Once moved in, Galileo launched into a busy schedule of visits to dignitaries strategic to his purpose. One of the most important of these came when he called on the Jesuit Christopher Clavius and his younger colleagues at the College of Rome.
Clavius greeted him with the same words he had used twenty-four years before, when Galileo had been an unknown young mathematician and Clavius in his prime, known through Europe as “the Euclid of the sixteenth century.”
“Welcome to Rome, young signor. All praise to God and Archimedes!”
He was not much changed in appearance, despite all the years: a slight man with a puckered mouth and a kindly eye. He led Galileo into the Jesuit college’s workshop, where together they inspected the spyglasses the monk mechanicals had constructed. The glasses looked like Galileo’s, and were equivalent in power, although more marred by irregularities, as Galileo told the monks freely.
Christopher Grienberger and Odo Maelcote then joined them, and Clavius introduced them as the ones who had made the bulk of the observations; Clavius lamented his aged eyesight. “But I have seen your so-called Medicean Stars several times,” he added, “and they are obviously orbiting Jupiter, just as you say.”
Galileo bowed deeply. There were people out there claiming the moons were just flaws in Galileo’s glass. He had angrily offered ten thousand crowns to anyone who could make a glass that would show flaws around Jupiter but not around the other planets, and of course there were no takers, but still—not everyone believed. So this mattered. Seeing was believing, and Clavius had seen. As Galileo straightened up, he said, “God bless you, Father. I was quite sure that you would see them, they are so prominent, and you such an experienced astronomer. And I can tell you that on my journey to Rome I have made good progress in determining the period of orbit of all four of these new moons.”
Grienberger and Maelcote raised their eyebrows and exchanged glances, but Clavius only smiled. “I think here we are in rare agreement with Johannes Kepler, that establishing their periods of rotation will be very difficult.”
“But …” Galileo hesitated, then realized he had made a mistake, and dropped the matter with a wave of the hand. There was no point in making announcements in advance of results; indeed, since he was intent on being the first to make every discovery having to do with the new stars, he should not be inciting competitors to further effort. It was already startling enough to see that they had managed to manufacture spyglasses almost as strong as his.
So he let the talk turn to the phases of Venus. They also had seen these, and while he did not press the point that this was strong evidence in support of the Copernican view, he could see in their faces that the implications were already clear to them. And they did not deny the appearances. They believed in the glass. This was a most excellent sign, and as he considered the happy implications of their public acknowledgment that their observations agreed with his, Galileo recovered from his uneasiness at the power of their devices. These were the pope’s official astronomers, supporting his findings! So he spent the rest of the afternoon reminiscing with Clavius and laughing at his jokes.
The next important meeting for Galileo, though he did not know it, came on the Saturday before Easter, when he paid his respects to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini. They met in one of the outer offices of St. Peter’s, near the Vatican’s river gate. Galileo examined the interior gardens of the place with a close eye; he had never been inside the sacred fortress before, and it was interesting to observe the horticulture deployed inside. Purity had been emphasized over liveliness, he was not surprised to note. Paths were graveled, borders were lines of clean cobbles, long narrow lawns were trimmed as if by barbers. Massed roses and camelias were all either white or red. It was a little too much.
Barberini proved to be a man of the world—affable, quick, well-dressed in a cardinal’s everyday finery; lithe and handsome, goateed, smooth-skinned, fulsome. His power made him as graceful as a dancer, as confident in his body as a minx or otter. Galileo handed him the introductory letters from Michelangelo’s nephew and from Antonio de Medici, and Barberini put them aside after a glance and took Galileo by the hand and led him out into his office’s courtyard, dispensing with all ceremony. “Let’s take our ease and talk.”
