Galilæana. Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Science

John Lewis Heilbron (1934-2023)

Eileen A. Reeves — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Massimo Bucciantini — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This focus concerns the wide and complex relation between “Galileo and literature”. Seven essays: from a study of Galileo’s Library to Brecht’s Life of Galileo.

Literature in Galileo's Library

Crystal Hall — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The 195 entries in Antonio Favaro’s first catalog of books in the library of Galileo Galilei would seem to be an eclectic collection of literary genres, and indeed, Favaro sorted them accordingly: literary criticism, grammar and rhetoric, Latin classics, Italian classics, various poetic works, drama and fables, novels (romanzi) and fiction, history, and festivals. A closer look at the identities of the authors of the texts and paratexts as well as the content of the books reveals a distinct trend across these categories. Over 60% of the works printed after 1610 contain either a direct or indirect connection to Galileo and his associates, the telescope, the compound microscope, or the discoveries with these instruments. This article aggregates modern scholarship on the literary texts in the library and adds new literary sightings of Galileo while indicating areas open for further scholarly investigation.

Galileo's Enimma in verse

Giuseppe Patota — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 1640 Florentine Antonio Malatesti published a collection of one hundred poetic enigmas in the form of sonnets. One of these was dedicated to the telescope designed by Galileo, who appreciated the homage and returned it with his poetic Enimma (also a sonnet) for which he did not provide the solution. It is therefore no wonder that, over time, scholars have searched for it. The author of this article reviews their hypotheses and proposes a new one, the first based on direct evidence drawn from Galilean texts.

A World of words

Edward Chappell — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most famous passages in Galileo’s Il Saggiatore is his declaration that “philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze”. He opposed this book of nature with what he claimed was his opponent Orazio Grassi’s understanding of philosophy – “a book of fiction, productions in which the least important thing is whether what is written there is true”. This paper seeks to situate this passage within the larger debate between Galileo and Grassi about the relationship between poetry and natural philosophy throughout their publications regarding the comet controversy of 1618. During their back and forth, Galileo had claimed that “nature takes no delight in poetry”, which Grassi had turned on him by alleging that he was too serious if he could not appreciate a poetic flourish in a learned debate such as theirs. This was a major insult given how central poetry and letters were to any early modern discourse. This paper argues that Galileo’s “grand book” responded to this insult by both doubling down on his poetry-nature claim and illustrating that he was more familiar with poetry than Grassi. He accomplished both by referring to debates about epic poetry in late sixteenth-century Italy. This connection sheds new light on a passage that seemingly repudiates poetry, as well as contributing to scholarship that has sought to reevaluate the mathematician’s engagement with the rich world of early modern Italian poetry.

The prose of episteme

Francesco Brancato — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What literature, art – especially painting – and music meant for Galileo’s human formation is easy to guess, given his oft-stated love for all the most important artistic and cultural expressions of humanity. From this point of view, he is a child of his time and is perfectly embedded in the cultural environment that characterized Europe and, in particular, many of the major Italian cities in which he lived and worked: from Pisa to Florence, from Padua to Rome. Less known, however, is the influence that the liberal arts exerted on his science, on his way of thinking about man, the cosmos, and their relationship; the influence, that is, on his style of thought and action. In this article, therefore, an attempt will be made to recover some of the main elements useful for reconstructing the delicate and interesting relationship that linked Galileo to the arts and, especially, to literature, but with the aim of ascertaining whether the hypothesis is well-founded that in the almost perfect synthesis that was achieved in him between strictly scientific discourse and literary writing, the root of that humility, indeed, should always inform science and its search for what is closest to the truth.

Assonances and dissonances: Vincenzio Galilei’s and his father Galileo’s rhymes

Duccio Tognini, Elisa Spettoli Caselli, Elettra Capecchi; Gioia Innocenti — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A comparison of Vincenzio Galilei’s poetry and his father Galileo’s will be offered in this paper. As the majority of Vincenzio’s poems have remained unpublished, the original handwritten codes attributed to Vincenzio have been considered. Assonances between the father’s and the son’s productions have been observed, both in common literary models and in the use of burlesque poetry. Whereas the lines in the Riccardiano code ms. 2749 are close to the tones and language of Galileo’s love sonnets, the Marciano code ms. It., IX, 138 (=6749) reveals a strongly ironic, mocking nature, approaching the one of “Against the Donning of the Gown”. The study of Vincenzio’s poetry offers a possibility to broaden the perspective on the literary culture of the Galilei family, to analyse the critical issues of attribution, and to discover Vincenzio’s peculiar, many-sided character.

