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Galileo: From University Professor to Inventor of Modern Mechanics and Astronomy
Ahead of a rare autograph letter being offered at auction, the leading Galileo scholar shares an insight in to the man behind the document.
G alileo is one of those few individuals famous enough to be get by mononymously. Before his name was given to a satellite system, a rocket, and a Star Trek shuttle, before he'd been branded a martyr for science, a second Socrates or a heretic; before being lauded for inventing modern mechanics, astronomy and cosmology, he spent many years as an under-paid university professor.
His youth and student years had been somewhat aimless: should he follow his father and brother into music, or train in medicine? Neither option suited this ambitious, opportunist virtuoso. He left Pisa university without a degree but with a strong interest in mathematics, and a realisation that this field had potential beyond its traditional utilitarian confines as a tool for merchants and soldiers. The way forward, however, was not at all obvious, and after a brief stint at his alma mater, he landed a secure job in 1592 at the prestigious University of Padua.
He would remain there for nearly twenty years until, in 1610, he found the stable point from which to move the world. Tweaking the telescope with serendipity and skill, he made a startling series of radical astronomical discoveries, published the revolutionary pamphlet Sidereus Nuncius, and set science up as a rival authority to the Bible.
After the rise to international fame, the increasingly bitter controversies, the multi-pronged opposition of Jesuits, Dominicans and others, his forays into theology and philosophy, and his disastrous trial, he looked back on the Paduan period as "the happiest years of my life." What were those years like? Padua was a famously cosmopolitan university - the intellectual motor driving the Venetian empire, still powerful enough in its grip of the Eastern Mediterranean economy to be relatively undiminished, at the start of the seventeenth-century, by trans-Atlantic trade.
Old and new money flowed into the arts and the sciences: both Venetian and terrafirma palaces were lavishly decorated; some patricians ran salons and academies where everything from anatomy to zoology was discussed. Venice housed the largest publishing centre in the world, with strong and regular trade ties to the rest of the European book world via the fairs in Lyons and Frankfurt. The most important social gathering place in Padua for Galileo was the library of his humanist patron Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (d.1601), with its exceptional collection of Ancient Greek texts in addition to a cutting-edge research library.
Alongside a remarkably robust group of local regulars, including the political theorist and polemicist Paolo Sarpi, with whom Galileo discussed tides, magnetism, and optics, and his bosom friend Gianfrancesco Sagredo, Pinelli hosted itinerant scholars passing through on their Itinera Italica: such unconventional thinkers as Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella performed there before ending up in jail.
Tweaking the telescope with serendipity and skill, he made a startling series of radical astronomical discoveries, published the revolutionary pamphlet 'Sidereus Nuncius', and set science up as a rival authority to the Bible.
Elsewhere in Italy, experimenters were everywhere: Monteverdi was down the road in Mantua; Caravaggio in Rome; Tasso all over the place. At the university, students came from across Europe and its confessional divides, many seeking a modern military education. Galileo, the not-so-young academic, found himself financially burdened by an extended family with a patrician lifestyle and low earnings. His father had died in 1591, his salary was low. He'd made a few smart contributions to mathematics and invented some gadgets, but published nothing. He wrote a tract on motion, and another on mechanics: along with his satirical verse, they remained unpublished. His university teaching was underwhelming: Euclid, traditional astronomy.
He dabbled on the side with astrology and technology, casting horoscopes and patenting a pump and trying to help out the ship designers in the Venetian Arsenal with a new way of thinking about oars as levers. He drafted a tract on the science of fortification, and started teaching students privately, taking in lodgers to supplement, and then dwarf his paltry university stipend: by 1600 he was earning three times his salary with these side gigs, which branched out to include designing, manufacturing and selling military and geometric compasses along with their manuscript instruction manuals.
This is the environment which produced the document on offer: it is a vivid glimpse of Galileo wheeling and dealing, lending money to a foreign student, presumably as a guaranteed investment on future lodging and teaching bills. Most of the documents that permit us to reconstruct his household activities are the financial notebooks, compiled for his own domestic record-keeping and now archived among the Galileo Manuscripts of the National Library of Florence. Other receipts and financial survive, such as a series in the Florentine State Archives.
Personal loans would generate documents retained by the recipient, not archived by Galileo, and it is likely that this, like a similar receipt from 1611 which first surfaced in Rome at the start of the twentieth century and is now located in the University of Basel, were removed from local archives as soon as the illustrious lender's name jumped out from the ledgers. The present document can be traced back well over a century: it was briefly described in the Morrison Collection in 1885 though for some unspecified reason the great Galileo scholar and editor Antonio Favaro did not include it in his National Edition (1890-1909), and it was missed by later editors too.
The figure of Louis de la Court, named in the document as Galileo's debtor, is not mentioned elsewhere in the Galileian corpus but he can be shown historically to have existed (see lot description), and is precisely the kind of student Galileo would have welcomed to his growing stable in the 1590s, alongside many other French, Dutch, English, Scottish and, especially, Polish, soldiers.
The star fortress of Palmanova had been built in 1593 amid intense debate about the geometry of design and anxiety of Ottoman invasion; Galileo's private courses disseminated the latest theories to an international cadre of budding officers eager to possess the latest military knowledge. Although autograph Galileo documents are not rare, totaling a few hundred, the vast majority is in the National Library of Florence.
All but two others (autograph Galileo letters, now in the Karpeles collection, and a Florentine family archive) are in institutional libraries. Galileo autographs were relatively common in private collections in the nineteenth century, all but these three are now housed institutionally. Realistically, this sale provides the only opportunity for an individual to acquire an autograph Galileo document.
