MICHAEL SEGRE
11 The never-ending Galileo story
This essay is concerned with the myth of Galileo and, thus, with his image as a hero and martyr. It does not endeavor to state who Galileo was or what he did, but deals rather with people's expectations of who he was; in other words how his image and the image of his science have evolved from his time to the present day.
Galileo's great qualities and skills as a scientist are well known, but he was also an accomplished writer, wielding his sharp pen as a major protagonist in an age of upheaval, and he was the most famous martyr of science. His fate is, therefore, an endless source of material for an epic, enough to satisfy every age's demand for hero worship. This is why Bertolt Brecht chose to write his famous play Galileo.1
It is nothing new that Galileo has been a subject of worship since his own day.2 It is agreed among Galilean scholars that the Galileo story is often distorted by popular as well as scholarly literature.3 Moreover, Galileo is naturally idolized.4 If we cannot, or do not wish to, safeguard historical description from circumstantial influences or fashions, let us at least try to explore the twilight zone between “true” history and myth.
At times this myth, as we shall see, has even been useful in fostering scholarship. In describing various metamorphoses of Galileo's image, however, I would call for caution or – to borrow the expression of a leading Galilean scholar, Maurice Finocchiaro – judiciousness, and I would suggest that even today we occasionally fail to notice, whether unconsciously or consciously, when quasi-hagiography disguises itself as scholarship.
GALILEO IN THE EYES OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES
In his own day, Galileo was a celebrity and a hero, receiving endless praise during his lifetime from admirers, friends, and opponents alike throughout Europe.5 Even Maffeo Barberini, before becoming Pope Urban VIII and having him condemned by the Inquisition, composed an ode in 1620, Adulatio Perniciosa, in Galileo's honor, praising his astronomical discoveries.6 And the most famous contemporary Italian poet, Giambattista Marino, devoted the following lines to Galileo in his Adone (1623):7
Through thee, O Galileo, the telescope,
to present age unknown, shall be composed,
the work which brings remotest object close
and makes it show much larger to one's sense.
Thou only, the observer of her motion
and of what in her parts has concealed,
thou shalt, without a veil to shroud her form,
behold her nude, O new Endymion.8
In this same glass thou'lt spy not only each
of her minute details from near at hand,
but also, by my aid, thou shalt observe
Jupiter girt round with other lights,
whence in the sky the Arno's demigods
will leave their names inscribed forevermore.
Then Julius9 shall yield to Cosimo,
Augustus vanquished by thy Medici.
Despite the condemnation of Galileo in 1633 under the Pontificate of Urban VIII, the latter's Adulatio was published in Antwerp in 1636 and again in Paris in 1642, the very year of Galileo's death.10
No doubt, however, Galileo's misfortune meant that there would be little open enthusiasm for him in the Catholic world for well over a century. His death was given little public attention, in sharp contrast to the tide of feeling that accompanied the death of other giants such as Michelangelo and Newton.11 In the years following his death, he was mentioned and praised in contemporary literature but not worshipped; or rather, worship was not allowed.12
Louis Moreri's successful Grand Diction[n]aire Historique (1674) devoted a flattering, though balanced, article to Galileo saying that never had there been a greater spirit for the sciences of the heavens.13 Pierre Bayle's erudite and historically oriented Diction[n]aire Historique et Critique (first edition in 1695–97) did not even in its fourth edition of 1730 devote an entry to Galileo and mentioned him only in the entry devoted to his pupil Vincenzio Viviani (1622–1703).14
Every age creates its own heroes, and Galileo is a perennial candidate for that position; his extraordinary life adventure has all the necessary elements for a promising career as a superstar. In post-Renaissance Italy, the Renaissance genius was heroized, and the prototype of the contemporary genius was the “divine” Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Many illustrious writers shared the shaping of the latter's image as a hero, above all Michelangelo's famous pupil, the pioneer art historian and biographer Giorgio Vasari, and the contemporary writer and historian Benedetto Varchi. So did the Church representative, the Apostolic Nuncius to Florence, Giorgio Bolognetti.15 This image was also the ideal of Galileo's worshipers, who, while the Inquisition was on watch to ensure Galileo's memory remained low-profile, were secretly preparing to celebrate his comeback as a second Michelangelo.16
GALILEO AS A RENAISSANCE GENIUS
On January 12, 1642, four days after Galileo's death, Bolognetti wrote, evidently in great distress, to the Pope's nephew Cardinal Francesco Barberini in Rome: “They say that the Grand Duke wants to erect to him [Galileo] a sumptuous mausoleum comparable with and opposite that of Michelangelo Buonarroti.”17 The aim of Galileo's followers and admirers was thus clear from the very beginning, and, despite difficulties, they persisted. Galileo's canonization as a hero was carried out above all by his young disciple, Vincenzio Viviani, who, indeed, devoted most of his creative career to the memory of his teacher. The first important step was his biography of Galileo.18
Viviani began writing Life of Galileo in 1654 at the request of another admirer of Galileo, Prince Leopold de Medici, the brother of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Since Viviani was a perfectionist, he went on writing it and improving it for the rest of his life, and the short, eloquent essay appeared only posthumously in 1717.19
In Viviani's eyes, Galileo was the Renaissance ideal of a genius, and his Life of Galileo followed the typical pattern of contemporary literary “hagiography,” which ascribed to its heroes supernatural qualities from the moment of birth (often a birth accompanied by some cosmic event), the childhood qualities of a prodigy, a knowledge more profound than that possessed by normal mortals, and extraordinary talents (preferably practical ones).20
Viviani introduces Galileo thus: “Nature chose Galileo as one who should reveal part of those secrets.”21 His main inspirer, as his papers in Florence's National Library clearly reveal, was none other than Vasari: One sentence in Viviani's Life is closely copied from Vasari's Life of Giotto.22 Viviani's particular ideal was, naturally, Michelangelo, and, as a fortunate coincidence, Galileo was born three days before Michelangelo died (February 15 and 18, 1564). Viviani's papers include all sorts of calculations related to Michelangelo's death; perhaps he was trying to find some additional, transcendental, links. Although nobody mentioned reincarnation – after all, all parties involved were good Christians – it must have been, subconsciously at least, a most welcome event.23
Admittedly, Viviani made an effort to seek out sources and was certainly more conscientious a historian than many of his contemporaries. Yet, in order to achieve his ideal, he had to embellish historical facts – a common practice at the time – and his biography is of course not very reliable for the purposes of modern historians of science. Above all he related – or invented – anecdotes indicating the deep, magical, practical insights of Galileo. Thus Viviani reports, and today we question, that Galileo discovered the principle of the pendulum as the result of his having observed the swinging of a lamp in the cathedral of Pisa. The same kind of embellishment holds, even more emphatically, for the legendary experiment of dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.24
Viviani's Life of Galileo was one of the most authoritative texts on Galileo's life until the twentieth century, if not to date. The reason is obvious: Despite its shortcomings, this kind of embellishment in Viviani's essay is altogether both a good piece of contemporary “hagiographical” literature, and (considering his time) a relatively accurate history of science. It is the excellence of Viviani's essay that makes it so difficult to interpret; even today, historians have difficulties in distinguishing between reality and myth in its pages. The details related by Viviani and his embellishments were considered by later historians to be the unvarnished truth.
Above all, by presenting Galileo as a practical man, Viviani was the originator of the historiographical tradition, in popular as well as scholarly history of science, which considered and considers Galileo the founder of experimental sciences, based on sheer common sense. This view has been seriously questioned in the present century by some modern historians of science, especially Emil Wohlwill, Lane Cooper, and, most significantly, Alexandre Koyré.25 I will return to this later in this essay.
