Van Helden - Representing The Heavens Galileo and Visual Astronomy

Representing the Heavens: Galileo and Visual Astronomy
Author(s): Mary G. Winkler and Albert Van Helden

Source: Isis, Vol. 83, No. 2 (Jun., 1992), pp. 195-217
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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>sAmi
Copper engraving of last quarter moon from Galileo, Sidereus nuncius (1610). (Courtesy of
the Linda Hall Library,Kansas City, Missouri.)

Representing the Heavens
Galileo and Visual Astronomy
By Mary G. Winkler* and Albert Van Helden**
IN HIS Selenographia (1647), the first treatise devoted to the telescopic ap-
pearance of the moon, Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) reflected on the differ-
ence between his own work and that of Galileo. Congratulating himself on the
accuracy of his own pictorial information, he remarked that the quality of Gali-
leo's representations of the moon in Sidereus nuncius (1610) left something to be
desired. Hevelius concluded that "Galileo lacked a sufficiently good telescope, or
he could not be sufficiently attentive to those observations of his, or, most likely,
he was ignorant of the art of picturing and drawing, which art serves this work
greatly and no less than acute vision, patience, and toil."'
Although it was certainly reasonable for Hevelius thus to explain the shortcom-
ings of Galileo's renditions of the moon (about which more below), his explana-
tion was wrong: Galileo, whose telescopes were not much inferior to those of
Hevelius, was a careful observer, and he was anything but ignorant of "the art of
picturing and drawing." What separated Hevelius's engravings of the moon from
Galileo's renditions, thirty-seven years earlier, was not so much technology or
talent as a difference in the status of pictorial information in the science of as-
tronomy. It is the aim of this paper to explore Galileo's use of naturalistic repre-
sentations in his astronomical work and to attempt to explain why his use of such
representations was limited to his early works (1610-1613).
Before Galileo turned his telescope to the heavens, in 1609, astronomy was a
science with diagrams but without naturalistic representations, or pictures, of the
heavens.2 Diagrams of the Aristotelian or Copernican universe and models of the
* Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas
77550.
** Department of History, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77251-1892.
We thank William B. Ashworth, Jr., Mario Biagioli, Samuel Y. Edgerton, J. V. Field, Owen Gin-
gerich, Irving Lavin, Robert S. Westman, and Martin J. Wiener for their help and comments.
1 Johannes Hevelius, Selenographia sive lunae descriptio (Gdansk, 1647; rpt. New York: Johnson
Reprint, 1968), p. 205 (here and elsewhere, translations are ours unless otherwise stated).
2 Note that astronomy books did, from time to time, contain naturalistic representations of instru-
ments. See, e.g., Tycho Brahe's Astronomiae instauratae mechanica of 1598: Tycho Brahe's Descrip-
tion of His Instruments and Scientific Work, trans. and ed. by Hans Raeder, Ellis Stromgren, and
Bengt Stromgren (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1946).
For the purpose of this paper, we take the word picture to mean a naturalistic depiction of an object
in the world accessible to our eye, and we exclude schemas, diagrams, emblems or allegorical repre-
sentations, and visual fantasies. For a discussion of contemporary scientific pictorial representation
not directly drawn from the world accessible to our senses see Robert S. Westman, "Nature, Art, and
Psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd Polemic," in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the
Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 177-229, esp. pp.
ISIS, 1992, 83: 195-217 195

196 MARY G. WINKLER AND ALBERT VAN HELDEN
motions of individual planets were the common fare of astronomical texts in the
Ptolemaic tradition,3 fanciful representations of constellations were central in the
poetic-astronomical tradition going back to Aratus (fl. early third century B.C.);4
and emblematic representations of heavenly bodies were used routinely in books
on various subjects.5 But these books contained no naturalistic representations of
heavenly bodies-not even the moon, on which considerable detail can be seen
with the naked eye. The only pretelescopic drawings of the moon, unpublished
until later, are those by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), in which the moon is
likened to a face, and by William Gilbert (1544-1603) in the manuscript of De
mundo nostro sublunari, which he left at his death in 1603.6
Galileo (1564-1642) changed all that. In his Sidereus nuncius of 1610 he showed
a number of pictures of the moon as seen through the telescope (see Frontis-
piece). Although these representations are somewhat distorted, so that modern
astronomers have had difficulties in dating the observations, on the whole they
are recognizable pictures, or portraits.7 In his Letters on Sunspots of 1613 Galileo
178-207; and William B. Ashworth, Jr., "Light of Reason, Light of Nature: Catholic and Protestant
Metaphors of Scientific Knowledge," Science in Context, 1989, 3:89-107.
3 The manuscript tradition of Ptolemy's Almagest contains diagrams only. In modern editions
diagrams of measuring instruments have been reconstructed. See Ptolemy, Almagest, trans. G. J.
Toomer (London: Duckworth; New York: Springer-Verlag, 1984), pp. 24-25, 61, 62, 218, 245. Nicho-
las Copernicus's De revolutionibus contains one diagram of the Copernican cosmos besides the usual
astronomical diagrams. See Nicholas Copernicus, On the Revolutions, trans. Edward Rosen, Vol. 2
of Copernicus, Complete Works, ed. Jerzy Dobrzycki, 3 vols. (Warsaw/Cracow: Polish Scientific
Publishers; London: Macmillan, 1972-1985). This volume was also published separately: Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978); see p. 21. The development of diagrams in the seventeenth century
is very different from that of scientific pictures. In dynamics, for instance, diagrams had to evolve
away from close representation of the physical world in order to accommodate variables such as time
and force. See Michael S. Mahoney, "Diagrams and Dynamics: Mathematical Perspectives on Ed-
gerton's Thesis," in Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed. John W. Shirley and F. David
Hoeniger (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library; London/Toronto: Associated Univ.
Presses, 1985), pp. 198-220. For the limited iconography in physics during the seventeenth century
see William B. Ashworth, Jr., "Iconography of a New Physics," Histoty and Technology, 1987,
4:267-297.
4 See, e.g., Ranee Katzenstein and Emilie Savage-Smith, The Leiden Aratea: Ancient Constella-
tions in a Medieval Manuscript (Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1988). The accuracy of the
star formations was only incidental in this tradition. Only with Albrecht Durer's star maps, early in
the sixteenth century, can we begin to talk about celestial cartography. See Deborah J. Warner, The
Sky Explored: Celestial Cartography, 1500-1800 (New York: Alan R. Liss, 1979), pp. 71-75. Here,
although one can say that the accurate positional representations of the stars themselves constituted
a picture in the sense in which we use it here, the superimposed figures of the constellations were not
naturalistic but, rather, fanciful depictions.
5 S. K. Heninger, Jr., The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe (San
Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1977).
6 Leonardo da Vinci, Il codice atlantico, 12 vols. (Florence: Giunti-Barbera; New York: Johnson
Reprint, 1973-1975), Fols. 310r, 674v; see also Gibson Reaves and Carlo Pedretti, "Leonardo da
Vinci's Drawings of the Surface Features of the Moon," Journal for the History of Astronomy, 1987,
18:55-58. Suzanne Kelly, O.S.B., The De mundo of William Gilbert, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Menno
Hertzberger, 1965), Vol. 2, pp. 172-173.
7 Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius (Venice, 1610). See Galileo, Sidereus nuncius, or the Sidereal
Messenger, trans. Albert Van Helden (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 41, 44-46. For
Galileo's wash drawings see Le opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. Antonio Favaro, 20 vols. (Florence: G.
Barbera, 1890-1909; rpt. 1929-1939, 1964-1966) (hereafter Galileo, Opere), Vol. 3, p. 48. Galileo used
figura to denote both diagrams and his pictures of the moon and delineatio once to refer to a lunar
picture.
On the difficulty of dating the observations see Guglielmo Righini, "New Light on Galileo's Lunar
Observations," in Reason, Experiment, and Alysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. Maria Luisa

