Galileo’s Dream

On 7th May of 1610 he wrote again to Vinta. He did not beat around the bush, but made it an explicit letter of application, a real piece of rhetoric. He requested a salary of a thousand florins a year, and sufficient free time to bring to completion certain works he had in progress. Glancing up at the dusty workbooks on the shelf to make sure he forgot nothing, he made a list of what he hoped to publish if he were given the time:

Two books on the system and constitution of the universe, an overarching conception full of philosophy, astronomy, and geometry; three books on local motion, an entirely new science, as no one else ancient or modern has discovered the many amazing properties that I demonstrate to exist in natural and forced motions, which is why I may call this a new science discovered by me from its first principles; three books on mechanics, two pertaining to principles and foundations, one on its problems-and though others have written on this same material, what has been written to date is not one-quarter of what I will write, either in quantity or otherwise. I have also various little works on physical subjects, such as On Sound and Voice, On Vision and Colours, On the Tides, On the Composition of the Continuum, On the Motion of Animals, and still more. I will also write on military science, giving not only a model of what a soldier ought to be, but also mathematical treatises on fortification, the movement of troops, sieges, surveying, estimating distances and artillery power, and a fuller description of my military compass,

-which is in fact my greatest invention, a single device that allows one to make all of the military calculations I have already mentioned plus also the division of lines, the solution of the Rule of Three, the equalization of money, the calculation of interest, proportional reduction of figures and solids, extraction of square and cube roots, identification of the mean proportionals, transformation of parallelepipeds into cubes, determination of proportional weights of metals and other substances, description of polygons and division of circumferences into equal parts, squaring of the circle or any other regular figures, taking the batter of scarps on walls-in short, an omni-calculator, able to make any computation you could want, despite which hardly anyone has noticed its existence, and even fewer bought one, so stupid is the common run of humanity!

-he did not add, and so moved on to his conclusion:

Finally, as to the title and the scope of my duties, I wish in

addition to the name of Mathematician that His Highness adjoin that of Philosopher. Whether I can and should have this title I shall be able to show Their Highnesses whenever it is their pleasure to give me a chance to deal with this in their presence with the most esteemed men of that profession,

-such as they are, being for the most part grossly overpaid Peripatetic idiots!

-he did not add.

Reading over the final flourishes, it seemed to him that the opportunities being offered to any potential patron were too brilliant to decline. What a great application! What prince could say no to such a thing?

And, in fact, on 24th May, 1610, a reply from Vinta came to the house behind the church of Santa Giustina, the house on Via Vignali where they had all lived and worked together for eighteen years. Grand Duke Cosimo, Vinta wrote, accepts your services.

Galileo wrote to accept the acceptance on 28th May. On 5th June Vinta wrote back, confirming that his title would be ‘Chief Mathematician of the University of Pisa and Philosopher to the Grand Duke’.

Galileo wrote back in turn, asking that his title be revised to ‘Mathematician and Philosopher to the Grand Duke’.

He also requested that he be absolved of any further obligation to his two brothers-in-law arising from defaults on dowry payments for his sisters. That would allow him to go home without the inconvenience of embarrassing lawsuits from those disgusting chisellers, or the possibility of arrest. He would go up to them in the streets and say to them, ‘I am mathematician and philosopher to the Grand Duke, go fuck yourselves.’

And all this was agreed to in his formal appointment of 10th July of 1610. The new service to Cosimo was to begin in October. It was understood to be a lifetime appointment.

He had a prince.

With the prospect of Galileo’s move to Florence, what had never been more than controlled chaos at Hostel Galileo now fell apart into utter chaos. Aside from the practical tasks, Galileo had to deal with a lot of hard feelings in Padua and Venice. Many of the Venetian pregadi were outraged to hear he was walking out on his acceptance of their recent offer, calling it gross ingratitude and worse. The procurator Antonio Priuli was particularly bitter: ‘I hope I never lay eyes on that ingrate again in my life!’ he was said to have shouted, and of course this was quickly reported to Galileo. And it wasn’t just Priuli; the anger was widespread. It was obvious Venice would never offer him employment again.

Galileo gritted his teeth and forged on with the chores of the move. This reaction was to be expected, it was just part of the price he had to pay to get patronage. It was a sign that the Venetians had valued him and yet taken advantage of him, and knew it and felt guilty about it, and as people would always rather feel angry than guilty, the transmutation of the one to the other had been easy. It had to be his fault.