Nor was writing Galileo's Life in the style of Renaissance hagiographies the only undertaking of Viviani to turn his teacher into a hero.26 In 1674 he reminded the Tuscan Grand Duke, Cosimo III, of the old plan of Cosimo's father to erect a monument in honor of Galileo similar to that erected in the same church, Santa Croce, in honor of Michelangelo. In a letter to another follower of Galileo, Ottavio Falconieri, he suggested how the monument should look: with three statues, representing geometry, astronomy, and philosophy, just like the statues representing architecture, sculpture and painting in Michelangelo's monument.27
Unfortunately, Viviani did not live to see such a monument. For the time being, all he could do was to place, in 1693, a bust of Galileo above the entrance of his own house and an inscription in Galileo's memory fixed to its wall.28 Five years later, the widespread small guide of Florence, Ristretto delle Cose Più Notabili della Città di Firenze, praised Viviani's initiative and expressed the long endeavor for an adequate memorial for Galileo in Florence.29 Such a monument, just as Viviani would have wished, was erected only in 1737, in the Church of Santa Croce, in front of Michelangelo's.
In the century that followed Viviani's death, the age of Newton, the details of Galileo's life and work remained relatively unknown. His works and the scientific controversies associated with them had by then receded in importance and all that remained was his fame as a genius and as a martyr of science. Yet he remained (and in many senses is still today) an icon. Newton mentioned him in his Principia on occasions in which he agreed with him, namely when stating the laws of motion.30 Newton's system of the world, based on his theory of gravitation, nevertheless surpassed and contradicted Galileo's system, in which planets had circular orbits. In this case, Newton concealed the discrepancy by not mentioning Galileo's name (he said “others” instead) though he was referring precisely to the latter's law. In his The System of the World he said:
But it has been long ago observed by others, that (allowance being made for the small resistance of the air) all bodies descend through equal spaces in equal times. And, by the help of pendulums, that equality of times may be distinguished to great exactness.31
This, however, was no more than contemporary scientific reverence. Galileo came to be much more than a Renaissance genius and a scientific sacred cow.
GALILEO, THE MARTYR OF SCIENCE
In April 1633, in the midst of Galileo's trial, the eclectic scholar Gabriel Naudé wrote to the philosopher Pierre Gassendi, making “the machinations of Father Scheiner, and other Jesuits, who wish to get rid of him” responsible for Galileo's fate.32 Today we know that the Galileo affair was much more complex. Naudé’s letter is one of the earliest attempts to turn Galileo into a martyr of science, an attempt that, thanks to the ideas of the Enlightenment, had full success.
Naudé’s letter is a private document. The earliest public presentation of Galileo as a martyr of science came from the Protestant world, out of the pen of none other than John Milton. Milton was an admirer of Galileo and in his Areopagitica – Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing (1644), he mentions his meeting with “the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licenser thought.”33
Galileo's martyrdom as a legend, however, prospered in the eighteenth century. In 1703, a work under the title Naudaeana et Patiniana appeared in Amsterdam. It said under the entry “Galileo:”
Everybody knows that the fame of Galileo has increased the list of unlucky intellectuals. After having languished in the prisons of the Inquisition, having been obliged, in order to come out, to revoke publicly his belief that probably had no fault other than that of not being liked by the Inquisitors.34
This vague description, in a book dedicated to Naudé, repeats and adds invented details to the latter's pronouncement and well illustrates the neglect of the vast documentation concerning Galileo's life. Even Viviani's relatively well-documented and detailed description of Galileo's life was still unpublished. Its publication, in 1717, came just as the ideas of the Enlightenment, with their anticlerical bias, were gaining popularity in Europe.35 In the eyes of that age, like Newton, Galileo was an exemplary hero.
Thus Viviani's Life of Galileo suited the eighteenth century's spirit, despite Viviani's caution in describing the controversy between his teacher and the Church. He had merely said of Galileo's discussion of the two world systems:
Galileo showed himself to be more adherent to the Copernican hypothesis which had been condemned by the Holy Church as repugnant to the Divine Scripture. Thus, after the publication of his Dialogues, Galileo was summoned to Rome by the Congregation of the Holy Office, where he arrived around 10 February 1632 ab incarnatione.36 By the supreme clemency of that Court and by the sovereign Pontiff Urban VIII who also knew him very well from the republic of men of letters, he was placed under arrest in the residence of the Tuscan ambassador in that exquisite Palace of the Trinità de’ Monti, and, for a short time (having been shown his error), he withdrew as a true Catholic this opinion of his.37
Viviani's biography may have been at the birth of the Galileo myth but does not touch on those traits that transformed Galileo into a martyr of science. As historian Rupert Hall points out, despite the evident naivete of Viviani's statement, “most eighteenth-century writers cast ‘Peripatetics’ in the role of villains.”38 Yet in 1754, Voltaire, the Enlightenment's most celebrated caricaturist-mouthpiece, wrote, in his Dictionnaire Philosophique:
The persecutors were the party that happened to be mistaken. Those who enjoined penance upon Galileo were more mistaken still. Every inquisitor ought to be overwhelmed by a feeling of shame in the deepest recesses of his soul at the very sight of one of the spheres of Copernicus. Yet if Newton had been born in Portugal, and any Dominican had discovered a heresy in his inverse ratio of the squares of the distances, he would without hesitation have been clothed in a ‘san-benito,’ and burned as a sacrifice acceptable to God at an ‘auto-da-fé.’39
(A footnote added to the above quotation by the English translator in 1835 says: “This is as true in fact, as piquant in description; and although san-benitos and autos-da-fé are out of fashion, the disposition to persecute and run down abstract truths is nearly as strong as ever.”)
In the same year in which Voltaire was writing about Galileo (1754), the fourth volume of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie appeared. Although it did not contain an entry on Galileo, the entry on Copernicus clearly presented Galileo as a martyr of science and appealed to the pope to put an end to the restrictions imposed on scientific research in Italy. It said:
It would be very desirable that a country as full of spirit and knowledge as Italy, should finally admit an error so damaging to the progress of science … Such a change would well suit the enlightened pontiff governing the Church today.40
The pressure of the Church was lessening, but the Enlightenment's hostility toward it persisted.41 Its ideas influenced dedicated Italian historians; they had at their disposal sources for Galileo's life which they scarcely used. In 1793, the Florentine historian Giovanni Bat[t]ista Clemente de’ Nelli published the most detailed biography of Galileo til then.42 It was particularly important and authoritative because Nelli had discovered Galileo's papers and had at his disposal an impressive collection of sources, now forming a substantial portion of the Galilean Collection of manuscripts in the Florence National Library.43
Yet – as other of Nelli's own manuscripts and drafts kept in the same library testify – what he did was mainly to amplify Viviani's biography.44 This is why his attitude to the Church is particularly relevant to the theme of this essay, namely Galileo's image. His critique of the Church reflects a fashion rather than documentary evidence. He says, inter alia:
It is amazing to see the extent of the friars’ hatred and the attitude of the Pontiff to his divine author … The Pope, the Inquisition, the friars, the ignorant peripatetics, with the utmost extravagance, found unheard ways to torment the spirit of that unfortunate philosopher.45
Galileo's image as the martyr of science as presented by the anticlerical spokesmen of the Enlightenment is well summarized by the authoritative contemporary Florentine naturalist and historian Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti in his balanced assessment (1780):
Galileo's ill-fortune, though partly brought upon himself, caused much noise in the world, and if it brought little honor to the Tuscan Government of those days, it also brought no small dishonor to the Roman Court; since it has given and will give to the heterodox, and even slightly recalcitrant orthodox, an opportunity not to support its [the Church's] course.46
Targioni Tozzetti was right in his judgment: Galileo remained a martyr of science long after the Enlightenment. In 1821, for instance, the British writer, Walter Savage Landor, began writing in Florence his monumental work, Imaginary Conversations, wherein he imagines the meeting between Milton and Galileo.47 Landor's “conversation,” like Milton's Areopagitica and Brecht's Galileo, is historically inexact, but it was extremely important in the diffusion of a certain image of Galileo's martyrdom in the English-speaking world.
