Galileo’s Dream

Galileo read a manuscript of this letter, given to him by Salviati to show him what was being circulated, and cursed at every sentence. ‘The heaviness of stone! This is stupid!’

Who wants the human mind put to death? he wrote angrily to Salviati. Who is going to claim that everything in the world which is observable and knowable has already been seen and discovered?

People were afraid of change. They seized on Aristotle because he said that above the sky there was no change; thus, if you died and went there, you would not change either. He wrote to the astronomer Mark Welser, I suspect that our wanting to measure the universe by our own little yardstick makes us fall into strange fantasies, and that our particular hatred of death makes us hate fragility. If that which we call corruption were annihilation, the Peripatetics would have some reason for being such staunch enemies of it. But if it is nothing else than a mutation, it does not merit so much hatred. I don’t think anyone would complain about the corruption of the egg if what results from it is a chick.

Change could be growth, in other words. It was intrinsic to life. And so these religious objections to the changes he saw in the sky were stupid. But they were also dangerous.

So he wrote weekly to Vinta, asking him to ask the bighearted brilliant splendiferous grandissimo Grand Duke to send him to Rome, so he could explain his discoveries. Eventually Galileo convinced Vinta that a visit could do no harm, indeed could add to the lustre of his prince’s reputation. The trip was therefore approved; but then Galileo fell ill again. For two months he suffered such headaches and fevers that there was no question of travel.

He recuperated at Salviati’s villa. ‘I’m embroiled in something strange,’ he confided to his young friend from out of a fever. ‘Lady Fortuna has grabbed me by the arm, she has tossed me over her shoulder. God knows where I’m headed.’

Salviati did not know what to make of this, but he was a good friend to have in a crisis. He held your hand, he looked at you and understood what you said; his liquid eyes and quick smile were the very picture of intelligent goodness. He laughed a lot, and he made Galileo laugh, and there was no one quicker to point out a bird or a cloud, or to propose a conundrum about negative numbers or the like. A sweet soul, and smart. ‘Maybe it’s La Vicuna who has taken you by the hand, the muse of justice.’

‘I wish it, but no,’ Galileo said, looking inward. ‘Lady Fortuna is the one deciding my fate. The capricious one. A big woman.’

‘But you have always been avventurato.’

‘But with luck of all kinds,’ Galileo groused. ‘Good luck and bad.’

‘But the good has been so good, my friend. Think of your gifts, your genius. That too is Fortuna making her dispensations.’

‘Maybe so. May it continue that way, then.’

Finally, impatient at the delay forced on him by his body, he wrote to Vinta asking if a ducal litter could be provided for his travel. By this time it was becoming clear that the Sidereus Nuncius had made Galileo famous all over Europe. In the courts lucky enough to have been sent one of Galileo’s spyglasses, star parties were being held, from Bavaria and Bohemia to France and England. Vinta decided that Galileo’s presence in Rome could only bring honour and prestige to the Medici: the use of the ducal litter was approved.

On 23rd March, 1611, Galileo left with his servants Cartophilus and Giuseppe, and a little group of the Grand Duke’s horsemen. He carried with him a letter of introduction to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, written by an old acquaintance of his, Michelangelo Buonarroti, nephew of Florence’s most famous artist, who had died the day before Galileo was born, causing talk (by Galileo’s father anyway) of a transmigration of souls.

The roads between Florence and Rome were as good as any in Italy, but they were still slow, even in the best stretches, which were much abbreviated by winter damage. In a litter the trip took six days. By day Galileo sat on pillows inside the carriage, enduring the jouncing of the iron-rimmed wooden wheels into potholes and over stones, also the steady grind over cobbles or beds of gravel. Sometimes he rode a horse to give his kidneys and back a rest, but this meant a different kind of hammering. He hated to travel. Rome was as far away from Florence as he had ever been, and his only previous trip had occurred twenty-four years earlier, before the terrible incident in the cellar at Costozza had wrecked his health.

The roadside inns they stopped in along the way-at San Casciano, Siena, San Quirico, Acquapendente, Viterbo, and Monterosi-offered beds that were battered and flea-ridden, in rooms crowded with other bodies all snoring and hacking at once. It was better to spend the night outside in his coat, under a cape and a blanket, watching the sky. Jupiter was high, and every night he could log the positions of the four Jovian moons early and late, looking for the moments when a moon slowed and reached the outer point of its orbit, or the moments when it touched the lambent side of Jupiter itself. He was intent on being the first to determine their exact orbital times, which Kepler had written would be hard to do. He felt a strong bond with the moons, as if being their discoverer he somehow possessed them. One night he heard wolves howling and the bond seemed stronger than ever, as if wolves came from Jupiter. The white disc in his glass seemed to quiver with life, and he felt full of a feeling he couldn’t name.

