GALILEO PINTOR

GALILEO THE ARTIST

Thomas de Padova

BOOK REVIEWED-Galilei der Künstler. Die Zeichnung, der Mond, die Sonne
by Horst Bredekamp

Akademie-Verlag: 2007. 525 pp. 44.80 (in German) Published online 19 March
2008

B. HERRENKIND
Galileo traced sunspots in his precise drawings.
As a young man, Galileo Galilei considered becoming a painter. He acquired extensive knowledge of
perspective from Ostilio Ricci, the court mathematician in Florence, who later taught at the Florentine
Academy of Design. Galileo was a close friend of the painter Lodovico Cigoli and was in great demand as
an art critic, advising Bronzino, Empoli and the cream of Tuscan painters. His trained eye and practice in
drawing proved to be extremely useful when Galileo suddenly turned to the study of astronomy at the age of
45.
Galileo was not the first scientist to observe the Moon through a telescope. The Englishman Thomas Harriot
did so a few months earlier, in the summer of 1609, and Galileo followed suit, building better telescopes
using top-quality lenses. But Galileo did more than that. He saw more. And he drew what he saw,
delineating the features of the Moon's landscape, its mountains and craters.
In Galilei der Künstler (Galileo the Artist), German art historian Horst Bredekamp contends that Galileo's
mastery of the modulation of light and shadow made drawing an instrument of learning for the great
scientist as well as a method of documentation. Just as Galileo's Moon sketches convinced people — who at
the time trusted images more than words — that the Moon was not a perfectly smooth sphere, so
Bredekamp's intriguing book succeeds in showing that the act of seeing is itself a powerful tool of analysis.
Bredekamp gained access to unique sources. A few years ago, a previously unknown copy of Galileo's
ground-breaking collection of his telescopic discoveries published in March 1610, the Sidereus Nuncius
(The Starry Messenger), was acquired by a United States art dealer. Bredekamp, a professor of art history at
Humboldt University in Berlin, suspected that the Moon drawings in this copy were forgeries. Nevertheless,
he flew to New York to compare them with the renowned Galileo drawings from Florence held in Italy's
National Central Library.
"I spent weeks examining everything meticulously, and finally concluded that they were indeed originals,"
says Bredekamp. Independent studies by scientists, paper experts and restorers from Berlin and the United
States confirmed his view. It was an astonishing and exciting find. Bredekamp believes that these Moon
sketches, drawn by Galileo himself, served as templates for the better-known copper engravings in the
published Sidereus Nuncius, a view that is yet to be corroborated by other experts.
Posterity's judgement of Galileo has varied more than that of any other scientist — books about him have
ranged from Galileo the Martyr in the seventeenth century to Galileo, Heretic and Galileo, Courtier more
recently. Now the author of Galileo the Artist argues for the extent to which the astronomer's artistic talent
furthered his scientific achievements, as also illustrated by his discovery of sunspots, detailed in the second
part of the book.
Galileo studied these cloud-like structures on the surface of the Sun through drawings he made around 1612.
Much as with the Moon, this solar phenomenon had previously been misidentified, this time by the Jesuit
astronomer Christoph Scheiner, who thought that they were heavenly bodies orbiting the Sun. Galileo's
sunspot drawings, Bredekamp argues convincingly, enabled him to discover that the Sun, like the Moon, is
not the perfect sphere that Aristotle had claimed. These pictures alone make the book worth reading.

