Galileo’s Dream

‘Of course, Your Grace.’

‘And what does Bellarmino say?’

‘I don’t know, Your Grace.’

The cardinal’s smile was even a little wicked in its foxiness. ‘Perhaps we will find out.’

Then he spoke of Florence, of his love for the city and its nobility, which Galileo happily echoed. And when Barberini asked the usual question about favourite poets, Galileo declared, ‘Oh, I prefer Ariosto to Tasso, as meat over candied fruit,’ which made the cardinal laugh, as being the reverse of the usual characterization of the two; and thus the interview continued well to its conclusion and Galileo’s obsequious withdrawal. And Cardinal Barberini must have enjoyed it, for that very afternoon he wrote to Buonarotti, Michelangelo’s nephew, and to Antonio de Medici, to say he appreciated their recommendations of Florence’s new court philosopher, and would be delighted to help him in any way he could.

A few days later Galileo was invited to a party organized by Giovanni Battista Deti, nephew of the late Pope Clement III, where he met four more cardinals, and listened to a talk given to the group by Giovanni Battista Strozzi. In the discussion afterward Galileo held his tongue, as he told all his correspondents later, feeling that as a newcomer this was the courteous thing to do. Staying silent was no doubt difficult for him, given his natural tendency towards continuous speech, and also given what could only be called his growing intimacy with the topic of Strozzi’s talk, which was Pride. For the success of all these visits was clearly going to his head. Night after night he was joining evening meals, often at Cardinal Ottavio Bandini’s residence on the Quirinal, right next to the Pope’s palace, and after the food and the musical entertainment standing up to become himself the featured entertainment, speaking and then showing the guests what could be seen of nearby landmarks through his glass. People never ceased to be amazed, and Galileo puffed up accordingly; back at the Palazzo Firenze after these events we could barely get him out of his jacket and boots.

One meeting had lasting consequences. It took place at the palazzo of Federico Cesi, the Marquis of Monticelli, the young man who had founded the Accademia dei Lincei, the Academy of the Lynxes, in which matters of mathematics and natural philosophy were regularly discussed. Cesi also used his fortune to gather in his palazzo an ever-growing collection of natural wonders. When Galileo arrived at his palazzo, Cesi took him on a tour of two rooms that were filled to overflowing with lodestones, chunks of coral, fossils, unicorn horns, griffins’ eggs, coconuts, nautilus shells, sharks’ teeth, jars containing monstrous births, carbuncles that glowed in the dark, turtle shells, a rhinoceros horn worked in gold, a bowl of lapis lazuli, dried crocodiles, model cannons, a collection of Roman coins, and a box of truly exquisite lapidary specimens.

Galileo inspected each of these objects with genuine curiosity. ‘Marvellous,’ he said as he looked in the hollow end of a unicorn’s horn chased with gold. ‘It must be as big as a horse.’

‘It does seem so, doesn’t it,’ Cesi replied happily. ‘But come look at my herbarium.’

Most of all, it turned out, Cesi was a botanist; he had hundreds of leaves and flowers arranged in big thick books, all dried and displayed with descriptions. He pointed out his favourites enthusiastically. Galileo watched him closely: he was young and handsome, very wealthy, fond of the company of men. And his admiration for Galileo was boundless. ‘You are the one we’ve waited for,’ he said as they closed the plant books. ‘We’ve needed an intellectual leader to blaze the path to the higher levels, and now that you’re here, I’m sure it will happen.’

‘Maybe so,’ Galileo allowed. He liked the idea of the Lincean Academy very much. To get out from under the thumb of the universities and all their Peripatetics, to elevate mathematics and natural philosophy to the highest level of thought and inquiry; it was a great new thing, a way forward. A new kind of institution, and a potential ally too.

Later that day Cesi hosted a dinner to introduce Galileo to the rest of the Lynxes. The party took place on top of the Janiculum, the highest of the Roman hills, in the vineyard of Monsignor Malvasia. The Lincean membership and a dozen other likeminded gentlemen assembled while it was still day, for the views from the Janiculum over the city were unobstructed in all directions. Among the guests were the foreign Linceans Johann Faber and Johann Schreck from Germany, Jan Eck from Holland, and Giovanni Demisiani from Greece.

