To the other servants it was simpler than that: he was Pulcinella. All over Italy the figure of Pulcinella had begun appearing in the festivals and buffa plays, a loud fool constantly lying, cheating, fornicating and beating on people—in short, the very image of a certain kind of master, which every servant in the land recognized and laughed to see. Once when Galileo was snoring in his chair while wearing a white shirt, someone had put a black cloth over his head and the typical costume was thereby hilariously complete, and they all tiptoed in to look and treasure this knowledge ever after: they worked for the greatest Pulcinella of all.
Now this ham-fisted tendency was catching up to him, and his enemies were becoming remarkably numerous. Colombe for one had never slackened in his assault. Previously this Bible-quoting malevolence could be ignored or used as a foil, as he had had no patrons. But now he was being used by figures much higher than he, who were interested in the success of his tactic of accusing Galileo of contradicting Scripture. Joshua, these figures were now murmuring into higher ears, had ordered the sun to come to a halt, not the Earth. It was as clear as could be. Surely the Church had to respond? They could beat Galileo with this kind of stick forever, because no one outside the Church should have been talking about scriptural interpretation at all.
Galileo ignored that and tried to respond directly to his assailants. He pointed out that God stopping the sun in the sky for Joshua would entail stopping the celestial vault and all the stars as well, as Ptolemy said they were all affixed to each other, whereas if Copernicus were right, then all God would have had to do to fix the sun in the midday sky would be to stop the Earth’s rotation, a much easier task, as could be easily seen. That this was ingeniously argued did not keep it from being also ridiculous—so much so that some people took it to be a mockery of the very idea of biblical explanations of the skies. It was hard to tell; a deadpan sarcasm was one arrow in Galileo’s sling. But either way it would have been wiser not to venture into such territory at all.
Still, he persisted in doing so. He wrote a long “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” explaining to her and to the letter’s wider readership the principles he thought should rule science’s relation to theology. In discussion of physical questions, we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense experiences and necessary demonstration. God is known first through Nature, and then by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.
“And God would not lie to us!” This was what he said over and over, from the very first moment of the controversy, when out in the workshop he had shouted it while striking the anvil with a long pair of tongs. “God would not lie to us!”
This was logically and perhaps even theologically sound, but it didn’t matter. The attacks continued, and many of them sounded like the kind of thing that might be accompanied by a secret denunciation to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. There were rumors that had already happened.
Galileo kept defending himself, in print and in person, but he fell ill more and more often, with rheumatism, bleeding hernias, shaking spells, blinding headaches, insomnia, syncopes and catalepsies, hypochondria, and bouts of irrational fear. Whenever he was healthy, he begged Cosimo’s secretary Curzio Picchena to be allowed to go to Rome so he could defend himself. He was still confident he could demonstrate the truth of the Copernican hypothesis to anyone he spoke to in person. Picchena was not the only one who doubted this. Winning all those banquet debates had apparently caused Galileo to think that argument was how things were settled in the world. Unfortunately this is never how it happens.
Galileo also was ignoring new complications that mattered. The general of the Jesuits, Claudio Aquaviva, had ordered his people to teach only the Aristotelian philosophy. Then also there was a doctored copy of Galileo’s “Letter to Castelli” being passed around Rome that made his positions sound even more radical than they were.
Worst of all, it was said that Bellarmino had recently ordered an investigation of the Copernican position as put forth by Galileo. This was a secret investigation, but everyone knew about it. A trial had therefore begun—a secret trial that was not actually secret. That was the Inquisition for you; rumors were part of their method, part of their terror. Sometimes they liked to apply pressures that might cause a panicked mistake.
Galileo fell ill again, very conveniently. He took to his bed for most of the winter, miserable and sleepless. In Rome Cesi made inquiries on his behalf to Bellarmino himself, asking what His Eminence thought Galileo should do. Bellarmino told Cesi that Galileo should stick to mathematics, avoid any assertions about the nature of the world, and avoid in particular any scriptural interpretations.
“Happy to do so!” Galileo shouted hoarsely from his bed, shaking Cesi’s fisted letter at his servants. “But how? How can I do that, when these ignorant vipers use Scripture to attack me? If I can’t reply in kind then I can’t defend myself!”
Which was of course the point. They had him. Being thus garotted in a double bind, naturally he choked on it. His stomach too went bad, and he could keep nothing down. He had to remain in his bed. His fear and anger were palpable, a sweaty stink that filled his room. Broken crockery littered the floor, and one had to step carefully to serve him, toe the shards aside and pretend everything was fine, even while dodging things thrown at one. We all knew things were not fine.
“I have to go to Rome,” he would say, repeating it like a rosary. “I have to go to Rome. I must go.” At night, watching the moons of Jupiter, taking notes as he hummed one of his father’s old tunes, falling asleep on his stool, he would murmur: “Help me, help me, help me. Get me to Rome.”
Finally Cosimo approved the visit. He wrote to his Roman ambassador to say that Galileo was coming to defend himself against the accusations of his rivals. The ambassador was to provide Galileo with two rooms in the Villa Medici, because he needs peace and quiet on account of his poor health.
Guicciardini, that same ambassador who had taken over during Galileo’s last stay in Rome, was still unimpressed by the astronomer. He wrote back to Cosimo, I do not know whether he has changed his theories or his disposition, but I know this: certain Dominican friars who play a major role in the Holy Office, and others, are ill disposed toward him. This is no place to come and argue about the Moon and, especially in these times, arrive with new ideas.
And yet that’s what he did. A ducal litter carried him south to Rome as before, and after the arduous week of the journey he came into the city with Federico Cesi, rolling through the ever-more-crowded outskirts of the great city, to the Pincian Hill in the northeast quarter. The hill rose out of squalid warrens crawling with people, all the poor souls who had migrated to the City of God hoping for succor either mundane or supernatural. Now Galileo made one more.
THE VILLA MEDICI occupied the very top of the Pincian Hill, which was also known as the Hill of Gardens—and deservedly so, as the few villas on it stuck out like ships on a billowing wave of vineyards. The Medici villa was the vast white hulk at the top, with a tall and nearly blank stucco façade facing the city center. Newer galleries extended away from the main building into the great gardens surrounding it, where one could wander among the hedges and the magnificent collection of antiquities that the family had bought from the Capranicas a generation before.