So the damp spring nights would pass, and he would collapse into the litter as the Grand Duke’s men prepared for departure, hoping for sleep through the jouncing day on the road. Many mornings he succeeded in this, and was insensible to some hours of travel. But both his night and day routines were hard on his back, and he arrived in Rome exhausted.

On Holy Tuesday the litter ground its way through the immense shabby outskirts of Rome. The broad road was flanked hard on each side by innumerable shacks made of sticks, as if built by magpies. Once inside the ancient wall, which was easy to miss, Galileo’s party clopped slowly through packed paved streets. Rome was as big as ten Florences, and the tightly packed buildings were often three and even four storeys tall, balconies overhanging the narrow streets. People lived their lives and dried their laundry on the balconies, commenting freely on the passersby below.

The tight streets opened up by the river, where there were flood fields and orchards. Further into the city they came to the Palazzo Firenze, which overlooked a small campo. This was where Galileo was to be hosted by Cosimo’s ambassador to Rome, one Giovanni Niccolini, a lifelong diplomat near the end of a long career in the Medici service. This worthy appeared in the entryway of the palazzo and greeted Galileo rather coolly. Vinta had written Niccolini to say that Galileo would be accompanied by a single servant, and here were two, Cartophilus having insinuated himself at the last minute. Financial arrangements between the Grand Duke and his ambassador were meticulously kept, so perhaps it was not clear to Niccolini that he would be reimbursed for the keep of this extra servant. In any case, he was distinctly reserved as he led Galileo and his little retinue into a big suite of rooms at the back of the ground floor, looking onto the formal garden. This elaborate green space was dotted with ancient Roman statues whose marble faces had melted away. Something about the look of them caught Galileo’s eye and disturbed him.

Once moved in, Galileo launched into a busy schedule of visits to dignitaries strategic to his purpose, one of the most important being the Jesuit Christopher Clavius at the College of Rome.

Clavius greeted him with the same words he had used twentyfour years before, when Galileo had been an unknown young mathematician and Clavius in his prime, known throughout Europe as ‘the Euclid of the sixteenth century’:

‘Welcome to Rome, young signor! All praise to God and Archimedes!’

He was not much changed in appearance, despite all the years: a slight man with a puckered mouth and a kindly eye. He led Galileo into the Jesuit college’s workshop, where together they inspected the spyglasses the monk mechanicals had constructed. The glasses looked like Galileo’s, and were equivalent in power, although more marred by irregularities, as Galileo told the monks freely.

Christopher Grienberger and Odo Maelcote then joined them, and Clavius introduced his younger colleagues as the ones who had made the bulk of the observations; Clavius lamented his aged eyesight. ‘But I have seen your so-called Medicean stars several times,’ he added, ‘and they are obviously orbiting Jupiter, just as you say.’

Galileo bowed deeply. There were people out there claiming the moons were just flaws in Galileo’s glass; he had angrily offered ten thousand crowns to anyone who could make a glass that would show flaws around Jupiter but not around the other planets, and of course there were no takers, but still-not everyone believed. So this mattered. Seeing was believing, and Clavius had seen. As Galileo straightened up he said, ‘God bless you, Father, I was quite sure that you would see them, they are so prominent, and you such an experienced astronomer. And I can tell you that on my journey to Rome I have made good progress in determining the period of orbit of all four of these new moons.’

Grienberger and Maelcote raised their eyebrows and exchanged glances. Clavius only smiled. ‘I think here we are in rare agreement with Johannes Kepler, that establishing their periods of rotation will be very difficult.’

‘But…’ Galileo hesitated, then realized he had made a mistake, and dropped the matter with a wave of the hand. There was no point in making announcements in advance of results; indeed, since he was intent on being the first to make every discovery having to do with the new stars, he should not be inciting competitors to further effort. It was already startling enough to see that they had managed to manufacture spyglasses almost as strong as his own.

So he let the talk turn to the phases of Venus. The Jesuits also had seen these, and while he did not press the point that this was strong evidence in support of the Copernican view, he could see in their faces that the implications were already clear to them. And they did not deny the appearances. They believed in the glass. This was a most excellent sign, and as he considered the happy implications of a public acknowledgment that their observations agreed with his, Galileo recovered from his uneasiness at the power of their devices. These were the Pope’s official astronomers, supporting his findings! So he spent the rest of the afternoon reminiscing with Clavius and laughing at his jokes.

