Galileo's Daughter (9 page)

These off-key reeds that Galileo decried sounded several flat notes, including the immutability of the heavens, the farrago of the celestial spheres, and the immobility of the Earth.

Welser wrote back gratefully to say, “You have paid a high rate of interest for the favor of a little time, sending me so copious and diffuse a treatise in reply to a few lines.” The thrill of witnessing new philosophy grow up around the astronomical anomaly of the sunspots made Welser want to share Galileo’s letter with a larger audience than just the alleged Apelles, who didn’t even read Italian and had to wait months for a suitable translation to be made. Welser thought perhaps Prince Cesi of the Lyncean Academy, with whom he also corresponded, should publish the sunspot report as part of an ongoing series. “It would be a public benefit for these little treatises concerning new discoveries to come out one by one,” Welser opined, “keeping things fresh in everyone’s mind and inspiring others to apply their talents more to such things; for it is impossible that so great a framework should be sustained upon the shoulders of one man, however strong.”

Sunspot drawing by Galileo

Prince Cesi liked the idea so well that he not only initiated preparations for printing but also inducted Welser into the academy. Soon Welser and Galileo were both signing themselves proudly as “Lyncean” in their letters and politely commiserating with each other on their physical complaints. When Cesi published Welser’s four relatively short notes together with Galileo’s three very long replies as
History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and Their
Phenomena
in Rome in the spring of 1613, he retained all the chitchat about Welser’s gout and Galileo’s miscellaneous infirmities.

“I have read [your letter], or rather devoured it, with a pleasure equal to the appetite and longing I had for it,” Welser wrote Galileo on June i, 1612. “Let me assure you that it has served to alleviate for me a long and painful illness that has been causing me extreme discomfort in the left thigh. For this the physicians have not yet found any effective remedy; indeed, the doctor in charge has told me in very plain words that the first men of his profession have written of this disease that ‘some cases are cured, but others are incurable.’ One must therefore submit to the fatherly disposition of God’s providence; “Thou art the Lord, do what is good in Thy sight.’”

Poor Welser would be dead within two years, escaping the pain of his disease through suicide, but meanwhile he worried how Cesi could accomplish the printing of the many meticulous drawings, which Galileo appended to his letters, of sunspots ingeniously observed. Galileo rendered these near-photographic records by letting the telescope image of the Sun fall on a piece of white paper instead of on his retina. There he faithfully traced them— and later retraced them, reorienting the telescope’s inverted vision— to avoid any damage to his eyes.

More than a month’s worth of excellent engravings embellished the finished book, tracking the Sun day by day from the first of June through mid-July of 1612. The ideas espoused in the book, however, exacerbated the existing tensions between Galileo and his avowed opponents. Book discussions attracted additional new opponents among people who had not even read the text. And, since Copernicus had died in silence in another country years before, Galileo began to be credited—or rather blamed—for having fathered the Sun-centered universe.

Although the “pigeon league” attacks on
Bodies in Water
had held up the books of Aristotle to oppose Galileo, critics of the
Sunspot Letters
now appealed to the even higher authority of the Bible.

[VI]

Observant

executrix of

God’s commands

The reorganization of the heavens according to Copernicus struck some individuals as suspiciously heretical.

“That opinion of Ipernicus, or whatever his name is,” an elderly Dominican father wagged in Florence in November of 1612, “appears to be against Holy Scripture.” Neither Copernicus nor Galileo, however, both Catholic believers, intended any such criticism of the Bible or attack against the Church. Copernicus had in fact dedicated
De revolutionibus
to Pope Paul III (the pontiff who excommunicated King Henry VIII of England and established the Roman Inquisition). Galileo, in the course of writing the
Sunspot
Letters,
had sought the expert opinion of Carlo Cardinal Conti on the subject of change in the heavens. Cardinal Conti had assured him that the Bible did not support Aristotle’s doctrine of immutability; in fact, he said, Scripture seemed to argue against it.

None of his experience parrying angry attacks from academics prepared Galileo for the intimations of heresy—a crime he considered “more abhorrent than death itself"—that now swirled around him. Given these circumstances, he must have felt relieved in October 1613, when Ottavio Cardinal Bandini, another prelate of his acquaintance, finally secured the dispensation of age for Galileo’s daughters. The immediate admission of both thirteen-year-old Virginia and twelve-year-old Livia into the nearby Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri was apparently facilitated by the coincidence that the mother abbess, Suor Ludovica Vinta, was sister to a Florentine senator who had served as secretary of state under Grand Duke Ferdinando. No sooner were the girls secured within the enclosure walls than the pitch of the Copernican controversy escalated.

