The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (43 page)

It was now, at the age of twenty-eight, that he applied for the vacant chair of mathematics at Padua and was accepted for the post that had eluded Bruno. From a purely intellectual point of view, the authorities had made an astute choice: Galileo’s ideas were not allied to any anomalous metaphysical hermeticism. Unlike Bruno, who speculated on the nature of the world around him, Galileo experimented. This meant that his science was permeated with exactitude. He confidently pronounced, ‘The book of the world is written in mathematics.’ Likewise, he insisted that the way forward in science lay in ‘measuring what is measurable, and rendering measurable what is at present not so.’ Yet with a dangerous arrogance similar to that of Bruno, he was not afraid of expressing himself on matters of theology: ‘I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason and intellect intended us to forgo their use.’ Here too he was contemptuous of fellow academics who clung to outmoded medieval ideas, especially ‘the foremost philosophers of this university, who refuse, with the obstinacy of bloated adders, to see the truth of my ideas’.

Fortunately Padua retained its intellectual freedom – despite the Bruno debacle, which was soon to move to Rome and its grisly climax. Although the university curriculum required Galileo to lecture on such orthodox topics as the Ptolemaic universe and Aristotelian science (which decreed that everything was made up of a mixture of earth, air, fire and water), he also was able to give private lectures explaining his more modern scientific ideas. Not all of these were original – Galileo was not above ‘improving’ on the ideas of others and claiming them for himself. Yet such was his genius that
this activity invariably rose above the level of mere plagiarism. Thus, in line with what Tartaglia had discovered some fifty years previously, Galileo too contradicted Aristotle’s belief that cannonballs travelled in straight lines, maintaining that their trajectory did in fact follow the course of a parabola. Yet where Tartaglia had only written of this discovery, producing a handbook of tables, Galileo went a significant step further, producing a hinged mechanical range-finder, which could be placed in the mouth of a cannon to determine the angle to which its barrel should be raised in order for its trajectory to reach a certain range. This was the device that he would sell to armies all over Europe, and in this way make his fortune. Unfortunately, the unsatisfactory state of the current patent law was such that competitors were soon manufacturing their own cheap versions of Galileo’s range-finder and undercutting his market. Undaunted, Galileo would continue over the years creating a number of other inventions and ingenious devices – ranging from the first modern thermometer to instructions on how to reinforce ancient battlements so as to withstand the latest artillery. These too were soon copied, and riches continued to elude Galileo.

Making a fortune would become a lasting preoccupation with Galileo. However, he was not naturally given to the quest for fame and fortune, and this was largely thrust upon him by his financial circumstances. Although his professorial salary at Padua was far from meagre, it was not enough to support his continuing extravagant lifestyle and the financial burdens that had now been forced upon him.

In 1591 Galileo’s father had died, leaving his large family in dire financial straits. He now had to provide for six brothers and sisters, as well as an elderly complaining mother, none of whom he could even travel to see. During his earlier years as a tutor in Florence, his extravagances in the taverns and elsewhere had left such a trail of unpaid bills that his mother had written to warn him not to visit Florence as his creditors were now ‘threatening to have you clapped in irons as soon as you set foot in the city’.

On top of this, Galileo now had a family of his own in Padua. He had taken up with a twenty-two-year-old local woman called Marina Gamba, known equally for her striking beauty and her volatile temperament. This proved a fine match for Galileo’s own character, and Marina would
eventually produce two daughters and a son by Galileo – though he never married her.

Despite his busy life supporting two families, and performing his professorial duties as a public and private lecturer whilst constantly searching for some invention that would make his fortune, Galileo also found time to advance his theoretical ideas. During his early years at Padua he had quickly come to the conclusion that the Copernican heliocentric view of the universe was correct, and had begun corresponding with the astronomer Johannes Kepler in Prague, who was at the time calculating the elliptical orbits of the planets about the sun. However, even the ebullient Galileo felt it best to refrain from publishing his Copernican views in the light of Bruno’s fate in Rome.

In the summer of 1609 news reached Venice of a sensational new type of perspicillum that had been invented in Holland. Previously a perspicillum had consisted of a lens or a pair of glasses, but this new instrument was said to be made up of two lenses arranged in a single tube and enabled a distant object to appear close up, enlarging its image by as much as three times that seen by the naked eye. When Galileo heard of this instrument, ‘by which a man two miles away can be distinctly seen’, it immediately sparked his scientific curiosity. Without even seeing one, he quickly grasped the optical principle upon which it was based and began constructing a perspicillum of his own. As ever he improved on this purloined idea, and after a number of experimental versions produced an instrument capable of almost three times the power of the orginal. Here, surely, was the invention that would guarantee his future. But this time, guided by astute Venetian friends, Galileo curbed his financial ambitions and took the unprecedented step of offering his invention to the Venetian authorities for free. Accompanied by a number of senior senators, Galileo climbed the stairs to the top of the Campanile and demonstrated his new instrument, so that they were able ‘to observe at sea sails and vessels so far away that, coming under full sail to port, two hours and more were required before they could be seen without my spyglass’. He further claimed that his instrument could ‘represent an object which is for example fifty miles away as large and near as if it were but five’. The defensive uses of such an instrument for a city like Venice were obvious: there would be no further surprise attacks from the sea.

The Senate voted to accept Galileo’s gift, and gratefully awarded him an immediate grant of 500 ducats, as well as doubling his university salary to more than 1,000 ducats a year for life. Fortunately the headstrong Galileo had heeded the advice of his friends: by selling manufactured examples of his perspicillum he could never have earned such a sum, especially since he had no patent on the idea. Within no time instrument-makers all over Europe were producing what two years later came to be known as a telescope,
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which Galileo now insisted he had invented. When presented with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, his reply was characteristically robust: ‘Any idiot can discover such a thing by accident. I was the one who discovered it by reason, which requires genuine originality.’