Anticlericalism was one feature of the Enlightenment response to the case of Galileo. Another feature is the conviction that correct reasoning leads to demonstrated truth, namely knowledge – although there was no consensus on what correct reasoning or knowledge was. The leaders of the Enlightenment movement included philosophers of contradicting views, notably the inductivist Francis Bacon and the intellectualist René Descartes.
Galileo was recognized as one of the pioneers of the modern method of investigation, but since the details of his work and methodology were little known and less understood, contemporary thinkers adopted and adapted him and his work to their own philosophy. Thus, the eighteenth century also saw the rebirth of a different Galileo, at times inconsistent, and his heroization began to take different paths.
GALILEO, SCIENTIFIC METHOD, AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Colin Maclaurin, the mathematician and follower of Newton, described Galileo in 1748 as one who
did no less service by treating, in a clear and geometrical manner, the doctrine of motion, which has been justly called the key of nature. The rational part of mechanics had been so much neglected, that there was hardly any improvement made in it, from the time of the incomparable Archimedes to that of Galileo; but this last named author has given us fully the theory of equable motions, and of such as are uniformly accelerated or retarded, and of these two components together.48
Maclaurin stressed the importance of geometry in Galileo's contribution, including in the concept the view of acceleration and velocity (i.e., the view that velocity is the time differential of position and that acceleration is the time differential of velocity). He praised Galileo's mathematics, as here he was on safe ground (although not quite, since Newtonian time differential is not a Galilean concept and, moreover, this is not quite geometry).
Other philosophers preferred to stress the empirical aspects of Galileo's work. In his Saggio sopra il Cartesio, written in 1754, Francesco Algarotti, the popularizer of Newton, friend of Voltaire, and admirer of British empiricism, regarded Galileo and Newton as empiricists in contrast to the rationalist Descartes. For Algarotti, Galileo had been an “enemy of Hypotheses, modest and patient discoverer, at the mercy of the experimental and geometrical help of the doctrine of motion.”49 Similarly, Nelli described Galilean methodology in the following words:
Galileo in Tuscany, in Italy, and I would nearly say in Europe, was the one that introduced the right manner of philosophizing, and the first that not with litigious arguments, but with founded, firm experiments proved true his opinions.50
There were, of course, more balanced presentations of Galileo, such as that of David Hume, who in The History of England (1759) wrote:
Bacon pointed out at a distance the road to true philosophy: Galileo both pointed it out to others, and made himself considerable advances in it. The Englishman was ignorant of geometry: the Florentine revived that science, excelled in it, and was the first that applied it, together with experiment, to natural philosophy. The former rejected, with the most positive disdain, the system of Copernicus: the latter fortified it with new proofs, derived both from reason and the senses.51
Similarly, Paolo Frisi, Barnabite, mathematician, physicist, and astronomer, and author of Saggio sul Galileo (1765), presented Galileo as “a philosopher, a geometer, a mechanician and an astronomer, not less theoretical than practical.”52
Yet the view that modern science is essentially empirical and detached from prejudices prevailed, and with it the belief that Galileo, as one of the earliest modern scientists, grounded – and perhaps even founded – experimental science. Galileo became (and still is) the model for the empiricist scientist who, unlike the natural philosophers of his day, sought to answer questions not by reading philosophical works, but rather through direct contact with nature. As support for this view of science, Viviani's anecdotes were particularly important.
Thus, by the end of the eighteenth century, the picture that emerged of Galileo was that of Galileo as freethinker, martyr of science, and founder of experimental science. The Enlightenment, no doubt, erected statues to honor great scientists, and it was during this period that Galileo's myth grew. However, as the philosopher of science Joseph Agassi points out, Enlightenment writers did not expect a scientist to be a genius.53
“The intellectual leaders of the Age of Reason, Bacon and Descartes, agreed,” says Agassi, “that common intelligence suffices for the pursuit of knowledge. The last great philosopher of the Age of Reason, Immanuel Kant, also endorsed this view.”54 The age that followed, Romanticism, was different in essence. It was reactionary and irrationally condemned all rebels. How did the Galileo tale survive this period?
GALILEO AND ROMANTICISM
Romanticism was a revolt against authority and tradition, as well as against reason and science. It had, according to Joseph Agassi, “acceptance or popular success as the criterion of correctness.”55 Science, to be “good,” had to be useful.
A typical example is John Herschel's A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830).56 For Herschel, Galileo was more than the pioneer of science: He was also the pioneer of applied science. “Among the Greeks,” he says, “this point was attained by Archimedes, but attained too late, on the eve of that great eclipse of science which was destined to continue for nearly 18 centuries, till Galileo in Italy, and Bacon in England, at once dispelled the darkness: the one, by his inventions and discoveries; the other, by the irresistible force of arguments and eloquence.”57
Because for Herschel experience, which includes both observation and experiment, was the “only ultimate source of our knowledge of nature and its laws,”58 Galileo must have reached his discoveries by means of experience:
A fair induction from a great number of facts led Galileo to conclude that the accelerating power of gravity is the same on all sorts of bodies, and on great and small masses indifferently; and this he exemplified by letting bodies of very different natures and weights fall at the same instant from a high tower, when it was observed that they struck the ground at the same moment, abating a certain trifling difference, due, as he justly believed it to be, to the greater proportional resistance of the air to light than to heavy bodies.59
Moreover, Galileo was a kind of prophet and already knew what was discovered after him, and Herschel remarks: “the gravity of every material body is in the direct proportion of its mass, which is only another mode of expressing Galileo's law.”60 The Galileo tale had to become utilitarian, and Alexander von Humboldt related in his Cosmos (1846) that Galileo used a pendulum to measure the height of the cathedral in Pisa. This invented story is nothing but a Romantic addition to the Renaissance embellishment in Viviani's story.61
In summary, the only way to cope with a prominent rebel such as Galileo in the age of Romanticism was to let him escape forward, namely to turn him into a modern genius. It would be hard to describe the innumerable representations produced by the eighteenth century of Galileo as a genius. The outstanding editor of Galileo, Antonio Favaro, has devoted two essays to Galilean iconography, amply documenting the contemporary blooming of paintings depicting Galileo's genius.62 It would be enough to glance at the “Tribuna di Galileo,” erected in 1841 by Grand Duke Leopold II on the first floor of the Palazzo Torregiani in Florence.63 Pietro Redondi has recently written a long study of nineteenth-century literature and painting concerning Galileo, showing how “the martyr has been sanctified.”64
Romanticism influenced the political changes in Europe during the nineteenth century, including the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian unification.65 It was in the wake of the Risorgimento that, in 1887, a royal decree issued by Umberto I, second King of Unified Italy, ordered the collection of Galileo's writing in the National Edition. The decree announced
a consideration of supreme national pride to satisfy in this manner the long-lasting desire of the scholars, the raising of a new and permanent monument of glory to the marvelous Genius who created experimental philosophy.66
Pathos aside, as the decree itself said, the National Edition, published between 1890 and 1909, is not only a monument, but also a masterpiece of scholarly work, and of course a most reliable source for Galilean studies. Indeed, this was also the period in which modern history of science was emerging, whose critical approach would sooner or later come to question the heroic model of Galileo.
