The Ghost of Galileo

by J. L. Heilbron

  MW. Also, it is hard to credit that the young della Bella knew enough about Galileo’s work to put in the arrows and weights on the ground or the reference to the ships and the wharf.

  FC. No doubt, Sir Maurice, but I feel confident that the soul of the drawing came from della Bella. As an artist he was well acquainted with what I call the three-body problem: how to represent a triplet of people of unequal rank on the same canvas, say two saints and the Virgin or two laymen and a saint. There are very pertinent examples in Venetian painting that Galileo might have seen during the many years he spent in Padua. They are by a very famous trio of artists (there is not much space between them!) who sometimes worked together, Giorgione, Titian, and Sebastiano del Piombo.25

  MW. What were the trio’s solutions to the three-body problem?

  FC. From Titian I have in mind a painting you probably know. Van Dyck made a copy of it in Venice and later it hung in the king’s gallery. It celebrates a victory over the Turks by a Venetian fleet led by a bishop, Jacopo Pesaro, who was put in charge by Pope Alexander VI. The picture shows the pope presenting the kneeling bishop to St Peter seated on a throne. Between the saint and the prelates is an eloquent space expressing the difference in merit between them. Titian uses this space to depict a part of the fleet on its way to engage the Turks.

  MW. The gap of merit is well observed, Mr Cleyn. Now that you have me thinking in gaps, am I not right in recalling that you put two of them in your tapestry The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, between Christ and Peter and between Peter and the other apostles (see Figure 39)?

  FC. Well observed, Sir Maurice! The gap of merit in the painting by Sebastiano I am thinking of is a window through which the viewer sees a distant landscape. St Catherine and St John the Baptist make a group on one side of the window, the Virgin holding the child a single figure on the other. The third picture, by Giorgione and Sebastiano, offers an interesting variation. It depicts three philosophers. Since they enjoy the same level of being, no gaps occur between them; instead, the artists have individuated them by props and attitudes. One, a youth holding a T-square and drawing compasses, sits with his back to the other two, a tall man in oriental garb and an old man holding a paper covered with strange figures. What it all signifies no one knows for sure; for me it is enough to know it has no gaps of merit.

  MW. There are dozens of interpretations each more fanciful than the next: the Magi; Aristotle, Averroes, and Virgil; Archimedes, Ptolemy, and Pythagoras; Aristotle, Averroes, and Regiomontanus; Moses, Averroes, and a Christian; Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great.26

  JB. Too bad that chronology rules out Galileo’s trio Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Copernicus. If I understand you correctly, Mr Cleyn, the separation between Aristotle and Ptolemy, taken together, and Copernicus taken alone in della Bella’s description is to be read as a gap of merit.

  FC. That’s it, and that is not all. Della Bella drew Copernicus as an old man resembling Galileo: the gap thus separates ordinary mortals from the sublime mathematician–philosopher of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The editors of the Latin edition missed this subtlety and had the frontispiece redrawn, using the standard representation of Copernicus as a clean-shaven young man. The redrawing of the frontispiece by van der Heyden, which is based on Copernicus’s self-portrait, thus destroys what was almost certainly the original intent, to show Galileo with a gap of merit.

  JB. What you say, Mr Cleyn, fits well with the habit of astronomers of depicting themselves on their frontispieces as the latest adept of their science. So, if I remember correctly, Philipp Lansbergen places himself in his Tables of Celestial Motions after Aristarchus, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Albetagnius, and Tycho. To make clear that Lansbergen stands for Copernicus, he put in a sun-centered zodiac between his effigy and Tycho’s around which the earth revolves as if it were a roulette ball (Figure 61).27

  Figure 61 Frontispiece to Philipp Lansbergen, Tabulae motuum coelestium (1632).

  FC. Since I’ve gone this far, I’ll confide another of my reasons for considering della Bella’s rendition a play on threesomes. When I was in Denmark I worked on a program of the seven ages of man developed by Tycho’s disciple Longomontanus. From him I learned that no respectable astronomer believed in the old earth-centered system anymore, but that many accepted Tycho’s system rather than Copernicus’. Where is Tycho in Galileo’s Dialogue? Certainly not in the frontispiece, where he would have made up an awkward quartet both symbolically and graphically. The frontispiece puts a gap of merit between the ancients and Copernicus by omitting the major modern challenger to the world system Galileo championed.

