The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Erwin Panofsky *
Galileo as a Critic of the Arts: †
Aesthetic Attitude and Scientific Thought
Mar. 1956, 3-15
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Content
1.
Sympathy with Art & Artists
5. Kepler’s Ellipse vs. Galileo’s Circle
6. Celestial Dynamics vs. Celestial Cinematics
HHC: Titling and Index added.
Figures not included |
GALILEO, the son of a renowned musician and
theorist of music, grew up in a humanistic rather than scientific environment
and never lost his interest in art and literature.
It is well known, for example, that he
devoted “many months or even years” of patient labor to a comparison between
Ariosto and Tasso, extolling the former and tearing the latter to pieces; and
up to this day Tasso’s biographers tend to be critical of Galileo because he
failed to appreciate the greatness of Tasso, while Galileo’s biographers tend
to be critical of Tasso because be failed to live up to the standards of
Galileo.
Not much attention, however, has been paid to
the fact that Galileo’s views on the other arts, though scattered about his
writings rather than concentrated in one place, are no less outspoken than his
views on poetry, and that from all his statements there emerges an aesthetic
attitude no less consistent than - and possibly interrelated with - his
scientific convictions.
1. Sympathy with Art & Artists
Concrete evidence of Galileo’s sympathy with art
and artists is found in his life-long and truly reciprocal friendship with
Lodovico Cigoli, the most important Florentine painter of his time
(1559-1613). Cigoli collaborated with
Galileo in collecting data on the sunspots and proclaimed his “loyal devotion”
to his great friend in his last work, the frescoes in S. M. Maggiore (Fig. 1)
††
† This paper, scheduled for delivery at the
meeting of the History of Science Society at Washington on 30 December 1955
but not presented on account of illness, is a much abridged and somewhat
revised version of a pamphlet, entitled Galileo as a Critic of the Arts
(The Hague, 1934), to which the reader is referred for documentation.
The publication of this version in
Isis was suggested by the editor and may seem justifiable for two
reasons. First, the original pamphlet,
printed in a comparatively small edition and primarily addressed to historians
of art and art criticism, may be difficult of access to many readers of
Isis. Second, the author welcomes
the opportunity of making certain additions and corrections - mostly suggested
by Alexandre Koyré’s “Attitude esthétique et pensée scientifique,”
Critique, IX (Tome XII, No. 100-101), 1955, p. 835 ff., and a number of
personal communications - and is glad to comply with Professor Koyré’s kind
recommendation to clarify his purpose by the addition of a subtitle.
Bibliographical references given in
the original pamphlet have not been repeated, and the texts there quoted and
translated in extenso have been here condensed and, in part, rendered
somewhat more freely; the writer would like, however, to call attention to
three annoying misprints (p. 22, Note 1, lines 4 and 6: “1519” and
“1518” should read “1619” and “1618,” respectively; ibidein, Note 2,
line 1901: “1891” should read “1891”).
He also wishes to thank the Kunsthistorisch Instituut of Utrecht
University for permission to publish the present abstract.
* The Institute for Advanced Study.
†† Illustrations referred to as Fig. 1, Fig. 2,
are to be found on the plates following p. 8.
The inclusion of these plates has been
made possible by the courtesy of the Institute for Advanced Study.
3
by placing the Assunta upon a moon depicted
exactly as it had revealed itself to Galileo’s telescope, complete with the
“jagged dividing line” and the “many little islands,” exactly as shown in the
illustrations of the Sidereus Nuncius (Fig. 2) [1]; Galileo in turn
rushed to Cigoli’s assistance when the latter, then in Rome, had become
involved in an art-theoretical discussion which had been going on for nearly
two centuries. A modest man who felt
that abstract speculation was “not his dish,” Cigoli had asked Galileo to
provide him with arguments against those who claimed that sculpture was
superior to painting, and Galileo obliged with a long letter, dated 26 June
1612, the authenticity of which must be accepted for a number of reasons,
among them the fact that the main argument is developed from an unquestionably
authentic propria manu fragment.