MODERN HERESY BEGINS
In the middle of the nineteenth century, modern history and philosophy of science were emerging. From 1837 onward, the philosopher and historian William Whewell produced a series of original and powerful studies combining history of science, philosophy of science, and theory of knowledge.67 Although Whewell did not contribute directly to dispelling the mythical image of Galileo, his modern approach certainly challenged it.
Whewell stressed the importance of intuition and imagination against the worthlessness of induction in the development of science, and he noticed that small modifications to theories are important to the growth of science.68 Whewell noticed, for instance, incompatibilities between theories in science, such as Kepler's laws and Newton's Theory of Gravitation: They are, in fact, equivalent only for a two-body system.69 Whewell's views implicitly questioned the traditional image of Galileo by suggesting that all great scientific discoveries, including Galileo's, are sooner or later surpassed. Whewell's work, however, had little impact: Because he went against current opinion his work was set aside and forgotten.70
Yet scholarship was making progress. In 1876–1877, Karl von Gebler published a masterly edition of the documents of Galileo's Trial.71 In 1893, the historian of art Igino Benvenuto Supino found that the so-called Galilean Lamp in the cathedral of Pisa was hung there in 1587, contradicting Viviani's report that Galileo had observed it swinging four years earlier.72 The more legendary aspects of the Galileo myth began to crumble.
The most radical step in the demythologization of Galileo came toward the end of the century. Between 1891 and 1900, Raffaello Caverni, a Florentine priest, wrote a monumental work (six volumes), relying on many previously unpublished documents, attempting to study the position and importance of Galileo's work in relation to his predecessors, his followers, and other seventeenth-century European scientists.73
The result was a totally new presentation of Galileo's work, claiming that too much credit had been given to him at the expense of other Renaissance scientists and of his contemporaries. Despite his great admiration for Galileo, Caverni boldly questioned what the latter pretended to have discovered, going as far as to denounce him for having claimed priority for the discoveries of many natural philosophers who were his predecessors, such as Tartaglia or Stevin, or even his own followers such as Castelli or Cavalieri. Galileo's false claims, says Caverni, were reported and, in a few cases, amplified by his biographers.
Caverni's work has many merits. Most important of all, he drew attention to the work of many scientists whom Galileo had overshadowed. He also pinpointed one of Galileo's most important contributions to science – the recognition of the basic importance of geometry.74 Admittedly, Caverni let his “anti-Galileanism” carry him too far, and his claims are at times exaggerated and no less mythical than the views he criticized.
Caverni's presentation of Galileo as an antihero naturally encountered much opposition, and this was not just restricted to philosophical polemic.75 Caverni was isolated outright: He was excluded from the board of editors of the National Edition, and his claims were to a great extent ignored. The printing of his work was even interrupted in the middle of the sixth volume when he died in 1900, although he left a complete manuscript. Incredibly, Volume 6 abruptly ends in the middle of a sentence. It took three quarters of a century to rediscover and reprint his work.76
Yet even in his own day, Caverni's work had an impact, though initially outside Italy, marking a turning point in Galilean studies and encouraging critical study of Galileo's work. In 1903, Emil Wohlwill, a German chemist and historian, pointed out that there is no evidence that several additional details in Viviani's story ever occurred.77 Wohlwill doubted, among other things, the truthfulness of stories such as that of the lamp in the cathedral of Pisa and the Leaning Tower experiment.
Moreover, before Caverni, to the best of my knowledge, no one had investigated Galileo's intellectual predecessors – indeed, it was taken for granted that Galileo had none. A few years after Caverni had published his work, the French physicist, philosopher, and historian of science Pierre Duhem, in the wake of Whewell and Caverni, studied the development of science as constant modification to theories, known as the “conventionalist” approach to the history of science. Duhem published a monumental study of Galileo's predecessors, emphasizing the former's debt to their work.78 All these studies, of course, reshaped Galileo's image.
Official history of science could not abide these heresies. Favaro, in a series of articles, attempted to refute Wohlwill's claims.79 Favaro's arguments were plausible, but the tone in which they were written displayed an irritation that went beyond scholarly argument. For instance, Wohlwill had claimed that there was no evidence that King Gustav Adolf of Sweden had been a student of Galileo in Padua as Viviani had related.
Favaro replied with an article with the angry title: “Ancora, e per l'ultima volta, intorno all'episodio di Gustavo Adolfo di Svezia nei racconti della vita di Galileo” (“Again, once and for all, concerning the episode of Gustav Adolf of Sweden in the stories of Galileo's Life”). The article accuses Wohlwill of being no less than anti-Italian and anti-Latin.80 On another occasion he wrote: “Nobody had ever doubted, until, regrettably, in the past few months, one of the most authoritative and profound Galilean scholars argued against him [Viviani].”81 Wohlwill had violated the sanctum.
But heresy went on. In 1935, Lane Cooper, an American professor of English, published a small humorous book, Aristotle, Galileo and the Tower of Pisa.82 Cooper's aim was to assemble the literature relevant to the Leaning Tower story for the use of English-speaking readers, and he repeated Wohlwill's doubts, pointing out that there was no evidence that the episode ever took place. The book was not so much directed against Viviani's story as against that mythological literature that presented the Leaning Tower demonstration as a dramatic turning point in the history of science.
The reaction was excessive.83 Shortly after its appearance, Cooper's book was reviewed and criticized by two leading scholars, the historian of science Aldo Mieli and the classicist Harold Cherniss.84 Both reviewers focused their criticism on a secondary feature of Cooper's book – his presentation for misrepresentation) of Aristotle's law of fall – and practically disregarded the rather more important point raised by him and, earlier, by Wohlwill, namely that no documentation exists to prove Viviani's story.
Mieli was particularly scornful, and in his four-page review he ridiculed Cooper by referring to him no less than six times as “the Professor of English” who tried to meddle in matters that did not concern him. Mieli's irrational arguments were soon picked up by Giuseppe Boffito, who in 1940 updated the Galilean bibliography. He commented on the entry for Cooper's book: “The author is a philologist, not a physicist: this deficiency is evident throughout the book.”85
Neither Mieli nor Boffito say, however, how a better knowledge of physics or history of science can produce evidence in favor of Viviani. The disproportionate and irrational reaction to Cooper's book confirms that progress not only failed to dispel the mythological aspects of the Galilean story but probably emphasized them.
KOYRÉ
Shortly after the publication of Cooper's book, Alexandre Koyré began a series of Galilean studies that became fundamental for the history of science in general.86 Koyré conjectured that neither experience nor experiment played any essential role in Galileo's work and even suggested that some experiments Galileo described in detail had never been performed, basing his claim both on evidence and even more on his view of Galileo's apriorist view of method.
Koyré’s claim was frankly presented as an outcome not so much of his remarkable study of the Galilean heritage as of his own views concerning the role of experiment in science. An experiment, he maintains, is a question put before nature and the “facts” resulting from asking this question have to be ordered, interpreted, and explained within the language in which it is formulated; thus the results are necessarily formulated a priori.87 This interpretation, claims Koyré, is particularly appropriate when applied to the birth of modern science, when mathematical language had evolved further than experimental ability.
