Date: May 1, 2009

Title: Galileo, the Moon, and the Visual Arts

Podcaster: James Clifton

Organization: The Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Description: Galileo was a skilled draftsman, a respected critic of painting, and a member of the Florentine art academy. His observations of the Moon led to an interesting conjunction of art, science, and religion. Shortly after the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo’s friend, Lodovico Cigoli, painted the Moon in the Pope’s chapel in the church of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome as Galileo described it: rough and dense rather than smooth and translucent, as it was usually painted.

Bio: Dr. James Clifton is the Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and a Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he has curated “The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain, 1150-1800” (1997), as well as two exhibitions of prints from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation: “A Portrait of the Artist, 1525-1825” (2005); and “The Plains of Mars: European War Prints, 1500-1825” (with Leslie Scattone) (2009). He has published and lectured widely on the art of Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Today’s sponsor: The American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)

Transcript: Hello. This is James Clifton. I’m an art historian at the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Four hundred years ago, in the spring of 1609, Galileo Galilei, an Italian mathematician at the University of Padua in the Venetian Republic, first heard of a new instrument – the telescope – which had been invented the previous year in the Netherlands. Galileo built his own telescopes, grinding and polishing the lenses himself, gradually improving and refining the design for greater magnification and clarity. In August of 1609, he demonstrated a telescope to the Senate of Venice, extolling its virtues for military applications. But his personal interest was in using the telescope to understand astronomical bodies and phenomena. In the autumn of 1609, having dismissed earthly things, as he put it, he applied himself to explorations of the heavens and turned his telescope to the Moon, the planets, and the stars. His careful observations, especially of the Earth’s Moon and four moons of Jupiter, which Galileo discovered, were hurriedly published, in March of 1610, in a little illustrated book called Sidereus Nuncius (usually translated from the Latin into English as The Starry Messenger or The Sidereal Messenger). Galileo quickly became an international celebrity. He had dedicated his book to Cosimo II de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Cosimo rewarded him with the position of mathematician and philosopher at his court in Florence and principal mathematician at the University of Pisa. In 1611, Galileo visited Rome where he was received with good will by Pope Paul V, and honored at the Collegio Romano, the college of the Jesuit Order of the Catholic Church.

It may seem odd for an art historian to participate in the “365 Days of Astronomy” podcasts, but Galileo was closely connected with the arts of his time, and his observations of the Moon led to an interesting conjunction of art, science, and religion.

The son of a famous musician, Galileo was well schooled in music and literature. He lectured and wrote on poetry and the visual arts. In 1613, he was elected to the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, an association of artists dedicated to the proposition that painting, sculpture, and architecture were intellectual rather than manual endeavors, united on the foundation of disegno, which means both “design” and “drawing.” The Academy engaged geometers to teach perspective, and the young Galileo sought such a position in 1588. But his election to the Academy after the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius acknowledged his abilities as a draftsman as well as a mathematician. According to a seventeenth-century biography, Galileo used to wish that he had been allowed to choose painting as a profession. The biographer praised, perhaps with some exaggeration, Galileo’s artistic abilities and understanding, saying that he had “great genius and talent” in drawing and that his judgment on paintings and drawings was so well respected that it was preferred to that of the leading painters, even by the painters themselves, who often asked him his opinions on the various aspects of the art. They recognized in Galileo a “perfect taste” in painting that couldn’t be found in any other.

The biographer also said that Lodovico Cigoli, Galileo’s close friend and one of the best painters of the time, claimed that only Galileo surpassed him in perspective drawing. In the 1580s, Galileo and Cigoli studied perspective and mathematics with the same teacher in Florence, and their friendship probably dates from this time. Cigoli was, like Galileo, multi-talented: a poet, musician, architect, and art theorist as well as a painter, deeply interested in anatomy and perspective, and a member of literary and art academies. Cigoli and Galileo maintained a lively correspondence, and in one letter, Galileo wrote at considerable length on the relative merits of painting and sculpture, a common topic of debate at the time. Cigoli had his own telescope, and he helped Galileo’s researches by observing and recording sunspots.

Galileo recorded his observations of the Moon in drawings. There are seven very fine drawings of the Moon, thought to be by Galileo, preserved in the national library in Florence, and five more appear in place of the engravings in a recently discovered exemplar of the Sidereus Nuncius. Within carefully inscribed circles, the appearance of the Moon in different phases is subtly depicted with sepia ink washes in a range of tones. Evident in these drawings is the so-called “ashen light” that weakly illuminates the shadowed part of the Moon. Galileo lists and dismisses the prevailing theories of the ashen light in the Sidereus Nuncius, and explains that this “secondary light,” as he calls it, is sunlight reflected from the Earth – what is now called “earthshine” – an idea that first appeared, as far as we know, in an unpublished manuscript by the artist Leonardo da Vinci about a century before Galileo. Renaissance artists were very interested in the properties of reflected light, and Galileo would have been well aware of their theorizing on it as well as their nuanced depictions of it.

