The Lying Stones of Marrakech Page 5
After this lengthy preamble on the maximally celebrated Galileo, let me now present the main subject of this essay: the virtually unknown Francesco Stelluti, one of the original four Lynxes, a loyal friend and supporter of Galileo, and the man who tried to maintain, and eventually disbanded with dignity (in 1652), the original Academy of the Lynxes, fatally weakened after Cesi’s untimely death in 1630. The previously uncharted links between Stelluti and Galileo are rich and fascinating (I would have said “the links between these Lynxes,” if the pun were not so egregious), and these connections provide a poignant illustration of this essay’s central theme: the power and poverty of pure empiricism, and the need to scrutinize social and intellectual contexts, both for practicing scientists (so they will not be beguiled) and for all people who wish to understand the role and history of knowledge (so they will grasp the necessary and complex interdigitation of science and society).
The original Lynxes began with all the bravado and secrecy of a typical boys’ club (Cesi, remember, was only eighteen years old, while his three compatriots were all twenty-six). They wrote complex rules and enunciated lofty ideals. (I do not know whether or not they developed a secret handshake!) Each adopted a special role, received a Latin moniker, and took a planet for his emblem. The leader Cesi commanded the botanical sciences as Coelivagus (the heavenly wanderer); the Dutchman Johannes van Heeck would read and interpret classical philosophy as Illuminatus; Anastasio de Filiis became the group’s historian and secretary as Eclipsatus. Poor Francesco Stelluti, who published little and evidently saw himself as a systematic plodder, took up mathematics and geometry under the name of Tardigradus (the slow stepper). For his planet, Stelluti received the most distant and most slowly revolving body—Saturn, the subject of Galileo’s error!
In their maturity, the Lynxes would provide powerful intellectual and institutional support for the open and empirical approach to science, as promoted by their most prominent member, Galileo. But at their beginnings, as a small club of young men, the Lynxes preferred the older tradition of science as an arcane and secret form of knowledge, vouchsafed only to initiates who learned the codes and formulae that could reveal the mysterious harmonies of universal order—the astrological links between planetary positions and human lives; the alchemical potions and philosopher’s stones, heated in vats that could transmute base metals to gold (double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble, to cite some famous witches); and the experiments in smoke, mirrors, and optical illusions that occupied an uncertain position between categories now labeled as magic and science, but then conflated. Giambattista Della Porta, the fifth Lynx, had survived as a living legend of this fading philosophy. Della Porta had made his reputation in 1558, long before the birth of any original Lynx, with a book entided Magia naturalis, or Natural Magic. As a young man in Naples, Della Porta had founded his own arcane organization, the Accademia dei Segreti (Academy of Secrets), dedicated to alchemical and astrological knowledge, and later officially suppressed by the Inquisition.
By initiating the aged Della Porta into the Academy of Lynxes, Cesi and his compatriots showed the strength of their earlier intellectual allegiances. By inducting Galileo the next year, they displayed their ambivalence, and their growing attraction to a new view of knowledge and scientific procedure.
The election of both newcomers virtually guaranteed a period of definitional struggle within the Academy, for no love could unite Della Porta and Galileo, who not only differed maximally in their basic philosophical approaches to science, but also nearly came to blows for a much more specific reason vested in the eternally contentious issue of priority. Galileo never claimed that he had invented the telescope from scratch. He stated that he had heard reports about a crude version during a trip to Venice in 1609. He recognized the optical principles behind the device, and then built a more powerful machine that could survey the heavens. But Della Porta, who had used lenses and mirrors for many demonstrations and illusions in his Natural Magic, and who surely understood the rules of optics, then claimed that he had formulated all the principles for building a telescope (although he had not constructed the device) and therefore deserved primary credit for the invention. Although tensions remained high, the festering issue never erupted into overt battle because Galileo and Della Porta held each other in mutual respect, and Della Porta died in 1615 before any growing bitterness could bubble over.