It is Galileo's work on method rather than on the physical world that fits this interpretation, having much in common with the Platonic and, more specifically, Archimedean view of scientific method. According to Koyré, Galileo's great contribution to science was in going one step beyond Plato and Archimedes, by successfully granting movement to the abstract and immovable Archimedean bodies. The laws of his physics are thus deduced abstractly, without recourse to experiment on real bodies. Therefore, says Koyré, the experiments Galileo claims to have performed, even the ones he really carried out, cannot be anything but thought experiments.88
Koyré ridiculed, for instance, the description of Galileo's inclined-plane experiment in the Two New Sciences as “An accumulation of sources of error and inexactitude,”89 adding: “It is obvious that the Galilean experiments are completely worthless: the very perfection of their results is a rigorous proof of their lack of correction.”90 These words, if taken out of the context of Koyré’s general apriorism, do indeed sound blasphemous. Yet this still does not mean that, according to Koyré, Galileo did not perform empirical work, but only that his empiricism was conceived a priori.91
Koyré’s fascinating view is difficult to criticize because, as one of his critics, Maurice Finocchiaro, has pointed out to me, it concerns what Galileo should have done rather than what he actually did. Indeed, Koyré’s view may be considered part of the Galilean myth, more precisely of the anti-Galilean myth, and it suffers from the main weaknesses of the Galilean myth in that it attempts to use Galileo as a mouthpiece through which to expound Koyré’s own view of science.
Koyré’s challenge raised different types of criticism. One attempt to invalidate Koyré’s arguments by checking his precision came from a number of prominent scholars, such as Eugenio Garin and Maurice Finocchiaro, who indeed showed that Koyré had been imprecise. The latter, in particular, found in Koyré’s treatment “superficiality in logical analysis, oversimplification, injudicious exaggerations, and questionable manipulation of the text by means of excessive quotations, of taking passages out of context, and of not infrequent scholarly carelessness.”92 Finocchiaro's criticism is strong because it is rational but does not prevent Finocchiaro from praising Koyré:
Nevertheless, Koyré does deserve the credit for having called attention to the logical structure and validity of Galileo's arguments and to his rationalism, even though he misunderstands the former as circular and misinterprets the latter as apriorism. Finally, it would be unhistorical to deny that the study of the history of science made great progress with Koyré; to turn the clock backwards is simply unthinkable.93
Yet there were those who tried to turn the clock back, to invalidate Koyré’s arguments, by irrational criticism. It all started in 1961, when Thomas Settle repeated Galileo's inclined-plane experiment ridiculed by Koyré.94
Settle's description of the repetition of Galileo's experiment in a nice short article is among the most quoted in Galilean studies. It concluded, in contradiction to Koyré, that the experiment could be performed with the means Galileo described. Settle's experiment, however, neither refuted nor claimed to refute Koyré’s general methodological argument that since all experiments are premeditated, whether or not Galileo performed some experiments is not important for understanding his intentions.95
Settle's interesting result, however, was twisted by several later empirically oriented works. Typical of these is Stillman Drake's complaint, in his classic and outstanding article on Galileo's experimental confirmation of horizontal inertia: “Koyré’s paper was reprinted years later in book form without so much as a note by the editors concerning Settle's refutation of its thesis.”96
In his article, Drake attempted to reconstruct Galileo's inclined-plane experiment on the basis of unpublished manuscripts. Drake's work initiated a new rich trend of Galilean studies, in attempts to interpret Galileo's working notes. It would be beyond the boundaries of this article, and frankly monotonous, to outline the ramifications of this research (which include, among other things, many modern ball-rolling experiments). Let me here only quote Jürgen Teichmann, a scholar who had the perseverance to follow it throughout and study its results.97 His conclusion was that these studies as a whole strengthen the Galileo myth.
The myth of Galileo's empiricism is only part of the Galileo myth. In recent times no less emphasis has been placed on the myth of Galileo the martyr of science.
GALILEO'S MODERN MARTYRDOM
Gebler and Favaro's edition of the manuscripts of Galileo's trial was followed by many studies of the “Galileo Case.” Two exciting books are particularly relevant to the present article: Giorgio De Santillana's The Crime of Galileo and Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers.98 The first relies on Gebler, argues in favor of Galileo, and adds one more link to the long literary chain of Galileo's martyrdom. The second blames, in the wake of Caverni, Galileo's arrogance as the source of his misfortunes, rather than the “obscurantism” of his opponents, and adds one more link to the chain of the Galileo antimyth.
There is a basic difference between these works. Santillana's was written as a more scholarly work, its intention apparently to provide “an objective” account of the case.99 Koestler's main purpose seems to have been to present a more popular history of cosmology from the Greeks to Newton (I. Bernard Cohen even suggested that “One almost has the feeling that what began as a biography of Kepler ended up as a history of cosmology”100). Indeed, the book, with over 600 pages and subtitled “A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe,” is divided into five parts and does not deal with Galileo until the middle of Part Four (p. 352).101
Koestler was a novelist; he did not make an effort to get his facts right, and history of science would have done better to treat his book as a work of divulgation, in the same way as Brecht's Galileo was treated as fiction. But Brecht's Galileo is “good” and Koestler's Galileo is “bad.”
A violently hostile review article by Santillana and Stillman Drake branded Koestler as a heretic and elevated his book to the rank of a scholarly work. Of the seven points discussed at length in that article, six deal with Galileo.102 It is hard to blame the two prominent Galilean scholars of having been irrational in their criticism.
There is no doubt, however, that the reaction that provoked the review was emotional: Joseph Agassi, after a meticulous analysis of the controversy, points out,
Generally, every time Galileo's defenders are apologetic, Koestler stresses the point which causes them discomfort; and every time the Catholic apologists show a weak point in Galileo's scientific view, Koestler follows them. And he regularly attributes some unpleasant motives to Galileo.103
Koestler, the iconoclast, did not escape the fate of his predecessors.
ON GOES THE GALILEO TALE
“So well have we defended the pantheon of science from any suggestion of stain,” says the late Richard Westfall in a classic article on Galileo's science and patronage, “that only after I had pursued this question nearly to its conclusion did I discover it had been raised once before, nearly a century ago, by an Italian scholar, Raffaello Caverni. Caverni, who wrote during the springtime of Italian unity, was summarily drummed right out of the Italian learned community for casting a shadow on the name of the national hero. Since I have no desire to suffer a similar fate, I trust that I am far enough removed from the seat of such emotions. I do wish to emphasize that it is not my purpose in any way to call Galileo's position in the history of science into question.”104
If a scholar of the stature of Westfall found it appropriate to make a declaration such as the one above, I feel all the more impelled to repeat it at the end of this article dealing with heroes and heretics. For a historian who repeated Galilean experiments did me the honor of placing me in the company of Caverni & Co.105 I had dared, in my book In the Wake of Galileo, on the successors of Galileo, to devote about two pages to the discussion of Galileo's empiricism, saying that although there is no doubt that Galileo experimented a great deal, one cannot say exactly what role he assigned to experiment.106
The myth-ridden image of Galileo's work as perfect remains, and his (little-studied) critics and disciples are still considered better ignored. Criticism in science and its history can endure as long as it is rational, respects intellectual propriety and fair play. Only under these conditions may history be distinguished from legend.
