by Dava Sobel
On the evening of March 12, 1737, after permission had been granted to move Galileo’s body from its first interment site to the marble sarcophagus of the nearly completed monument, a distinguished congregation—part ecclesiastic, mostly civic—assembled discreetly with torches and candles in the church of Santa Croce. Their task that long night involved elements of demolition work, religious ceremony, mortuary identification, and hero veneration as they exhumed the body of Galileo. This occasion also saw the ritual removal of a single vertebra from the venerated scientist, along with three fingers of his right hand and a tooth—and surely would have included the preservation of his brain as well, if by some miracle that organ had still survived.
The closet-sized room under the campanile, where Galileo had lain buried for ninety-five years, now contained two brick biers: one belonging to Galileo and the other to his disciple, Vincenzio Viviani, who had asked in his will to share the master’s grave.
The few men who could fit inside the tiny room broke open the more recent brickwork, laid at the time of Viviani’s death in 1703, and extracted a wood coffin. According to an eyewitness report filed by a notary, they carried this into the Novice’s Chapel, where everyone could watch as the lid was lifted to reveal a lead plate identifying the corpse as Viviani’s. Several sculptors and scientists in the party covered the bier with a black cloth, and lifting the draped coffin to their shoulders, they bore it through the long passageway from the chapel and across the cavernous basilica. Their chanted prayers for the dead reverberated off the wooden columns, which towered over the unattended procession, and the stone walls that had been frescoed by Giotto to trace the life of Saint Francis.
The assembly placed the body at the new site, then returned to the little chapel and set about repeating the procedure—smashing the older brick container under the 1674 memorial Viviani had mounted for Galileo, and pulling out another wooden coffin. This one had apparently been damaged over time, its lid bashed in and littered with broken pieces of plaster. As the men dragged the bier from the bricks, they were startled to discover another almost identical wooden box lying directly beneath it. Galileo’s grave contained two coffins, two skeletons, and no lead nameplate on either one of them.
Galileo’s tomb in Santa Croce
Panic no doubt gripped several hearts at the prospect of being unable to decide which body deserved to be deposited in the new monument. But when the grand duke’s chief physician, accompanied by several professors of anatomy, stepped forward to examine the evidence, they accomplished their identification with reassuring ease. Only one of the skeletons could possibly have belonged to Galileo—the top one, because its bones were those of an old man, with the detached mandible containing only four teeth. The skeleton in the lower coffin, the experts all concurred, was unmistakably female. Although the woman had lain dead for at least as long a time as the man, if not longer, she had died at a much younger age.
The congregation divided itself solemnly in half, each group walking Galileo’s body partway through the basilica, so that as many participants as possible could share the honor of being his pallbearers. Then they carried the woman to the mausoleum, too, and they laid her in the sepulchre beside her father.
Once the shock of the discovery had dissipated into the silence of the great empty church, those attendants who remembered Viviani could unfurl the mystery for themselves. The disciple, driven to despair by his failure to pay the tribute he felt he owed his mentor, had given Galileo something dearer than bronze or marble to distinguish his grave.
Even now, no inscription on Galileo’s much-visited tomb in Santa Croce announces the presence of Suor Maria Celeste.
But still she is there.
IN GALILEO’S TIME
1543 Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) publishes De revolutionibus, and Andreas Vesalius (1514-64), On the Fabric of the Human Body.
1545 Council of Trent convenes under Pope Paul III; first ten sessions last two years.
1551 Collegio Romano, or Pontifical Gregorian University, founded by Jesuits in Rome. Council of Trent reconvenes.
1559 First worldwide Index of Prohibited Books promulgated by the Roman Inquisition.
1562-63 Third convention and final sessions of the Council of Trent.
1564 Galileo is born in Pisa, February 15. Michelangelo Buonarroti dies in Florence, February 18. William Shakespeare is born in England, April 23.
1569 Cosimo I, duke of Florence, named grand duke of Tuscany by authority of Pope Pius V.
1572 Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) of Denmark observes a nova and concludes that changes could occur in the heavens.