Stelluti first encountered Galileo in the context of this struggle—and he initially took Della Porta’s side! In 1610, with Della Porta inscribed as a Lynx but Galileo not yet a member, Stelluti wrote a gossipy letter to his brother about the furor generated by Sidereus nuncius and the dubious claims of the pamphlet’s author:
I believe that by now you must have seen Galileo, he of the Siderius nuncius … Giambattista Della Porta wrote about [the telescope] more than thirty years ago in his Natural Magic … so poor Galileo will be besmirched. But, nonetheless, the Grand Duke has given him 800 piastres.*
But when Galileo joined the Lynxes, and as his fame and success solidified and spread, Stelluti and his compatriots muted their suspicions and eventually became fervent Galileans. With Della Porta dead and Starry Messenger riding a truly cosmic crest of triumph, the Academy of the Lynxes grew to become Galileo’s strongest intellectual (and practical) base, the primary institutional supporters of the new, open, empirical, and experimental view of scientific knowledge. Making the link between Galileo’s error and Stelluti’s emblem, Cesi wrote to Stelluti in 1611 about the wonders of the telescope, as revealed by Galileo himself, then paying a long visit to the duke of Acquasparta:
Each evening we see new things in the heavens, the true office of the Lynxes. Jupiter and its four revolving satellites; the moon with its mountains, caverns, and rivers; the horns of Venus; and Saturn, your own triple-star [il triplice suo Saturno].
Such floods of reforming novelty tend to alienate reigning powers, to say the least—a generality greatly exacerbated in early-seventeenth-century Rome, where the papal government, besieged by wars and assaulted by the successes of the Reformation, felt especially unfriendly to unorthodoxy of any sort. Galileo had written a first note of cautious support for the Copernican system at the end of his Letters on Sunspots (published by the Lynxes in 1613). Soon afterward, in 1616, the Church officially declared the Copernican doctrine false and forbade Galileo to teach heliocentrism as a physical reality (though he could continue to discuss the Copernican system as a “mathematical hypothesis”). Galileo kept his nose clean for a while and moved on to other subjects. But then, in 1623, the Lynxes rejoiced in an unanticipated event that Galileo called a “great conjuncture” (mirabel congiuntura): the elevation of his friend and supporter Maffeo Barberini to the papacy as Urban VIII. (In an act of literal nepotism, Maffeo quickly named his nephew Francesco Barberini as his first new cardinal. In the same year of 1623, Francesco Barberini became the twenty-ninth member of the Lynxes.)
On August 12, 1623, Stelluti wrote from Rome to Galileo, then in Florence, expressing both his practical and intellectual joy in the outcome of local elections. Three members of the Lynxes would be serving in the new papal government, along with “many other friends.” Stelluti then enthused about the new boss:
The creation of the new pope has filled us all with rejoicing, for he is a man of such valor and goodness, as you yourself know so well. And he is a particular supporter of learned men, so we shall have a supreme patron…. We pray to the Lord God to preserve the life of this pope for a long time.
The Lynxes, suffused with hope that freedom of scientific inquiry would now be established, met for an extended convention and planning session at Cesi’s estate in 1624. Galileo had just built the first usable microscope for scientific investigation, after recognizing that lenses, properly arranged, could magnify truly tiny nearby objects, as well as enormous cosmic bodies rendered tiny in appearance by their great distance from human observers. Anticipating the forthcoming gathering of the Lynxes, Galileo s
ent one of his first microscopes to Cesi, along with a note describing his second great optical invention:
I have examined a great many tiny animals with infinite admiration. Mosquitoes are the most horrible among them.… I have seen, with great contentment, how flies and other tiny animals can walk across mirrors, and even upside down. But you, my lord, will have a great opportunity to view thousands and thousands of details…. In short, you will be able to enjoy infinite contemplation of nature’s grandness, and how subtly, and with what incredible diligence, she works.
Galileo’s microscope entranced the Lynxes and became the hit of their meeting. Stelluti took a special interest and used the new device to observe and draw the anatomy of bees. In 1625, Stelluti published his results, including a large engraving of three bees drawn under Galileo’s instrument. Historian of science Charles Singer cites these bees as “the earliest figures still extant drawn with the aid of the microscope.” If the name of the sadly underrated Francesco Stelluti, the tardigrade among the Lynxes, has survived at all in conventional annals of the history of science, he perseveres only as an entry in the “list of firsts” for his microscopical drawing.
