Christopher Lewis
Galileo’s
Revenge is based upon the life of the Italian scientist
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) when he was a young man. Eventually Galileo became
the most famous scientist of his day, thanks to his revolutionary astronomical
discoveries with the newly-invented telescope. But his success didn’t come
easily, or early, and there are big gaps in the historical record of his early
life. So Galileo’s Revenge fills in
some of those gaps.
Galileo’s gap years
When Galileo left the
university of Pisa in 1585, aged 21, he had no proper job to go to. Returning
to his family home in Florence, he struggled to make a living from a portfolio
of activities: part-time teaching, casting horoscopes, playing on the lute . .
. and gambling. At the same time he was trying to make a name for himself at
the cultured but extravagant and debauched court of the Medici Dukes who ruled
Tuscany.
Grand Duke Francesco
The current head of the
family was Francesco de’ Medici (1541-87): aloof, capricious and
self-indulgent. Some ten years earlier, for example, upon the death of his
first wife, the aristocratic Joanna of Austria, Francesco had scandalized his
family and Florence by marrying his charismatic mistress, Bianca Cappello
(1548-87). She was considered an unsuitable match because her parents were
relatively humble merchants from Venice[CL1] .
Otherwise Francesco devoted himself mainly to lavish entertainments, to hunting
and alchemy (of a largely practical kind, e.g. explosives, poisons), and to
collecting – coins, curiosities, antiquities . . . and gems. And therein lay an
opportunity for the young Galileo.
Archimedes
At Pisa Galileo had
been supposed to study the dominant Aristotelian philosophy of the day, with a
view to further training to become a doctor. But he also became fascinated by
mathematics, especially the mechanics of the ‘divine’ Archimedes (c.287-212
BCE). Archimedes had famously detected the fraudulent adulteration of a gold
crown with silver by measuring its density – gold being heavier than silver. Now
Galileo’s first published work, La
bilancetta (1586), described his own invention of a neat ‘hydrostatic’
balance for quickly and accurately measuring the density of small objects. Such
as gemstones.
The Medici jewels
Much of the Medici
collection of jewellery had been lent to Catherine de’ Medici (1519-89) to wear
at her marriage to the King of France in 1533. Catherine was a fairly distant
cousin of Duke Francesco, but actually it was she who came from the senior line of the family that had made the
family fortunes in the 15th century. Francesco came from a
relatively minor branch. Catherine had been slow to return the jewels. When she
did, could Francesco be sure that they were genuine? At this time there were no
hard-and-fast criteria for identifying a ruby, say, as ‘genuine’, and not a
garnet or merely cleverly coloured glass. At the end of Galileo’s Bilancetta there is a list of densities
measured with his balance: specimens of gold and silver, of course, but also a lengthy
list of the densities of some rather substantial gemstones. Where could Galileo
have accessed such treasures to study?
Galileo lab assistant
It is my conceit (only
in the old-fashioned sense, of course) that Duke Francesco engaged Galileo as
his assayer, to help him identify any fakes among the family jewels. And perhaps
that Galileo – very knowledgeable, ingenious and dextrous, amusing and charming
if he needed to be – insinuated himself as an accomplice to the Duke in his
alchemical investigations. In other words, Galileo became His Highness’ laboratorio assistant.[1] In
the basement of the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano – basically a huge hunting
lodge some the miles outside Florence – the Duke maintained a small but
well-equipped laboratory. So, in October 1587, Galileo might well have been
summoned to attend the Duke during a lavish hunting holiday arranged by Bianca for
the Duke and his brother, the Cardinal Ferdinando, and their entourages. With
fatal consequences. As described in Galileo’s
Revenge.
Galileo’s
Revenge has a subtitle A
Cure for the Itch. I am very fond of Jacobethan[2]
drama, when the plays often had such subtitles – Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will, for
example. The origins of modern crime writing may be traced to the sub-genre of
‘revenge tragedy’ hugely popular at the time, from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (pre-1592) through Hamlet (c.1600) to Ford’s ‘Tis
Pity She’s a Whore (1633).
In the middle of that
series lies Thomas Middleton’s Women
Beware Women (c. 1621?). This play is based on precisely the same events as
form the backdrop to Galileo’s Revenge;
it is a complex and moving story, but there is scarcely a member of the cast
left alive at the end. Middleton got the story from his friend, the English
traveller Fynes Moryson (1566-1630), who visited Florence in the mid-1590s, and
recorded the story thus:
Then seeming to make conscience to live a
Concubine, at last, (his wife Joanna now being dead,) she [Bianca] had the
power to make him [Francesco] to take her to wife; which done she bent all her
wits to have her son legitimate, and admitted to succeed in the Dukedom. And
whilst Cardinal Ferdinand, brother to Duke Francesco, opposed this her design,
it happened that he came to Florence to pass some days merrily with the Duke. And
they being to go out hunting early in a morning, the
Duchess sent the Cardinal a marzipan for his breakfast, which he returned with
due ceremony saying that he did eat nothing but that was dressed by his own
cook. But the Duke by ill happ meeting the messenger, did eat a piece thereof,
and when the Duchess saw it broken, she smiled and spoke some words of joy. But
the messenger telling her the Cardinal’s answer, and that the Duke had eaten
that piece, she with an unchanged countenance took another piece, and having
eaten it, locked herself in a closet. And hereupon the Duke and she died in one
hour, and the Cardinal Ferdinand succeeded in the Dukedom.[3]
Too
neat by half, I say. You will find the true origins and significance of this
story in Galileo’s Revenge, of
course.
Galileo and me
Although theoretical
physics was my first love, I subsequently became fascinated by the history of
science. I especially like the medieval and early modern periods: roughly, that
is, everything from the Venerable Bede (c.673-735) to the Honourable Boyle (1627-91)
and a bit beyond. But Galileo was always my particular favourite: initially his
work on falling bodies, projectiles, and pendulums and such, and then more
broadly his character, life and the wider world in which he lived and worked.
A few years ago,
therefore, I started work on a new, up-to-date biography of Galileo.
Unfortunately (for me) a couple of other excellent scholars had already had the
same idea. J.L.Heilbron’s brilliant Galileo,
for example, came out in 2010 and I shelved my own project. But all was not
lost. I have always loved crime fiction and historical fiction and above all
historical crime fiction. (Yes, yes, I admit it, I adore Cadfael, even if he is
the veritable white line down the middle of the road.) So I had already started
working on an early draft of Galileo’s
Revenge. How hard can creative
writing be, I wondered? You just make it up as you go along. And I won’t have
to check my references. A much older and slightly wiser man, I finally
stopped writing last year.
Christopher J T Lewis
[1]
Meaning of ‘laboratory’ etc.
[2]
I.e. drama from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, 1559-1627 or thereabouts.
[3] Unpublished
chapters of Fynes Moryson’s ‘Itinerary’, ed. Charles Hughes (London, 1903),
p.94-5
[CL1]Oh,
yes, and she had run away from home in the arms of a feckless bank clerk from
Florence, to whom she was still married when she became the Duke’s mistress.
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