This main argument is directed against the old
contention that three-dimensional statues, having “relief” where
two-dimensional paintings have none, were able to produce a more convincing
illusion of reality. To this Galileo
replies by an interesting anticipation of the modern distinction between
“optical” and “tactical” values: there are two entirely different kinds of
“relief,” one deceiving the sense of touch, the other, the sense of vision.
The deception of the sense of touch
Galileo discards with an argument so utterly matter-of-fact as to seem trivial
yet never before advanced in a discussion of this kind: nobody, when touching
a statue, will ever believe that it is a living thing.
Concerning the deception of the sense
of vision, on the other hand, he contends that all optical effects fall within
the province of the painter rather than the sculptor.
“Works of sculpture,” he says, “will
have relief only to the extent that they are shaded, light in one part and
dark in another… If we darkened all the light portions of a sculptured figure
with paint until its tone was completely unified, the figure would appear
devoid of relief altogether.”
This contention substantially agrees with a
statement by another defender of painting, Leonardo da Vinci; but it differs
from it in one important respect: in maintaining that a statue exposed to a
perfectly diffused light would look flat, Leonardo describes what happens
under given natural conditions. Galileo,
proposing to paint a statue dark wherever it is light, describes what human
interference can cause to happen by determining the natural conditions.
Leonardo invokes an experience that
may or may not recur; Galileo suggests an experiment that can be repeated
ad libitum. I have, in fact,
repeated it in simplified form: I have photographed two reddish rubber balls,
placed per-
[1] Eleven years later, Cigoli’s painted
portrayal of Galileo’s moon was matched by the poetic description in Giovanni
Battista Marino’s Adone, X, 34-44, which culminates in the well-known
tribute to Galileo and his telescopic discoveries, including the Jupiter
satellites (for another example, see Tommaso Campailla. l’adamo, ovvero il
Mondo creato [Rome, 1637], III, 1-99).
Conversely, the telescope was ridiculed or downright discredited by
other poets and poetasters (see H. G. Dick, “The Telescope and the Comic
Imagination,” Modern Language Notes, 1943, 58: 544 ff.), especially in the
illustrated emblem books which tend to be neglected by historians of
literature. Johannes de Brunes in
Emblemata of Zinnewerck (Amsterdam, 1624, p. 333), for instance, likens
the magnifying effect of the telescope to that of jealousy, envy and hatred,
while Paolo Moccio in Emblemata (Bologna, 1628, p. 17) compares
it to that of boastfulness. Silvestro
Pietrasanta in Symbola Heroica,
4
pendicularly above each other, under identical
lighting conditions before and after one of them had been treated according to
Galileo’s prescription. The
left-hand photograph shows the two balls as real spheres; the other makes the
upper ball, the lighted area of which had been darkened by paint, appear like
a flat, black disk (Fig. 4).
Galileo thus reduces the claims of sculpture to
one undeniable fact: its products are more closely akin to natural things in
that they share with them the quality of three-dimensionality.
But does this fact redound to the
credit of sculpture? On the contrary,
says Galileo, it greatly diminishes its merit because - and this is a most
remarkable statement of principle - “the farther removed the means of
imitation are from the thing to be imitated, the more admirable the imitation
will be… Will we not admire a musician who moves us to sympathy with a lover
by representing his sorrows and passions in song much more than if he were to
do it by sobs? And would we not admire
him even more if he were to perform silently, on an instrument only, and
achieve his aims solely by dissonances and passionate musical accents?”
Once musical theory had turned humanistic, it
was agreed that the purpose of music was not only to delight the ear of the
listener but also to influence his soul emotionally, intellectually and
morally. There was a certain amount of
dissension as to the relative importance of these aims, but no one doubted
that music lived in an indissoluble union with poetry.