1577 Studies of comets by Tycho convince him the heavens could not consist of solid spheres, though he rejects the Copernican system.
1581 Galileo enrolls at University of Pisa.
1582 Gregorian calendar replaces Julian in Catholic Europe.
1585 Galileo abandons studies at Pisa without a university degree.
1587 Ferdinando I becomes grand duke of Tuscany when his older brother, Francesco, dies of malaria.
1589 Galileo begins teaching at Pisa; develops a rudimentary thermometer; begins to study falling bodies. 1591 Vincenzio Galilei (father) dies.
1592 Galileo begins teaching at the University of Padua.
1600 Giordano Bruno burns at the stake in Rome. Virginia Galilei (daughter) is born in Padua.
1601 Livia Galilei (daughter) is born in Padua. Tycho Brahe dies.
1603 Prince Federico Cesi founds Lyncean Academy in Rome.
1604 New star appears in the heavens, generating debate and three public lectures by Galileo.
1605 Prince Cosimo de’ Medici takes instruction from Galileo.
1606 Galileo publishes treatise on geometric and military compass; Vincenzio Galilei (son) is born in Padua.
1607 Baldessar Capra publishes pirated Latin edition of Galileo’s instructions for geometric and military compass.
1608 Hans Lippershey invents a refracting telescope in Holland. Prince Cosimo marries Maria Maddalena, archduchess of Austria.
1609 Grand Duke Ferdinando I dies; Cosimo II succeeds him. Galileo improves telescope, observes and measures mountains on the Moon. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) publishes first two laws of planetary motion.
1610 Galileo discovers the moons of Jupiter. The Starry Messenger is published. Galileo is appointed chief mathematician and philosopher to the grand duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II.
1611 Galileo visits Rome, is elected to membership in the Lyncean Academy.
1612 Bodies That Stay Atop Water or Move Within It is published in Florence.
1613 Prince Cesi publishes Galileo’s Sunspot Letters; Virginia and Livia Galilei (daughters) enter the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri.
1614 Virginia and Livia Galilei assume religious habit.
1616 Galileo writes his “Theory on the Tides.” Edict issued in Rome against Copernican doctrine. Virginia Galilei professes her vows as Suor Maria Celeste. Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes die.
1617 Livia Galilei professes vows as Suor Arcangela.
1618 Three comets appear, generating interest and debate; Jesuit father Orazio Grassi lectures on comets at Collegio Romano; Thirty Years’ War begins.
1619 Grassi’s account of the comets is published anonymously; Mario Guiducci delivers Discourse on the Comets, provoking pseudonymous Astronomical and Philosophical Balance. Kepler publishes third law of planetary motion. Galileo’s mistress, Marina Gamba, dies. Vincenzio Galilei (son) is legitimized.
1623 Galileo’s sister Virginia dies. Maffeo Cardinal Barberini becomes Pope Urban VIII. Galileo dedicates The Assayer to him.
1624 Galileo travels to Rome for papal audience.
1628 William Harvey (1578-1657) in England describes the circulation of the blood.
1629 Bubonic plague enters northern Italy from Germany.
1630 Galileo visits Rome to obtain printing license for his Dialogue. Prince Cesi dies. Bubonic plague strikes Florence.
; 1631 Michelangelo Galilei (brother) dies of plague in Germany.
1632 Galileo publishes Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican.
1633 Galileo stands trial for heresy by the Holy Office of the Inquisition; Dialogue is prohibited.
1634 Suor Maria Celeste Galilei dies in Arcetri on April 2.
1636 Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina is published in Holland, in Latin and Italian.
1637 Galileo discovers lunar libration, loses his eyesight.
1638 Louis Elzevir publishes Galileo’s Two New Sciences in Leiden, Holland.
1641 Vincenzio Galilei draws his father’s design for a pendulum clock.
1642 Galileo dies in Arcetri, January 8. Isaac Newton is born in England, December 25.
1643 Galileo’s student Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47) invents mercury barometer.
1644 Pope Urban VIII dies.
1648 Thirty Years’ War ends.
1649 Vincenzio Galilei (son) dies in Florence, May 15.
1654 Grand Duke Ferdinando II improves on Galileo’s thermometer by closing the glass tube to keep air out.
1655-56 Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) improves telescope, discovers largest of Saturn’s moons, sees Saturn’s “companions” as a ring, patents pendulum clock.