Galileo trained his glass first on the basilica of St John Lateran, across the Tiber at a distance of about three miles, adjusting it until the chiselled inscription was legible on the loggia over the side entrance. It had been placed there by Sixtus V in the first year of his pontificate:

Sixtus

Pontifex Maximus

anno primo

Everyone was startled, as usual. When they had all looked through the occhialino more than once, and read and re-read the distant inscription, several toasts were proposed and drunk down. The group grew raucous, even a little giddy; Cesi’s musicians, sensing the spirit of the moment, played a fanfare on horns they pulled out from beneath their chairs. Galileo bowed, and while the brassy music played on, turned his glass on the residence of the Duke of Altemps, on a hill in the first rise of the Appenines, far to the east of them. When he had it fixed the Linceans again crowded round, taking turns counting the windows on the façade of the great villa, some fifteen miles away. This made people stark amazed, and the Janiculum rang with cheers.

Later that night, after a great deal of eating and drinking and talk, and a brief look at the moon, which was too full to see through the glass as other than a white blaze, Demisiani the Greek sat down by Galileo and leaned into him.

‘You should name your device with a new Greek word,’ he said, his saturnine face alive with the humour of his suggestion, or the fact that he was the one making it. ‘You should call it a telescope.’

‘Telescopio?’ Galileo repeated.

‘To see at a distance. Tele scopio, distance seeing. It’s better than perspicillum, which means merely a lens after all, or visorio, which is only to say visual or optical. And occhialino is petty somehow, as if you wanted only to spy on someone, it’s too small, too provincial, too Tuscan. The other languages will never use it, and will have to make up words of their own. But telescope all will understand and use together. As always with Greek!’

Galileo nodded. Certainly the best scientific names were always either Latin or Greek. Kepler had been calling it a perspicillum.

‘The root words are very old and basic,’ Demisiani said, ‘and the compounding method as well.’

Galileo surged to his feet and raised his glass, waited for the group to notice and go quiet. ‘Telescopio!’ he bellowed, dragging out the syllables as if calling for Mazzoleni, as if announcing the name of a champion: the group cheered, and Galileo leaned over to give the grinning Greek a hug, filled with sudden glee: of course his invention was such a new thing in the world that it needed a new name! No mere occhialino this!

‘TEL ESCOPIO!’ Who knows how many of the surrounding hills of Rome heard the party shouting out the new word. Galileo alone could have been heard halfway to Salerno.

The very next day, word came: the Pope wanted to see him.

An audience with Pope Paul V. The routine at the Palazzo Firenze took on a slightly frenzied air. Sleep was difficult. Galileo didn’t even try, but watched Jupiter and considered what was to come, and so slept eventually. He woke early, before sunrise, and took a slow dawn walk in the formal garden among the statues. He performed his ablutions, ate a small meal. Perhaps on this day it was even smaller than usual. Then Cartophilus and Giuseppe helped him dress in his best clothes, choosing the darker and more formal of his two dress jackets, which were getting a lot of wear on this visit.

Niccolini came by while he was completing his toilet, to discuss the audience, and to tell him all the latest from the Avvisi, Rome’s broadsheet of rumour and gossip, concerning His Holiness’s activities the previous week and what seemed to be on his mind. Like everyone else, Galileo already knew the Pope’s background: he had been Cardinal Camillo Borghese, a heretofore obscure member of that most powerful and dangerous of families, a canon lawyer whose election as Pope was so unlooked-for that he himself considered it an intercession of the Holy Ghost, and all his subsequent pontifical actions therefore divinely intended. This included the hanging of one Piccinardi, who had been so remiss as to write (though not to have published) an unauthorized biography of Paul’s predecessor, Clement VIII. That had set a tone that no one forgot.

Niccolini did not remind Galileo of that particular example of Paul’s severity, but made the point in more roundabout ways. The pontiff, he warned, was rigid, headstrong, peremptory; in these difficult years of the Counter-Reformation, he brooked no deviation from the rules and tactics laid out by the Council of Trent half a century before. In short, a pope. ‘He has grown a bit fat with papal power, in the usual way,’ Niccolini concluded.

The audience was held at the Villa Malvasia, where Galileo had been only the night before. This was the Pope’s idea; he wanted to get away from the Vatican. Niccolini led Galileo into the villa’s giant antechamber, and there introduced him to Paul V, using rather stiff and nervous phrases.

