“If anyone is allowed to imagine whatever he pleases, then of course someone can say that the moon is surrounded by a crystalline substance that is transparent and invisible! Who can deny it? I will grant it without objection, provided that, with equal courtesy, I be allowed to say that the crystal has on its outer surface a large number of huge mountains, thirty times as high as terrestrial ones, but invisible because they are diaphanous. Thus I can picture to myself another moon ten times as mountainous as I said in the first place!” The guests at the table laughed. “The hypothesis is pretty,” Galileo went on, goaded by their amusement, “but its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor demonstrable! Who does not see that this is a purely arbitrary fiction? Why, if you counted the Earth’s atmosphere as a similar kind of clear shell, then the Earth too would be perfectly spherical!”
And of course they all laughed. Galileo’s signature mix of wit and sarcasm had been making people laugh for years. But Christopher Clavius had always been friendly to him; and more generally, it was never good to make fun of the Jesuits. Especially publicly, in Rome, and right before the Jesuits were to host a lavish feast at the College of Rome to celebrate your accomplishments. Yet here he was. Cartophilus could only groan and have another swig from his bottle. From the darkness of the vineyard, the sight of Galileo standing in the torchlight over the long table of seated revelers was like a tableau vivant illustrating Pride before its Fall.
But he did not notice. He ate, he talked, he boasted. He trained his telescope on the sun, using a method suggested by Castelli to look at it. The sun’s light was directed through the tube onto a sheet of paper, where one could look at the big lit circle at one’s ease and with no danger to one’s eyes. And immediately it became apparent to any viewer that the lit image of the sun was dotted by small indistinct dark patches. Over the course of days, these dark spots moved across the sun’s face in a manner that suggested to Galileo that the sun too was rotating, at a speed that he calculated made its day about a month long. Rotating at about the same speed as the moon in its course around the Earth, therefore; and they were the same size in the sky. It was odd. He made sketches each day of the sun spots’ patterns, and placed the sketches side by side to show the sequence of movement.
Galileo claimed this discovery of the sun’s rotation for himself, though there were astronomers—Jesuits again—who had been tracking the sunspots for some time. He proclaimed his discovery far and wide, pretending to be unaware that it was another inconvenient finding for the Peripatetics, and also that it contradicted certain astronomical statements in the Bible. He didn’t care; if he noticed such problems for his opponents, he would only make another sharp heavy joke about them.
For now, none of these indiscretions seemed to be having any bad effect. At the Jesuit banquet in his honor, no one spoke of his jape at Clavius’s expense, and the Dutch Jesuit astronomer whom Galileo had met earlier, Odo Maelcote, read a learned commentary on Sidereus Nuncius that confirmed every discovery Galileo had reported. It appeared he did not have to care.
Then the newly enthusiastic Niccolini was replaced as Cosimo’s ambassador to Rome by Piero Guicciardini, who, finding Galileo at the height of his magniloquence, did not like him. And back home, Belis-ario Vinta was replaced as secretary to Cosimo by Curzio Picchena, who shared with Guicciardini a more jaundiced view of Galileo’s loud advocacy of the Copernican position. They saw no reason why the Medici should be drawn into such a potentially awkward controversy. But if Galileo noticed these new men and their attitude toward him, again, he did not seem to care.
Meanwhile, Cardinal Bellarmino, Pope Paul’s closest advisor, also a Jesuit, and the inquisitor who had handled the case of Giordano Bruno, initiated an investigation into Galileo’s theories. This was probably on Paul’s instruction, but the spies within the Vatican who had found out about it could not be sure of that. Bellarmino, they said, had looked through a Jesuit telescope himself; he had asked his Jesuit colleagues for an opinion; he had attended a meeting of the Holy Office of the Congregation, which after that began to look into the case. Bellarmino seemed to have been the one to order the investigation.
But no one told Galileo about this troubling development, being not quite sure what it meant. And because of his meeting with the pope, and everything else that had happened, he was still full of himself, bumptious and grand. The visit to Rome was accomplishing even more than he had hoped; it was a triumph in every way, even if Guicciardini was now hinting that it might be best to leave while he was still being lionized. The ambassador stayed just on the right side of politeness about this, but if Galileo had sneaked into his office and looked at the letters on his desk, as proved fairly easy to do, he would have gotten a truer sense of the ambassador’s mind:
Galileo has little strength of judgment wherewith to control himself, so that he makes the climate of Rome extremely dangerous to himself, particularly in these times, when we have a Pope who hates geniuses.
Eventually Galileo took the ambassador’s hint, or decided on his own, and announced he was returning to Florence. Cardinal Farnese hosted the farewell banquet in his honor, and accompanied him in his trip north as far as Caprarola, the country villa of the Farnese, where Galileo was invited to rest a night in luxury. Galileo carried with him a written report he had requested and received from Cardinal del Monte, addressed to Cosimo and Picchena. The cardinal had finished his tribute with the words, Were we still living under the ancient republic of Rome, I am certain that a statue would have been erected in his honor on the Capitol—perhaps next to the statue of Marcus Aurelius, still located there. Not a bad companion in fame. No wonder Galileo’s head had been turned. The visit to Rome was a complete success, as far as he knew.
Things continued that way after he got back to Florence. He was feted in fine style by Cosimo and his court, and it was clear that Cosimo was extremely pleased with him. His Roman performance had made Cosimo’s patronage look very discriminating indeed.
The Medici youth was no longer so young; he sat at the head of his table like a man used to command, and the boy Galileo remembered so well was no longer evident. He looked quite a bit the same, physically: slight, a bit pale, very like his father in his features, which was to say long-nosed and narrow headed, with a noble forehead. Not a robust youth, but now much more sure of himself, as only made sense: he was a prince. And he, like everyone else, had read his Machiavelli. He had given hard commands, and the whole duchy had obeyed them.
“Maestro, you have set the Romans on their heels,” he said complacently, offering a toast to the room. “To my old teacher, the wonder of the age!”
And the Florentines cheered even louder than the Romans had.
Soon after his return, Galileo got involved in a debate concerning hydrostatics: why did ice float? His opponent was his old foe Colombe, the malevolent shit who had tried to hang scriptural objections around his neck and thus cast him into hell. Galileo was anxious to stick the knives into this man while his Roman victories were fresh in everyone’s mind, and went at the contest like a bull seeing red, yes. But then he was frustrated by Cosimo, who ordered him to debate such insignificant enemies in writing only, speaking over such a gadfly’s head to the world at large. When Galileo did that, writing at great length as usual with him, Cosimo followed up by ordering him to debate the issue orally with a Bolognan professor named Pappazoni, whom Galileo had just helped to get his teaching position at Il Bo. This was like staking down a lamb to be killed and eaten by a lion, but Galileo and Pappazoni could only play their parts, and Galileo could not help enjoying it, as it was only a verbal killing.