Galileo's Daughter (47 page)

“I see that you took the trouble to transcribe these in your own hand,” Fra Micanzio once remarked with surprise upon receipt of certain pages, “and I don’t see how you can stand it, for to me it would be absolutely impossible.”

While Galileo refined the main themes, he also expanded the content of the book to include some seemingly unrelated sections. After all, who knew when he would ever secure another opportunity to publish anything?

“I shall send as soon as possible this treatise on projectiles,” Galileo promised in December 1636 while finalizing Day Four of
Two New Sciences,
“along with an appendix [twenty-five pages long] on some demonstrations of certain conclusions about the centers of gravity of solids, found by me at the age of 22 after two years of study of geometry, for it is good that these not be lost.”

In June of 1637, Galileo sent off the last pieces of dialogue for
Two New Sciences,
which ended with Sagredo’s hopeful allusion to other discussion meetings the trio might enjoy “in the future.” Printing began at Leiden, Holland, that fall, and the published volume came out the following spring.

John Milton visiting Galileo at II Gioiello

Safe in a Protestant country, the Dutch publisher feared no reprisal from the Roman Inquisition. Galileo, however, remaining vulnerable in Arcetri, claimed ignorance of the book’s publication until the ultimate moment. Even in his dedicatory note to French ambassador Francois de Noailles, he feigned surprise at how his manuscript had found its way to a foreign printing press. “I recognize as resulting from Your Excellency’s magnanimity the disposition you have been pleased to make of this work of mine,” Galileo wrote in a preface dated March 6, 1638,

notwithstanding the fact that I myself, as you know, being confused and dismayed by the ill fortune of my other works, had resolved not to put before the public any more of my labors. Yet in order that they might not remain completely buried, I was persuaded to leave a manuscript copy in some place, that it might be known at least to those who understand the subjects of which I treat. And thus having chosen, as the best and loftiest such place, to put this into Your Excellency’s hands, I felt certain that you, out of your special affection for me, would take to heart the preservation of my studies and labors. Hence, during your passage through this place on your return from your Roman embassy, when I was privileged to greet you in person (as I had so often greeted you before by letters), I had occasion to present to you the copy that I then had ready of these two works. You benignly showed yourself very much pleased to have them, to be willing to keep them securely, and by sharing them in France with any friend of yours who is apt in these sciences, to show that although I remain silent, I do not therefore pass my life in entire idleness.

  I was later preparing some other copies, to send to Germany, Flanders, England, Spain, and perhaps also to some place in Italy, when I was notified by the Elzevirs that they had these works of mine in press, and that I must therefore decide about the dedication and send them promptly my thoughts on that subject. From this unexpected and astonishing news, I concluded that it had been Your Excellency’s wish to elevate and spread my name, by sharing various of my writings, that accounted for their having come into the hands of those printers who, being engaged in the publication of other works of mine
[Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina],
wished to honor me by bringing these also to light at their handsome and elaborate press. . . . Now that matters have arrived at this stage, it is certainly reasonable that, in some conspicuous way, I should show myself grateful by recognizing Your Excellency’s generous affection. For it is you who have thought to increase my fame by having these works spread their wings freely under an open sky, when it appeared to me that my reputation must surely remain confined within narrower spaces.

Around the same time he wrote this fictitious scenario, Galileo appealed to the Holy Office for permission to seek medical treatment in Florence. Urban’s brother Antonio Cardinal Sant’ Onofrio, sternly denying this request via the Florentine inquisitor, ruled that Galileo had not described his illness in enough detail to be granted such an indulgence. Furthermore, the cardinal imagined, “Galileo’s return to the city would give him the opportunity of having meetings, conversations, and discussions in which he might once again let his condemned opinions on the motion of the Earth come to light.”

Galileo’s failing health forced him to persist in this pursuit, however, and after he submitted to a surprise medical examination demanded by the Inquisition, he won the right to repair temporarily to Vincenzio’s house on the Costa San Giorgio. On March 6 Cardinal Sant’ Onofrio told the inquisitor at Florence that Galileo “may let himself be moved from the villa at Arcetri, where he now is, to his house in Florence in order to be cured of his maladies. But I give Your Eminence orders that he must not go out into the city and not have public or secret conversations at his house.”

From the city, Galileo petitioned again, asking allowance to be carried in his chair by his family, over the few steps he could not walk in his present state, to hear mass at the neighborhood Church of San Giorgio. In the spirit of Easter, Cardinal Sant’ Onofrio then instructed the Florentine inquisitor “according to his own judgment to give Galileo permission to attend Mass on feast days in the nearest possible church, provided that he does not have personal contacts.”

Galileo returned to Arcetri later in the spring of 1638, before
Two New Sciences
came off the printing press at Leiden. Somehow his title for the book got changed, if not in translation, perhaps in translocation or by editorial fiat. Its title page names it:

Discourses
and
Mathematical
Demonstrations,
Concerning Two New Sciences
Pertaining to
Mechanics & Local Motions,
by Signor
Galileo Galilei, Lyncean
Philosopher and Chief Mathematician to His Serene Highness
The Grand Duke of Tuscany.
With an Appendix on the center of gravity in various Solids.