He focused on practical matters. Merely boxing up the contents of the big house took weeks, and just at a time when his astronomical work was at a crucial point. Happily that was night work, so that no matter the loud and dusty tumble of days, he could always wake up after an evening meal and a nap, settle down on his stool, and make his observations through the long cool nights. This meant foregoing sleep, but as he had never been much of a sleeper anyway, often existing for months at a time on mere snatches, it did not really matter. And it was all too interesting to stop. ‘What must be done can be done,’ he would say hoarsely to Mazzoleni as he flogged them through the afternoons. ‘We can sleep when we’re dead.’ In the meantime he slept whenever it was cloudy.

The household therefore avoided him in the morning, when he was often abusive, and even at the best of times a bit befuddled and melancholy. He would throw things at anyone foolish enough to bother him in the couple of hours it took to pull himself together, and out of what looked like deep sleep he could kick with vicious accuracy.

Once up, groaning and yawning on his bed, he broke his fast on leftovers, then took a walk in his garden. Pulled a few weeds, plucked a lemon or a cluster of grapes, then went back in to face the day: the move, the correspondence, the students, the accounts, eating as he worked, wolfing down sugared ravioli or pork pies, washing it down with wine and cinnamon. At night everyone else would collapse into bed, while he went out to the terrazzo alone and made his observations, using spyglasses they had constructed back in the spring; there would be no more improvements made in them until he was settled in Florence.

And of course there was Marina to attend to. Ever since she had gotten pregnant, Galileo had provided her with the funds to rent and keep a little house on the Ponte Corvo, around the corner from his place, so that he could sometimes drop off the girls on the way to his lectures at Il Bo. Now Virginia was ten, Livia nine, and Vincenzio four. They had spent their whole lives between the two houses, the girls mostly in Galileo’s big place, being taken care of by the servants. Now decisions had to be made.

Galileo stumped down to the Ponte Corvo unhappily, readying himself for the inevitable tongue-lashing. He was a barrel of a man with a red beard and wild hair, but now he looked small. At moments like these he could not help remembering his poor father. Vincenzio Galilei had been the most hen-pecked pussywhipped pancake of a husband in the history of mankind; he had felt the lash daily, Galileo had seen it with his own eyes. Marina was nothing compared to the old dragon, who was an educated woman and knew just where to stick the knives. Indeed Giulia was even now a more fearful presence to Galileo than Marina, no matter Marina’s black gaze, her cobalt-edged tongue and thick right arm. He had heard so many harangues in his life that they simply bounced off him; he was an expert in them, a connoisseur, and there was no doubt in his mind that the old rolling pin was champion of the world. He recalled his father’s hung head, the tightness at the corners of his mouth-the way he would pick up his lute and hit its strings, playing double time and fortissimo, even though this only served as accompaniment to Giulia’s dread arias, which were louder by far than the lute-these scenes were all too clear in Galileo’s mind, if he did not avoid them.

And yet here he had gone and done the same thing as his dad: coupled with a younger woman; no doubt it led to some fundamental imbalance, or just the natural contempt of youth for age. In any case here was another Galilei about to get thrashed by a strong-armed woman, hesitating to knock at the door. Fearful to knock.

He knocked. She answered with a shout, knowing by the rap who it was.

He entered. She kept the place clean, there was no doubt of that. Perhaps she did it to emphasize the paucity of furniture, or the confusion and squalor of his place. She stood in the kitchen doorway wiping her hands, as beautiful as ever, even though the years had been hard on her. Black hair, black eyes, a face that still caught Galileo’s breath; the body he loved, her hand on her hip, washcloth flung over her shoulder.

‘I heard,’ she told him.

‘I figured you would.’

‘So-what now?’

She watched him, expecting nothing. It wasn’t like the time he had explained what their arrangement would be, sitting on the fondamenta in Venice with her five months pregnant. That had been hard. This was merely awkward and tedious. They hadn’t been in love for many years. She was seeing a man out near the docks on the canal, a butcher he thought it was. He had what he wanted. Still, that look, that time in Venice-it shot through into this time too, it was still there between them. He had a particular sensitivity to looks, no doubt the result of growing up with Medusa for a mother.

‘The girls will come with me,’ he said. ‘Vincenzio is too young, he still needs you.’

‘They all need me.’

‘I’m taking the girls to Florence.’

‘Livia won’t like it. She hates your place. It’s too loud for her, there are too many people.’

Galileo sighed. ‘It will be a bigger place. And I won’t be taking in students any more.’

‘So now you’re a court creature.’

‘I am the prince’s philosopher.’

She laughed. ‘No more compasses.’

‘That’s right.’

They both went silent, thinking perhaps about how his compass had been an ongoing joke between them.