  JB. I recall that in Kepler’s allegory of the history of astronomy, contained in his wonderful frontispiece to the tables he calculated using Tycho’s data, there are no gaps of merit, just equal spaces, between the representations of the major contributors to astronomical knowledge including Tycho (see Figure 23). Of course, and rightly, Kepler put himself in the series [seated, in the left-hand panel of the base of the gazebo]. Galileo did indeed load the dice in omitting Tycho from the inventors of world systems. But to return to our main question, which is not a gap in merit but in knowledge, who asked Greaves to bring Galileo’s book for inclusion in our painting?

  MW. Greaves cannot tell us since he died last year here in London. The parliamentary visitors to Oxford headed by that hothead Nathaniel Brent had ejected him from his professorship. That was not fair, but Brent was strong against monarchy. I think his sympathy with the Republic of Venice and his intimate familiarity with Sarpi’s Trent, which, as you may know, he translated into English, colored his mind. I was called in when Greaves took ill. He was incurably melancholic over his forced separation from Oxford. His appointment as Savilian Professor was the fulfillment of his dreams. He was just 50. But I can answer your question, John. I asked Greaves for the book after a conversation with your father, who wanted a symbol personal to you and, by an appropriate reference to the troubles of the time, also to him.

  JB. So the question becomes why he decided to refer to Galileo. No doubt he had several reasons. He seldom did anything if he could think of only one reason in its favor. He was a great lawyer.

  MW. One reason is obvious. Since you and I were then studying astronomy and reading the Sidereus nuncius, a reference to Galileo in a picture painted on your leaving the university would have commemorated your studies and interests. That would have been an ordinary gesture.

  JB. And it would also have commemorated Galileo, who died the year before I went up. Father would have had that in mind too. He admired Galileo for several reasons. He knew a lot about mechanical devices from his upbringing in Cumberland and from evaluating proposals for monopolies when he was Attorney General. He could appreciate Galileo’s work in transforming the Dutch spyglass into a practical instrument for military and commercial purposes. And for searching the heavens. Father took an interest in astronomy, not least because it supplied nice images for his legal arguments; he invented a complicated one when defending ship money that may have helped him win his case. He understood that Galileo had discovered something new about the size and complexity of the world and respected him for his courage in proclaiming it.

  MW. What then did Sir John make of Pope Urban’s condemnation of Galileo?

  JB. It gave him a problem. As a law-and-order judge, Father did not criticize Urban for disciplining Galileo in so far as he had violated an edict or injunction properly drawn up and served: but as a fair-minded man, he could not excuse Urban for exacting an unusual penalty, keeping Galileo under house arrest for so many years and then harrowing him beyond the grave.

  FC. Do popes claim jurisdiction in the afterlife? No wonder our recusants are so intractable!

  JB. No, I meant that Urban refused to allow the Florentines to give Galileo a suitable monument, or even a decent burial, because he had been “vehemently suspected of heresy.” He deserves a monument as great as Michelangelo’s, or perhaps he should share it if it is true that he inherited Miche
langelo’s soul.

  MW. Urban had exercised a similar after-death authority over Sarpi. The Venetian Senate wanted to raise a monument to him. Urban told their ambassador that it would be inappropriate to honor a man excommunicated by a pope. The senate did not think the matter important enough to go to battle with Rome and acquiesced, no doubt expecting to put up a proper statue one day. Anyway, Galileo and Sarpi created their own monuments. Sarpi’s Trent, which Sir Henry Wotton rated the best book on the subject ever written in Italian, ranks with Galileo’s Dialogue, which has a fair claim to being the greatest literary product of the Italian Renaissance.28

  JB. I know Sarpi’s book, not as Italian literature but as English propaganda. Father bought a copy of the 1640 edition of Brent’s translation. I cannot say that I have read it, but he did, all the way through. He liked to read the wittiest attacks on the papal establishment aloud, so I absorbed some of it. Curious that Urban reunited Galileo and Sarpi in that great gap in afterlife, Limbo!