REPRESENTING THE HEAVENS 197
continued this practice of showing naturalistic representations of heavenly phe-

nomena. Here, he pictured the daily appearances of the sun in an almost unin-
terrupted sequence for over a month, so that the reader could see the changing
shapes of the spots and their progress across the sun's face.8
We would thus be tempted to conclude that the practice of illustrating astro-
nomical texts with pictures carrying information essential to the argument came
into astronomy quite naturally as a concomitant of the telescope. The story is,
however, not so simple. In his subsequent astronomical and cosmological writ-
ings, Galileo made no use of pictures. In The Assayer of 1623 there is one illus-
tration showing the shapes of several planets-little more than a diagram9-and,
most surprisingly, in the entire Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Sys-
tems of 1632, Galileo's great cosmological work, there is not a single picture. We
might expect that in his lengthy and elaborate argument concerning the nature of
the moon Galileo would present at least one picture of this earthlike heavenly
body. Could this omission perhaps have been caused by overriding economic
constraints? The physical quality of the book and its magnificent frontispiece
would argue against this.10 Moreover, except for some early pictures of the moon
(including a few rough sketches in letters), star formations, sunspots, and a
sketch of Saturn's appearance in 1616, Galileo's manuscripts contain no astro-
nomical pictures.
Nor was Galileo alone in this. In printed works by his contemporaries astro-
nomical pictures are lacking. Although in the rendition of the moon published by
Christoph Scheiner (1573-1650) in 1614 we can at least recognize some of the
large spots or "seas" (Figure 1),ll those published by Charles Malapert (1584-
Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), pp. 59-76;
Owen Gingerich, "Dissertatio cum Professore Righini et Sidereo Nuncio," ibid., pp. 77-88; Stillman
Drake, "Galileo's First Telescopic Observations," J. Hist. Astron., 1976, 7:153-168; Righini, Contri-
buto alla interpretazione scientifica dell'opera astronomica di Galileo (Istituto e Museo di Storia della
Scienza di Firenze, 2) (Florence: Presso l'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 1978),
pp. 26-44; and Ewen A. Whitaker, "Galileo's Lunar Observations and the Dating of the Composition
of 'Sidereus Nuncius,' " J. Hist. Astron., 1978, 9:155-169.
8 Galileo Galilei, Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti (Rome, 1613),
in Opere, Vol. 5, pp. 107, 145-182. For Christoph Scheiner's much inferior illustrations in Tres
epistolae de maculis solaribus (Augsburg, 1612) and De maculis solaribus . . . accuratior disquisitio
(Augsburg, 1612) see ibid., pp. 33, 47, 55, 63, 66. See also Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information
(Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1990), pp. 18-21; and Martin Kemp, The Science of Art (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 93-95. In the sunspot letters, written in Italian, Galileo
consistently used the words disegno and disegnare for to draw and drawing.
9 Galileo Galilei, Il saggiatore (1623), in Opere, Vol. 6, p. 361. See also Stillman Drake and C. D.
O'Malley, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618 (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1960), p.
324. Although one can easily recognize Saturn in this illustration, positive identification of Jupiter,
Mars, and Venus would be impossible without the astrological planetary symbols. Galileo used the
wordfigura to designate this diagram.
10The Dialogo contains thirty-one diagrams, all of a mathematical and astronomical nature. Galileo
does not show even a diagram of the phases of Venus. The information and argument are entirely
verbal. See Galileo, Opere, Vol. 7, pp. 23 (frontispiece), 25-520; and Galileo, Dialogue Concerning
the Two Chief World Systems-Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake (Berkeley/Los An-
geles: Univ. California Press, 1953, 1962, 1967) (the frontispiece follows p. xxvii). For an analysis of
Galileo's verbal argument in the Dialogue see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Galileo and the Art of Rea-
soning (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 61) (Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel, 1980), pp. 3-141.
11Disquisitiones mathematicae de controversiis et novitatibus astronomicis: Quas sub praesidio
Christophori Scheineri . .. publice disputandas posuit propugnavit . . . Joannes Georgius Locher
(Ingolstadt, 1614), p. 58. Note also the diagrammatic representation of Saturn on p. 89. A convenient

198 MARY G. WINKLERAND ALBERTVAN HELDEN
Figure 1. Copper engraving of the first quarter moon. From Christoph Scheiner,
Disquisitiones mathematicae (1614). (Courtesy of the Linda Hall Library,Kansas City,
Missouri.)
1630)in 1619and Giuseppe Biancani(1566-1624)in 1620(Figure2) show generic

moons, not our moon.12 They are not pictures so much as diagrams, and dia-
grams were nothing new in astronomy. The routine illustrationof astronomical
texts with pictures, and even picture-bookastronomy, did not come about until
the 1640s.
The case of Galileo's contemporariesis perhapseasy to explain. Because they
worked within the traditionaldiscipline of the mathematicalsciences, they quite
naturallyused diagramsinstead of pictures. Not until telescopic astronomy had
evolved into a separate research area, in the 1640s, did it develop its own, picto-
rial, language. But in his first majorpublication,Sidereus nuncius, Galileo used
pictures effectively, and he continued his practice in this Letters on Sunspots.
Why did he then stop? Here the explanationmust be found in his career trajec-
tory, his rise from a mere mathematicianto a philosopherand gentlemanof the
Medici court. At this court he increasinglydistancedhimself from direct involve-
ment with mechanical subjects (among which we must count the visual arts),
reproductionof Scheiner's figureof the moon can be found in Ewen A. Whitaker,"Selenographyin

the SeventeenthCentury,"in PlanetaryAstronomyfrom the Renaissanceto the Rise of Astrophysics,
PartA: TychoBrahe to Newton, ed. Rent Taton and CurtisWilson(GeneralHistory of Astronomy,
2) (Cambridge:CambridgeUniv. Press, 1989), pp. 119-143, on p. 126. See also 0. Van de Vyver,
S.J., LunarMaps of the SeventeenthCentury(VaticanObservatoryPublications,1 [2])(VaticanCity:
Specola Vaticana, 1971),p. 70 and Fig. 2.
12 Caroli Malapertii... Oratio ... in qua de novis belgici telescopiiphaenomenisnon injucunda
quaedam academice disputatur(Douay, 1619), pp. 32, 34; and Sphaera mundi, seu Cosmographia
(Bologna, 1620),p. 150. See also Whitaker,"Selenographyin the SeventeenthCentury,"p. 126.

.:..... ..: ~.. . .
Flgure 2. Woodcut of the first quarter moon. From Giuseppe Biancani, Sphaera mundi (1620).
(Courtesy of the Linda Hall Library,Kansas City, Missouri.)
concentratinghis effortson the legitimationof the mathematicalsciences and the

Copernicanworld view-a programfor which the propervehicle was not pictures
but, rather, mathematicalsymbols and words.
VISUAL INFORMATION AND THE RENAISSANCE
In EnvisioningInformation, Edward R. Tufte calls the paper on which informa-

tion is recorded "flatland.""The world,"he writes, "is complex, dynamic, mul-
tidimensional;the paper is static, flat. How are we to represent the rich visual
world of experience and measurementon mere flatland?"His answer to his own
question is illuminatingto our discussion. "To envision information-and what
bright and splendid visions can result-is to work at the intersection of image,
a
word number, "a13
What happens at this intersection not only can vary with time or across cul-
tures, but also may depend on disciplinary boundaries. Contemporary eyes, ac-
customed to the visual conventions of photographyand three-dimensionalcom-
puter graphics may forget that the "escape from flatland" (the title of Tufte's first
chapter) was not always effected in the visual languagewe now read with such
ease: illusionistic naturalism is only one mode of conveying visual information. In
some cases charts, tables, schemata, and diagramswill serve as well-or better.
The zones, colures, eccentric circles, and epicycles that aboundedin astronom-
ical texts from antiquity to the sixteenth century are visual informants. Like
illusionistic naturalism,these "work at the intersectionof image, word, number,
art." Thus the problem is not that information about the natural world is absent
13 Tufte, EnvisioningInformation(cit. n. 8), p. 9.

from art and illustration before the Renaissance. On the contrary, as Arthur
Danto notes, the glory of Christian art in the West "lies in the ways [artists]
invented for infusing natural appearances with divine presences, and yet leaving
the visual world intact.",14
It is a different problem, however, to transmit naturalistic descriptions of ob-
served phenomena by means of pictures. Even in antiquity, writers recognized
the difficulty. Speaking of certain botanical writers, Pliny (23-79) observed:
"They painted likenesses of the plants and then wrote under them their proper-
ties. But not only is a picture misleading when the colors are so many, particu-
larly as the aim is to copy nature, but besides this, much imperfection arises from
the manifold hazards in the inaccuracy of the copyist. "15
Pliny perceived two difficulties with these descriptive pictures. One was that
the picture does not accurately represent what the eye sees. The other is that
"exactly repeatable visual statements" are impossible because each copyist alters
his original. In other words, over time the illustrations lose touch with nature.
Pliny continued: "For this reason the other writers have given verbal accounts
only; some have not even given the shape of the plants, and for the most part
have been content with bare names, since they thought it sufficient to point out
the properties and nature of a plant to those willing to look for it.",16
The possibilities for transmitting pictorial statements changed in the Renais-
sance. Three interrelated factors contributed to a new approach to scientific il-
lustrations: naturalism, perspective, and printing.
Naturalism had its origin in the artist's increasing fascination with studying and
reproducing the details of the natural world. In Italy Giotto is the acknowledged
precursor of Renaissance naturalism, while in northern Europe the brothers Hu-
bert (d. 1426) and Jan (d. 1441) van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400-
1464), and the master of Flemalle (fl. early fifteenth century) pursued their own
studies. When Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) looked back two hundred years at the
work of Giotto, he singled out the artist's ability to "imitate and reproduce na-
ture" as the most salient and praiseworthy aspect of his art. 17 In one sense the
history of Renaissance art is that of the artists' laying claim to the natural world
as their proper province and field of activity. Nature became the focus of eyes
and intellect, for, as Leonardo wrote, "he who has access to the fountain does
14 Arthur C. Danto, "Piero della Francesca, an Instant of Stunned Triumph," Art News, 1991,
90(6): 91-92, on p. 92.