Galileo was his usual lively self, a happy man with a genius for mathematics. In these interviews with nobles, he was quick and funny, always chuckling in his baritone rumble, ready to please. He did not know much about this cardinal, but the Barberini were a powerful family, and what he had heard was that Maffeo was a virtuoso, with a great interest in intellectual and artistic matters. He hosted many evenings in which poetry and song and philosophical debates were featured entertainments, and he wrote poetry himself that he was said to be vain about. Galileo seemed to be assuming that this was therefore a prelate in the style of Sarpi, broad-minded and liberal. In any case he was perfectly at ease, and showed Barberini his occhialino inside and out.
“I wish I had been able to bring enough of them with me to leave one with you as a gift, Your Eminence, but I was only allowed a small traveling trunk for baggage.”
Barberini nodded at this awkwardness. “I understand,” he murmured as he looked through it. “Seeing through yours is enough, for now, and more than enough. Although I do want one, it is true. It’s simply amazing how much you can see.” He pulled back to look at Galileo. “It’s odd—you wouldn’t think that more could be held there for the eye, in distant things, than we already see.”
“No, it’s true. We must admit that our senses don’t convey everything to us, not even in the sensible world.”
“Certainly not.”
They looked through it at the distant hills east of Rome, and the cardinal marveled and clapped him on the shoulder in the manner of any other man.
“You have given us new worlds,” he said.
“The seeing of them, anyway,” Galileo corrected him, to seem properly humble.
“And how do the Peripatetics take it? And the Jesuits?”
Galileo tipped his head side to side. “They are none too pleased, Your Grace.”
Barberini laughed. He had been trained by the Jesuits, but he did not like them, Galileo saw, and so continued. “There are some of them who refuse to look through the glass at all. One of them recently died, and as I said at the time, since he would not look at the stars through my glass, he could now inspect them from up close, on his way past them to Heaven!”
Barberini laughed uproariously. “And Clavius, what does he say?”
“He admits the moons orbiting Jupiter are really there.”
“The Medici moons, you have called them?”
“Yes,” Galileo admitted, realizing for the first time how this could be another awkwardness. “I expect to make many more discoveries in the heavens, and hope to honor those who have helped me accordingly.”
The little smile that twitched over the cardinal’s face was not entirely friendly. “And you think these Jovian moons show that the Earth goes around the sun in an analogous manner, as Copernicus claimed?”
“Well, it shows at least that moons go around planets, as our moon goes around the Earth. Better proof of the Copernican view, Your Grace, is how you can see the phases of Venus through the glass.” Galileo explained how in the Copernican understanding the phases of Venus had combined with its varying distance from Earth to make it seem to the naked eye as if it had always the same brightness, which had argued against the idea it had phases, when one had no glass to see them; and how its position, always low in the sky in the mornings and evenings, added to the actual discovery of the phases through the glass to support the idea that Venus was orbiting the sun inside the Earth’s own orbiting of the sun. The ideas were complicated to describe in words, and Galileo felt at ease enough to stand and take three citrons from a bowl, then place them and move them about on the table to illustrate the concepts, to Barberini’s evident delight.
“And the Jesuits deny this!” the cardinal repeated when Ga
lileo had completed a very convincing demonstration of the system.
“Well, no. They are agreeing now that the phenomena at least are real.”
“But then saying that the explanation is not yet so clear. Yes, that makes sense. That sounds like them. And after all, I suppose God could have arranged it any way He wanted.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
“And what does Bellarmino say?”
“I don’t know, Your Grace.”
The cardinal’s smile was even a little wicked in its foxiness. “Perhaps we will find out.”
Then he spoke of Florence, of his love for the city and its nobility, which Galileo happily echoed. And when Barberini asked the usual question about favorite poets, Galileo declared, “Oh, I prefer Ariosto to Tasso, as meat over candied fruit,” which made the cardinal laugh, as being the reverse of the usual characterization of the two. Thus the interview continued well, to its conclusion and Galileo’s obsequious withdrawal. And Cardinal Barberini must have enjoyed it, for that very afternoon he wrote to Buonarotti, Michelangelo’s nephew, and to Antonio de Medici, to say he appreciated their recommendations of Florence’s new court philosopher, and would be delighted to help him in any way he could.