“From the great book of the world”: Francesco Lomonaco and Galileo’s lesson

Rosanna Lavopa — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The essay aims to highlight some significant correspondences with Galileo’s style of thought in Francesco Lomonaco’s philosophical-literary production. The Lucanian Enlightenment felt the urgency of illustrating the ethical and civil “great book of the world” with the “same exactness of geometry”, with an ordered and mathematical alphabet in Galileo’s style, which included – in harmony with the picaresque sketch of the investigator of sounds present in Il Saggiatore – the principle of doubt and error. This dialectic – doubt/truth – is transferred by Lomonaco to the ground of morality in terms of ‘prudence’ and ‘action’. Further attesting to a Galilean theoretical substratum in Lomonaco’s thought is the direct association between the principle of ‘motion’ and the figure of Galileo, a mirror in which the Lucanian intellectual projected his own image. Lomonaco also reemployed Galileo’s rhetorical model for his own theoretical discourse: the rhetoric of the ego, the game of ‘masks’, and the attitude to laughter.

Brecht’s Life of Galileo: Staging a theory of the encounter of practices

Alejo Stark — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Brecht’s Life of Galileo provides elements for elaborating what I call “a theory of the encounter of practices”. The concept of the encounter pushes back against teleological theories that predestine modern science to operate as an instrument of domination. I argue that Life of Galileo stages the missed encounters in modernity between science, politics, and art at the same time as it foregrounds the emancipatory power of science. I trace the encounter of practices from the play’s opening scenes – highlighting what I call Galileo’s “double life”. Then, I turn to the most important scene of the play, Scene 10, in which political and artistic practices repurpose Galileo’s novel inventions for their emancipatory desires. In the virtual potentialities of this encounter, that is, despite the missed encounter between Galileo and “the people”, Brecht’s Life of Galileo continues to be fruitful for theorizing the emancipatory power of science.

A digital library on the controversy on the comets, 1618-1626

Stefano Casati, Adele Pocci, Giancarlo Truffa — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Federico Commandino e il recupero della matematica greca nel Rinascimento

Elio Nenci — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Book review of: Ciocci, Argante. Federico Commandino: Umanesimo matematico e rivoluzione scientifica. Con un’appendice a cura di Anna Falcioni e Vincenzo Mosconi, “Federico Commandino nelle fonti notarili urbinati. Regesto documentario”. Urbino: Urbino University Press, 2023.

Imagined nature, nature in images. Illuminated herbaria and botanical treaties as laboratories of complexities

Irene Baldriga — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Long subordinated to medicine and pharmacology, studies on the properties and behaviour of plants only gained a separate epistemological space at the end of the 16th century. Of this arduous and controversial path, illustrated herbaria offer a rich and fascinating documentation on which the exhibition Rara Herbaria (2023) suggested interesting insights. The quality of the specimens on display, partly from Peter Goop’s collection and partly selected from the Lincean collection of the Biblioteca Corsiniana, highlighted the relevance of these ‘complex devices’ in terms of cultural history for understanding the relationship between man and nature in early modern Europe.

“L’unghia del leone e la scintilla del genio”: Vincenzo Tonni Bazza and the rediscovery of Niccolò Tartaglia

Diego Cancrini — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A cache of documents from the private archive of the Brescia engineer and scholar Vincenzo Tonni Bazza (1878‑1920) has recently surfaced on the antiquarian market and promptly been purchased by the “Raccolte Storiche” Research Centre at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Brescia campus. The acquisition has enabled researchers to shed further light on Tonni Bazza and explore his contribution to the rediscovery, both nationally and internationally, of Niccolò Tartaglia (1499‑1557) in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Tonni Bazza was a little-known entrepreneur who served as an intermediary in Rome between the leading Italian industrial companies and the government; he also took an interest in financial and cultural institutions and organizations and was a keen observer of Italian politics. As a historian, he focused on his hometown, Brescia, and the figures who made it great in the fields of science and mathematics.

The mathematician and the viceroy

Fernando Bouza — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The renowned claim that Gloriosi’s library was transferred to Spain in the mid-seventeenth century is confirmed by the identification of thirty-five printed books that had originally belonged to the Neapolitan mathematician. Following his death in 1643, Gloriosi’s books were sold in Naples to Viceroy Ramiro Núñez de Guzmán, Duke of Medina de las Torres. In the wake of the viceroy’s demise in 1668, the collection began to be dispersed. This note presents part of Gloriosi’s library and provides an opportunity to explore his diverse interests as well as the sources he drew on for his inquiry into a wide range of scientific subjects.