With his telescope, Galileo was able to determine that the surface of the Moon is, as he put it, “by no means endowed with a smooth and polished surface, but [it] is rough and uneven and, just as the face of the Earth itself, crowded everywhere with vast prominences, deep chasms, and convolutions.” Its uneven topography was indicated in his drawings and in the engravings of the Sidereus Nuncius. Galileo’s understanding of the Moon’s surface was not new, but it was contrary to prominent views that the Moon was smooth and perfect.

Artists typically depicted the Moon as a smooth orb, but soon after the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, Cigoli painted Galileo’s pockmarked Moon in one of the most prominent places in Rome: in the dome of a large, sumptuous chapel built by Pope Paul V in the church of S. Maria Maggiore. The subject of Cigoli’s painting was fairly conventional by then. The twelfth chapter of the New Testament book of Revelation describes “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” This woman had long been thought to represent both the Church and the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. This Apocalyptic Woman, as she is sometimes called, was used to symbolize the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, the belief that the Virgin Mary had been miraculously conceived by her mother Anne without the stain, or macula, of Original Sin. Mary was often equated with the Moon: the words from the sixth chapter of the Song of Solomon, “beautiful as the moon,” were applied to her, and both Mary and the Moon were referred to as the “Queen of Heaven.” In this way of thinking, the Moon must be as immaculate, as unblemished, as she. And thus artists usually depicted the Moon under the feet of the Virgin as pure, smooth, translucent, even transparent, and perfect in all respects. Most artists depicted a crisp crescent Moon, with the horns pointed either up or down, and with a background perfectly visible between the horns. Cigoli also turned the Moon on its side, with the lighted portion up – it is, after all, reflecting the light of the Woman Clothed with the Sun – but his Moon is a dense orb of rough and uneven surface, not immaculate, not perfect. Cigoli’s Moon was not, however, sacrilegious; it suited another, opposing interpretation of the Moon at the feet of the Apocalyptic Woman: that it represented the imperfection of earthly things and was not, therefore, equated with Mary, but was vanquished by her.

But Cigoli’s depiction of the Moon with the Immaculate Virgin was not imitated. Galileo’s assertions in Sidereus Nuncius continued to excite controversy, and his relations with the Catholic Church eventually soured, although he remained a lifelong Catholic. Cigoli’s sudden passing in 1613 deprived Galileo of a dear friend and ardent supporter.

The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, Germany, has organized an exhibition on depictions of the Moon from the fifteenth century to the present. The exhibition includes Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius among the many books, paintings, prints, photographs, and scientific instruments on view. It will be at the Wallraf-Richartz until August 16, 2009, after which time it will travel to Houston, where you can see it at the Museum of Fine Arts from September 27, 2009 to January 10, 2010. More information is available on the museums’ websites. You can find a bibliography on Galileo and the visual arts, along with the text of this podcast, on the “365 Days of Astronomy” website.

I close with Galileo’s valediction in a letter to his friend Cigoli: “And now I most cordially kiss your hands, and pray you to continue your affection for me, and also your observations of the sunspots.”

Thank you for listening.

Bibliography

Ashworth, William B. The Face of the Moon: Galileo to Apollo, An Exhibition of Rare Books and Maps. Exh. cat. Kansas City, Missouri: Linda Hall Library, 1989.

Blühm, Andreas, ed. Der Mond. Exh. cat. Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Fondation Corboud, 2009.

Bredekamp, Horst. Galilei der Künstler: Der Mond. Die Sonne. Die Hand. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007.

Chappell, Miles. “Cigoli, Galileo, and Invidia.” The Art Bulletin 57:1 (1975): 91-98.

Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr. The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Freedberg, David. The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Galilei, Galileo. Sidereus Nuncius or The Sidereal Messenger. Trans., with introduction, conclusion, and notes by Albert van Helden. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Kemp, Martin. The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990.

Montgomery, Scott L. The Moon and the Western Imagination. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1999.

Ostrow, Steven F. “Cigoli’s Immacolata and Galileo’s Moon: Astronomy and the Virgin in Early Seicento Rome.” The Art Bulletin 78:2 (1996): 218-35.

Panofsky, Erwin. Galileo as a Critic of the Arts. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954.

Panofsky, Erwin. “Galileo as a Critic of the Arts: Aesthetic Attitude and Scientific Thought.” Isis 47:1 (1956): 3-15.

Reeves, Eileen. Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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