Even Mersenne, who held that the
essential value of music was perceptual rather than either moral or
intellectual, conceived of it as illustrative of words, to which it gave
leur vrai sens. And Galileo’s own
father had asserted that the text was “the most important thing in musical
composition.” He must have turned in
his grave when his great son anticipated what Jacob Burckhardt was to say some
two hundred and fifty years later: “Music, if we wish to penetrate the essence
of its being, must be taken as instrumental music detached from words.”
In Galileo’s view, then, art is at its best
where its “means of imitation” (sounds in the case of music; light, line and
color in the case of the representational arts) are most emphatically distinct
from its subject matter: the world of psychological experience, on the one
hand; the world of three-dimensional things, on the other.
And this insistence upon a clear and
clean separation of values and procedures which at the time were commonly
accepted as inseparable bears witness to a critical purism that may be said to
be the very signature of Galileo’s genius. As
he preferred “pure,” instrumental music to song, let alone to song intermixed
with sobs or laughter, so did he insist on a separation of quantity from
qualities, of science from religion, magic, mysticism and art.
His discovery of the four Jupiter
satellites was greeted with cries of horror by those who claimed that God
would never have permitted the elements of the planetary system to exceed the
sacred number of seven, and with cries of triumph by those who felt that
Galileo’s discovery had showed forth once more the metaphysical importance of
the number four. Galileo himself would
have
5
accepted any number without even thinking of its
Biblical or Neo-Pythagorean implications: he objected to whatever amounted to
a blurring of borderlines.
He loved the poets and historiographers but
refused to accept them as authorities on questions of physics (ironically,
even when they happened to be right). [1a]
He was by no means averse to honest, straightforward indecency,
but he resented it when out of place (particularly when the faux pas
was committed unintentionally), and he squirmed at innuendo.
In instinctive agreement with Samuel
Butler’s immortal phrase, “I don’t mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy,” he had
no objection to Ariosto’s fairies, dragons, hippogriffs and sorcerers but was
annoyed when Tasso asked him to believe in a garden located in the middle of a
palace yet containing, “hills, valleys, woods, caves, rivers, and swamps, and
all this junk on top of a high mountain.” And
his main objection to the Gerusalemme Liberata was that it was
allegorical. In his opinion
allegorical poems, forcing the reader to interpret everything as a reference
to something else, resembled those perspective trick pictures, known as “anamorphoses,”
which, to use Galileo’s own words, “show a human figure when looked at
sideways but, when observed frontally (as we naturally and normally do),
display nothing but a welter of lines, colors, and strange, chimerical
shapes.” In similar manner, he thought, allegorical poetry “compels the
straightforward narrative to adapt itself to an allegorical meaning, seen
obliquely, as it were, and thus obstructs it by fantastic and superfluous
figments.”
The best-known example of such “perspectives
which, rightly gazed upon,/ show nothing but confusion, viewed awry,/
distinguish form,” is found in Holbein’s Ambassadors in the National
Gallery at London (Fig. 3), where the foreground is occupied by an object that
certainly deserves to be called “a strange, chimerical shape”; it is only when
viewed sideways from the extreme lower left that this object reveals itself as
a death’s-head - here serving both as a memento mori, an idea
frequently expressed in portraits of the time, and as a hidden signature: the
name Holbein means, translated literally, “hollow bone” (Fig. 5).
Elsewhere Galileo compares the procedure of
those opponents who piece their arguments together from assorted quotations
from Aristotle instead of “looking at the great book of nature” [lb] to
another form of artistic trickery
[1a] My attention has been called to Galileo’s
approving reference to Ariosto (Orlando
furioso, XVII, 30) in the Due nuove
scienze (Ed. Naz., VIII, p. 169). Here
Galileo explains that the bones in a creature larger than those existing in
nature would have to be either disproportionately thickened or would have to
consist of a different substance in order to fulfill the same function and
concludes that Ariosto may have had this in mind (forse) when he described a
giant in the following terms: {HHC: Italian not reproduced} In the opinion of
this writer Galileo here credits his favorite poet with more physical insight
than he possessed: what Ariosto means to say is that, if the width of the
giant (grosso, incorrectly
translated by “size” in Two New
Sciences, H. Crew and A. de Salvio, tr., New York, 1914, p. 131), which
should be comparatively easy to estimate because he stands on the same level
as does the beholder, is “beyond measure,” the giant’s
height, extending far beyond eye
level, is quite impossible to calculate. But
even if Galileo’s interpretation were correct, he would not have adduced
Ariosto as an authority for a statement about physics (as did those who
attempted to prove a scientific theory by examples taken from classical
literature) but, on the contrary, would have paid a graceful compliment to his
accortissimo poeta by crediting him
with a quasi-prophetic insight into what he, Galileo, had discovered more than
a hundred years later.