A few days later, Galileo was invited to a party organized by Giovanni Battista Deti, nephew of the late Pope Clement III, where he met four more cardinals, and listened to a talk given to the group by Giovanni Battista Strozzi. In the discussion afterward, Galileo held his tongue, as he told all his correspondents later, feeling that as a newcomer this was the courteous thing to do. Staying silent was difficult for him, given his natural tendency toward speech, not to say continuous babble, and also given what could only be called his growing intimacy with the topic of Strozzi’s talk, which was Pride. For the success of all these visits was going to his head. Night after night he was joining evening meals, often at Cardinal Ottavio Bandini’s residence on the Quirinal, right next to the pope’s palace, and after enjoying the food and the musicians’ efforts, standing up to become the featured entertainment, speaking and then showing the guests what could be seen through his glass of nearby landmarks. People never ceased to be amazed by what they saw, and Galileo puffed up accordingly. Back at the Palazzo Firenze after these events we could barely get him out of his jacket and boots.
One banquet with lasting consequences took place at the palazzo of Federico Cesi, the Marquis of Monticelli. This young man had founded the Accademia dei Lincei, the Academy of the Lynxes, to gather on a regular basis to discuss matters of mathematics and natural philosophy. Cesi paid for the meetings, and he also had used his fortune to gather in his palazzo an ever-growing collection of natural wonders. When Galileo arrived at his palazzo, Cesi took him on a tour of two rooms that were filled to overflowing with lodestones, chunks of coral, fossils, unicorn horns, griffin eggs, coconuts, nautilus shells, shark teeth, jars containing monstrous births, carbuncles that glowed in the dark, turtle shells, a rhinoceros horn worked in gold, a bowl of lapis lazuli, dried crocodiles, model cannons, a collection of Roman coins, and a box of truly exquisite lapidary specimens.
Galileo inspected each one of these objects with genuine curiosity. “Marvelous,” he said as he looked in the hollow end of a unicorn horn chased with gold. “It must be as big as a horse.”
“It does seems so, doesn’t it?” Cesi replied happily. “But come look at my herbarium.”
Most of all, it turned out, Cesi was a botanist; he had hundreds of leaves and flowers arranged in big thick books, all dried and displayed with descriptions. He pointed out his favorites enthusiastically. Galileo watched him closely. He was young and handsome, very wealthy, fond of the company of men. And his admiration for Galileo was boundless. “You are the one we’ve waited for,” he said as they closed the plant books. “We’ve needed an intellectual leader to blaze the path to the higher levels, and now that you’re here, I’m sure it will happen.”
“Maybe so,” Galileo allowed. He liked the idea of the Lincean Academy very much. To get out from under the thumb of the universities and all their Peripatetics, to elevate mathematics and natural philosophy to the highest level of thought and inquiry; it was a great new thing, a way forward. A new kind of institution, and a potential ally too.
Later that day Cesi hosted a dinner to introduce Galileo to the rest of the Lynxes. The party took place up in the vineyard of Monsignor Malvasia, on top of the Janiculum, the highest of the Roman hills. The Lincean membership and a dozen other like-minded gentlemen met while it was still day, for from the Janiculum the views over the city were unobstructed in all directions. Among the guests were the foreign Linceans Johann Faber and Johann Schreck from Germany, Jan Eck from Holland, and Giovanni Demisiani from Greece.