  [Not until 1892 did the Venetian government think it expedient to raise a monument to Sarpi against continuing objections from Rome. Like the monument to Bruno, erected in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome in 1889, Sarpi’s bigger-than-life statue stands at the scene of his suffering, the foot of the bridge where the assassination attempt on him occurred. Appropriate anti-church speeches accompanied its unveiling. Galileo got his monument 155 years earlier—a proof that physics is less dangerous than history—opposite Michelangelo’s in Santa Croce. He came minus a few body parts removed by souvenir seekers. Sarpi’s remains wandered further than Galileo’s, in and out of monastery, church, library, and private home, and may probably be as widely distributed as fragments of the true cross.29]

  JB. I should add about my father’s interest in Galileo’s case that he very much approved of John Milton’s use of it in his pamphlet on the censorship of the press, which has some pompous Greek title, Areopagitica I think…

  FC. What does it mean?

  MW. It refers to an oration by an ancient Greek urging a return to government by aristocracy rather than by democracy, which he thought had failed. The title suggests the argument favored by all sides in our political debates: the way to mend is to return to the past. Thus Milton’s title, which suggests renovation, goes against his evocation of Galileo, the champion of innovation.

  JB. Milton’s essay was one of the last things my father was able to read. Although he sharply prosecuted people whose writings he considered seditious, he did not like the practice of censorship before publication, especially of matters having little or nothing to do with the royal prerogative. I remember his reading to me in Oxford Milton’s powerful image of “the famous Galileo, grown old a prisoner of the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensors thought.”30 My father must have taken Galileo as a symbol of legitimate questioning suppressed by improperly exercised authority.

  Ambiguities

  MW. Can it be that simple, John? If your father judged that Galileo’s behavior was seditious, then, as you said a minute ago, he would have thought punishment in order; Urban’s fault, if any, was its severity. Galileo may have suffered more than strict justice required, but that does not make him “a symbol of legitimate questioning.”

  JB. Galileo was an ambiguous figure for my father. As you say, he disapproved of Galileo’s disobedience to the order issued to him by his legitimate prince, Paul V, and the prince’s agent, Cardinal Bellarmine, to keep silent about world pictures. Father distinguished Galileo’s behavior from Sarpi’s. He admired Sarpi without reservation; in doing his best to undermine the Roman establishment, he was following the order of his prince, the doge.

  MW. But Sir John opposed the Crown in parliament and tried to change the king’s mind when Chief Justice. This was not quite doing his duty as you say he saw it.

  JB. Well, yes. The answer is tied up with the larger question of his ambivalence over Galileo. Like many open-minded men of his generation, he was content to leave politics and religion fuzzy. He recognized that the claims of royal prerogatives, parliamentary privileges, and the liberties of the people were fundamentally incompatible. When everyone forbore, the peace for which King James and King Charles were lauded stumbled on. The same sort of unstable equilibrium existed between the Arminian church and the Calvinists. Unfortunately, Laud had too weak a mind to be able to keep things fuzzy.

  MW. That is why when confrontation loomed each side insisted that it was merely trying to return to an earlier state of exemplary balance. That imaginary state, ill defined, obscured by time, was a perfect subject for fuzzy thinking.

  JB. A good illustration of the importance of forbearance is the religious behavior of the Stuart queens. Anna did not parade her Catholicism and King James did not make an issue of it. Henrietta Maria constantly flaunted hers and so helped to destroy her husband. During his pursuit of the Spanish match, James may have thought that his son would have no more trouble with a Catholic wife than he had.

  FC. Shall we add foreign policy and astrology to the list of items saved by fuzzy logic? Maybe King Charles’s foreign policy was not transparent enough to be fuzzy. The situation is clearer in astrology. I can believe that the sun and moon influence the growth of lettuce but not that the planets determine what I put in my salad. It is hard to know where to draw the line.