[lb] For the long history of the “book of nature”
simile, see E. R. Curtius, Europäische
Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (
HHC:
[bracketed]
displayed on page 7 or original.
6
which had been greatly admired by earlier
patrons and critics but which in his opinion could be justified only as a
joke: the construction of faces or figures from assorted objects appropriate
to the theme but constituting, as it were, a series of secondary images within
the primary one. In this case we can
even identify the particular target of Galileo’s mockery: in citing,
specifically, a personification of agriculture “entirely composed of
agricultural implements” and personifications of the seasons “entirely
composed of fruits or flowers” (Fig. 6), he evidently aims at an artist named
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (died 1593) whose works, in part preserved, were widely
imitated and eulogized in prose and poetry during his lifetime and even
brought him a knighthood. [2]
3. Anti-Classicism
Both perspective “anamorphoses” and what may be
called “double images” are playful but characteristic manifestations of a
peculiar style which we have learned to refer to as Mannerism.
In Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles
of Art Theory an attempt has been made to construe the style of the
seventeenth century - the century that saw the emergence of both the florid
Baroque of Bernini and the severe classicism of Sacchi or Poussin - as a
diametrical contrast to the “classic” High Renaissance as represented by
Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, or Titian. But
this construction was made possible only by the omission of everything that
had occurred in between. In reality
there had arisen, from as early as 1515-1520, an “anti-classic” tendency which
had opposed to the ideals of rationality, selective verisimilitude,
simplicity, and bal-
[2] The inclusion of this interesting passage,
inadvertently omitted from the original pamphlet, was suggested by Mr.
Stillman Drake. Found in the Third
Letter on the Sunspots (Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale, V,
Florence, p. 190 f.), it reads as follows: {HHC: Italian not reproduced}
That Galileo had Arcimboldo in ind is
evident from the fact that one of the latter’s most eloquent admirers,
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, mentions precisely the same paintings (a
personification of agriculture and a series of pictures representing the
seasons) as does Galileo: Trattato
della pittura (Milan, 1584), VI, 26, p. 349 f.; Idea del tempio della
pittura (Milan, 1590), XXXVIII, p. 154 ff. For
further references, see Thieme-Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden
Künstler, II, p. 70, and F. C. Legrand and F. Sluys, “Some Little-Known
Arcimboldeschi,” Burlington Magazine,
1954, 96: 210 f.
7
ance, a taste for the irrational, the fanciful,
the complex, and the dissonant. The
style of the seventeenth century resulted from two countermovements against
this “anti-classic” or Mannerist style (both setting in toward the end of the
sixteenth century) which, for all their diversity, were united in their desire
to recapture the values of the High Renaissance: the revolutionary naturalism
of Caravaggio and the reformatory eclecticism of the Carracci brothers and
Domenichino - the former supported, as is so often the case, by sophisticated
aristocrats as well as “long-haired radicals,” the latter hailed by the
honnêtes hommes whose views, equally averse to the “crude,” or
non-selective, imitation of nature and to the vagaries of Mannerism, found
their expression in the theory of the beau ideal, the central dogma of
the academies.