Within months of his original ‘invention’ Galileo had improved upon his telescope so that it magnified the original object twenty times. But this was only the beginning. Though he was certainly not the first to raise a telescope to the night sky, he was the first to understand the full significance of what he was seeing. Indeed, he was hardly exaggerating when he now referred to himself as ‘the new Columbus’. His drawing of what he saw would cause a revolution in science and transform humanity’s entire understanding of the world and our place in it. Galileo’s drawings of the moon showed that it was not a perfect sphere, as it was described according to the dictates of Aristotelianism. Instead, it was another world, in many ways resembling our own, complete with volcanic craters and mountains, which cast shadows across its sunlit surface. And when he turned his telescope to the Milky Way, instead of a diaphanous haze it became transformed into a vast rash of stars extending through the heavens. There were even stars that were not visible to the naked eye, completely disproving Aristotle’s claim that there could be no such thing. Galileo went on to observe, and record in remarkably accurate drawings, four moon-like satellites of Jupiter, sunspots which darkened and then disappeared from the surface of the sun, as well as the ‘phases of Venus’, which showed that this planet waxed and waned like the moon. This could only have taken place if Venus orbited the sun. Here was incontrovertible evidence for the solar system, utterly disproving the Ptolemaic model.

Galileo quickly wrote up his findings, and in 1610 published them in a short work called
Sidereus Nuncius
(The Starry Messenger). Later that same year he received word from Florence, from his former pupil Cosimo de’ Medici, who had recently succeeded as Grand Duke of Tuscany. Grand Duke Cosimo II formally invited Galileo to accept the well-paid post of ‘first philosopher and mathematician at his court. Galileo was elated by this opportunity, and late in 1610 left Venice for his native Tuscany. He is known to have taken his two daughters with him and to have placed them in the San Matteo convent at Arcetri in the hills a mile south of Florence. By means of letters he would remain in constant contact with his favourite eldest daughter Virginia, who certainly inherited at least some of her father’s intellect. Their mother, Marina Gamba, and his four-year-old son were left behind in Venice; it was long thought that Galileo had provided her with sufficient money for a dowry, which she used to get married, but it now appears that she was probably in ill health and too debilitated to travel such a distance, for she died two years later.

Galileo would live to regret leaving the protection of Venice. In 1615 a decree was issued in Rome declaring that the Copernican theory was heretical, and banning his work, as well as several other works, including one by Kepler. No work by Galileo was banned, but he received a private warning from Cardinal Bellarmine, who just fifteen years previously had condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake. Galileo would rashly ignore this warning and, despite the efforts of Grand Duke Cosimo II to protect him, in 1633 the sixty-nine-year-old Galileo was summoned to Rome to face the Inquisition. Fearing Bruno’s fate, Galileo publicly retracted his view that the Earth moved around the sun, though at the same time he is said to have been unable to refrain from muttering to himself, ‘And yet it does move.’ He was now banned from disseminating any of his scientific views and condemned to house arrest. He chose to stay in a villa in Arcetri, in order to be near his daughter in her convent, but was heart-broken when she died of dysentery in 1634, within a year of his return. The ageing Galileo lived on in Arcetri, surreptitiously continuing with his work even as his sight began to fail, until he died blind at the age of seventy-seven in 1642.

News of Galileo’s trial, his confinement and his eventual demise would
all have been followed closely in Venice. A direct consequence of the liberal climate maintained by the Republic was that the people of Venice were becoming increasingly informed on all manner of matters. Sir Henry Wotton stigmatised the dissemination of ‘news’ as ‘the very disease of this city’. When reports of events reached Venice, they would be publicly read out before an assembled crowd of citizens, each of whom was expected to pay a coin called a
gazzetta
for the privilege. And news reported by these means was not only confined to such matters as war, disasters and Galileo’s appearance before the Roman Inquisition. People were equally interested in, and willing to pay for, all manner of the latest information: Galileo’s discoveries of the wonders of an entirely new universe were also reported in this fashion. When the world’s first newspaper was produced in Venice sometime around 1630 it was known as the
Gazzetta
.
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Although there are other claims to this ‘first’, the
Gazzetta
was perhaps the earliest publication to appear regularly, usually on a weekly basis; it was printed on a large sheet, which could be folded so as to produce four pages of news.

Ironically, this liberalising and insatiable thirst for news of all kinds also had its repressive underside. Gossip flourished in the narrow streets of the city, secrets from overheard conversations quickly circulated, and within this comparatively close-knit community everyone kept an eye on everyone else. Inevitably this fuelled a collective paranoia about spying, which was put to effective use by the Council of Ten in the interests of public order, detecting plots against the government and any suspicious activities by agents acting for foreign powers. As had been seen in the ‘Spanish Plot’ of 1610, fears of spying were certainly justified, and throughout the following century the city would continue to attract foreign spies, even in the most unlikely of guises. Thus in 1625 the French philosopher Rene Descartes would spend a month or so in the city, acting as a spy for the Jesuits. And three-quarters of a century later the German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Leibniz would make two visits to Venice of a similar
length, covertly soliciting sensitive intelligence on various political and theological matters, while at the same time more openly gathering information for his own omnivorous intellectual purposes, which included a pioneering interest in China. (It was in Italy that he was given a first-hand description of the wonders of Hangzhou, the very city described by Marco Polo.)

Under such circumstances there is no denying that the Council of Ten faced a considerable challenge. However, the coexistence of its intrusive attitude towards the behaviour of its own citizens and the city’s traditionally liberal attitude towards ideas appears to have formed a tension in which creative ideas were still able to flourish, though how long such a delicate balance could be maintained was open to question.