The Pope was indeed fat, an immense man, nearly spherical under his red robes, his neck fleshy and as thick as his head, his piggish eyes deep in thick folds of skin. He had a triangular goatee. Galileo knelt before him and kissed the offered ring, murmuring the prayer of obeisance Niccolini had taught him to use.

‘Rise,’ Paul said gruffly, interrupting him. ‘Speak to us standing.’

This was a great honour. Holding his features steady, Galileo got to his feet with the least clumsiness he could manage, then bowed his head.

‘Walk with us,’ Paul said. ‘We wish to take a turn in the garden.’

Galileo followed the Pope and walked with him, Niccolini and a clutch of papal assistants and servants trailing behind. They wandered through the hilltop’s vineyard, already well known to Galileo, and as he grew used to the big man’s blunt manner, and his slow gait, he grew more comfortable. He seemed to forget the stiletto sticking in and out of Paolo Sarpi’s head, and spoke as if to God Himself. Mostly he talked about the joy of seeing new stars in the sky, and of the blessing it was to witness the new powers now given to man by God.

‘Some speak of theological problems arising from the new discoveries,’ Galileo said calmly, ‘but really these problems are not possible, as creation is all one. God’s world and God’s word are necessarily the same, both being God’s. Any apparent discrepancies are only a matter of human misunderstanding.’

‘Of course,’ Paul said shortly. He did not like theology. He waved these problems aside as if they were the bees humming in the vineyard. ‘You have our support in this.’

After that Galileo spoke of other things, billowing on this pronouncement like a sail filled with the wind. He became less serious, more his usual courtier self. Then, after three quarters of an hour of this slow stroll through the vines, Paul glanced back at his secretaries and simply walked away, down to his litter at the front of the villa.

Startled by this abrupt departure, Galileo stood with his mouth hanging open, wondering if he had said something to offend. But Niccolini assured him that this was Paul’s way, that given the frequency of his audiences, the time he saved by dispensing with the always-lengthy farewells added up to an hour or more a day. ‘The amazing thing is that he stayed as long as he did. If he had not been truly interested he would have left much earlier.’ In truth the audience had gone wonderfully well, and Galileo had been shown great favour by being commanded to walk with the Pope. It had been one of the friendliest audiences the ambassador had ever witnessed. A triumph for both Galileo and for Florence. Coming from Niccolini, who was suddenly enthusiastic, Galileo knew it must be so.

After that Galileo lost his head, everyone around him saw it. The endless parade of banquets at which he was the centre of all attention and praise; the rich food; the balthazars and fiascos of wine; the long nights, when despite all the revelry he would stay up afterward to get some more sightings of Jupiter and its moons, so that even in the midst of everything else he was homing in on good orbital times for I, II, III, and IV-and yet he still had to rise early on the mornings after to prepare for yet another feast: all these began to take their toll on him. The idea that he would keep his mouth shut during a banquet discussion, be it on pride or anything else, became laughable. He talked lots: he discoursed, he lectured, he conversed, he boasted. He had always known that he was smarter than other people, but in the years when that had not actually seemed to benefit him, he had not been so impressed by it. Now, as he became ever more full of himself, he began to use his wit like a sword, or to be more accurate, given the rough buffo tenor of his humor, like a club. Buffo became buffare as he swelled up.

Speaking one night of the uneven surface of the moon, for instance, revealed so clearly by his telescope, he reminded everyone that this was a big problem for the poor Peripatetics, as the Aristotelian orthodoxy was that everything in the heavens was perfectly geometrical, and the moon therefore a perfect sphere. Even Father Clavius, he said, had ventured, and in print, that although the visible surface of the moon was uneven, this could be illusory, and all its mountains and plains could be encased in a clear crystal shell that constituted its perfect sphericality. Galileo’s tone of voice expressed his incredulity at this opinion, and as the audience chuckled they also grew more attentive; this was treading a little close to the edge.