NOTES
I am indebted to Joseph Agassi for having read an early version of this article and suggesting many improvements. Just before the completion of this article, Neil Harris gave me invaluable criticism and suggestions: Not all could be incorporated in the manuscript but they contributed greatly to its improvement. I am also indebted to Alison Moffat for her editing work as well as her improvements to the contents.
1 Bertolt Brecht, Leben des Galilei, Berlin: Hen schelverlag, 1956, English adaptation, Galileo, by Charles Laughton, edited and introduction by Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1966).
2 For Galileo's changing image in Italian culture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Gianni Micheli's informative “L'idea di Galileo nella cultura Italiana dal XVI al XIX secolo,” in Galileo: La Sensata Esperienza, Cinisello Balsamo: Amilcare Pizzi, 1988, pp. 163–237.
3 One should of course distinguish between scholarship and more divulgative forms of writing or between the use of the figure of Galileo and the story (or myth) of his life in creative writers. Some of these episodes seem high art, such as Brecht's, but the interpretation is linked with the preoccupations of these writers. In many cases, they also have only a partial and imperfect knowledge of Galileo's writings and thus accept the myth. Most of this article concerns the figure of Galileo in the work of specialists, yet history itself is often a myth, and one finds the Galileo myth in different nuances but basically the same traits in all types of literature.
4 A delicious presentation of the Galileo myth in relation to the story of the Leaning Tower Experiment is Lane Cooper's, Aristotle, Galileo, and the Tower of Pisa Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1935, which was ignored for decades before it achieved its present status as a classic. Both his philosophy and his history of science were heretical, and at that time heresy was less tolerated than today. For the rejection of Cooper see my “Galileo, Viviani and the Tower of Pisa,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (1989), pp. 435–51.
5 It would be enough to look at Galileo's wide correspondence, collected in volumes 10–18 of Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale, 20 vols., ed. Antonio Favaro (henceforth abbreviated as EN), Florence Barbera, 1890–1909; reprint: 1929–1939, 1964–1966, 1968. For a compilation of the poetic references to Galileo in contemporary works see Nunzio Vaccaluzzo, Galileo Galilei nella Poesia del Suo Secolo. Raccolta di Poesie Edite e Inedite, Scritte da Contemporanei in Lode di Galileo, Milan: Remo Sandron, 1910. This useful work, with a long introduction, clearly shows how the Galileo myth existed already in his own day. For some other examples see also Micheli, “L'idea di Galileo,” pp. 166–8.
6 Pernicious Adulation. The poem was sent to Galileo by Barberini accompanied by a letter dated August 28, 1620. Galileo thanked him with a letter written on September 7; EN 13:48–50. As Giorgio de Santillana points out in his exciting though biased The Crime of Galileo (London: Mercury Books, 1961, first published 1955), p. 156, in the Adulatio Galileo's discoveries “are brought in as an example of how greatness and glory deemed to be above the changes of fortune will eventually show their weakness and come to grief.”
7 Adone, x, 43. Quotation from Adonis. Selections from L'Adone of Giambattista Marino, Harold Martin Priest, trans., Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967, p. 190. Marino's and others’ attitude to Galileo's discoveries is discussed by Giovanni Aquileia, “Da Bruno a Marino,” Studi Secenteschi 20, 1979; pp. 89–95. Not everybody agreed with Galileo's Copernicanism but his telescopic discoveries were highly acclaimed.
8 A handsome youth, loved by Cynthia.
9 Julius Caesar.
10 The first publication is quoted by Favaro, EN, 13:48, note 2; the second one in Maphaei S. R. E. Card. Barberini nunc Urbani Papae VIII poemata, Parisiis, e Typographia Regia, anno 1642.
11 For public indifference to Galileo's death and burial see Paolo Galluzzi, “I sepolcri di Galileo: le spoglie ‘vive’ di un eroe della scienza,” in Luciano Berti, Il Pantheon di Santa Croce Firenze, Florence: Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, 1993 (this bank publication is not available commercially), pp. 145–82. Galileo's funeral was attended by only a small number of relatives, friends, and followers (see p. 145). Galluzzi relates the efforts made by Galileo's followers to grant Galileo a mausoleum appropriate to his standing and the difficulties they encountered, and he adds another interesting piece to the mosaic of the growth of the Galileo myth.
12 Three sonnets composed in his honor in 1642 by one Paganino Gaudenzio, “In morte del famosissimo Galileo,” disappeared without trace from Florence's Magliabechi library; see Antonio Favaro and Alarico Carli, Bibliografia Galileiana (1568–1895), Rome, 1896, p. 40. This was not necessarily censorship, but when Galileo's pupil Vincenzio Viviani wanted to describe Galileo's “supernatural talent” (“talento sopranaturale”), he was dissuaded by a churchman; see Luigi Tenca, “Relazione fra Vincenzio Viviani e Michel Angelo Ricci,” Rendiconti dell'Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, Classe di Scienze, 87 (1954):212–28, p. 219. Things were however significantly different in Catholic France: Pierre Gassendi, an admirer of Galileo, in his Institutio Astronomica (London, 1653), praised Galileo's astronomical discoveries (I was not able to find this early edition of Gassendi's work and I rely on Favaro and Carli, Bibliografia Galileiana, p. 52).
13 Louis Moreri, Le Grand Dictionaire Historique, 2 vols., Lyon, 1681, 2:11. I quote this edition since it is the earliest available to me.
14 Pierre Bayle, Diction[n]aire Historique et Critique, 4 vols., Leiden, 1730, 4:463. This edition, too, was the only one I had available.
15 For Bolognetti see next section on “Galileo as a Renaissance Genius.”
16 Galileo was already compared to Michelangelo during his own life time: In 1612, reacting to criticism of Galileo's highly controversial Bodies in Water, Galileo's friend, the painter Ludovico Cardi da Cigoli, wrote him an encouraging letter saying that Michelangelo too had been criticized and was alleged to have ruined architecture. See EN 12:361.
17 EN 18:378.
18 See my “Viviani's Life of Galileo,” Isis, 80 (1989):207–31. See also my In the Wake of Galileo New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991, where his life's work is outlined in some detail.
19 Ibid. Viviani's Life [of Galileo] was published for the first time in Fasti consolari dell'Accademia Fiorentina, ed. Salvino Salvini, Florence, 1717, pp. 397–431, and included in EN 19:597–646.
20 This pattern has been vividly described by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, transl. Alastair Laing, transl. rev. by Lottie M. New man New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979; based on Kris and Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein historischer Versuch, Vienna: Krystall Verlag, 1934, with additions to the original text by Otto Kurz.
21 EN 19:602.
22 Vasari says of the young Giotto: “mostrando in tutti gli atti ancora fanciulleschi una vivacità e prontezza d'ingegno,” and Viviani says of Galileo: “ne’ prim'anni della sua fanciullezza a dar saggio della vivacità del suo ingegno.” The first quotation is from Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ Più Eccellenti Pittori, Scultori e Architettori nelle Redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini, annotated by Paola Barocchi, vol. 2 Florence: Sansoni, 1966, pp. 96 and 139 for the 1550 and 1568 editions respectively. The second is from EN 19:601.