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

‘Yes, of course. I’ll keep paying for this place. And I’ll need to see Vincenzio. In a few years he’ll need to move to Florence too. Maybe you can move to Florence then too, if you want.’

She stared at him. She could still flay him with a look; but the tightness at the corners of her mouth reminded him of his father, and he felt a stab of remorse, thinking that maybe now he was the Giulia. A horrible thought; but there was nothing for it but to nod and take his leave, the back of his neck crawling under the heat of that fiery gaze.

All during this time he continued to make his nightly observations, and to spread the word concerning the usefulness of his glass. Occhialino, visorio, perspicullum-different people called it different things, and he did too. He sent excellent glasses to the Duke of Bavaria, the Elector of Cologne, and Cardinal del Monte, among other nobles of court and church. He was now in the service of the Medicis, of course, but the Medici would want the capabilities of his glass advertised to as many of the powers in Europe as possible. And it was important to establish the legitimacy of what Galileo had reported in his book by having it confirmed in other places by influential figures. He had heard there were people like Cremonini refusing to look through a glass, and others claiming his new discoveries were merely optical illusions, artifacts of the instrument itself. Indeed he had suffered an unfortunate demonstration in Bologna, when he had tried to show the famous astronomer Giovanni Magini the Medicean stars, and only been able to see one himself; which may have been because three were behind Jupiter, but it was a hard case to make, especially with the odious Bohemian climber Martin Horky there smirking at every word, obviously delighted that things weren’t going as planned. Afterward he heard that Horky had written to Kepler telling him that the visorio was a fraud, useless for astronomy.

Kepler was experienced enough to ignore backstabbing by such a loathsome toad, but his characteristically long and incoherent letter in support of Galileo’s discoveries, published as a book for the world to read under the title Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo, was in some ways as bad as the Horky nonsense. Confusions from Kepler were nothing new, although up until this point they had always made Galileo laugh. One time for the entertainment of his artisans he had translated into Tuscan Kepler’s claim that the music of the spheres was a literal sound made by the planets, a six-note chord which moved from major to minor depending on whether Mars was at perihelia or aphelia. This idea made Galileo laugh so hard he could barely read. He wiped tears from his eyes as he went on: ‘The chapter’s title is “Which Planet Sings Soprano, Which Alto, Which Tenor, and Which Bass!” I swear to God! The greatest astronomer of our time! He admits he has no basis for this stuff except his own desire for it, and then concludes that Jupiter and Saturn must sing bass, Mars tenor, Earth and Venus alto, and Mercury soprano.’

‘But of course!’ The workshop gang then sang in their usual four-part harmony one of their rudest love songs, replacing all the usual girls’ names with ‘Venus’.

That was Kepler: a good source for jokes. Now, reading Kepler’s defence of his discoveries, Galileo felt an uneasiness that sharpened the further he read. Lots of people would read this book, but much of Kepler’s praise was so harebrained it cut both ways:

I may perhaps seem rash in accepting your claims so readily with no support from my own experience. But why should I not believe a most learned mathematician, whose very style attests to the soundness of his judgement? He has no intention of practising deception in a bid for vulgar publicity, nor does he pretend to have seen what he has not seen. Because he loves the truth, he does not hesitate to oppose even the most familiar opinions, and to bear the jeers of the crowd with equanimity.

What jeers of the crowd? For one thing there hadn’t been that many, and for another, Galileo did not bear them with equanimity: he wanted to kill every critic he had. He liked fights in the same way bulls are attracted to red-not because it looks like blood, or so they say, but because it has the colour of the pulsing parts of cows in heat. Galileo loved to fight like that. And so far he had never lost one. So equanimity had nothing to do with it.

Then further on in Kepler’s fatuous endorsement he asked what Galileo saw through his perspicillum when he looked at ‘the left corner of the face of the Man in the Moon,’ because it turned out that Kepler had a theory about that region, which he now propounded to the world-that a certain mark there was the work of intelligent beings who lived on the Moon, who must therefore have to endure days the equal of fourteen days on Earth. Kepler wrote,

Therefore they feel insufferable heat. Perhaps they lack stone for erecting shelters against the sun. On the other hand, maybe they have a soil as sticky as clay. Their usual building plan, accordingly, is as follows. Digging up huge fields, they carry out the earth and heap it in a circle, perhaps for the purpose of drawing out the moisture down below. In this way they may hide in the deep shade behind their excavated mounds and, in keeping with the sun’s motion, shift about inside, clinging to the shadow. They have, as it were, a sort of underground city. They make their homes in numerous caves hewn out of that circular embankment. They place their fields and pastures in the middle, to avoid being forced to go too far away from their farms in their flight from the sun.