The Partnership of Art and Science: The Moon of Cigoli and Galileo

In 1612 Galileo wrote to his friend, the painter Lodovico Cardi, known as Cigoli:
The statue does not have its relief by virtue of being wide, long and deep but by virtue of being light in some
places and dark in others. And one should note as proof of this that only two of its three dimensions are
actually exposed to the eye: length and width (which is the superficies . . . that is to say, periphery or
circumference). For, of the objects appearing and seen, we see nothing but their superficies; their depth can
not be perceived by the eye because our vision does not penetrate opaque bodies. The eye then sees only
length and width and never thickness. Thus, since thickness is never exposed to view, nothing but length and
width can be perceived by us in a statue. We know of depth, not as a visual experience per se and absolutely
but only be accident and in relation to light and darkness. And all this is present in painting no less than
sculpture. . . . But sculpture receives lightness and darkness from nature herself whereas painting receives it
from Art.
(Edgerton, 225)
Galileo was answering Cigoli's request for help in an ongoing philosophical debate (dating from the early
renaissance) concerning painting and sculpture. Cigoli, as a painter, argued for the superiority of his two
dimensional genre. Lacking criteria, the debate was not the winnable kind, even for the great physicist and
astronomer.
Galileo was also a master of perspective drawing, for example, chiaroscuro, a pure exercise in the art (also
considered a science and studied as such) of representing three dimensions in two through the use of light
and shadow on complex geometric forms. Galileo's drawing ability improved further and a year later he was
admitted to the Accademia del Disegno (Academy of Drawing), of which Cigoli was a member.
Samuel Edgerton Jr. (p 226) writes that Galileo "most certainly studied" a pratica di prospettiva by Lorenzo
Sirigatti, a charter member of the Accademia. In this work, Sirigatti includes chiaroscuro problems.
Edgerton believes that when Galileo and Thomas Harriot simultaneously pioneered the use of the telescope
to study the moon's surface, it was Galileo's training in chiaroscuro (an art mostly unknown in Harriot's
England) that led him to see mountains and craters where Harriot only saw "strange spottedness." Galileo's
watercolors of the moon
Galileo's training in art may also have aided his understanding of earthshine, seen when sunlight reflected
from Earth illuminates the dark side of the moon. Edgerton (p 248) writes that, "Galileo, through association
with Cigoli and the [Accademia], is likely to have known the relevant instructions in Leon Battista Alberti's
treatise On Painting." Alberti describes seeing an example of reflected light: "when the faces of people
walking about in the meadow appear to have a greenish tinge." (Edgerton, 250)
Galileo's discoveries of earthshine and lunar topology obviously benefited from analogies between Earth and
moon. However, the idea that the perfect moon could have mountains and valleys as did the corrupt planet
Earth was new and maybe heretical. Could the Earth shine just as the celestial moon did? Was the moon
made not of incandescent vapor but instead of dust and dirt--of earth?
In fact, the moon was a symbol of purity. The Virgin Mary was often portrayed in paintings of that era atop
a perfectly smooth moon as in Murillo's Immaculate Conception (ca. 1660). Cigoli's last work, inspired by
Galileo's findings, was a fresco in the Pauline Chapel depicting Mary over a cratered moon. The fresco
could no longer be The "Immaculate" Conception since imperfect earthly mountains marred the moon,
instead, the Vatican named it Assumption of the Virgin.
Galileo found the true nature of the moon with art on his mind and Cigoli painted Mary on Galileo's
scientifically accurate moon. Later artists were strongly influenced by science. For example, Seurat studied
the color theories of Chevreul, and Kandinsky was inspired by contemporary findings in physics.
While Galileo believed in the perfection of circular orbits (ignoring Kepler's finding that orbits are elliptical)
his belief in and contributions to Copernican ideas got him in trouble with Aristotelian/Ptolemaic
academicians who, in turn, alerted the Church to Galileo's heresy. Though a friend of a powerful clergymen,
Galileo spent his last eight years under house arrest.
In his arguments for painting, Galileo made several observations on the nature of visual perception that were
similarly addressed in the twentieth century. In his letter, he wrote that, "only two of [a statue's] three
dimensions are actually exposed to the eye." Marr actually described humans as seeing in 2 1/2 dimensions!
Gabo with his Two Cubes challenged Galileo's idea that "our vision does not penetrate opaque bodies."