When we compare, for example, Raphael’s
Madonna di Foligno of 1511-1512 (Fig. 7) with a Madonna by Annibale
Carracci, produced some eighty or ninety years later (Fig. 8), we perceive,
all differences in style and temper notwithstanding, a basic community of
intention. Carracci’s figures, though
painted in a looser, more pictorial manner and animated by a more intense
emotion, do not appreciably deviate from what Raphael would have considered as
the norm of nature. There is a
tendency to harmonize the relationship between surface and depth, plastic
volume and ambient space, pattern and intervals.
And the Mother of God appearing to,
and venerated by, saints, is easily accessible to the beholder’s eye and mind.
A Mannerist painting such as Vasari’s
Immaculate Conception of 1540
(Fig. 9) differs from both Raphael’s High Renaissance and Annibale
Carracci’s Proto-Baroque. The
arbitrary proportions and contorted movements reveal inhibitions and tensions
equally far from tranquility and open passion.
The forms, strongly modeled but confined by tight contours, are
crammed into a dense pattern which prohibits a reconciliation of volume and
space. And the subject is an intricate
allegory, perplexing, as we learn from his own words, to the artist himself
and reduced to visible form only with the help of many erudite friends.
Galileo, born in 1564, was an eye witness to the revolt against this Mannerism, and it is not difficult to guess where he stood. He was, if not a friend, at least a well-disposed acquaintance of the very father of the theory of the beau ideal, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi. His fidus Achates, Lodovico Cigoli, played exactly the same role in
[3] For the success of Arcimboldo (court poets
writing two or three decades before painter to three successive German
emperors, Galileo, see particularly Lomazzo as cited in the Ferdinand II,
Maximilian II and Rudolph II) preceding note.
In his Trattato this author and the praise lavished upon him by
critics and prints a poem by Gregorio Comanini (cf. also
[the
latter’s Il Figino, Mantua, 1591) which glorifies a Flora entirely composed of
flowers and is so characteristic of the amphigoric and amphibolic - as Galileo
would say, “oblique” - mentality expressing itself in double images of this
kind that it deserves to be quoted in full: {HHC: Italian not reproduced} “Am
I Flora or just flowers? If [I am] flowers, how does it happen that my face
bears the smile of Flora? And if [I
am] Flora, how [does it happen] that Flora is nothing but flowers?
I am neither flowers nor Flora; yet I
am Flora as well as flowers - a thousand flowers and one Flora, living flowers
and a living Flora - because the flowers make [the image of] Flora, and [the
goddess] Flora makes the flowers. Do
you know how? The ingenious painter
has transmuted flowers into Flora, Flora into flowers.”]
HHC:
[bracketed]
displayed on page 9 or original.
8
Galileo’s aesthetic judgments - whether of
music, painting or poetry - thus appear to be dictated by a consistent
principle or, if you will, by an insurmountable prejudice: a classicistic
prejudice in favor of simplicity, order, and separation des genres, and
against complexity, imbalance, and all kinds of conflation.
And that this unity of principle was
felt by Galileo himself is evident from the fact that some of his strongest
objections to his pet aversion, Tasso, are clothed in similes borrowed from
the visual arts. That he compared
Tasso’s allegorical method to perspective anamorphosis has already been
mentioned. And right at the beginning
of his discussion he describes the contrast between Tasso’s and Ariosto’s
styles in terms which, without much verbal change, might be applied to the two
paintings by Raphael and Vasari which we have just considered; or, for that
matter, to any High Renaissance picture as compared to any work of any
Mannerist such as Bronzino or Francesco Salviati, who was the favorite painter
of Tasso: “Tasso’s narrative resembles a piece of marquetry rather than an oil
painting, for marquetry uses little varicolored pieces of wood which never
unite very smoothly, so that the contours remain sharp and precise and the
figures strike us as dry, hard and without roundness.
In an oil painting, however, the
contours are softly dissolved, and by virtue of smooth transitions from one
color to the other the picture becomes soft, round and rich in relief.
Ariosto shades and models in the
round… Tasso works piecemeal, dryly and sharply, filling his stanzas, for want
of words, with concepts having no cogent connection with what is said or to be
said.”