15 Pliny, Historia naturalis, 25.4; see Pliny, Natural History with an English Translation in Ten
Volumes (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1938-1963), Vol. 7, trans.
W. H. S. Jones, p. 141.
16 William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1953), passim; and Pliny, Natural History, Vol. 7, p. 142. It is ironic that a millennium and a
half later Federico Cardinal Borromeo would write in his Musaeum (1625): "Moreover how much
light would we glean from interpreting the passages of writers, principally Pliny, if we had in sight
those things which he told only with words." See Arlen Quint, Cardinal Federico Borromeo as a
Patron and Critic of the Arts and His Musaeum (New York: Garland, 1986), p. 233. Borromeo was
speaking of the objects themselves, but his comment can be applied to pictorial representations as
well.
17 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' pilu eccellenti architetti, pittori, e scultori italiani da Cimabue insino
a tempi nostri (Florence, 1550, 1568). See Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 57. See also Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fif-
teenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972); John White, The Birth and Rebirth of
Pictorial Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987); and James Stubblebine, Assisi and
the Rise of Vernacular Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).

REPRESENTINGTHE HEAVENS 201
not go to the water pot." Or, as his German contemporary Albrecht Durer (1471-
1528) would have it, "Art is in nature. Who can extract it, has it."18 Moreover,
the artists and theorists understood the imitation of nature to consist in the ability
to make pictures that represent the world as the eye sees it. In other words,
naturalistically.
Linked to the drive toward naturalism was the development of a new method
for rendering bodies in space. From the thirteenth century, pictorial experiments
tended increasingly toward visual descriptions of solid forms inhabiting space. In
the fifteenth century, however, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) arrived at a
means of representing space according to geometric rules, which led to a method
for creating "a systematic illusion of receding forms behind the flat surface of a
panel, canvas, wall or ceiling." Linear perspective, his method, was so psycho-
logically satisfying to Europeans that until the nineteenth century Western artists
and viewers understood it to be the "correct" technique for reproducing visible
reality. 19
Moreover, because the method could be easily taught, the number of "how-to"
books proliferated immensely by the seventeenth century, making linear perspec-
tive the common language of European art. The cultural rationale and the histor-
ical implications of this system have been discussed frequently and at length, and
this is not the place to rehearse the arguments. We do, however, suggest that a
system based on the static viewpoint of a single observer and reflecting the im-
petus to naturalistic modes of depiction (we might call this a portrait of nature) is
closely related to the cultural milieu in which early modern science flourished.
According to Martin Kemp,
One of the most conspicuouscharacteristicsof the physical sciences from the Renais-
sance to the nineteenth century was to construct a visual model of the world as it
appearsto a rational,objective observer. This model was constructedon the invari-
able certainties of mathematical laws independent of individual "accidents," but it
was at the same time founded on the notion that the individual observer in particular
circumstances can "see through the accidents" to the underlying invariables.20
The third development was printing, which made it possible to repeat identical
pictorial statements with precision.21 Within a century after Johannes Gutenberg
18 The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci: Arranged, Rendered into English, and Introduced by
Edward MacCurdy, 2 vols. (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1938), Vol. 2, p. 279; and Fritz Koreny,
Albrecht Darer und die Tier- und Pflanzenstudien der Renaissance (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1985), p. 14.
19 Kemp, Science of Art (cit. n. 8), p. 7. See also Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscov-
ery of Linear Perspective (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); and, on Brunelleschi, Michael Kubovy,
The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p.
164. It is interesting to note that Paolo Toscanelli (1397-1482), who, as tradition has it, taught Brunel-
leschi mathematics, was the first to map the daily progress of comets (1433-1457) against the back-
drop of the fixed stars. See Jane L. Jervis, Cometary Theory in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Dordrecht/
Boston: Reidel, 1985), esp. pp. 76-84.
20 Kemp, Science of Art, p. 34. For the relationship between perspective and science see Samuel Y.
Edgerton, "The Renaissance Artist as Quantifier," in The Perception of Pictures, ed. Margaret A.
Hagen, 2 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1980), Vol. 1, pp. 179-212; and Edgerton, "The Renais-
sance Development of Scientific Illustration," in Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed. Shirley
and Hoeniger (cit. n. 3), pp. 168-197. See also Erwin Panofky, "Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on
the 'Renaissance-Dammerung,' " in The Renaissance: Six Essays, ed. Wallace K. Ferguson (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 123-182.
21 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural
Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), Vol. 1,
pp. 252-270; and Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (cit. n. 16), pp. 21-50.

(d. 1468), the systematized naturalism of linear perspective and the printed book
helped change the life sciences beyond recognition. The anatomical charts in
Tabulae anatomicae sex (1538) of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564)-combinations
of diagrams and pictures-greatly facilitated the transmission of information
about the human body. In De fabrica humani corporis (1543), Vesalius explicitly
pointed the medical studentand physicianback to natureand used vivid graphics
to supplementhis text: "Thebook contains pictures [imagines]of all parts [of the
human body] inserted into the context of the narrative, so that the dissected
human body is, so to speak, before those studying the works of nature."22Al-
though Vesalius's illustrationssay as much about Renaissance artistic ideals as
they say about actual bodies or body parts, the visual dimensionof his work, the
integrationof pictures and words, surely changed the way anatomywas learned,
and probablyaltered the way the human specimen was perceived.
Artists were also teaching sixteenth-centurybotanists new ways of seeing their
subject. The 1530 Herbarum vivae eicones, published in Strasbourg, although
associated with the physician Otto Brunfels(1489-1534),probablyowed its influ-
ential status to the illustrations of Hans Weiditz (d. ca. 1536). Weiditz, who
trained in the workshop of Hans Burgkmair(1473-1531), belongs to the artistic
traditionestablished by Albrecht Durer. (In fact, several works of Weiditz were
formerly attributedto Durer.) Contemporaries,althoughconfused by the depar-
ture from tradition(Brunfels apologized for including the illustrationof a plant
without a Latin name), understoodthe skill implied in the naturalisticrepresen-
tations. A Latin verse in the first volume of Eicones compares Weiditz with
Apelles, a Renaissance convention for praising the artist's realism.23 Thus, like
the anatomicalstudies of Italianartists, the work of Weiditz belongs as much to
the realm of art history as to the history of science.
In the case of ConradGesner (1515-1565)the emphasishas shifted. Gesner was
a physician and naturalistwho taught himself (perhaps with the help of Zurich
artists) to make naturalistic representations of his specimens. Gesner himself
preparedat least 150 of the 1,500 drawings planned for his encyclopedic work
Historia plantarum (which remained uncompleted and unpublishedbecause of
his death from the plague in 1565), and they remain a testimony not only to his
skill, but also to the high value he accorded to visual and pictorialknowledge.24
Anatomy and botany became hands-on sciences in the sixteenth century. Prac-
22 Andreas Vesalius, De fabrica humani corporis (Basel, 1543), preface, p. 4. The translation is
taken from Logan Clendening, A Source Book of Medical History (1942; rpt. New York: Dover,
1960), p. 137. See also J. B. de C. M. Saunders and Charles D. O'Malley, The Illustrations from the
Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (1950; rpt. New York: Dover, 1973), pp. 233-247. On Vesa-
lius's strategy of representation and the relationship between his science and art see Glenn Harcourt,
"Andreas Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture," Representations, 1987, 17:28-61. See
also A. H. Major, Artists and Anatomists (New York: Artists Limited, 1984); and Bernard Schultz,
Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985).
23 Agnes Arber, Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1460-
1670, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 202-206 (on the misattribution to
Durer), 55 (on the plant illustration without a Latin name); and Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical
Illustration (London: Collins, 1971), p. 47 (on the Renaissance convention).
24 Heinrich Zoller, "Konrad Gessners Historia Plantarum: Eine Synthese von Wissenschaft und
Kunst," Verhandlungen der Schweizerischen Naturforschenden Gesellschaft (Basel: Birkhauser,
1975), pp. 57-64. See Conrad Gesner, Historia Plantarum: Faksimileausgabe aus dem botanischen
nachlass von Konrad Gessner, 1516-1565, in der Universitatsbibliothek Erlangen, ed. Heinrich Zol-
ler, Martin Steinman, and Karl Schmid (Dietikon/Zurich: Urs Graf Verlag, 1980). See also F. David

