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In August, we reported that a letter believed to have been written by Galileo Galilei — part of the University of Michigan Library’s collection — was in fact a forgery, along with a similar document at the Morgan Library in New York City. Now that research has led to a new discovery. An Italian historian has concluded that Galileo wrote a 17th-century treatise on astronomy under a pseudonym.
The letter from Michigan purporting to be a draft of a letter dated August 24, 1609 that Galileo wrote to the Doge of Venice describing his observations with a telescope (occhiale) he had built. (The latter letter is housed in the State Archives in Venice.) But historian Nick Wilding of Georgia State University became suspicious of the manuscript’s authenticity while working on a biography of Galileo. Wilding has in the past uncovered Galileo-related forgeries, most notably a copy of Sidereus Nuncius owned by a New York City dealer of rare books.
The Michigan Preservation Lab determined that the manuscript’s ink and paper matched the time period in which Galileo made his observations, but any hope of authenticity was dashed after Wilding’s research into the watermark. It matched documents dating back to 1790 – 150 years after Galileo made his discoveries.
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The letter from Michigan was authenticated by an Archbishop of Pisa named Cardinal Pietro Maffi. The cardinal had two other documents in his collection that were supposedly signed by Galileo, and Maffi used those documents as comparisons. But later it turned out that they were forgeries. And one of them (a letter) is said to have been accompanied by a treatise from 1606, Libro della Considerazione Astronomica, published under the pseudonym Alimberto Mauri. The text argued for the existence of mountains on the moon, among other insights, and attributed the movement of celestial bodies following non-uniform paths to physical causes.
The suggestion that Galileo may have written the 1606 treatise began to circulate shortly after it was published. For example, according to Matteo Cosci, a historian at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, one of Galileo’s colleagues at the University of Padua, Fortuna Liceti, described the pseudonymous Mauri as someone who was an expert mathematician posing as an astronomer.
Galileo was known to use pseudonyms. For example, he took part in a debate on the supernova of 1604 (the subject of Johannes Kepler’s 1606 treatise The Stella Nova) under the name Cecco da Ronchitti. Philosopher Lodovico delle Colombe believed that this new star was not new; it had always been there, but it was not always visible. He adhered to the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, in which stars were fixed and unchanging. Galileo was a professor at the University of Padua at the time and was also interested in this ‘stella nova’. He thought it was a new phenomenon, not a permanent star, and even suggested possible mechanisms by which it could have been produced.
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Delle Colombe published his thoughts on the “stella nova”, citing not only astronomical observations, but also Aristotle and other notable philosophers. A few months later, Predominantly Astronomics popped up. “Mauri” argued that astronomy should focus on observations and mathematics rather than Aristotle, referring to delle Colombe as “our dove”.
Delle Colombe never explicitly identified Galileo as his opponent. But in his rispost piacevoli and curiosities (1608), he indirectly referred to the opponent as “Mr. Mask” and “that professor who was a lecturer in Padua.” And a student at the time wrote “Galileo Galilei” under the subtitle of his copy of: rispost (“a knowing mask called Alimberto Mauri”)
Scholars in the 1970s cited the Maffi letter as proof that Galileo had written Predominantly Astronomics. When that letter turned out to be a forgery, Galileo’s authorship was called into question. But Cosci doggedly searched the archives of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, especially a collection of Galileo’s handwritten notes on various subjects at different time periods, which had never been published, and discovered new evidence to support the hypothesis.
The strongest evidence he found for Galileo’s authorship of Predominantly Astronomics is a list the astronomer made of “places where” [delle Colombe] speaks of me with contempt.” Those “places” were specific references to passages in delle Colombe’s rispost, but when Cosci sought them out, the references attacked the pseudonym Alimberto Mauri. Cosci reasoned that unless he was indeed Mauri, Galileo would not have felt personally attacked by these scornful references.
Cosci’s research also uncovered a handwritten note from Galileo indicating that the astronomer considered another answer to delle Colombe, but decided it wasn’t worth his time. They were still arguing years later – about the motion of the earth (mentioned in Sidereus Nuncius), the surface of the moon and floating bodies, among others — but by this time Galileo was famous and no longer felt the need for a pseudonym, according to Cosci. The historian is now preparing a new edition of Predominantly Astronomics he emphasized his analysis of the main textual similarities between that treatise and Galileo’s other written works.