In an even more amazing passage, perhaps fully
appreciable only by art historians, Galileo draws another parallel: “When
setting foot into the Orlando Furioso, I behold opening up before me a
treasure room, a festive hail, a regal gallery adorned with a hundred
classical statues, with countless complete historical pictures by the most
excellent masters and full of everything that is admirable and perfect.”
One thinks of both the School of
Athens and the rich gallery pictures by Giovanni Paolo Pannini (Fig. 10).
When reading the Gerusalemme
Liberata, however, it seems to Galileo that he enters “the study of some
little man with a taste for curios who has been pleased to fit it out with
things that have something strange about them because of age or rarity or for
some other reason but are, as a matter of fact, nothing but bric-a-brac: a
petrified crayfish, a dried-up chameleon, a fly and a spider embedded in a
piece of amber; some of those little clay figures which are said to be found
in the
9
ancient tombs of
Here Galileo portrays to a nicety and with
evident gusto one of those jumbled Kunst- und Wunderkammern so typical
of the Mannerist age (Fig.11).
And when he contrasts “the
countless complete historical pictures by the most excellent masters” with
“some little sketches by Bandinelli and Parmigianino,” he not only disparages
the small and trifling in favor of the large and lofty, and the fragmentary
and preliminary in favor of the finished and final, but also points his finger
with unerring accuracy at two Cinquecento artists whose names are still
synonymous with Mannerism pur sang.
Tasso has never lost his place among the great poets of the human race, and our own twentieth century has thoroughly revised the wholesale condemnation of Mannerism as an art form. Arcimboldo’s double images are having a vogue in the circles of the
5. Kepler’s Ellipse vs.
Galileo’s Circle
It is a well-known but puzzling fact that Galileo always ignored the Keplerian laws (
[4] Galileo’s early familiarity with Kepler’s
first and second laws is unequivocally proved by a letter addressed to him by
Federico Cesi on
10
their elimination from his whole thinking. [5]
He seems to have dismissed them from his mind - in an act of automatic
self-defense, as it were - as something incompatible with the very principles
which dominated his thoughts as well as his imagination. [6]
Everyone knows the famous passage at the very
beginning of the Dialogue where Galileo endorses the belief, common to
Platonists and Aristotelians, in the perfection of the circle not only from a
mathematical and aesthetic but also from a mechanical point of view: according
to him the qualities of uniformity and perpetuity, reserved to rectilinear
motion in post-Galilean dynamics, exclusively belong to the circular movement
which Huygens and his successors have taught us to consider as vectorially
accelerated. “Circular motion is
naturally [that is, without external interference] appropriate to the bodies
constituting the universe and disposed in the best order; rectilinear motion
has been assigned by nature to the bodies and their parts only where they are
disposed in bad order, outside their proper places.”
Everyone also knows that Galileo, when
discussing the absolute motion of free-falling bodies in hypothesi terrae
motae, erroneously describes their trajectory as a perfect semicircle
connecting the point of departure with the center of the earth. [7]
But few Galileists have found it in their hearts to take such
pronouncements at their face value, all the more so as the triumphant
conclusion of Galileo’s discussion of absolute motion is couched in language
that
[5] See Koyre, “Attitude esthétique…,” p.
841 f.
[6] A similar view has been expressed by G. de
Santillana, The Crime of Galileo, Chicago, n.d. [1955], p. 106,
Note 29: “Galileo seems
to have heard from someone (Cesi or Cavallieri) a casual mention of the
elliptical orbits, but it must have set in motion a protective mechanism in
his own mind, for his theory needed circles as a physical reality.”
Cesi is also mentioned, though again
without special reference to the letter of
1612, in the same author’s
excellent edition of Galileo’s Great World Systems in the Salusbury
Translation, Chicago, 1953,
p. 349, note 34.
