Abstract
What did one know of Galileo before he got great? The few published texts predating his encounter with the telescope in 1609 offer a prescient sketch of the man who would become early modern Europe’s most celebrated private citizen. The earliest published allusion seems to have been a troubling vignette of 1601, a gauzy text praising alchemy and a particular practitioner in Padua, absurdly based on Apollonius of Rhodes’ Jason and the Argonauts. There, Galileo was portrayed as a recalcitrant member of the support cast required by this latest seeker of the Golden Fleece. The astronomer was identified not only as a “new Euclid,” but also as one who, like the doomed Prometheus, had offered to others the gift of stolen fire; the mythical figure had played no part in Jason’s quest but was simply an anguished cry overheard as the ship passed Mount Caucasus. A strong corrective appeared in Filippo Valori’s description of the cultural elite of Tuscany; this text emerged, like the New Star in Serpentarius, in the fall of 1604. Valori gestured to Galileo’s precocity, to his position as “a good lecturer” in Pisa, to his subsequent, more prestigious employment in Padua, and above all to his robust defence of a fifteenth-century Florentine mathematician and architect’s analysis of the site, structure, and dimensions of Dante’s Inferno against criticism from Lucca. The hostile portrait of Galileo as Prometheus reappeared in late 1606; it would have made little difference to the astronomer that the text was published as a palinode or disavowal of alchemy, for in this version he was explicitly identified in a marginal note. The year 1607 saw a second corrective. In his biography of the late humanist Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, Paolo Gualdo did not simply depict the Pisan as a renowned scholar of “mathematical matters” at Padua but also alluded, with studied casualness, to Galileo’s manuscript letter of 1597 supporting the Copernican world system, an elegant refutation of a mentor’s recent assessment of what it was that one might see of the starry sphere from the peak of Caucasus.
The cardinal features of these early, brief accounts – an oversized destiny but one subject to constant reinterpretation, local inflection, and the authority conferred by acquaintance with the man and his work, an insistence on Galileo’s close involvement with humanists and with a vaguely defined world of “mathematical matters,” and the conflicting hints of self-serving appropriation and immense intellectual generosity – would inform the 14 Italian, Latin, and French biographies published over the course of 70 years. The earliest of these dates from 1633, just as the Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems was banned and Galileo himself was obliged to issue a “palinode” or retraction; the latest in 1702, shortly before the death of Vincenzo Viviani, the astronomer’s amanuensis and last student. This is the subject of On the Life of Galileo, an extraordinarily valuable compendium edited, translated, and annotated by Stefano Gattei and accompanied by a wealth of visual materials. The sheer range of these texts is impressive, and among the many merits of this study are the historical and cultural contexts offered for each. As Gattei demonstrates, the political climate, the tardy pace and fiscal impasses of publication, the differing conventions of literary genres, as well as authorial bouts of envy or idleness explain the curious repetition of certain “alternative facts,” odd exclusions of particular works or discoveries, anecdotes suggesting or simulating personal acquaintance with Galileo, and a familiar insistence on his confessional and national rivalries.
Four of these biographies were authored by Viviani and they constitute, in their detail and accuracy, our best and most enduring resource for the scientist’s agenda, achievements, and legacy. The final such text, envisaged as a permanent public monument to Galileo, is taken from inscriptions carved on the façade of Viviani’s home in Florence. Given that Galileo began the Sidereus Nuncius with a gesture to the Propertian trope of overpriced and ephemeral monuments, and that an antiquarian would soon observe that the telescope did not help him read ancient mural inscriptions, Viviani’s “Testimony of a Grateful Soul” is an ironic artefact. It has been available to the passerby with good Latin, binoculars, and a certain tolerance for Viviani’s insistence on Galileo’s piety; the rest of us can now rely on the transcription, translation, and helpful notes Gattei has provided. This volume is a splendid contribution to Galileo’s afterlife.