The Lynxes, always savvy as well as smart, did not choose to draw bees for abstract amusement. Not coincidentally, the family crest of Maffeo Barberini, the new pope and the Lynxes’ anticipated patron, featured three bees. Stelluti dedicated his work to Urban VIII, writing in a banner placed above the three bees: “To Urban VIII Pontifex Optimus Maximus… from the Academy of the Lynxes, and in perpetual devotion, we offer you this symbol.”
The emboldened Galileo now decided to come out of intellectual hiding, and to risk a discussion of the Copernican system. In 1632, he published his epochal masterpiece in the history of science and, from the resulting tragedy, the history of society as well: Dialogo … sopra i due massimi sistemi nel mondo tolemaico e copernicano (A dialogue on the two great systems of the world, Ptolemaic and Copernican). Galileo hoped that he could avoid any ecclesiastical trouble by framing the work as a dialogue—an argument between a supporter of the earth-centered Ptolemaic system and a partisan of Copernicus’s sun-centered view.
The first published scientific figure based on observations under a microscope—Stelluti’s 1625 image of bees, drawn to honor the new pope, Urban VIII, whose family crest featured three bees.
We all know the tragic outcome of this decision only too well. The pope, Galileo’s erstwhile friend, became furious and ordered the scientist to stand trial before the Roman Inquisition. This tribunal convicted Galileo and forced him to abjure, on his knees, his “false” and heretical Copernican beliefs. The Inquisition then placed him under a form of house arrest for the remainder of his life, on his small estate at Arcetri. Galileo’s situation did not resemble solitary confinement at Alcatraz, and he remained fully active in scientific affairs by receiving visitors and engaging in voluminous correspondence to the moment of his death (even though blindness afflicted his last four years). In 1638, and partly by stealth, Galileo wrote his second great book in dialogue form (with the same protagonists) and had a copy smuggled to the Netherlands for publication: Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences. But he was not allowed to leave Arcetri either, as the vindictive pope, still feeling betrayed, refused Galileo’s requests to attend Easter mass and to consult doctors in Florence when his sight began to fail.
The famous frontispiece of Galileo’s dialogue between Ptolemy and Copernicus (with Aristotle as their mediator).
The literature on the whys and wherefores of Galileo’s ordeal could fill a large room in a scholarly library, and I shall not attempt even the barest summary here. (The most interesting and original of recent books include Mario Biagioli’s Galileo, Courtier, University of Chicago Press, 1993; and Pietro Redondi’s Galileo Heretic, Princeton University Press, 1987.) All agree that Galileo might have avoided his fate if any one of a hundred circumstances had unfolded in a slightly different manner. He was, in other words, a victim of bad luck and bad judgment (on both sides), not an inevitable sacrificial lamb in an eternal war between science and religion.
Until doing research for this essay, however, I had never appreciated the strength of one particularly relevant factor along the string of contingencies. From the vantage point of the Lynxes, Galileo would almost surely have managed to weave a subtle path around potential trouble, if the most final of all events had not intervened. In 1630, at age forty-five and the height of his influence, Federico Cesi, founder and perpetual leader of the Lynxes, died. Galileo learned the sad news in a letter from Stelluti: “My dear signor Galileo, with a trembling hand, and with eyes full of tears [con man tremante, e con occhi peni di lacrime—such lamentation sounds so much better in Italian!], I must tell you the unhappy news of the loss of our leader, the duke of Acquasparta, as the result of an acute fever.”
I feel confident that Cesi could have intervened to spare Galileo for two reasons. First, his caution and diplomacy, combined with his uncanny sense of the practical, would have suppressed Galileo’s famous and fatal impetuosity. Galileo, ever testing the limits, ever pushing beyond into a realm of danger, did cast his work in the form of a dialogue between a Copernican and a supporter of Ptolemy’s earth-centered universe. But he had scarcely devised a fair fight. The supporter of Ptolemy bore the name Simplicio, and the quality of his arguments matched his moniker. Moreover, Urban VIII developed a sneaking suspicion that Simplicio might represent a caricature of his own imperial self—hence his angry feeling that Galileo had betrayed an agreement to discuss Copernicanism as a coherent theory among equally viable alternatives. If Cesi had lived, he would, no doubt, have insisted that Galileo write his dialogue in a less partisan, or at least a more subtly veiled, form. And Cesi would have prevailed, both because Galileo respected his judgment so highly, and because the Lynxes intended to publish his book at Cesi’s expense.