1659 Suor Arcangela dies at San Matteo, June 14.
1665 Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625-1712) discovers and times the rotation of Jupiter and Mars.
1669 Sestilia Bocchineri Galilei dies.
1670 Grand Duke Ferdinando II dies, succeeded by his only surviving son, Cosimo III.
1676 Ole Roemer (1644-1710) uses eclipses of Jupiter’s moons to determine the speed of light; Cassini discovers gap in Saturn’s rings.
1687 Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation are published in his Principia.
1705 Edmond Halley (1656-1742) studies comets, realizes they orbit the Sun, predicts return of a comet later named in his honor.
1714 Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) develops mercury thermometer with accurate scale for scientific purposes.
1718 Halley observes that even the fixed stars move with almost imperceptible “proper motion” over long periods of time.
1728 English astronomer James Bradley (1693-1762) provides first evidence for the Earth’s motion through space based on the aberration of starlight.
1755 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) discerns the true shape of the Milky Way, identifies the Andromeda nebula as a separate galaxy.
1758 “Halley’s comet” returns.
1761 Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-65) realizes Venus has an atmosphere.
1771 Comet hunter Charles Messier (1730-1817) identifies a list of noncometary objects, many of which later prove to be distant galaxies.
1781 William Herschel (1738-1822) discovers the planet Uranus.
1810 Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered the Papal States, transfers the Roman archives, including those of the Holy Office with all records of Galileo’s trial, to Paris.
1822 Holy Office permits publication of books that teach Earth’s motion.
1835 Galileo’s Dialogue is dropped from Index of Prohibited Books.
1838 Stellar parallax, and with it the distance to the stars, is detected independently by astronomers working in South Africa, Russia, and Germany; Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846) publishes the first account of this phenomenon, for the star 61 Cygni.
1843 Galileo’s trial documents are returned to Italy.
1846 Neptune and its largest moon are discovered by predictions and observations of astronomers working in several countries. 1851 Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault (1819-68) in Paris demonstrates the rotation of the Earth by means of a two-hundred-foot pendulum.
1861 Kingdom of Italy proclaimed, uniting most states and duchies.
1862 French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-95) publishes germ theory of disease.
1877 Asaph Hall (1829-1907) discovers the moons of Mars.
1890-1910 Complete works, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, are edited and published in Florence by Antonio Favaro.
1892 University of Pisa awards Galileo an honorary degree—250 years after his death.
1893 Providentissimus Deus of Pope Leo XIII cites Saint Augustine, taking the same position Galileo did in his Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina, to show that the Bible did not aim to teach science.
1894 Pasteur’s student Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943) discovers bubonic plague bacillus and prepares serum to combat it.
1905 Albert Einstein (1879-1955) publishes his special theory of relativity, establishing the speed of light as an absolute limit.
1908 George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) discerns the magnetic nature of sunspots.
1917 Willem de Sitter (1872-1934) intuits the expansion of the universe from Einstein’s equations.
1929 American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) finds evidence for expanding universe.
1930 Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino is canonized as Saint Robert Bellarmine by Pope Pius XI.
1935 Pope Pius XI inaugurates Vatican Observatory and Astrophysical Laboratory at Castel Gandolfo.
1950 Humani generis of Pope Pius XII discusses the treatment of unproven scientific theories that may relate to Scripture; reaches same conclusion as Galileo’s Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina.
1959 Unmanned Russian Luna 3 spacecraft radios first views of the Moon’s far side from lunar orbit.
1966 Index of Prohibited Books is abolished following the Second Vatican Council.
1969 American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon.
1971 Apollo 15 commander David R. Scott drops a falcon feather and a hammer on the lunar surface; when they fall together he says, “This proves that Mr. Galileo was correct.”