  JB. I am tempted to suggest an analogy between della Bella’s frontispiece, with its suggestive blurred figures, and the hardline version of van der Heyden. Della Bella’s version aligned with my father’s political philosophy, which was to avoid hard confrontations. He knew that the Roman establishment had made a big mistake in meeting Galileo’s challenge with its own hard line. The pope had a choice: he did not have to regard Galileo’s conduct as a sort of sedition. Certainly, the Roman establishment erred in invoking Scripture against him. Father agreed with Sarpi that the popes had the bad habit of ascribing their misuse of authority to the dictates of God.

  MW. Let me try to summarize what you have said, John, about your father’s attitude toward Galileo. As a lawyer and a judge worried about a nascent rebellion, he saw Galileo’s case as one of sedition; as an Englishman of the muddle-through school, he tried to dissuade people who insisted on challenging the fuzzy logic that underlay stable government in church and state; but, as an educated, just, and honest man, he thought that Galileo acted correctly, even bravely, in revealing what he had found that was useful to humankind and innocuous to true religion. That is the ambiguity, and the value, of Galileo’s image to thoughtful people.

  JB. I would add that my father did not find muddling attractive. In points of law and treasury receipts he could be painfully exact. He did not like the dissimulation muddling entailed, even though his hero Sarpi and Sir Maurice’s hero Bacon recommended the practice. Father would have liked to argue in constitutional questions like his friends Selden and Cotton; but he saw that he might be more effective after the removal of Buckingham by blunting rather than sharpening opposition. Also, despite its remoteness and draftiness, he preferred Corfe Castle to the Tower.

  MW. Politics is the art of the possible. Despite his occasional fulminations, King James understood this and avoided confrontation with humans by hunting animals. King Charles, Archbishop Laud, and my lamented patron the Earl of Strafford did not understand this; hence they left this world without their heads, while the English Solomon died intact in bed, perhaps, as it was rumored, with a helping hand from his dear Buckingham.

  FC. It seems to me that Sir John Bankes might have exploited Galileo’s image more effectively and without the least fuzziness as confirmation of Sarpi’s exposure of the power grabs of the Roman church. What a convenient club to beat popes with! I wonder that our divines have not made greater use of it.

  JB. Galileo was condemned in 1633, just when King Charles’s personal rule was stabilizing and his Catholic problem easing. I suppose that he did not want his prelates to undercut his policy toward Rome by pointing the les
son of Galileo’s continuing detention. And very probably the king regarded the disciplinary acts of the pope within his domains as legitimate if mistaken.

  FC. Yes, King Charles and Pope Urban were then on friendly terms. I do not like to claim too much for my profession, but art more than politics was the reason of their mutual amiability.

  JB. To say nothing of the influence of the queen and the papal agent Conn, who, to top the list of unlikely coincidences, was a friend and supporter of Galileo. My father had several conversations with Conn. He was a very witty and pleasant man and quite open about the ways of the court of Rome. So too was Bentivoglio, with whom Professor Greaves spent some time touring Rome. Their accounts almost make you feel sorry for people caught between their respect and friendship for Galileo and their obligation to their church and pope.

  MW. However, ministers opposed to King Charles’s flirtation with the pope and to Laud’s vision of the church would have had no scruples against brandishing what we may call the Club of Galileo against Romanism. But here again we confront an unexpected limit. Blockheads like Ross, who would apply Scripture to quash all innovation, would rather destroy Galileo than exploit him.

  JB. The implication, Sir Maurice, that people in the Protestant center are more likely to wield the Club of Galileo than those on the extremes is borne out in a book Bishop Duppa mentioned to me—I got to know him through Isham at Oxford. It is a verbose rambling around Proverbs 20:27: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the Belly.” The author was a Platonist, so he ignored the bit about the belly and interpreted the candle as human reason. He then castigated Rome for blowing out the candles. “[I]f a Galilaeus should but present the world with a handful of new demonstrations, though never so warily, and submissively, if he shall frame, and contrive a glasse for the discovery of more lights; all the reward he must expect from Rome, is, to rot in an Inquisition, for such unlicensed inventions, for such virtuous undertakings.”31 To tie things off, I should say that Bishop Duppa liked to use the telescope as a metaphor for reliable investigation.32