Cartophilus had joined some of the other servants in borrowing a pillow and a bottle of wine and lying out in the vineyard, outside the cast of the torchlight bathing the long banqueting table, there to watch and listen. The guests in their bejewelled finery were like a painting come to life and performing for them alone; but Cartophilus sat up and put the bottle down as Galileo began to poke fun at the famous old Jesuit:

‘If everyone is allowed to imagine whatever they please, then of course someone can say that the moon is surrounded by a crystalline substance that is transparent and invisible! Who can deny it? I will grant it without objection, provided that with equal courtesy I be allowed to say that the crystal has on its outer surface a large number of huge mountains, thirty times as high as terrestrial ones, but invisible because they are diaphanous. Thus I can picture to myself another moon ten times as mountainous as I said in the first place!’ The guests at the table laughed. ‘The hypothesis is pretty,’ Galileo went on, goaded by their amusement, ‘but its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor demonstrable! Who does not see that this is a purely arbitrary fiction? Why, if you counted the Earth’s atmosphere as a similar kind of clear shell, then the Earth too would be perfectly spherical!’

And of course they all laughed. Ha ha! Very funny! And it was. Galileo’s signature mix of wit and sarcasm had been making people laugh for years. But Christopher Clavius had always been friendly to him; and more generally, it was never good to make fun of the Jesuits. Especially publicly, in Rome, and right before the Jesuits were to host a lavish feast at the College of Rome to celebrate your accomplishments. Yet here he was. Cartophilus could only groan and take another swig from his bottle: from the darkness of the vineyard, the sight of Galileo standing in the torchlight over the long table of seated revellers was the very image of Pride before its Fall.

But Galileo did not notice any danger. He ate, he talked, he boasted. He trained his telescope on the sun, using a method suggested by Castelli: the sun’s light was directed through the tube onto a sheet of paper, where one could look at the big lit circle with no danger to the eyes. And immediately it became apparent to any viewer that the lit image of the sun was dotted by small indistinct dark patches. Over the course of days, these dark spots moved across the sun’s face in a manner that suggested to Galileo that the sun too was rotating, at a speed that he calculated made its day about a month long. Rotating at about the same speed as the moon in its course around the Earth, therefore; and they were the same size in the sky. It was odd. He made sketches each day of the sun spots’ patterns, and placed the sketches side by side to show the sequence of movement.

Galileo claimed this discovery of the sun’s rotation for himself, though there were astronomers-Jesuits again-who had been tracking the sun spots for some time. He proclaimed his discovery far and wide, ignoring the fact that it was another inconvenient finding for the Peripatetics, also that it contradicted certain astronomical statements in the Bible. He didn’t care; if he noticed such problems for his opponents, he would only make another sharp heavy joke about them.

For now, none of these indiscretions seemed to be having any bad effect. At the Jesuit banquet in his honour no one spoke of his jape at Clavius’s expense, and Clavius’s colleague, the Dutch astronomer Odo Maelcote, read a learned commentary on Sidereus Nuncius which confirmed every discovery Galileo had reported. It appeared he did not have to care.

Then the newly enthusiastic Niccolini was replaced as Cosimo’s ambassador to Rome by Piero Guicciardini, who, finding Galileo at the height of his magniloquence, did not like him. And back home, Belisario Vinta was replaced as secretary to Cosimo by Curzio Picchena, who shared with Guicciardini a more jaundiced view of Galileo’s loud advocacy of the Copernican position. They saw no reason the Medici should be drawn into such a potentially awkward controversy. But if Galileo noticed these new men and their attitude toward him, again he did not seem to care.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Bellarmino, Pope Paul’s closest advisor, also a Jesuit, and the inquisitor who had handled the case of Giordano Bruno, initiated an investigation into Galileo’s theories. This was probably on Paul’s instruction, but the spies within the Vatican who had found out about it could not be sure of that. Bellarmino, they said, had looked through a Jesuit telescope himself; he had asked his Jesuit colleagues for an opinion; he had attended a meeting of the Holy Office of the Congregation, which subsequently began to look into the case. Bellarmino seemed to have been the one to order the investigation.

But no one told Galileo about this troubling development, being not quite sure what it meant. And because of his meeting with the Pope, and everything else that had happened, he was still full of himself, bumptious and grand. The visit to Rome was a triumph in every way, even if Guicciardini was now hinting that it might be best to leave while he was still being lionized. The ambassador stayed just on the right side of politeness about this, but if Galileo had sneaked into his office and looked at the letters on his desk, as proved fairly easy to do, he would have gained a truer sense of the ambassador’s mind: