Galileo’s Dream. Kim Stanley Robinson
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of all these visits was clearly 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 the food and the musical entertainment standing up to become himself the featured entertainment, speaking and then showing the guests what could be seen of nearby landmarks through his glass. People never ceased to be amazed, 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 meeting had lasting consequences. It took place at the palazzo of Federico Cesi, the Marquis of Monticelli, the young man who had founded the Accademia dei Lincei, the Academy of the Lynxes, in which matters of mathematics and natural philosophy were regularly discussed. Cesi also 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, griffins’ eggs, coconuts, nautilus shells, sharks’ 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 of these objects with genuine curiosity. ‘Marvellous,’ he said as he looked in the hollow end of a unicorn’s horn chased with gold. ‘It must be as big as a horse.’
‘It does seem 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 favourites 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 on top of the Janiculum, the highest of the Roman hills, in the vineyard of Monsignor Malvasia. The Lincean membership and a dozen other likeminded gentlemen assembled while it was still day, for the views from the Janiculum 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 the chiselled inscription was legible on the loggia over the side entrance. It had been placed there by Sixtus V in the first year of his pontificate:
Sixtus
Pontifex Maximus
anno primo
Everyone was startled, as usual. When they had all looked through the occhialino more than once, and read and re-read 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 Appenines, 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 people stark amazed, and the Janiculum rang 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 into him.
‘You should name your device with a new Greek word,’ he said, his saturnine face alive with the humour 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 ESCOPIO!’ 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.
An audience with Pope Paul V. 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 Giuseppe 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 rumour and gossip, concerning His Holiness’s activities the 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, where Galileo had been only the night before. This was the Pope’s idea; he wanted to get away from the Vatican. Niccolini led Galileo into the villa’s giant antechamber, and there introduced him to Paul V, using rather stiff and nervous phrases.
The Pope was indeed fat, an immense man, nearly spherical under his red robes, his neck fleshy and as thick as his head, his piggish eyes deep in thick folds of skin. He had a triangular goatee. Galileo knelt before him and kissed the offered ring, murmuring the prayer of obeisance Niccolini had taught him to use.
‘Rise,’