No record remains of Galileo’s original title, but only his later lament over the substitution of “a low and common title for the noble and dignified one" he had selected. Nevertheless, the book sold briskly when it appeared in June of 1638. Weeks passed after its publication before Galileo himself received even a single copy. And by the time it reached his hands, he could not read or even see it. His eyes, vulnerable to infections and strains that had pained him much of his life, were now ruined by a combination of cataracts and glaucoma.

The blindness took first his right eye, in July 1637, forcing him to abandon the addition of a fifth day to
Two New Sciences,
and then the left the next winter. During the gloaming time when he had only one eye with which to observe the heavens or peruse his earlier notes and drawings, he wrote a final brief treatise on how best to gauge the diameters of stars and the distances between celestial bodies, and also made his last astronomical discovery, regarding the librations, or rocking, of the Moon.

“I have discovered a very marvelous observation in the face of the Moon,” Galileo wrote to Venetian Fra Micanzio in November of 1637, “in which body, though it has been looked at infinitely many times, I do not find that any change was ever noticed, but that the same face was always seen the same to our eyes.”

The Moon indeed keeps the same face—that of a smiling man’s eyes, nose, and mouth—always turned toward the Earth. For although the Moon rotates about its axis as it revolves around the Earth, the time period of its rotation precisely matches the monthly period of its revolution, keeping the far side out of sight.
*
Around the fringes of the Moon’s face, however, a combination of curious effects affords occasional glimpses of parts otherwise unseen.

“It alters its aspect,” Galileo told Fra Micanzio, “like one who shows to our eyes his full face, head on so to speak, and then goes changing this in all possible ways, that is, turning now a bit to the right and then a bit to the left, or else nodding up and down, or finally, tilting his left shoulder to right and left. All these variations are seen in the face of the Moon, and the large and ancient spots perceived in it make manifest and sensible what I say.”

When the total darkness descended, Galileo tried to accept the loss of his sight gracefully, remarking how no son of Adam had seen farther than he. Still the irony overwhelmed him.

“This universe,” he railed to Elia Diodati in 1638, “which I with my astonishing observations and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred, nay, a thousandfold beyond the limits commonly seen by wise men of all centuries past, is now for me so diminished and reduced, it has shrunk to the meager confines of my body.”

[ XXXIII]

The memory
of the
sweetnesses

While Galileo grew old and bent under house arrest in Arcetri, prohibited by inquisitors and infirmities from leaving II Gioiello, the priest assigned to San Matteo visited him once a month, the convent records show, presumably to hear his confession and administer the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Thus enfeebled, Galileo welcomed the October 1638 arrival of the perfect live-in companion: Vincenzio Viviani, a Florentine youth of sixteen years with a remarkable aptitude for mathematics. His scholastic distinction had brought the boy to the attention of Grand Duke Ferdinando, who in turn commended him to Galileo as an assistant.

Viviani wrote Galileo’s letters for him, read aloud the responses, and helped Galileo reconstruct his earliest scientific investigations to clarify questions raised by correspondents. The biography of Galileo that Viviani began writing years later, in 1654, suggests a timeless period of pleasant hours shared by these two alone, when the old man would unleash his tongue to ramble and the young one would listen with all his might. It was Viviani who pursued, perpetuated, and all but mythologized certain pivotal moments in the story of Galileo’s life—how, for example, while still a medical student, he intuited the law of the pendulum from watching a lamp swing during mass in the Pisan cathedral,
*
and how he dropped cannonballs from the summit of the Leaning Tower to crowds of professors and students below.

Vincenzio Viviani

If Galileo warmed to Viviani as to a second son, he also enjoyed the attentions of his actual son through these last years. Vincenzio, now the father of three boys (the youngest, Cosimo, was born in 1636), visited Galileo in Arcetri—and most likely Suor Arcangela as well, who lived on in silence at the convent next door. When Galileo conceived the idea for harnessing the pendulum as the regulator for a mechanical clock, he discussed the project at length with his son, appealing to Vincenzio for the use of his sight and artistic skill in drawing the clockwork. The sketch completed, Vincenzio offered to build the working model himself, rather than let the idea fall into the hands of some competitor who might pirate Galileo’s invention.

In a description he later wrote of his father, Vincenzio mixed memories of such times with hagiography:

Galileo was of jovial aspect, in particular in old age, of proper and square stature, of robust and strong complexion, as such that is necessary to support the really Atlantic efforts he endured in the endless celestial observations. His eloquence and expressiveness were admirable; talking seriously he was extremely rich of sentences and deep concepts; in the pleasing discourses he did not lack wit and jokes. He was easily angered but more easily calmed. He had an extraordinary memory, so that, in addition to the many things connected to his studies, he had in mind a great quantity of poetry and in particular the better part of
Orlando Furioso,
his favorite among the poems of whose author [Ludovico Ariosto] he praised above all the Latin and Tuscan poets. His most detested vice was the lie, maybe because with the help of the mathematical science he knew the beauty of the Truth too well.