23 Viviani's papers related to his Life (of Galileo) have been collected in vol. 11 of the Galilean Collections of MSS in the National Library in Florence. For full details see my “Viviani's Life of Galileo,” pp. 221–5, and In the Wake of Galileo, pp. 116–22. In his article “I sepolcri di Galileo” (1993) Galluzzi, too, deals with the myth of Michelangelo as Viviani's source and with the providential coincidence between Michelangelo's death and Galileo's birth. Galluzzi flatters me by devoting a footnote to my book, In the Wake of Galileo, referring to my account of Viviani's efforts to scrutinize this coincidence (pp. 169–70 in Galluzzi's article, pp. 116–22 in my book). Galluzzi also criticizes my having allegedly said that Viviani had falsified dates. I neither ascribed to Viviani any such misconduct nor have I dated any falsification, observing instead that it is not known when Viviani wrote the different drafts of his Life. Galluzzi also reproaches me for having spoken of Viviani's juxtaposition of dates only in relation to a biographical cliché, without exploring the intellectural drives behind such a juxtaposition. Such an exploration would be, indeed, too ambitious for me: I am eager to hear more from him about his own work in this direction.
24 EN 19, pp. 603 and 606 respectively.
25 For the creation of the myth of Galileo as the common-sense founder of experimental science, see my In the Wake of Galileo.
26 See Galluzzi, “I sepolcri di Galileo.”
27 Ibid., p. 169.
28 The building, known as “Palazzo dei Cartelloni,” and the bust and inscription still exist in Via dell'Amore (near S. Maria Novella, now called Via S. Antonino).
29 Raffaello Del Bruno, Ristretto delle Cose Più Notabili della Città di Firenze (2nd ed., Florence, 1698). This guide appeared in many editions, especially in the eighteenth century; I was not able to find this particular edition. It is missing today in the Florence National Library, though not in its Magliabechi catalog. I rely on Galluzzi “I sepolcri di Galileo,” p. 145.
30 For instance at the beginning of the Principia or when speaking of parabolic motion or of free fall. Newton does not mention Galileo anywhere in Book III of the Principia.
31 Isaac Newton, A Treatise of the System of the World, translated from Latin into English by I. Bernard Cohen, London: Dawson of Pall Mall, 1969, p. 36 (italics mine). Newton's difficulty is discussed by Joseph Agassi in “Newtonianism Before and After the Einsteinian Revolution,” in Frank Durham and Robert D. Purrington, eds., Some Truer Method: Reflections on the Heritage of Newton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 145–74. What disturbed Newton, according to Agassi (p. 166), “was his realization that a theory which is an approximation to the truth, no matter how good, is false, and that no falsehood is provable, so that he was pressed by the theory of rationality as proof to declare Galileo's or Kepler's theory absolutely true, or not rational!” Agassi's solution is to devise a new theory of rationality.
32 EN 15:87–8.
33 The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson, vol. 4, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1931, p. 330. For a study of Milton's references to Galileo and their historical context see Neil Harris, “Galileo as a Symbol: The “Tuscan Artist” in Paradise Lost,” Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze 10 (1985) 2:3–29; “The Vallombrosa Simile and the Image of the Poet in Paradise Lost,” in Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare, New York: Binghamton, 1991, pp. 71–94.
34 No author or editor is mentioned on the title page: Naudaeana et patiniana ou singularitez remarquables, prises des conversations de Mess. Naudé & Patin, Amsterdam, 2nd ed., 1703, pp. 153–4.
35 For an outline of Galileo's image in the eighteenth century, see A. Rupert Hall, “Galileo in the Eighteenth Century,” in Haydn Mason (general ed.), Transactions of the Fifth International Congress on the Enlightenment, vol. 1, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1980, pp. 81–99. For a detailed presentation of the scientific controversies in the Age of Enlightenment in Italy see Vincenzo Ferrone, Scienza Natura Religione: Mondo Newtoniano e Cultura Italiana, Naples: Jovene, 1982.
36 In Florence in Viviani's day, the years were counted ab incarnatione, so that they began with the feast of the Annunciation (March 25). Thus February 10, 1632 in Viviani's biography refers to February 10, 1633 in today's dating.
37 EN 19:617 (my translation).
38 Hall, “Galileo in the Eighteenth Century,” p. 89.
39 Translation from A Philosophical Dictionary, from the French of M. De Voltaire With Additional Notes, Abner Kneeland, Boston, 1835, p. 172.
40 Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, vol. 4, reprint of the first edition 1751–1780, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann, 1966, p. 174 (my translation).
41 See Bernard Jacqueline, “La Chiesa e Galileo nel secolo dell'Illuminismo,” in Galileo Galilei: 350 Anni di Storia (1633–1983). Studi e ricerche, Rome: Edizioni Piemme, 1984. This article relies on Hall's “Galileo in the Eighteenth Century”.
42 Giovanni Batista Clemente De’ Nelli, Vita e Commercio Letterario di Galileo Galilei, Lausanne, 1793.
43 The story of Nelli's discovery of Galileo's manuscript is related in Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, Notizie degli Aggrandimenti delle Scienze Fisiche Accaduti in Toscana nel Corso di Anni LX del Secolo XVII, 3 vols., Florence, 1780; reprint, Bologna: Forni, 1967, 1:124–5. Targioni Tozzetti was a Florentine naturalist and historian and his Notizie are an impressive description of the development of science in Tuscany in the seventeenth century, focusing on Medici patronage.
44 The documentation used by Nelli and the drafts of his work are collected in MSS 318–22 of the Galilean Collection.
45 Nelli, Vita, pp. 557 and 558 (my translation).
46 Targioni Tozzetti, Notizie, 1:120 (my translation).
47 Walter Savage Landor, “Galileo, Milton, and a Dominican, in Imaginary Conversation,” Imaginary Conversations, vol. 4, London: Aldine House, 1916, pp. 384–93.
48 An account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries, in Four Books by Colin Maclaurin, reprint. New York, 1968, p. 55.
49 “Saggio sopra il Cartesio,” in Francesco Algarotti, Saggi, edited by Giovanni Da Pozzo, Bari: Laterza, 1963, pp. 405–31. Quotation from p. 427.
50 Giovanni Batista Clemente Nelli, Saggio di Storia Letteraria Fiorentina del Secolo XVII, Lucca 1759, p. 84.
51 David Hume, The History of England, vol. IV, London, 1830, p. 391.
52 Frisi's Saggio has been republished and commented on in Micheli, Galileo, la Sensata Esperienza, pp. 207–12 (my translation from p. 211).
53 Joseph Agassi, “Genius in Science,” in Joseph Agassi, Science and Society, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981, pp. 192–222.
54 Ibid., p. 193.
55 Ibid., p. 202.
56 John F. W. Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, London, 1830; reprint, The University of Chicago Press, 1987. John Herschel (1792–1871), son of William Herschel, was an important astronomer in his own right, as well as a philosopher of science. Joseph Agassi has stressed the importance of Herschel in “Sir John Herschel's Philosophy of Success,” Science and Society, pp. 388–420.
57 Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse, p. 72.
58 Ibid., p. 76.
59 Ibid., pp. 167–8.
60 Ibid., p. 169.
61 Alexandre De Humboldt, Cosmos: Essai d'une Description Physique du Monde, transl. H. Faye, 4 vols., Paris 1846, 1:189.
62 Favaro, Studi e Ricerche per una Iconografia Galileiana, Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1913, and Nuove Ricerche per una Iconografia Galileiana, Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1914.
63 Reference from Micheli, La Sensata Esperienza, reproducing these paintings, pp. 166–72.
64 Pietro Redondi, “Dietro l'Immagine. Rappresentazioni di Galileo nella Cultura Positivistica,” Nuncius, 9, (1994) 1:65–116, p. 73.
65 The Risorgimento was essentially anticlerical and its leaders searched for a list of martyrs of the Church, such as Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, and, of course, Galileo, to designate as Italian heroes.
