Gli scritti De motu antiquiora di Galileo Galilei: Il Ms. Gal.

71: Un'analisi storico-critica by

Michele Camerota
Review by: William A. Wallace
Isis, Vol. 84, No. 4 (Dec., 1993), p. 797
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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 BOOKREVIEWS-ISIS, 84 : 4 (1993)
tistic traditions of the next three centuries.
However, far from being simply inaccurately
depicted, or victim of a fungus acquired on
the voyage from Cambay to Portugal (p. 270),
the true Indian rhinoceros does normally sport
tubercles on the underside of its body, and its
skin does fall in folds, forming a ruff around
the neck and bloomer-like drapings of the up-
per legs; the rib cage does show through the
heavy skin, though not in the stylized pattern
found in the woodcut-a product of Diirer's
"decorative"phase, when he was working for
Maximilian I. Gessner's rendition of Duirer's
rhinoceros, reversed from Duirer's woodcut
and stubbier in proportions, appears in living
mannerist color as one of the tempera illus-
trations (many based on Diirer) to Pier Can-
dido Decembrio's De animantium naturis
(Vatican MS Urb. lat. 276, fol. 41; facsimile
ed., 1984), attributedby me to the naturalist-
artist Teodoro Ghisi.
The whimsical arrangementof information
in Diirer's Animals, with no footnotes and few
exact references in the text, makes for pleas-
ant, interesting perusal but unfortunately not
for scholarly use, except at the most prelim-
inary stages. It is always regrettable when re-
search goes into a book that, owing to a lack
of documentation, does not facilitate future
research. A compromise could have been
struck by placing notes at the back. Two
quibbles: misprints (e.g., "existance," p. 18;
"Prosperpina,"p. 28; "lead" for "led," p. 29)
could have been avoided; also, I am slightly
put off by columns of text in a book, though
perhaps that layout afforded greater flexibil-
ity for insertion of the myriad illustrationsthat
are made so generously available here.
CYNTHIAM. PYLE
Michele Camerota. Gli scritti De motu an-
tiquiora di Galileo Galilei: II Ms. Gal. 71:
Un'analisi storico-critica. Preface by Al-
berto Pala. 182 pp., bibl., index. Cagliari:
CUEC Editrice, 1992. (Paper.)
This brief but erudite study clears up a num-
ber of important problems relating to Manu-
script 71 in the Collezione Galileiana at the
Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, which con-
tains Galileo's early writings on motion.
Hitherto the most extensive study of that
manuscript was a doctoral dissertation sub-
mitted by Raymond Fredette to the Univer-
sity of Montreal in 1969, a portion of which
This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:08:34 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
797
was published as "Galileo's De motu anti-
quiora" (Physics, 1972, 41[4]:321-350).
While generally endorsing Fredette's results,
Michele Camerota goes considerably beyond
them in two ways. First, he provides a com-
prehensive archival history of the manuscript
and its six components-a plan of the work,
an elaboration in the form of a dialogue, an
interpolated fragment entitled De motu ac-
celerato, an essay on the problem of weight,
a treatise De motu in twenty-three chapters,
and a reelaboration of the first two chapters
of that treatise. Then, using materials un-
available at the time of Fredette's writing,
Camerota explores the relationship of Manu-
script 71 to two other manuscriptsin the same
collection in Florence, Manuscripts 27 and
46, the second of which also contains mater-
ials on the problem of motion. He does not
attempt to date each component of Manu-
script 71, nor does he propose his results as
apodictic, but he effectively establishes that
all three manuscripts were Pisan in origin and
so rules out a much later dating proposed by
Adriano Carugo and Alistair Crombie. Of
particularinterest is Camerota's discussion of
the fragment on accelerated motion and how
it came to be included in the codex; on this
he favors Fredette's view that it was put among
the De motu antiquiora papers by Galileo
himself. Also illuminating is his account of
another fragment on floating bodies that was
included among the same papers at one time.
He sees both fragments as attesting to the im-
portance Galileo attached to his earlier writ-
ings for the influence they exerted on his ma-
ture thought.
There is little to criticize in this compact
study. If anything Camerota has been a bit
too conservative in not going beyond the facts
to propose at least a tentative dating of the
components of Manuscript 71. Although he
has taken full account of my own work on
Manuscripts 27 and 46, he might have looked
more closely at Stillman Drake's extensive
analyses of Manuscript 72 for the light these
might shed on the dating of the De motu ac-
celerato fragment. Such initiatives are un-
doubtedly a part of his future agenda. A
promising scholar, he is in the enviable po-
sition of being able to dig into Italian ar-
chives and improve on Antonio Favaro's Na-
tional Edition of Galileo's Opere-a work so
impressive that it has intimidated his coun-
trymen for well over a century.
WILLIAMA. WALLACE