Second, Cesi operated as one of the most consummate politicians on the Roman scene. As a diplomat and nobleman (contrasted with Galileo’s status as a commoner and something of a hothead), Cesi would have greased all the wheels and prepared a smooth way. Galileo recognized the dimensions of his personal misfortune only too well. He wrote to his friend G. B. Baliani in 1630, just before Cesi’s death:
I was in Rome last month to obtain a license to print the Dialogue that I am writing to examine the two great systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican…. Truly, I would have left all this in the hands of our most excellent prince Cesi, who would have accomplished it with much care, as he has done for my other works. But he is feeling indisposed, and now I hear that he is worse, and may be in danger.
Cesi’s death produced two complex and intertwined results lying at the heart of this essay: the subsequent, and preventable, condemnation of Galileo; and the attrition and inevitable extinction of the Society of Lynxes. Stelluti tried valiantly to keep the Lynxes alive. He importuned Francesco Barberini, the cardinal nephew of the pope, and the only, member of the Lynxes with enough clout to fill Cesi’s shoes, to become the new leader. Barberini’s refusal sealed the Lynxes’ fate, for no other sufficiently rich and noble patron could be found. Cesi soldiered on for a while and, in a noble last hurrah, finally published, in 1651, the volume on the natural history of the New World that the Lynxes had been planning for decades: Nova plantarum et mineraliutn mexicanorum historia. In a final loving tribute, Stelluti included Cesi’s unpublished work on botanical classification in an appendix. In 1652, Stelluti, the last original Lynx, died—and the organization that he had nourished for a lifetime, in his own slow and steady manner, ceased to exist.
II. FRANCESCO STELLUTI AND THE MINERAL WOOD OF ACQUASPARTA
Francesco Stelluti remained faithful to Galileo during his friend’s final years of internal exile and arrest. On November 3, 1635, he wrote a long and interesting letter to Galileo at Arcetri, trying to cheer his friend with news from the world of science. Stelluti first expressed his sympathy for Galileo’s plight: “God knows
how grieved and pained I am by your ordeal” (Dio sa quanto mi son doluto e doglio de’ suoi travagli). Stelluti then attempted to raise Galileo’s spirits with the latest report on an old project of the Lynxes—an analysis of some curious fossil wood found on Cesi’s estate:
You should know that while I was in Rome, Signor Cioli visited the Duchess [Cesi’s widow] several times, and that she gave him, at his departure, several pieces of the fossil wood that originates near Acquasparta…. He wanted to know where it was found, and how it was generated … for he noted that Prince Cesi, of blessed memory, had planned to write about it. The Duchess then asked me to write something about this, and I have done so, and sent it to Signor Cioli, together with a package of several pieces of the wood, some petrified, and some just beginning to be petrified.
This fossil wood had long vexed and fascinated the Lynxes. Stelluti had described the problem to Galileo in a letter of August 23, 1624, written just before the Lynxes’ convention and the fateful series of events initiated by Stelluti’s microscopical drawings of bees, intended to curry favor with the new pope.
Our lord prince [Cesi] kisses your hands and is eager to hear good news from you. He is doing very well, despite the enervating heat, which does not cause him to lose any time in his studies and most beautiful observations on this mineralized wood. He has discovered several very large pieces, up to eleven palms [of the human hand, not the tree of the same name] in diameter, and others filled with lines of iron, or a material similar to iron…. If you can stop by here on your return to Florence, you can see all this wood, and where it originates, and some of the nearby mouths of fire [steaming volcanic pits near Acquasparta that played a major role in Stelluti’s interpretation of the wood]. You will observe all this with both surprise and enthusiasm.