66 Antonio Favaro, Per la edizione nazionale delle opere di Galileo Galilei sotto gli auspici di S. M. il Re d'Italia. Esposizione e disegno (Florence, 1888), p. 3: “Considerando di supremo decoro nazionale l'appagare per tal guisa illungo desiderio degli studiosi, elevando ad un tempo nuovo e durevole monumento di gloria al Genio meraviglioso che creava la filosofia sperimentale.”
67 In particular, William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, 3 vols., London, 1837, and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded upon Their History, 2 vols., London, 1840.
68 I am indebted to John Wettersten for summarizing to me Whewell's contribution to the history of science (I did not find anywhere in the literature a concise presentation of Whewell's contribution to the history of science.) Wettersten's book on Whewell, Whewell's Critics: Have they Prevented Him from Doing Good? is forthcoming, Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi.
69 See “On Hegel's Criticism of Newton's Principia,” in William Whewell, On the Philosophy of Discovery, London, 1860, Appendix H.
70 As claimed and described by John Wettersten and Joseph Agassi in “Whewell's Problematic Heritage,” in Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer, William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 345–69.
71 Karl Von Gebler, “Galileo Galilei und die Römische Kurie,” 2 vols., Stuttgart, 1876–1877. Translated into English by Jane Sturge under the title Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia, London, 1879; reprint, Merrick, NY: Richwood Publishing Company, 1977. For the history of the documents and of their publication see Sergio M. Pagano, ed., I Documenti del Processo di Galileo Galilei, Vatican City: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum, 1984, pp. 26–35 concerning Gebler.
72 Igino Benvenuto Supino, “La lampada di Galileo,” Archivio Storico dell'Arte, 6 (1893), 3:215–18.
73 Raffaello Caverni, Storia del Metodo Sperimentale in Italia, 6 vols., Florence, 1891–1900; reprint. Bologna: Forni, 1970.
74 Ibid., 1:143.
75 As post-Risorgimental Italy was anticlerical and Caverni was a priest he was at a disadvantage.
76 The story of Caverni's work is related by Giorgio Tabaronni at the beginning of the reprinted work and by Cesare S. Maffioli in “Sulla genesi e sugli inediti della Storia del metodo sperimentale in Italia di Raffaello Caverni,” Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 10 (1985), 1: 23–85.
77 Wohlwill's doubts were expressed at first in a meeting reported by the Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift 50 (1903):1849–50, and later, in detail, in his series of articles “Galilei-Studien: Die Pisaner Fallversuche,” Mitteilungen zur Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwis senschaften, 4 (1905):229–48; “Der Abschied von Pisa,” Mitteilungen zur Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, 5 (1906): 230–49, 439–64, 6 (1907):231–42.
78 Pierre Duhem, Études sur Léonard de Vinci, published in three series, Paris: Hermann, 1906–1913, and Le système du Monde: Histoire des Doctrines Cosmologiques de Platon a Copernic, 10 vols., Paris: Hermann, 1913–1959.
79 Favaro, “Ancora, e per l'ultima volta, intorno all'episodio di Gustavo Adolfo di Svezia nei racconti della vita di Galileo,” Atti e Memorie della R. Accademia di Scienze Lettere ed Arti in Padova, 365 (1906–1907), nuova serie – vol. 23, pp. 6–12. “Sulla veridicità del'Racconto istorico della vita di Galileo’ dettato da Vincenzio Viviani,” Archivio Storico Italiano, disp. 2a, 1915, Florence: Tipografia Galileiana, 1916; and “Di alcune inesattezze nel ‘Racconto istorico della vita di Galileo’ dettato da Vincenzio Viviani,” Archivio Storico Italiano, disp. 3a, 4a, 1916, Florence: Tipografia Galileiana, 1917.
80 Favaro, “Ancora, e per…,” p. 8.
81 Favaro, “Sulla veridicità,” p. 6.
82 Op. cit.
83 For a full account, see my “Galileo, Viviani and the Tower of Pisa.”
84 Aldo Mieli, Archeion, Archivio di Storia della Scienza, 17 (1935):303–7. Harold Cherniss, Modern Language Notes, 51 (1936):184–5.
85 Giuseppe Boffitto, Bibliografia Galileiana (1896–1940), primo supplemento, Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1943, p. 198.
86 Alexandre Koyré, Études Galiléennes (Paris; Hermann, 1939; reprint, 1966). English translation by John Mepham as Galileo Studies, Hassocks, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1978. The work is dated 1939, but it appeared only in 1940. It collected studies published from 1935. For details see Redondi's useful study of Koyré’s work: Alexandre Koyré, De la Mystique à la Science. Cours, conférences et documents, 1922–1962, edited by Pietro Redondi, Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1986, pp. 36–7 and 217.
87 See Alexandre Koyré’s outstanding, “An Experiment in Measurement” (1953), republished in Metaphysics and Measurement London: Chap man & Hall, 1968; reprint, Yverdon: Gordon and Breach, 1992, pp. 89–117. Koyré also believed that the Leaning Tower experiment did not take place, see “Galilée et l'Expérience de Pise: a propos d'une légende,” Annales de l'Université de Paris, 12(1936):441–53. Seep. 443.
88 See Koyré, Galileo Studies, pp. 36–8.
89 Koyré Metaphysics and Measurement, p. 94.
90 EN 8:212–13. Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement, p. 94.
91 See, in particular, Galileo Studies, p. 37. Cf. William Shea's outstanding Galileo's Intellectual Revolution, New York: Science History Publica tions, 1972, pp. 150–63.
92 Note of Eugenio Garin, in Giornale critico della Filosofìa Italiana, 36, terza serie, vol. 11 (1957):406–9. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Galileo and the Art of Reasoning: Rhetorical Foundations of Logic and Scientific Method, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980, Chapter 9. Quotation from p. 221.
93 Ibid., p. 222.
94 Thomas Settle, “An Experiment in the History of Science,” Science, 133 (1961):19–23.
95 Settle says: “Thus far I can only reproduce the end product of a process of evolution (in Galileo's own mind).” Ibid., p. 20.
96 Stillman Drake, “Galileo's Experimental Confirmation of Horizontal Inertia: Unpublished Manuscripts,” Isis, 64 (1973):291–305. Quotation from p. 291.
97 Jürgen Teichmann, “Der freie Fall bei Galilei: Experimente und Mythos,” paper given at the Berlin Galileo Conference (November 1013, 1994), to be published in the forthcoming proceedings.
98 Giorgio De Santillana, The Crime of Galileo; Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe, London: Hutchinson, 1959.
99 See Santillana's Preface, p. xiii.
100 I. Bernard Cohen, Review of Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, Scientific American, 200 (June 1959):187–92. Quotation from p. 188.
101 Agassi, Science and Society, p. 322.
102 Giorgio de Santillana, and Stillman Drake, “Arthur Koestler and his Sleepwalkers,” Isis, 50 (1959):255–60.
103 Joseph Agassi, “On Explaining the Trial of Galileo,” in Agassi, Science and Society, pp. 312–51. Quotation from p. 324. Agassi says that Galileo was a sincere and brave Catholic reformer (pp. 337–41).
104 Richard S. Westfall, “Science and Patronage: Galileo and the Telescope,” Isis, 76 (1985):11–30. Quotation from p. 28.
105 Ron Naylor, “Old Myths and New,” Nature, 355 (February 1992):597–8; Annals of Science, 50 (1993):496–7.
106 pp. 40–41.