Galileo trained his glass first on the basilica of St. John Lateran, across the Tiber at a distance of about three miles, adjusting it until all could look through it and read in the glass the chiseled inscription on the loggia over the side entrance, placed there by Sixtus V in the first year of his pontificate:
Sixtus
Pontifex Maximus
anno primo
Everyone there was startled as usual by their sudden ability to read an inscription at such a distance. When they had all looked through the occhialino more than once, and read and reread the distant inscription, several toasts were proposed and drunk down. The group grew raucous, even a little giddy; Cesi’s musicians, sensing the spirit of the moment, played a fanfare on horns they pulled out from beneath their chairs. Galileo bowed, and while the brassy music played on, turned his glass on the residence of the Duke of Altemps, on a hill in the first rise of the Apennines, far to the east of them. When he had it fixed the Linceans again crowded round, taking turns counting the windows on the façade of the great villa, some fifteen miles away. This made the Janiculum ring with cheers.
Later that night, after a great deal of eating and drinking and talk, and a brief look at the moon, which was too full to see through the glass as other than a white blaze, Demisiani the Greek sat down by Galileo and leaned in to him.
“You should name your device with a new Greek word,” he said, his saturnine face alive with the humor of his suggestion, or the fact that he was the one making it. “You should call it a telescope.”
“Telescopio?” Galileo repeated.
“To see at a distance. Tele scopio, distance seeing. It’s better than perspicillum, which means merely a lens after all, or visorio, which is only to say visual or optical. And occhialino is petty somehow, as if you wanted only to spy on someone. It’s too small, too provincial, too Tuscan. The other languages will never use it, and will have to make up words of their own. But telescope all will understand and use together. As always with Greek!”
Galileo nodded. Certainly the best scientific names were always either Latin or Greek. Kepler had been calling it a perspicillum.
“The root words are very old and basic,” Demisiani said, “and the compounding method as well.”
Galileo surged to his feet and raised his glass, waited for the group to notice and go quiet. “Telescopio!” he bellowed, dragging out the syllables as if calling for Mazzoleni, as if announcing the name of a champion. The group cheered, and Galileo leaned over to give the grinning Greek a hug, filled with sudden glee: of course his invention was such a new thing in the world that it needed a new name! No mere occhialino this!
“TEL! E! SCOP! IO!” Who knows how many of the surrounding hills of Rome heard the party shouting out the new word. Galileo alone could have been heard halfway to Salerno.
THE VERY NEXT DAY, word came: the pope wanted to see him. The routine at the Palazzo Firenze took on a slightly frenzied air. Sleep was difficult. Galileo didn’t even try, but watched Jupiter and considered what was to come, and so slept eventually. He woke early, before sunrise, and took a slow dawn walk in the formal garden among the statues. He performed his ablutions, ate a small meal. Perhaps on this day it was even smaller than usual. Then Cartophilus and Giusepp
e helped him dress in his best clothes, choosing the darker and more formal of his two dress jackets, which were getting a lot of wear on this visit.
Niccolini came by while he was completing his toilet, to discuss the audience, and to tell him all the latest from the Avvisi, Rome’s broadsheet of rumor and gossip, concerning His Holiness’s previous week and what seemed to be on his mind. Like everyone else, Galileo already knew the pope’s background: he had been Cardinal Camillo Borghese, a heretofore obscure member of that most powerful and dangerous of families, a canon lawyer whose election as pope was so unlooked-for that he himself considered it an intercession of the Holy Ghost, and all his subsequent pontifical actions therefore divinely intended. This included the hanging of one Piccinardi, who had been so remiss as to write (though not to have published) an unauthorized biography of Paul’s predecessor, Clement VIII. That had set a tone that no one forgot.
Niccolini did not remind Galileo of that particular example of Paul’s severity, but made the point in more roundabout ways. The pontiff, he warned, was rigid, headstrong, peremptory. In these difficult years of the Counter-Reformation, he brooked no deviation from the rules and tactics laid out by the Council of Trent half a century before. In short, a pope. “He has grown a bit fat with papal power, in the usual way,” Niccolini concluded.
The audience was held at the Villa Malvasia, right where Galileo had been the night before. This was the pope’s idea; he wanted to get away from the Vatican. So Niccolini led Galileo into the villa’s giant antechamber, and there introduced him to Paul, using rather stiff and nervous phrases.
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