In November, Galileo’s best and most beloved student, the Benedictine monk Benedetto Castelli, who had followed him from Padua, left Florence to take over Galileo’s old chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa. Castelli not only had devised the safe method of observing the Sun on paper used by Galileo to such good effect, but had actually drawn the numerous sunspot diagrams published in Galileo’s book. Galileo had further relied on Castelli to answer all four published attacks on
Bodies in Water.
Newly arrived at Pisa, Castelli was warned by the university overseer never to teach or even discuss the motion of the Earth. The monk agreed to these terms, naturally, pointing out that his mentor, Galileo, had followed the same course throughout two-plus decades of lecturing at both Pisa and Padua. Within weeks, however, Castelli found himself specifically questioned on the matter of Copernicus in a private but most influential setting, when the Medici family and full entourage arrived in Pisa for their annual winter visit. Holding court for the season at their Pisan palace, Their Serene Highnesses Cosimo II, Archduchess Maria Maddalena, and Grand Duchess Mother Madama Cristina filled the seats around their table three times a day with interesting conversationalists who could inform them on a variety of subjects.

Benedetto Castelli

“Thursday morning I was dining with our Patrons,” Castelli wrote Galileo on Saturday, December 14, “and when asked about the university by the Grand Duke I gave him a complete account of everything, with which he showed himself much pleased. He asked me if I had a telescope; saying yes, I began to tell about an observation of the Medicean planets I had made just the night before. Madama Cristina wanted to know their position, whereupon the talk turned to the necessity of their being real objects and not illusions of the telescope.”

Instead of receding from court life following the death of her husband, Ferdinando I, in 1609, the influential grand duchess Cristina had changed her dress to black and donned a widow’s cap with a voluminous black veil in place of her ducal crown. She had held fast to her rank of grand duchess, leaving her daughter-in-law— Cosimo’s wife, Maria Maddalena—to be content with the “archduchess” title that had come with her from Austria.

On this particular December morning, Madama Cristina found Castelli’s talk of planets disturbing—despite their ties to the House of Medici. Notwithstanding her fondness for Galileo, who had tutored her son, and over and above her respect for Castelli’s monastic robes, she much preferred the conversation of another breakfast guest from the university faculty, the Platonic philosopher Doctor Cosimo Boscaglia.

“After many things, all of which passed with decorum,” Castelli’s letter continued, “breakfast was over. I left, but I had hardly come out of the palace when I was overtaken by the porter of Madama Cristina, who had recalled me. But before I tell you what followed, you must first know that while we were at table Doctor Boscaglia had had Madama’s ear for a while, and while conceding as real all the things you have discovered in the sky, he said that only the motion of the Earth had in it something of the incredible, and could not occur, especially because the Holy Scripture was obviously contrary to that view.”

Friends of the court all knew Madama Cristina to be a devout Catholic who leant her ear most frequently to her confessor, other priests, cardinals, and of course the pope, even when His Holiness’s opinions ran counter to the best interests of the Medici dynasty or the Tuscan government. She had read her Bible and could quote from the Book of Joshua—wherein the Sun is ordered to stand still, presumably because it had been moving—as well as the Psalms:

O Lord my God, Thou art great indeed. . . . Thou fixed the Earth
upon its foundation, not to be moved forever. [103:1,
5]

“Now, getting back to my story,” Castelli went on,

I entered into the chambers of her Highness, and there I found the Grand Duke, Madama Cristina and the Archduchess, Don Antonio [de’ Medici], Don Paolo Giordano [Orsini], and Doctor Boscaglia. Madama began, after some questions about myself, to argue the Holy Scripture against me. Thereupon, after having made suitable disclaimers, I commenced to play the theologian with such assurance and dignity that it would have done you good to hear me. Don Antonio assisted me, giving me such heart that instead of being dismayed by the majesty of their Highnesses I carried things off like a paladin. I quite won over the Grand Duke and his Archduchess, while Don Paolo came to my assistance with a very apt quotation from the Scripture. Only Madama remained against me, but from her manner I judged that she did this only to hear my replies. Professor Boscaglia said never a word.

The troubling news of Madama Cristina’s displeasure inspired an immediate response from Galileo. Even more than he regretted her opposition, he dreaded the drawing of battle lines between science and Scripture. Personally, he saw no conflict between the two. In the long letter he wrote back to Castelli on December 21, 1613, he probed the relationship of discovered truth in Nature to revealed truth in the Bible.

“As to the first general question of Madama Cristina, it seems to me that it was most prudently propounded to you by her, and conceded and established by you, that Holy Scripture cannot err and the decrees therein contained are absolutely true and inviolable. I should only have added that, though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways . . . when they would base themselves always on the literal meaning of the words. For in this wise not only many contradictions would be apparent, but even grave heresies and blasphemies, since then it would be necessary to give God hands and feet and eyes, and human and bodily emotions such as anger, regret, hatred, and sometimes forgetfulness of things past, and ignorance of the future.”