[7] For Galileo’s treatment of this problem, see
A. Koyré, “An Unpublished Letter of Robert Hooke to Isaac Newton,” Isis,
1952, 43:
312 ff.; idem, “A
Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to
11
sounds as metaphysical or even aesthetic as that
of the introductory passages. We may
well ask, however, whether such passages should not be taken seriously not in
spite but because of the fact that they sound metaphysical or even aesthetic:
whether their style soutenu might not express the very depth of a
conviction - that of the purist and the classicist - which, on the one hand,
dictated Galileo’s mortal aversion to “impure” music, allegorical poetry,
perspective anamorphosis and double images and, on the other, produced that
liantise de la circularité (to borrow the beautiful phrase of Alexandre
Koyré) which made it impossible for him to visualize the solar system as a
combination of ellipses. Where we
would consider the circle as a special case of the ellipse, Galileo could not
but feel that the ellipse is a distorted circle: a form which was, so to
speak, unworthy of celestial bodies; which cannot result from what he
conceived as uniform motion; and which, we may add, was as emphatically
rejected by High Renaissance art as it was cherished in Mannerism.
In painting it does not occur until
Correggio (Fig. 12); in sculpture, not until Gian Maria Falconetto, [8]
Pierino da Vinci and Guglielmo
della Porta; in architecture
[8] For elliptical ground plans in Renaissance
architecture and architectural theory, see W. Lotz, “Die ovalen Kirchenräume
des Cinquecento,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 1955, 7, 9
ff.
It is the author of this
most interesting monograph who called the writer’s attention to the elliptical
frames in Falconetto’s Casino Cornaro et Padua of Ca. 1525 (A.
Venturi, Storia dell’arte HHC: Italiana, XI. I, Figs. 8, 9; for the
artist, see Thieme-Becker, op. cit., XI, p. 223 f.).
12
- apart from Michelangelo’s first project for
the tomb of Julius II (Text III. 2),
where it creeps in, as it were, as an interior feature invisible
from without - not until Baldassare Peruzzi.
Kepler, on the other hand, did break the “spell
of circularity” not only in establishing the elliptical shape of the planetary
orbits but in a much more general way.
In contrast to Galileo - though not as yet in the sense of
postGalilean physics [9] - he considered the rectilinear and not the
circular movement as “natural” to the physical world: “I deny,” he says, “that
God has instituted any perpetual nonrectilinear motion unguided by mental
control.” And the contrast between his
and Galileo’s point of view becomes almost amusingly evident when both attempt
to support their celestial mechanics by drawing a parallel between the
movements of the stars and those of the human body.
Kepler assures us that “all muscles
operate according to the principle of rectilinear movement”: “the bending of
the head, the feet and the tongue are brought about by straight muscles
shifted and stretched from here to there.” Galileo,
thinking in terms of effect (positional change) rather than cause (muscular
action), comes to exactly the opposite conclusion, “All human or animal
movements,” he contends, “are circular; and to the objection that man can run,
jump, walk up and down, etc., he replies: “Yes, but these are only secondary
movements depending on the primary ones which take place at the joints.
It is from the bending of the leg at
the knee and of the thigh at the hip, which are circular movements, that the
jump or the run results.”
Galileo, then, reduces all human movements to a
system of circles and epicycles; and this is, curiously enough, precisely what
Leonardo da Vinci had suggested in his Trattato della pittura and
systematically elaborated in a treatise on human movement which can be
reconstructed from the compilation of one of his followers (Fig. 13).
Galileo could hardly have known of
Leonardo’s ideas; but it is noteworthy that his conception of human movement
as completely agrees with that of the first High Renaissance painter as it
differs from that of the greatest contemporary astronomer.
In fact, this difference evinces,
beyond the question of circularity and rectilinearity, a basic contrast
between a cinematic and a dynamic interpretation of movement as such - a
contrast which, as Alexandre Koyré has pointed out, applies to Galileo’s and
Kepler’s astronomical as well as to their anatomical notions. [10]
6. Celestial Dynamics
vs. Celestial Cinematics
Shall we conclude from all this that Kepler was
more “modern” than Galileo? Nothing
could be farther from the truth. If
Kepler was more nearly right in several cases, [11] it was not because he had
fewer prejudices but because his
[9] The statement in
Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, p.