titioners usually did their own dissection and collecting. Many were active in
collaborationwith artists and printersin perfectingillustrationsfor their written
work.25These printed illustrationsbecame crucial to disseminatingnew knowl-
edge, and they were made possible by two new techniquesfor producingpictures
on a large scale. The first was the woodcut, the second the copper intaglioprint.
Customarily,woodcut productioninvolved three people, the artist/designer,the
cutter or formschneider, and the printer.26Copper engraving, which evolved
from the goldsmith's craft, was much more expensive and time consuming, and
requiredgreat skill and dexterityas well as long years of training.Also, engraving
allowed little division of labor: the engraverworked from a drawingthat estab-
lished almost every line, transferringit by incisions to the metal plate.27Yet this
became the establishedtechniquebecause, for renderingsubtle nuances and con-
veying minute detail, it was by far the superiormode of reproduction.
Collaborationsbetween scientificand artisticpractitionersbecame increasingly
importantas the possibility of presenting naturalisticprinted illustrations was
realized. The choice of techniques-ofering representationsrangingfrom linear
and clearly descriptive to silvery and atmospheric-played a role in how the
viewer understoodthe object or scene delineated. Practitionersand their illustra-
tors could opt for simple clarity or an almost impressionistic efect, and these
choices were not accidental to evoking a vision of the "underlyinginvariables"
beneath the "individualaccidents."28
Astronomy was, however, very differentfrom sciences such as anatomy and
botany, in which intimate contact with the body under study was easy. The
planets and stars are far away, and in the traditionalcosmology they were, more-
over, regarded as perfect and immutable; somehow they partook of divinity.
Only in the case of the moon could one detect markings.But except for Leonar-
do's few drawings, no pictures of the moon predate the seventeenth century.
Hoeniger, "How Plants and Animals Were Studied," in Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed.
Shirley and Hoeniger (cit. n. 3), pp. 139-146.
Gesner used the Latin verb pingo and the German word conterfeiten to denote representing some-
thing pictorially. In 1563 he wrote of his watercolor of a lizard drawn from life: "Melius pictus quam
prius olim"; and the same year he wrote next to his watercolor of a toad: "Ein Krot von Hottingen,
1563, sub finem Augusti, ist vor nitt conterfeitet" (italics added). See Zurcher Kunst nach der Re-
formation: Hans Asper und Seine Zeit, exhibit catalogue, ed. Hans Christoph von Tavel and Urs
Hobe (Zurich: Schweitzerisches Institut fur Kunstwissenschaft, 1981), pp. 138-139.
25 The best-known example is the collaboration of Andreas Vesalius and Jan van Kalkar, an artist
associated with Titian's atelier. But the tradition was already developing in the late fifteenth century.
See Schultz, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy (cit. n. 22), p. 64. Gesner's printed works were
accompanied by woodcuts from drawings by such Zurich artists as Jos Murer, Jos Amman, and
others: Ziircher Kunst nach der Reformation, ed. Von Tavel and Hobe, p. 133.
26 Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Darer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1955), p. 19; and Herman Joel Wechsler, Great Prints and Printmakers (Bentveld, Netherlands:
Harry N. Abrams, 1967), p. 20. A well-known depiction of artist and formschneider at work can be
seen in De historia stirpium (Basel, 1542), by Leonhard Fuchs (1501-1566). This illustration is fre-
quently reproduced; see, e.g., Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), p. 44. Until the invention of lithography in the late eighteenth century,
the woodcut and the copper intaglio print were the only methods of reproducing pictures on a large
scale; see Leon Voet, "The Graphic Arts," in Antwerp's Golden Age, exhibit catalogue (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1973), p. 101.
27 Panofsky, Durer, p. 4; and Voet, "Graphic Arts," p. 102. Etching, on the other hand, "is some-
thing any technically-minded amateur can try" (ibid.), and in the seventeenth century many did.
28
Kemp, Science of Art (cit. n. 8), p. 341.

Figure 3. Woodcut illustration of the comet of 1532. From Peter Apian, Ein kurtzer bericht
(1532). (Courtesy of the History of Science Collections, Cornell University Library.)
There is good reason for this. In his book Visual ThinkingRudolph Arnheim
writes: "In looking at an object we reach out for it. With an invisible finger we
move through the spaces around us, go out to distant places where things are
found, touch them, catch them, scan their surfaces, trace their borders, explore
their textures." We can hardly do this with objects that are so far beyond our
reach, and show so little detail to the naked eye, as the stars and planets. It is not
surprising,therefore, that, for instance, in Copernicus'sDe revolutionibus,pub-
lished in the same year as Vesalius's De fabrica, the pictorialdimensionis utterly
lacking: the book contains diagramsonly.29
Nevertheless, even in astronomythere were changes. On the title page of Peter
Apian's (1495-1532)book on the comet of 1532, there is a woodcut in which we
observe the observer measuringthe positions of that comet over time, as it pro-
gresses throughthe zodiac (Figure3). In this illustration,more a fancifuldiagram
than a portraitof the heavens, the essence of Apian's discovery-that the tail of
a comet always points away from the sun-is brilliantlycaptured.It manages to
convey an impressive amountof informationin a simple woodcut: the passage of
time, the paths of the comet and the sun across the heavens, the function of the
observer. This sort of informationis quite difficultto convey pictorially and
would have been even more difficultif Apian had limited himself to the frozen
momentobserved througha frameby a static observer. Curiously,the illustration
29 Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1969), p. 9; on Coperni-
cus's diagrams see note 3.

is both old-fashioned in its compression of events and forward looking, almost

cinematic, in its approach.30
Apian's illustrationis, however, an exception. Astronomicaltreatises and texts
continued to be devoid of naturalisticrepresentationsof the heavens. Cosmol-
ogy, a partof philosophy, continuedto be discussed and taughtin words, with an
occasional diagramof the celestial spheres. Technical astronomy, which still oc-
cupied a lower rung on the prestige ladder of the universities, was treated in
words, mathematicalsymbols, and diagrams. Surely the cost of woodcuts and
engravingscannot have been the only factor in this eschewing of pictorial evi-
dence.
In spite of the effortsof Renaissanceartists to enhance the social status of their
craft by developing explicit theories groundedin the liberalarts, with few excep-
tions the artistdid not rankhighlyin the sixteenth century.31Several writershave
documentedthe struggleof mathematicians(amongwhom we must place Galileo)
for social and cognitive legitimation.Mario Biagioli has shown that mathemati-
cians were by no means unified in this struggle: social backgroundcould deter-
mine whether other mathematicianswere allies or foes, often regardless of the
compatibility or incompatibility of their technical approach to the subject.32
Moreover, mathematicianswere not about to align themselves with paintersand
engravers-representatives of the mechanicalarts. The telescope, unveiled in the
Netherlandsin 1608,was the productof the mechanicalarts. Hans Lipperhey(d.
1619), the first to come forward with the device and request a patent, was an
illiterate spectacle-maker;Sacharias Janssen (1588-ca. 1630) was an unscrupu-
lous itinerant peddler; and only Jacob Metius (d. between 1624 and 1631), a
member of a family of mathematicians,was literate, although he, too, was a
practitionerof the mechanicalarts.33 And althoughthe mathematicians,including
Galileo, used the instrumentto good effect, we must not think that they were
unduly gratefulto the spectacle-makers.
GALILEO AND PICTURES
How, then, does Galileo fit into this scenario? First, as a Florentine, he was the
heir to the artistic developments of the Italian Renaissance, so many of which
happened in the city in which he grew up. Second, there is no question that he
30
Peter Apian, Ein kurtzer bericht d'Observation unnd urtels des Jungst erschinnen Cometen im
weinmon und wintermon dises XXXII. Jars (Ingolstadt, 1532). Note also that this book was in German
and aimed at a less learned audience.
31 For the status of artists in Renaissance Italy see Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture
and Society in Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), Ch. 3. Vasari noted that Mich-
elangelo's patrician father probably found his son's vocation unworthy, but the biographer found a
way around this difficulty by asserting that Michelangelo had "knowledge of true moral philosophy
and a gift of poetic expression": see Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. Bull (cit. n. 17), p. 328.
32 See, e.g., Robert S. Westman, "The Astronomer's Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary
Study," History of Science, 1980, 18:105-147. By "mathematician" we mean a practitioner of any of
the mathematical sciences, astronomy, mechanics, optics, etc. On mathematicians' own sense of their
respective places see Mario Biagioli, "The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450-1600," His.
Sci., 1989, 27:41-95, on pp. 50-56.
33 Albert Van Helden, The Invention of the Telescope (Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, 67 [4]) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1977), pp. 5-9, 20-25.

