The next important meeting for Galileo, though he did not know it, came on the Saturday before Easter, when he paid his respects to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini. They met in one of the outer offices of St. Peter’s, near the Vatican’s river gate. Galileo examined the interior gardens of the place with a close eye; he had never been inside the sacred fortress before, and it was interesting to observe the horticulture deployed inside. Purity had been emphasized over liveliness, he was not surprised to note. Paths were graveled, borders were lines of clean cobbles, long narrow lawns were trimmed as if by barbers. Massed roses and camelias were all either white or red. It was a little too much.
Barberini proved to be a man of the world—affable, quick, well-dressed in a cardinal’s everyday finery; lithe and handsome, goateed, smooth-skinned, fulsome. His power made him as graceful as a dancer, as confident in his body as a minx or otter. Galileo handed him the introductory letters from Michelangelo’s nephew and from Antonio de Medici, and Barberini put them aside after a glance and took Galileo by the hand and led him out into his office’s courtyard, dispensing with all ceremony. “Let’s take our ease and talk.”
Galileo was his usual lively self, a happy man with a genius for mathematics. In these interviews with nobles, he was quick and funny, always chuckling in his baritone rumble, ready to please. He did not know much about this cardinal, but the Barberini were a powerful family, and what he had heard was that Maffeo was a virtuoso, with a great interest in intellectual and artistic matters. He hosted many evenings in which poetry and song and philosophical debates were featured entertainments, and he wrote poetry himself that he was said to be vain about. Galileo seemed to be assuming that this was therefore a prelate in the style of Sarpi, broad-minded and liberal. In any case he was perfectly at ease, and showed Barberini his occhialino inside and out.
“I wish I had been able to bring enough of them with me to leave one with you as a gift, Your Eminence, but I was only allowed a small traveling trunk for baggage.”
Barberini nodded at this awkwardness. “I understand,” he murmured as he looked through it. “Seeing through yours is enough, for now, and more than enough. Although I do want one, it is true. It’s simply amazing how much you can see.” He pulled back to look at Galileo. “It’s odd—you wouldn’t think that more could be held there for the eye, in distant things, than we already see.”
“No, it’s true. We must admit that our senses don’t convey everything to us, not even in the sensible world.”
“Certainly not.”
They looked through it at the distant hills east of Rome, and the cardinal marveled and clapped him on the shoulder in the manner of any other man.
“You have given us new worlds,” he said.
“The seeing of them, anyway,” Galileo corrected him, to seem properly humble.
“And how do the Peripatetics take it? And the Jesuits?”
Galileo tipped his head side to side. “They are none too pleased, Your Grace.”
Barberini laughed. He had been trained by the Jesuits, but he did not like them, Galileo saw, and so continued. “There are some of them who refuse to look through the glass at all. One of them recently died, and as I said at the time, since he would not look at the stars through my glass, he could now inspect them from up close, on his way past them to Heaven!”
Barberini laughed uproariously. “And Clavius, what does he say?”
“He admits the moons orbiting Jupiter are really there.”
“The Medici moons, you have called them?”
“Yes,” Galileo admitted, realizing for the first time how this could be another awkwardness. “I expect to make many more discoveries in the heavens, and hope to honor those who have helped me accordingly.”
The little smile that twitched over the cardinal’s face was not entirely friendly. “And you think these Jovian moons show that the Earth goes around the sun in an analogous manner, as Copernicus claimed?”
“Well, it shows at least that moons go around planets, as our moon goes around the Earth. Better proof of the Copernican view, Your Grace, is how you can see the phases of Venus through the glass.” Galileo explained how in the Copernican understanding the phases of Venus had combined with its varying distance from Earth to make it seem to the naked eye as if it had always the same brightness, which had argued against the idea it had phases, when one had no glass to see them; and how its position, always low in the sky in the mornings and evenings, added to the actual discovery of the phases through the glass to support the idea that Venus was orbiting the sun inside the Earth’s own orbiting of the sun. The ideas were complicated to describe in words, and Galileo felt at ease enough to stand and take three citrons from a bowl, then place them and move them about on the table to illustrate the concepts, to Barberini’s evident delight.
“And the Jesuits deny this!” the cardinal repeated when Galileo had completed a very convincing demonstration of the system.
“Well, no. They are agreeing now that the phenomena at least are real.”
“But then saying that the explanation is not yet so clear. Yes, that makes sense. That sounds like them. And after all, I suppose God could have arranged it any way He wanted.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
“And what does Bellarmino say?”
“I don’t know, Your Grace.”
The cardinal’s smile was even a little wicked in its foxiness. “Perhaps we will find out.”
Then he spoke of Florence, of his love for the city and its nobility, which Galileo happily echoed. And when Barberini asked the usual question about favorite poets, Galileo declared, “Oh, I prefer Ariosto to Tasso, as meat over candied fruit,” which made the cardinal laugh, as being the reverse of the usual characterization of the two. Thus the interview continued well, to its conclusion and Galileo’s obsequious withdrawal. And Cardinal Barberini must have enjoyed it, for that very afternoon he wrote to Buonarotti, Michelangelo’s nephew, and to Antonio de Medici, to say he appreciated their recommendations of Florence’s new court philosopher, and would be delighted to help him in any way he could.
A few days later, Galileo was invited to a party organized by Giovanni Battista Deti, nephew of the late Pope Clement III, where he met four more cardinals, and listened to a talk given to the group by Giovanni Battista Strozzi. In the discussion afterward, Galileo held his tongue, as he told all his correspondents later, feeling that as a newcomer this was the courteous thing to do. Staying silent was difficult for him, given his natural tendency toward speech, not to say continuous babble, and also given what could only be called his growing intimacy with the topic of Strozzi’s talk, which was Pride. For the success of all these visits was going to his head. Night after night he was joining evening meals, often at Cardinal Ottavio Bandini’s residence on the Quirinal, right next to the pope’s palace, and after enjoying the food and the musicians’ efforts, standing up to become the featured entertainment, speaking and then showing the guests what could be seen through his glass of nearby landmarks. People never ceased to be amazed by what they saw, and Galileo puffed up accordingly. Back at the Palazzo Firenze after these events we could barely get him out of his jacket and boots.
One banquet with lasting consequences took place at the palazzo of Federico Cesi, the Marquis of Monticelli. This young man had founded the Accademia dei Lincei, the Academy of the Lynxes, to gather on a regular basis to discuss matters of mathematics and natural philosophy. Cesi paid for the meetings, and he also had used his fortune to gather in his palazzo an ever-growing collection of natural wonders. When Galileo arrived at his palazzo, Cesi took him on a tour of two rooms that were filled to overflowing with lodestones, chunks of coral, fossils, unicorn horns, griffin eggs, coconuts, nautilus shells, shark teeth, jars containing monstrous births, carbuncles that glowed in the dark, turtle shells, a rhinoceros horn worked in gold, a bowl of lapis lazuli, dried crocodiles, model cannons, a collection of Roman coins, and a box of truly exquisite lapidary specimens.