26, line 3, was proved to be incorrect by Koyré, “Attitude esthétigue…” p.
844.
[10] Koyré,
ibidem.
[11] For Kepler’s view on the problem of the
absolute motion of free-falling bodies, see Kovré. “A Documentary History…”
13
prejudices were of a different kind.
And it is one of the most amazing
paradoxes in history that Galileo was in error in some respects precisely
because he was more “progressive” than Kepler in principle.
Kepler and his friends were, after all, no less
deeply committed to the belief in the metaphysical supremacy - as we
would say, the “privileged status” - of the circle and the sphere than
Galileo. He was, in fact, the stricter
Platonist (or Aristotelian) in that he accepted the ontological difference
between geometrical figures and physical bodies which Galileo dared to deny.
Galileo had learned to consider the ideas of the sphere or
the circle as adequately realized in every material sphere or circle;
Kepler still sharply distinguished between “the intelligible idea of the
circle” and the “actual path of a planet.” But
just this “modern” geometrization of nature - or, put it the other way,
materialization of geometry - made it difficult for Galileo to deny the
privileged status of circularity in physics and astronomy while accepting it
as axiomatic in mathematics and aesthetics; whereas, conversely, Kepler’s
“conservative” separation between ideal and material form enabled him to
affirm that even the celestial bodies, qua bodies, were bound to
deviate from a perfectly circular course, however desirable from a
metaphysical point of view, when such a deviation was required by the laws of
nature: “If the celestial movements,” he says, “were the work of the mind, it
could be validly concluded that the orbits of the planets are perfect
circles…; the celestial movements, however, are not the work of the mind but
the work of nature, that is to say, of the natural faculty of bodies or of a
soul that acts in full accord with these corporeal faculties…; even assuming
that we were to endow the planets with intelligences, these intelligences
would still be unable to achieve what they want, that is to say, the absolute
perfection of the circle; for… since, in order to produce movement, there
would also be necessary, in addition to the mind, the natural and animal
faculties, these would follow their own inclinations [ingenium]; they
would not do everything according to the dictates of the mind - which they
would not apprehend - but would do much according to natural necessity.”
Here Kepler explicitly rejects a mathematical
and aesthetic prejudice which Galileo implicitly accepts; but he rejects it
- as is evident from the very wording of the text just quoted - in the
name of a still animistic cosmology which in Galileo’s mind had never existed,
and whose intrusion upon “pure science” must have struck him as no less
outmoded, illegitimate and, if one may say so, Manneristic, [12] than Tasso’s
allegorical poetry, perspective anamorphosis and the “double images” of
Arcimboldo (court painter, incidentally, to Kepler’s imperial patron, Rudolph
II). If - to quote Alexandre Koyré
once more - Kepler succeeded in substituting celestial dynamics for celestial
cinematics, he was able to do so precisely because he had never given up the
[11] See Koyré. “Attitude esthétique…” pp. 843,
846.
[12] See Koyré, ibidem, p. 847.
14
traditional Aristotelian interpretation of
motion as a “process” (according to him the planets would stop in their tracks
if the species motrix or virtus motoria supposed to emanate from
the sun ceased to act upon them), while Galileo had progressed to the
interpretation of motion as a “state”: [13] as Galileo ignored - and, in a
sense, was bound to ignore - Kepler’s ellipses, so did Kepler ignore - and, in
a sense, was bound to ignore - the principle of inertia quite clearly (though
restrictedly) stated in Galileo’s Second Letter on the Sunspots of
1612. [14]
[14]
Galileo, Ed. Naz., V, p.
134
f.: {HHC: Italian not reproduced}
The fact that Kepler ignored Galileo’s restricted principle of
inertia just as Galileo ignored Kepler’s first and second planetary laws was
brought to the writer’s attention by Mr. Stillman Drake.
15
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