206 MARYG. WINKLERAND ALBERT VAN HELDEN
placed great emphasis on sense experience, but in this he was no exception:

Aristotle had done much the same. Again not particularly surprisingly, Galileo
singled out vision as the most noble of the senses. In The Assayer he wrote: "I
believe that vision, the sense which is eminent above all the others, is related to
light, but in that ratio of excellence which exists between the finite and the infi-
nite, the temporal and the instantaneous, the quantity and the indivisible; be-
tween darkness and light."34
Galileo relished the wonderful new invention, the telescope, which, by his own
efforts, he had turned into a powerful instrument. In Sidereus nuncius he de-
scribed how he improved the instrument:
And firstI prepareda lead tube in whose ends I fit two glasses, both plane on one side
while the other side of one was sphericallyconvex and of the other concave. Then
applying my eye to the concave glass, I saw objects satisfactorilylarge and close.
Indeed, they appearedthree times closer and nine times largerthan when observed
with naturalvision only. AfterwardsI made anothermore perfect one for myself that
showed objects more than sixty times larger. Finally, sparingno labor or expense, I
progressedso far that I constructedfor myself an instrumentso excellent that things
seen throughit appearabouta thousandtimes largerand more than thirtytimes closer
than when observed with the naturalfaculty only.
In this passage Galileo gave more details about the telescope than any of his
contemporaries. Others who wrote on telescopic subjects during this period
merely introduced the instrument without any technical details.35 Galileo wrote
as one who had made his own instruments or, at any rate, had closely supervised
their construction.
What he did not mention here was that the eight-powered spyglass was pre-
sented to the Venetian Senate. That was the gift of a mathematician, and, in
Mario Biagioli's words, it was "patronage-generic, a gift for everybody and for
nobody in particular." By contrast, his gifts to the grand duke of Tuscany were
more specific. The Medicean stars were a dynastic emblem that glorified the
Medici family, and, as Galileo made clear in the dedication of Sidereus nuncius,
their discovery was preordained. The telescope he sent was not just any tele-
scope, but the very instrument with which he had discovered the Medicean stars.
Only the book in which he related his discoveries and celebrated the Medici name
was addressed to a wider audience.36 Here Galileo was in the role not of a math-
3 Galileo, Il saggiatore, in Opere, Vol. 6, p. 350; see also Drake and O'Malley, Controversy on the
Comets of 1618 (cit. n. 9), pp. 311-312 (the translation is from this text). For Galileo's emphasis on
sense experience see Galileo Galilei, Lettera a Madama Cristina di Lorena, Granduchessa di Tos-
cana (1615), in Opere, Vol. 5, p. 316; trans. Maurice A. Finocchiaro in Finocchiaro, ed., The Galileo
Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1989), p. 93.
35 Galileo, Sidereus nuncius, trans. Van Helden (cit. n. 7), pp. 37-38; note that the magnifications
of 60 and 1,000 refer to areas. Note the absence of technical details in, e.g., Johannes Fabricius, De
maculis in sole observatis (Wittenberg, 1611), pp. C2r-C3r; Scheiner, Disquisitiones mathematicae
(cit. n. 11), passim; Jacob Christmann, Nodus Gordius ex doctrina sinuum explicatus (Heidelberg,
1612), pp. 35-60; and Simon Marius, Mundus Iovialis (Nuremberg, 1614), trans. by A. 0. Prickard,
"The 'Mundus Jovialis' of Simon Marius," Observatory, 1916, 39:367-381, 403-412, 443-452, 498-
503, on pp. 370-372.
36 Mario Biagioli, "Galileo the Emblem Maker," Isis, 1990, 81:230-258, pp. 243 (quotation), 243-
245. See also Richard S. Westfall, "Science and Patronage: Galileo and the Telescope," Isis, 1985,
76:11-30, esp. pp. 16-21; and Galileo, Sidereus nuncius, trans. Van Helden, pp. 31-33.

Figure 4. Copper engraving of the moon, four or five days old. From Galileo, Sidereus
nuncius (1610). (Courtesy of the Linda Hall Library,Kansas City, Missouri.)
ematician but of a sidereal-nay, divine-messenger whose gifts were those of a

philosopher. As a reward he was appointed the grand duke's mathematician and
philosopher.
In Sidereus nuncius Galileo described what he saw, and his descriptions were
precise verbal pictures. For example:
I would by no means be silent about something deserving notice, observed by me

while the Moon was rushingtowardfirst quadrature,the appearanceof which is also
shown in the above figure [see Figure 4]. For toward the lower horn a vast gulf
projectedinto the brighterpart. As I observed this for a long time, I saw it very dark.
Finally, after about 2 hours, a bit below the middleof this cavity a certainbrightpeak
began to rise and, graduallygrowing, it assumed a triangularshape, still entirely
separated from the bright face. Presently three other small points began to shine
around it until, as the Moon was about to set, this enlargedtriangularshape, now
made larger,joined together with the rest of the brightpart, and like a huge promon-
tory, surroundedby the three brightpeaks already mentioned, it broke out into the
darkgulf. Also, in the tips of both the upperand the lower horns, some brightpoints
emerged, entirely separatedfrom the rest of the light, as shown in the same figure.
And there was a great abundanceof dark spots in both horns, especially the lower
one.37
The section of Sidereus nuncius dealing with the moon is illustrated with five
copperplate engravings of our nearest neighbor (one of which is a duplicate).
Galileo's verbal portrait of the moon is, however, much more compelling than the
accompanying pictures for, as in the above passage, he describes changes over
3 Galileo, Sidereus nuncius, trans. Van Helden (cit. n. 7), pp. 42-43.

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Figure 5. Ink wash of the last quarter moon, 1609-1610. From Le opere di Galileo Galilei, Vol.
raepitrs
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time that cannot easily be conveyed in pictures.3 Further,although,as his orig-
inal ink washes (e.g., Figure5) show, Galileo was perfectly capableof drawingan
accurate view of the moon, the engravingsin Sidereus nuncius were distorted.
He greatly exaggerated the size of the large "cavity" (now called a crater)just
below the middle of the terminator,presumablyAlbategnius (see Figure 1), in
order to illustrate his argumentconcerning its resemblance to large earthly val-
leys such as Bohemia.39Thus, althoughGalileo could have producedmore accu-
rate pictures of the moon to illustratethe text of Sidereus nuncius, the fact is that
he did not. He sacrificedthe accuracy of the visual representations(which were,
finally, visual aids) to the demandsof the text, which carriedthe real- and accu-
38
To convey the gradualchanges over time, Galileowould have had to presentan extended series
of pictures, but he had made only a few drawingsof the moon and was in a hurry to publish. In
1612-1613he presented such an extended sequence of drawingsof sunspots, showing their daily
motions.
39 Galileo, Sidereus nuncius, trans. Van Helden, pp. 44-46, 47 (on the large "cavity" and its
resemblanceto, e.g., Bohemia);Samuel Edgerton,"Galileo,Florentine'Disegno,' and the 'Strange
Spottednesse'of the Moon," Art Journal, 1984,44:225-232;and Edgerton,TheHeritage of Giotto's
Geometry:Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1991),pp. 223-253 (both on Galileo's accuraterepresentationsof the moon). For the identifi-
cationof Albategniussee Gingerich,"Dissertatio"(cit. n. 7), p. 85. See also Whitaker,"Selenography
in the SeventeenthCentury"(cit. n. 11), on p. 124.

rate-message.40 To Galileo one picture was not necessarily worth a thousand

words.4'
It is interesting to note that while he was still at Padua Galileo had plans to
enlarge on the visual component of Sidereus nuncius. In a letter to the grand duke
written shortly after the appearance of the book, Galileo proposed that for a
second edition he wanted to draw (disegnare) the face of the moon accurately
through an entire lunation and to have these drawings engraved by an excellent
artisan. All this was to be executed with a magnificence fitting to Cosimo's
power.42 But nothing ever came of this planned second edition, and there is no
further mention in Galileo's correspondence of picturing the moon until others
raised the issue in the late 1630s.
Galileo's next use of visual evidence was in his Letters on Sunspots, printed in
1613. This work was the result of a dispute, and in it Galileo wanted to prove that
sunspots were located on the surface of the sun or in its atmosphere and that they
were like clouds on the earth. The method he adopted for drawing these spots
was a mathematician's dream. In an arrangement that approximated a mechanical
eye, Galileo projected the sun's image through a telescope onto a sheet of paper
on which he had already drawn a circle of a certain diameter. He moved the
paper until the sun's image coincided exactly with the circle and then traced the
40 In Telescopes, Tides, and Tactics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1983), Stillman Drake puts the
following words in Salviati's (i.e., Galileo's) mouth (p. 30): "I may add that the cavity in question is
not as large as depicted in relation to the whole diameter, the drawing being intended to show the
differences in its illumination when the sun is on one side of the moon or the other. Although vividly
seen with the telescope, the effects could not be shown clearly in a small woodcut without giving the
cavity a width greater than its true one. The figures drawn for this book were intended not as exact
maps of the moon, but rather as illustrations of particular appearances described and explained in the
text." William R. Shea likewise argues that the exaggerated size of the crater was made necessary by
the limitation of the medium: "in a small woodcut, Galileo could not highlight the shifting pattern of
shadows without giving the crater considerable width. There is no telescopic enigma here, just good
pedagogy." See Shea, "Galileo Galilei: An Astronomer at Work," in Nature, Experiment, and the
Sciences: Essays on Galileo and the History of Science in Honour of Stillman Drake, ed. Trevor H.
Levere and W. R. Shea (Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer, 1990), pp. 51-76, on p. 57. The illustrations of
the moon in the first edition of Sidereus nuncius were not as small as Drake and Shea suggest. Each
occupies half a page, and the lunar diameter measures slightly over 3 inches. Furthermore, these
illustrations were not woodcuts but copper engravings, in which much more detail can be shown.
Perhaps some of this confusion is due to the fact that the pirated edition of Sidereus nuncius (Frank-
furt, 1610) is illustrated by carelessly executed woodcuts that give much less information than the
engravings in the original edition. Owen Gingerich writes, "[The large crater] surely conveys [Gali-
leo's] psychological impression of this curious feature, and in that sense it is probably more revealing
as he drew it than if it were drawn with exquisite precision." See Gingerich, "Galileo's Astronomy,"
in Reinterpreting Galileo, ed. William A. Wallace (Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science,
15) (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. America Press, 1986), pp. 111-126, on p. 114.
The most probing discussion of this problem is by Paul Feyerabend in "Problems of Empiricism,
Part II," in The Nature and Function of Scientific Theories, ed. Robert G. Colodny (Pittsburgh: Univ.
Pittsburgh Press, 1970), pp. 275-353, on pp. 285-289. Feyerabend suggests that Galileo's claims could
very well be undermined by this exaggerated crater because, as depicted in Sidereus nuncius, it was
so large that it should be visible to the naked eye (p. 288). This discussion is repeated in Against
Method (New York: Schocken, 1975), pp. 127-135.
41 Note that Galileo's friend, the painter Ludovico Cardi da Cigoli (1559-1613), did little better in
his well-known painting, The Assumption of Mary, in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The crescent
moon below the virgin's feet is covered with spots that cannot be identified on a modern moon map.
Cigoli made his own observations of the moon and surely could have represented the moon more
accurately if he had wanted. Clearly this was not his purpose. See Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic
of the Arts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), pp. 5-6. We do not agree with Panofsky's assess-
ment that Cigoli depicted the moon "exactly as it had revealed itself to Galileo's telescope."
42
Galileo to Cosimo de' Medici, 19 Mar. 1610, in Galileo, Opere, Vol. 10, pp. 299, 300.