1979 Pope John Paul II calls for theologians, scholars, historians, to reexamine Galileo’s case.
1982 Pope John Paul II establishes Galileo Commission with four formal study groups to reinvestigate the Galileo affair.
1986 Halley’s comet returns, observed by a waiting armada of spacecraft.
1989 National Aeronautics and Space Administration launches Galileo spacecraft to study the moons of Jupiter at close range.
1992 Pope John Paul II publicly endorses Galileo’s philosophy, noting how “intelligibility, attested to by the marvelous discoveries of science and technology, leads us, in the last analysis, to that transcendent and primordial thought imprinted on all things.”
1995 Galileo reaches Jupiter.
1999 Galileo’s successful reconnaissance of the Medicean stars, now better known as the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, continues to enlighten astronomers everywhere.
FLORENTINE
WEIGHTS, MEASURES,
CURRENCY
* * *
WEIGHT
libbra = 12 oncie = .75 pound = .3 kilogram (plural is libbre)
* * *
MEASURE
braccio = about 23 inches (plural is braccia)
* * *
CURRENCY
florin = 3.54 grams of gold
scudo = 7 lire
piastra = 22.42 grams of silver = about 5 lire
lira (silver coin) = 12 crazie = 20 soldi (Four lire could feed one person for a week.)
giulio (silver coin) = slightly more than half a lira
carlino = .01 scudo
Notes
[I] She who was so precious to you
“I render . . . centuries" is adapted from Albert Van Helden’s translation of Galileo’s report to the Tuscan court, January 30, 1610 (Sidereus Nuncius, pp. 17-18).
“I have observed . . . upside down" is Stillman Drake’s translation of a letter dated September 23, 1624 (Galileo at Work, p. 286).
“A woman of exquisite mind . . . to me" comes from Galileo’s letter to Elia Diodati, July 28,1634, translated by Maria Luisa Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea (Galileo’s Florentine Residences, p. 50).
“Whatever the course . . . divine" is taken from Galileo’s third letter on sunspots,
December 1, 1612, translated by Drake (Discoveries and Opinions, p. 128).
[II] This grand book the universe
“Philosophy . . . labyrinth" is excerpted from Galileo’s The Assayer, as translated by Drake (Galileo, p. 70).
“Try, if you can . . . top of the tower" is taken from Drake’s translation of the Dialogue (p. 223), and “Imagine them . . . claimed?” is adapted from I. E. Drabkin’s translation of “De motu,” as quoted in James MacLachlan, Galileo Galilei (p. 24).
“Aristotle . . . mistake" comes from Drake’s translation of Two New Sciences (p. 68).
The letter beginning “The present I am going to make Virginia” is translated by Righini Bonelli and Shea (p. 13).
[III] Bright stars speak of your virtues
“If, Most Serene Prince . . . let alone all" is from Drake’s translation of Operations of the Geometric and Military Compass (p. 39).
“I have waited . . . reflected rays" is from a letter translated by Mario Biagioli in Galileo, Courtier (p. 20).
“Her Most Serene Highness . . . tomorrow" is translated in Righini Bonelli and Shea (p. 14).
“Regarding . . . such a position" is Biagioli’s translation (p. 29).
All quotes come from Sidereus Nuncius. “And it is like . . . valleys” is Van Helden’s translation (p. 40), and “Planets show . . . a very great deal” is Drake’s (Telescopes, Tides, and Tactics, p. 49). The sentence fragments are from Van Helden (p. 13 and p. 64, respectively).
The long passage “Your Highness . . . power and authority” is taken from Van Helden (pp. 30-32).
Kepler’s statement is taken from Van Helden (p. 94).
[IV] To have the truth seen and recogniged
Madonna Giulia’s letter translated by Olaf Pedersen in “Galileo’s Religion” (p. 86). Description of Galileo’s new house is from Righini Bonelli and Shea (pp. 17-19); as is the letter about his poor health (p. 19).