion meetings the trio might enjoy “in the future.” Printing began at Leiden, Holland, that fall, and the published volume came out the following spring.

  John Milton visiting Galileo at II Gioiello

  Safe in a Protestant country, the Dutch publisher feared no reprisal from the Roman Inquisition. Galileo, however, remaining vulnerable in Arcetri, claimed ignorance of the book’s publication until the ultimate moment. Even in his dedicatory note to French ambassador Francois de Noailles, he feigned surprise at how his manuscript had found its way to a foreign printing press. “I recognize as resulting from Your Excellency’s magnanimity the disposition you have been pleased to make of this work of mine,” Galileo wrote in a preface dated March 6, 1638,

  notwithstanding the fact that I myself, as you know, being confused and dismayed by the ill fortune of my other works, had resolved not to put before the public any more of my labors. Yet in order that they might not remain completely buried, I was persuaded to leave a manuscript copy in some place, that it might be known at least to those who understand the subjects of which I treat. And thus having chosen, as the best and loftiest such place, to put this into Your Excellency’s hands, I felt certain that you, out of your special affection for me, would take to heart the preservation of my studies and labors. Hence, during your passage through this place on your return from your Roman embassy, when I was privileged to greet you in person (as I had so often greeted you before by letters), I had occasion to present to you the copy that I then had ready of these two works. You benignly showed yourself very much pleased to have them, to be willing to keep them securely, and by sharing them in France with any friend of yours who is apt in these sciences, to show that although I remain silent, I do not therefore pass my life in entire idleness.

  I was later preparing some other copies, to send to Germany, Flanders, England, Spain, and perhaps also to some place in Italy, when I was notified by the Elzevirs that they had these works of mine in press, and that I must therefore decide about the dedication and send them promptly my thoughts on that subject. From this unexpect
ed and astonishing news, I concluded that it had been Your Excellency’s wish to elevate and spread my name, by sharing various of my writings, that accounted for their having come into the hands of those printers who, being engaged in the publication of other works of mine [Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina], wished to honor me by bringing these also to light at their handsome and elaborate press. . . . Now that matters have arrived at this stage, it is certainly reasonable that, in some conspicuous way, I should show myself grateful by recognizing Your Excellency’s generous affection. For it is you who have thought to increase my fame by having these works spread their wings freely under an open sky, when it appeared to me that my reputation must surely remain confined within narrower spaces.

  Around the same time he wrote this fictitious scenario, Galileo appealed to the Holy Office for permission to seek medical treatment in Florence. Urban’s brother Antonio Cardinal Sant’ Onofrio, sternly denying this request via the Florentine inquisitor, ruled that Galileo had not described his illness in enough detail to be granted such an indulgence. Furthermore, the cardinal imagined, “Galileo’s return to the city would give him the opportunity of having meetings, conversations, and discussions in which he might once again let his condemned opinions on the motion of the Earth come to light.”

  Galileo’s failing health forced him to persist in this pursuit, however, and after he submitted to a surprise medical examination demanded by the Inquisition, he won the right to repair temporarily to Vincenzio’s house on the Costa San Giorgio. On March 6 Cardinal Sant’ Onofrio told the inquisitor at Florence that Galileo “may let himself be moved from the villa at Arcetri, where he now is, to his house in Florence in order to be cured of his maladies. But I give Your Eminence orders that he must not go out into the city and not have public or secret conversations at his house.”