210 MARY G. WINKLERAND ALBERTVAN HELDEN
FIgure 6. Copper engraving of Galileo's sunspot observation of 25 June 1612. From Istoriae
dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari (1613) (Courtesy of Owen Gingerich.
spots directly on the paper.43The importantfeatures were the varying sizes,

shapes, and darknesses of the spots, and these were traced as individual little
pictures in the predrawncirculardiagram.The result was a diagram-cum-picture
large enough to show the importantfeatures of the spots clearly (Figure 6). By
contrast, the illustrationsproduced by his antagonist ChnistophSchemnerwere
much smaller and showed the spots for the most part as dark little dots. They
were, in other words, little more than diagrams"4
The presentationof visual evidence was crucial in this debate. Very few mem-
bers of the audience had observed sunspots, and they had to rely on the verbal
argumentsand the visual evidence presentedby the protagonists.Schemner's little
diagrams, showing sunspots as little black dots, tended to supporthis argument
that they were satellites or swarms of satellites. Galileo's much larger illustra-
tions, with their detailed pictures of individualspots, falsified Schemner'sargu-
ment at a glance. Moreover, Galileo showed an uninterruptedseries of observa-
tions stretchingout over nearly a month, all oriented the same way, so that one
4 Galileo, Istoria e dimostrazioni,in Opere, Vol. 5, pp. 136-137;and StillmanDrake, Discoveries

and Opinionsof Galileo (GardenCity, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957),pp. 115-116. See also note 8.
" Scheiner, Tresepistolae and Accuratiordisquisitio,in Galileo, Opere,Vol. 5, pp. 33, 47, 55, 63,
66. Note that on this last page Scheinerdoes show sketches of the changingand irregularshape of the
spots.

could follow the progress of individual spots over the sun's disk from day to day
and see the changes in their shapes. The sequences also showed that spots came
into being and passed out of existence on the sun. Galileo's visual evidence was
very sophisticated and utterly compelling.
As we have seen, after the sunspot publication pictures disappear from Gali-
leo's works. In order to explain this we must examine Galileo's attitude toward
the mechanical and pictorial arts in the context of his changing social status at the
Tuscan court.
GALILEO AND WORDS
Although Galileo firmly believed that in studying nature one ought to begin with
the evidence of the senses rather than the authority of the scriptures or of one's
predecessors, in communicating one's ideas to others the choice was different.
Here there were three media: words, mathematical symbols and diagrams, and
pictures. Words and mathematical symbols and diagrams had been the standard
media in learned tomes for centuries and were therefore not controversial. But
the use of pictorial representations of any kind in scholarly communications,
especially in books on philosophy, was not sanctified by long tradition and was
with few exceptions (anatomy, botany, geography) controversial in court circles.
By interspersing naturalistic representations of heavenly bodies in his texts in
Sidereus nuncius and Letters on Sunspots, Galileo had mixed the mechanical and
the liberal arts, a practice he abandoned.45 Let us examine Galileo's thoughts on
words and pictures.
In the dedication of Sidereus nuncius Galileo talked about earthly monuments
erected to commemorate the deeds of famous men. In this earthly realm visual
monuments, such as statues, pyramids, and columns, are the least permanent.
Those "looking for more permanent and long-lasting things, have entrusted the
eternal celebration of the greatest men not to marbles and metals but rather to the
care of the Muses and to incorruptible monuments of letters. "46 Only in the
immutable heavens could one find more permanent monuments. Twenty years
later, in his Dialogue, Galileo expressed this hierarchy in another way:
If I look at some excellent statues, I say within my heart: "Whenwill you be able to
remove the excess from the block of marble and reveal so lovely a figure hidden
therein? When will you know how to mix differentcolors and spread them over a
canvas or a wall and representall visible objects by their means, like a Michelangelo,
a Raphael, or a Titian?"Looking at what men have found out about arrangingthe
45 In his Discorsi e dimostrazioni mathematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze (1638), in Opere, Vol.
8, pp. 43-346, Galileo reverted to the traditional language of mathematicians. The text is supple-
mented by diagrams, and much of it is cast in the form of mathematical propositions. See Galileo,
Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1974). Regarding picto-
rial representations in scholarly communications see, e.g., the controversy between Fludd and Kepler
on this subject: Westman, "Nature, Art, and Psyche" (cit. n. 2).
46 Galileo, Sidereus nuncius, trans. Van Helden (cit. n. 7), p. 29. Galileo refers to the Elegies of
Propertius, book 3, no. 2. But the more celebrated source is book 3, no. 30, of Horace's Odes: "I
have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramids' royal pile, one that
no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy, or the countless chains of years and the ages'
flight." See Horace, The Odes and Epodes, with an English Translation by C. E. Bennett (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press; London: Heinemann, 1914), p. 279.

212 ANDALBERTVANHELDEN
MARYG. WINKLER
musical intervals and forming precepts and rules in order to control them to the
wonderfuldelightof the ear, when shall I be able to cease my amazement?Whatshall
I say of so many and such diverse instruments?With what admirationthe readingof
excellent poets fills anyone who attentivelystudies the inventionand interpretationof
concepts! And what shall I say about architecture?What of the art of navigation?
But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was his who
dreamedof findingmeans to communicatehis deepest thoughts to any other person,
thoughdistantby mightyintervalsof place and time! Of talkingwith those who are in
India;of speakingto those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand
or ten thousandyears; and with what facility, by the differentarrangementsof twenty
characterson a page!47
Obviously, then, in spite of all his training in disegno,48 Galileo valued the
written word over pictures as a means of communicating. The explanation for
this preference must be found in his social aspirations. Let us return to Galileo's
ideas and actions in connection with the telescope. The instrument emerged from
the anonymous craft tradition. To this day we cannot pinpoint the exact moment
of or the circumstances surrounding the invention: there is a hazy period between
the speculations of the Renaissance magi and the first application for a patent on
the device in the Netherlands in early October 1608. But thereafter the identity of
this first applicant (the spectacle-maker Hans Lipperhey) was a matter of public
record. It is to be doubted, however, that Lipperhey's name was mentioned in
the dispatches on this subject that went from The Hague to other European
cities. A newssheet printed in The Hague in October 1608 (the month in which
the States-General discussed Lipperhey's patent application) reported the events
as follows:
a spectacle-makerfrom Middelburg,a humble, very religious and God-fearingman,

presentedto His Excellency [PrinceMaurice]certainglasses by means of which one
can detect and see distinctly things three or four leagues removed from us as if we
were seeing them from a hundredpaces.. . . The master[spectacle-]makerof the said
glasses was given three hundredguildersand was promisedmore for makingothers,
with the commandnot to teach the art to anyone.49
Clearly, no one was particularly interested in the identity of this humble spec-
tacle-maker. Galileo was no exception; in Sidereus nuncius he merely wrote that
"About ten months ago a rumor came to our ears that a spyglass had been made
by a certain Dutchman by means of which visible objects, although far removed
from the eye of the observer, were distinctly seen as though nearby. About this
truly wonderful effect some accounts were spread about, to which some gave
credence while others denied them."50
4 Galileo, Dialogue, trans. Drake (cit. n. 10), pp. 104-105.

48 Edgerton, "Galileo, Florentine 'Disegno,' and the 'Strange Spottednesse' of the Moon" (cit. n.
39).
49 Ambasades du Roy de Siam envoye a l'Excellence du Prince Maurice, arrive d la Haye le 10
Septemb. 1608 (The Hague, 1608), pp. 9-11. A facsimile of this tract is included in Stillman Drake,
The Unsung Journalist and the Origin of the Telescope (Los Angeles: Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, 1976).
See also Van Helden, Invention of the Telescope (cit. n. 33), pp. 16-25, 41.
50 Galileo, Sidereus nuncius, trans. Van Helden (cit. n. 7), pp. 36-37. It was not until two genera-
tions later, when the telescope had become the symbol of the new science, that some scholars began
enquiring after the identity of the inventor, but by then the trail had grown cold; see Pierre Borel, De
vero telescopii inventore (The Hague, 1655-1656); see also Van Helden, Invention of the Telescope,
pp. 54-64.