Another important meeting for Galileo, though he did not know it, came on the Saturday before Easter, when he paid his respects to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini. They met in one of the outer offices of St Peter’s, near the Vatican’s river gate. Galileo examined the interior gardens of the place with a close eye; he had never been inside the sacred fortress before, and he was interested to observe the horticulture deployed inside. Purity had been emphasized over liveliness, he was not surprised to note: paths were gravelled, borders were lines of clean cobbles, long narrow lawns were trimmed as if by barbers. Massed roses and camellias were all either white or red. It was a little too much.

Barberini proved to be a man of the world, affable, quick, well-dressed in a cardinal’s everyday finery; lithe and handsome, goateed, smooth-skinned, fulsome. His power made him as graceful as a dancer, as confident in his body as a minx or an otter. Galileo handed him the introductory letters from Michaelangelo’s nephew and from Antonio de Medici, and Barberini put them aside after a glance and took Galileo by the hand and led him out into the courtyard, dispensing with all ceremony. ‘Let’s take our ease and talk.’

Galileo was his usual lively self, a happy Pulcinella with a genius for mathematics. In his interviews with nobles he was quick and funny, always chuckling in his baritone rumble, out to please. The Barberini were a powerful family, and he had heard that Maffeo was a virtuoso, with a great interest in intellectual and artistic matters. He hosted many evenings in which poetry and song and philosophical debates were featured entertainments, and he wrote poetry himself that he was said to be vain about. Galileo seemed to be assuming that this was therefore a prelate in the style of Sarpi, broad-minded and liberal. In any case he was perfectly at ease, and showed Barberini his occhialino inside and out.

‘I wish I had been able to bring enough of them with me to leave one with you as a gift, Your Eminence, but I was only allowed a small trunk for baggage.’

Barberini nodded at this awkwardness. ‘I understand,’ he murmured as he looked through the glass. ‘Seeing through yours is enough, for now, and more than enough. Although I do want one, it is true. It’s simply amazing how much you can see.’ He pulled back to look at Galileo. ‘It’s odd-you wouldn’t think that more could be held there for the eye, in distant things, than we already see.’

‘No, it’s true. We must admit that our senses don’t convey everything to us, not even in the sensible world.’

‘Certainly not.’

They looked through it at the distant hills east of Rome, and the cardinal marveled and clapped him on the shoulder in the manner of any other man.

‘You have given us new worlds,’ he said.

‘The seeing of them, anyway,’ Galileo corrected him, to seem properly humble.

‘And how do the Peripatetics take it? And the Jesuits?’

Galileo tipped his head side to side. ‘They are none too pleased, Your Grace.’

Barberini laughed. He had been trained by the Jesuits, but he did not like them, Galileo saw; and so Galileo continued, ‘There are some of them who refuse to look through the glass at all. One of them recently died, and as I said at the time, since he would not look at the stars through my glass, he could now inspect them from up close, on his way past them to Heaven!’

Barberini laughed uproariously. ‘And Clavius, what does he say?’

‘He admits the moons orbiting Jupiter are really there.’

‘The Medici moons, you have called them?’

‘Yes,’ Galileo admitted, realizing for the first time how this could be another awkwardness. ‘I expect to make many more discoveries in the heavens, and hope to honour those who have helped me accordingly.’

The little smile that twitched over the cardinal’s face was not entirely friendly. ‘And you think these Jovian moons show that the Earth goes around the sun in an analogous manner, as Copernicus claimed?’

‘Well, it shows at least that moons go around planets, as our moon goes around the Earth. Better proof of the Copernican view, Your Grace, is how you can see the phases of Venus through the glass.’ Galileo explained how in the Copernican understanding the phases of Venus had combined with its varying distance from Earth to make it give to the naked eye always the same brightness, which had argued against the idea it had phases, when one had no glass to see them; and how its position, always low in the sky in the mornings and evenings, combined with actual sighting of the phases through the glass confirmed the idea that Venus was orbiting the sun inside the Earth’s own orbiting of it. The ideas were complicated to describe in words, and Galileo felt at ease enough to stand and take three citrons from a bowl, then place them and move them about on the table to illustrate the concepts, to Barberini’s evident delight.

‘And the Jesuits deny this!’ the cardinal repeated when Galileo had completed a very convincing demonstration of the system.

‘Well, no. They agree now that the phenomena at least are real.’

‘But then saying that the explanation is not yet so clear. Yes, that makes sense. That sounds like them. And after all, I suppose God could have arranged it any way He wanted.’