Immortal fame
Pointing his telescope at the heavens rather than out to sea revealed phenomenon with revolutionary implications which were theoretical rather than practical. The prospect of an astronomical revolution opened up for Galileo access to princely patronage very different in kind from that generated by the practical value of the telescope to the great maritime republic of Venice; but to access that patronage Galileo needed a new strategy for convincing a rival ruler of the value of these revolutionary discoveries.
The strategy developed in Galileo’s dedicatory letter to the Medici exploited three of the defining characteristics of the Renaissance. One was a pagan virtue which contemporary rulers desired to resurrect: namely, the thirst for immortal fame. A second was the pathos of contemplating the power of time to destroy even the greatest monuments which the ancient heroes had erected to preserve their memory. The mightiest of empires had disintegrated; the most populous of cities had crumbled into ruin; the most splendid monuments had been dismantled for their marble or melted down for their bronze. Even the greatest literary works, if not lost altogether, had been progressively despoiled by the hands of ignorant scribes and lazy monks. The third was the desire to revive the glories of antiquity or, better still, to surpass them, and thereby to achieve fame which rivalled the heroes of old.
How then could a prince like Cosimo de Medici surpass the ancients in his quest for immortal fame? Where could he erect monuments impervious to erosion by time? The answer, Galileo implied, was twofold. First, Cosimo should entrust his fame not to ars but to scientia, not to the perishable products of human art but to the eternal verities of knowledge. Second, he could do so, not by erecting monuments in this terrestrial world of endless change, but by etching his name on the perfect and changeless world of the heavens.
The irony of this strategy is also twofold. One irony is cultural: this transfer of emphasis from art to science, from the classical world to the natural world, represents a shift from the values of Renaissance humanism of the sixteenth century which inspired this dedication to those of the new philosophies of the seventeenth. The second deeper irony is philosophical: the most revolutionary implication of the Sidereus nuncius was to demonstrate that the supra-lunar realm was not a world of changeless perfection, as the ancient philosophers taught, but was composed of material and governed by laws similar or perhaps even identical to those of the terrestrial globe.
Image. Hieronymus Cock (1518-1570), Fourth view of the ruins of the Colosseum (detail), from a series of 25 images of Roman ruins, Antwerp, 1551. Etching on paper, H 225 × W 295 mm. Source: Rijksmuseum, no. RP-P-1882-A-6440 (public domain).
Credits: Howard Hotson (December 2018)