Miraculous as the effect was, the inventor was irrelevant.5' In fact, Galileo was
defensive about the telescope's humble origins. In Sidereus nuncius he already
tried to raise the status of the instrument a notch above the mechanical arts by
claiming that he had found how it works "on the basis of the science of refrac-
tion." In The Assayer he went even further to distance himself and his instrument
from the mechanical arts, arguing that his own invention (i.e., reinvention) of the
telescope was a product of the liberal arts:
to discover the solutionof a known and designatedproblemis a laborof much greater

ingenuitythan to solve a problemwhich has not been thoughtof and defined,for luck
may play a large role in the latter while the former is entirely a work of reasoning.
Indeed, we know that the Hollander who was first to invent the telescope was a
simple makerof ordinaryspectacles who in casually handlingpieces of glass of vari-
ous sorts happenedto look throughtwo at once, one convex and the other concave,
and placed at differentdistances from the eye. In this way he observed the resulting
effect, and thus discovered the instrument.But I, incited by the news . . , discov-
ered the same by means of reasoning.52
This reasoning, as Galileo went on to describe it, was nothing more than trial and
error, hardly beyond the ingenuity of a humble spectacle-maker. But the point of
the passage is clear: in inventing things, low social status is associated with luck,
high social status with reasoning.
Galileo began his academic career as a mathematician. As a professor of math-
ematics, his status in the university hierarchy was below that of the philosophers
(although financially not as low as has sometimes been suggested).53 When he
became one of the ten most highly paid members of the Medici bureaucracy in
Tuscany in 1610, he was given the title of chief mathematician and philosopher to
the grand duke. But although he was now removed from the limitations imposed
by the university's disciplinary boundaries, there was a hierarchy of subjects and
occupations at court as well.54 If at court Galileo had more freedom to merge
" In his Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (1598), which contains the description of his instru-
ments, Tycho Brahe does not mention the name of any of the makers of his instruments. See Tycho
Brahe's Description of His Instruments and Scientific Work, trans. Raeder et al. (cit. n. 2). Steven
Shapin has recently commented on the absence of the identities of the technicians in Boyle's writings:
Shapin, "The Invisible Technician," American Scientist, 1989, 77:554-563.
52 Galileo, Sidereus nuncius, trans. Van Helden, p. 37; and Drake and O'Malley, Controversy on
the Comets of 1618 (cit. n. 9), pp. 212-213.
53 In The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1955), Giorgio di Santillana writes:
"[Galileo's] salary was 180 florins a year [in 1592], later increased to 520. Cremonini, the 'great
philosopher' of the university and a straightforward pedant, earned 2,000" (p. 3; see also p. 29, n. 3).
In fact, Cremonini's salary reached 1,000 florins only in 1608, that is, two years before Galileo's.
Cremonini's salary did not reach 2,000 florins until 1629, two years before his death. See Antonio
Favaro, Galileo Galilei e lo Studio di Padova, 2 vols. (Padua, 1883; rpt. Padua: Antenore, 1966), Vol.
2, pp. 303-304; and Galileo, Opere, Vol. 19, pp. 116-117. See also Westfall, "Science and Patronage"
(cit. n. 36), p. 17.
54 On Galileo's salary at the Medici court see Biagioli, "Galileo the Emblem Maker" (cit. n. 36), p.
230. On his new title see Galileo to Belisario Vinta, 7 May 1610, in Opere, Vol. 10, pp. 350-353,
355-356; see also Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,
1978), p. 161. On disciplinary boundaries within the universities see Robert S. Westman, "The Co-
pernicans and the Churches," in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between
Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley/Los Angeles:
Univ. California Press, 1986), pp. 76-113, on p. 99.

mathematicsand philosophy (a practice that culminatedin his Dialogo of 1632),

we must not thinkthat in the process he tried to raise the status of the mechanical
and visual arts.55
Accounts of Galileo's life are replete with stories about his interest in mechan-
ical things. At Venice he frequently visited the famous arsenal; in his house at
Padua he employed a craftsmanto make his proportionalcompass (a calculating
device), which he sold along with an instructionalmanual.When he heard about
the telescope he duplicatedthe inventionand figuredout how to make the device
more powerful.56Because of his talent, he was able to monopolize telescopic
astronomy for the first several years and make almost all of the importantdis-
coveries.57At this stage secrecy was of great importancein order to preserve his
technologicaledge on the competition,and Galileo and his craftsmangroundand
polished a considerablenumberof lenses for telescopes. He remainedinvolved
with instrumentsfor many years, but the actual manualwork was normallydone
by a craftsman.58None of the surviving instruments ascribed to Galileo are
signed by him, in sharpcontrastto the custom among artists and later telescope-
makers-even scientists. From this we may deduce that althoughGalileo claimed
intellectualcredit for his instruments,he never identifiedwith their actual mate-
rial production the way an artist or, later, a professional telescope-maker did.
Among the class of gentlemen, in which he now counted himself, the mechanical
arts were respected only for the novelties they occasionally produced for pa-
trons.59
Visual representationwas tied up with the world of art and craft from which
Galileo was increasinglydistancing himself as he got older and his intellectual
5 On the importance of social status in patron-client relationships see Mario Biagioli, "Galileo's
System of Patronage," Hist. Sci. 1990, 28:1-62. Biagioli writes (p. 41): "Actually Galileo succeeded in
obtaining the status of a nobleman at court because-on top of the title of 'Philosopher'-he managed
to be included in the category of Gentilhuomini senza provisione (people of patrician status who had
full access to court but were not paid as court workers) rather than in the category of Artisti, architet-
tori et altri manifattori (in which we find artists, craftsmen, engineers, architects, teachers of math-
ematics, and geographers)." See also p. 61, n. 170.
56 On Galileo's visits to the arsenal see, e.g., Drake, Galileo at Work (cit. n. 54), pp. 33-34; and
Galileo, Two New Sciences, trans. Drake (cit. n. 45), p. 11. On the proportional compass see Galileo
Galilei, Operations of the Geometric and Military Compass, trans. Stillman Drake (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978); Silvio Bedini, "The Makers of Galileo's Scientific Instru-
ments," in Atti del simposio internazionale di storia, metodologia, logica, e filosofia della scienza
"Galileo nella storia e nella filosofia della scienza" (Florence: Barbera, 1967), pp. 89-115, on pp.
90-91; and Drake, Galileo at Work, pp. 44-46, 83. On improvements to the telescope see Galileo,
Sidereus nuncius, trans. Van Helden (cit. n. 7), pp. 36-38.
57 Galileo discovered the earthlike nature of the moon and the multitude of stars late in 1609, the
satellites of Jupiter in January 1610, the strange appearances of Saturn in July 1610, and the phases of
Venus in the fall of 1610. Only in the discovery of sunspots was he not the first.
58 Galileo to Vinta, 19 Mar. 1610, in Opere, Vol. 10, p. 301; and Galileo, Sidereus nuncius, trans.
Van Helden, pp. 91-92. The problem was grinding lenses of appropriate focal lengths. Whereas Drake
thinks that Galileo made many instruments himself (Galileo at Work, passim), Bedini assumes that all
his instruments were made by others ("Makers of Galileo's Scientific Instruments"). For information
on Ippolito Francini, Galileo's instrument maker late in life, see Carlo Vittorio Varetti, "L'artefice di
Galileo Ippolito Francini detto Tordo," Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rendiconti della
Classe de Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche, Ser. 6, 1939, 15(3-4).
5 Maria Luisa Righini Bonelli, "Note about Galileo's Instruments," in "Galileo nella Storia e nella
filosofia della scienza" (cit. n. 56), pp. 125-127. Christiaan Huygens signed his name on the lenses of
his telescopes; see Huygens, Oeuvres completes, 22 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888-1950),
Vol. 15, pp. 10-26. On the importance of social status see Biagioli, "Galileo's System of Patronage"
(cit. n. 55); and Biagioli, "Social Status of Italian Mathematicians" (cit. n. 32), pp. 48-50.

stature increased. In 1613 he was elected as a gentleman amateur to the Acca-

demia del Disegno, but no trace of his involvement can be found in his collected
works. In fact, his election was not noticed until recently. Galileo certainly did
not leave behind many drawings of any kind.60 In astronomy, in addition to the
early sketches of heavenly bodies and star formations, his papers contain only a
sketch of the appearance of the planet Saturn in 1616-no further pictorial record
of the heavens.61
The telescope did not remain in the form that Galileo had given it in 1609-1610;
it was further developed by Galileo's craftsmen and others. In the 1630s the
instruments of Francesco Fontana (d. 1656) of Naples, one of the first profes-
sional telescope-makers, began to attract attention. His instruments were of a
new construction. The form of telescope used by Galileo (the Galilean or Dutch
telescope) had a concave ocular lens: it produced an erect image, but its field of
view was so small that its magnification was effectively limited to about twenty
powers. Galileo's telescopes could take in only about half the moon's diameter at
one time. Fontana's instruments (Keplerian or astronomical telescopes) used
convex ocular lenses: they showed an inverted image (no great problem in ob-
servations of the heavens), but their field of view was much larger. Higher mag-
nifications therefore became feasible.62
Fontana's telescopes showed the entire moon at much higher magnifications
than Galileo's instruments could. The expression (no doubt originating with Fon-
tana) was that through these new instruments the moon appeared "bigger than
the Mercato of Naples." Galileo had received many reports about the new tele-
scopes of Fontana, and he could hardly deny their power. His contempt for the
Neapolitan artisan, however, knew no bounds:
As to magnifyingobjects more than other and shorter telescopes of ours, it is very

true;and as to magnifyingthe moon and showingit largerthanthe Mercatoof Naples,
this is a vulgarmannerof speaking[parlaredel volgo], proof of the low intelligenceof
the Neapolitanartisan.... As to seeing infiniteinequalities[on the moon], it is true,
but they are the same that are seen with our telescopes, except a bit more conspicu-
ous thanksto the magnification.But it is not true that new things are discovered there
and differentfrom the ones first discoveredby me and then verifiedby many others.63
6 Miles Chappell, "Cigoli, Galileo, and Invidia," Art Bulletin, 1975, 57:91-98, on p. 91, n. 4. See
also Ted Reynolds, "The Accademia del Disegno in Florence: Its Formation and Early Years" (Ph.D.
diss., Columbia Univ., 1974), p. 205.
61 For the sketch of Saturn see Galileo, Opere, Vol. 12, p. 276. See also Antonio Favaro, "Intorno
alla apparenza di Saturno osservata da Galileo Galilei nell'Agosto 1616," Atti del Reale Istituto
Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1900-1901, 60(2): 415-432; and Albert Van Helden, "Saturn and
His Anses," J. Hist. Astron., 1974, 5:105-121, on pp. 109-1 10.
Galileo made systematic observations of Jupiter's satellites from 7 Jan. to 23 Feb. 1613 whenever
he could. From that date up to 19 Nov. 1619 his observations were not as frequent and were made for
the most part to verify his calculations of the tables he was attempting to perfect. No observations
after 19 Nov. 1619, if any were made, have survived. See Galileo, Opere, Vol. 3, pt. 2, passim, esp.
pp. 409, 423.
62 Albert Van Helden, "The 'Astronomical Telescope,' 1611-1650," Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di
Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 1976, 1:13-36.
63 Gio Giacomo Cozzolani to Carlo Antonio Manzini, 11 Sept. 1638, in Galileo, Opere, Vol. 17, p.
375, and Galileo to ?, 15 Jan. 1639, ibid. Vol. 18, p. 18. See also Gino Arrighi, "Gli 'Occhiali' di
Francesco Fontana in un carteggio inedito di Antonio Santini nella Collezione Galileiana della Bib-
lioteca Nazionale di Firenze," Physis, 1964, 6:432-448. The Mercato in Naples was a market square.
The magnification of a telescope can be increased by decreasing the focal length of the ocular or

Galileo was, by this time, blind in both eyes and presumablyhad to rely on the
reportsof others, but we may assume that those who served as his eyes reported
the greaterfield of view of the new telescopes. In the largerfield of view of these
new instruments, described in such a homely way by Fontana, lay the key to
improving the telescope, and Galileo dismissed this breakthrough.In order to
distance himself from the mechanicalworld of telescope-making,the aging Gali-
leo raised his own discoveries to the status of revelation and denied that more
could be discovered in the heavens.
Galileo's contempt for the "Neapolitanartisan," as expressed in his letter, is
surely based on the social chasm that separated them. Symptomatic of that
chasm was the difference in their methods of communicatingastronomicaldis-
coveries. While Galileo verbally communicatedhis discovery of lunar libration,
Fontana circulated his observations of the moon, Mars, and Saturnpictorially.
Galileo judged Fontana's engravings of the moon as "truly very clumsy and
drawn by one who has never seen the face of the moon but has relied on the
account of some very coarse person." In 1646Fontana publishedNovae coeles-
tium terrestriumque rerum observationes, the first picture book of telescopic as-
tronomy. It contained twenty-eight engravings and twenty-six woodcuts, often
accompaniedby no more than a sentence or two to specify the date and place of
the observation. In the meantime, in Florence the work of depicting the moon
"with the aid of a large and perfect telescope of Galileo" had been relegated to
some clever painters(spiritosipittori).64As far as we know, nothingever came of
this project.
CONCLUSION
Galileo was not alone in his ambivalentattitudetoward visual communicationin

astronomy. His attitude was shared by his contemporaries.In fact, the use of
visual evidence is surprisinglyrareuntil after 1640.And when astronomersfinally
began using pictorial evidence, they did so with an explicit commitmentto rep-
resentingthe heavens faithfullyand accurately.AlthoughFrancesco Fontanawas
the first to publish an astronomicalbook in which pictorialinformationwas cen-
tral, it is in the work of Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687), a university trained
brewer in the Polish city of Gdansk, that we see the new visual dimension of
telescopic astronomy best exemplified. Hevelius's Selenographia sive lunae de-
scriptio of 1647 contained figures of forty differentlunar phases (e.g., Figure 7),
four views of the full moon, eighty-threediagrams,and several illustrationsof his
equipmentand the appearancesof other heavenly bodies.65Altogetherit had 134
increasing the focal length of the objective. For various reasons, the first option was not practical in
the seventeenth century and therefore the second was resorted to. This meant making telescopes
longer, and thus an instrument's length became synonymous with its power.
64 Galileo to Benedetto Castelli, 24 Oct. 1637, in Opere, Vol. 17, p. 204; and Filippo Baldinucci,
Delle notizie de'professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, Vol. 16 (Florence, 1773), p. 152. See also
Edgerton, "Galileo, Florentine 'Disegno,' and the 'Strange Spottednesse' of the Moon" (cit. n. 39), p.
232, n. 31. Baldinucci gives the date as "Circa all'anno 1642," but already in 1637 Galileo mentioned
in a letter that the grand duke, too, was having the moon drawn: Galileo to Castelli, 24 Oct. 1637.
65 Hevelius, Selenographia (cit. n. 1). On the life of Hevelius see Jean Beziat, "La vie et les travaux
de Jean Hevelius," Bullettino di Bibliografia e di Storia delle Scienze Matematiche e Fisiche, 1875,
8:497-558, 589-669.

;f*1! J2 ii . a=.
pp. 38- .
%89 _ O_ ..
30.
Figure 7. Copper engraving of the last quarter moon. from Hevelius, Selenographia(1647),
pp. 388-389.
illustrations,all engraved in copper, in 565 pages of text. And Hevelius's intent

was programmatic.The title of the book announcesthat it is to be a descriptionof
the moon, that it contains an accurate sketch (delineatio)of that body, and that it
also shows the naturalappearances(nativafacies) of the planets and the sun-
and all these figures were accurately engraved in copper (figuris accuratissime
aeri incisis). What is even more interesting, Hevelius made his own telescopes
and, he himself engraved virtuallyevery illustration-diagram or picture-in the
book, thus combiningthe roles of the naturalphilosopherand the lowly artisan.
Hevelius's approachto representingthe heavens was so differentfrom Galileo's
that he utterly misunderstoodthe purposebehindthe views of the moon shown in
Sidereus nuncius.
Such a completely wrongheadedjudgment of Galileo's instruments and his
ability as an observer and draftsmanshows just how differentthe worlds of these
two men were. Galileo distorted his drawingsof the moon in the service of his
verbal argumentthat its surface is rugged like that of the earth; Hevelius ac-
cepted that fact and wanted to represent the moon accurately-to depict it as
fully and naturalisticallyas possible. When, within the rangeof mediaavailableto
them, Hevelius and others chose to make the visual component central in com-
municatingtheir observations, astronomy became a visual science.


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Representing the Heavens: Galileo and Visual Astronomy

Author(s): Mary G. Winkler and Albert Van Helden

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:12:40 PM

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Galileo and Visual Astronomy

By Mary G. Winkler* and Albert Van Helden**

ISIS, 1992, 83: 195-217 195

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continued this practice of showing naturalistic representations of heavenly phe-

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1630)in 1619and Giuseppe Biancani(1566-1624)in 1620(Figure2) show generic

reproductionof Scheiner's figureof the moon can be found in Ewen A. Whitaker,"Selenographyin

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.:..... ..: ~.. . .

concentratinghis effortson the legitimationof the mathematicalsciences and the

In EnvisioningInformation, Edward R. Tufte calls the paper on which informa-

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90(6): 91-92, on p. 92.

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cus's diagrams see note 3.

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is both old-fashioned in its compression of events and forward looking, almost

GALILEO AND PICTURES

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placed great emphasis on sense experience, but in this he was no exception:

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ematician but of a sidereal-nay, divine-messenger whose gifts were those of a

I would by no means be silent about something deserving notice, observed by me

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s. .,,..... ... ..::;

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heidnoH sacfie te acryofte visareprsnain (whc were,

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rate-message.40 To Galileo one picture was not necessarily worth a thousand

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spots directly on the paper.43The importantfeatures were the varying sizes,

4 Galileo, Istoria e dimostrazioni,in Opere, Vol. 5, pp. 136-137;and StillmanDrake, Discoveries

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GALILEO AND WORDS

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a spectacle-makerfrom Middelburg,a humble, very religious and God-fearingman,

4 Galileo, Dialogue, trans. Drake (cit. n. 10), pp. 104-105.

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to discover the solutionof a known and designatedproblemis a laborof much greater

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mathematicsand philosophy (a practice that culminatedin his Dialogo of 1632),

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 18:12:40 PM

stature increased. In 1613 he was elected as a gentleman amateur to the Acca-

As to magnifyingobjects more than other and shorter telescopes of ours, it is very