Galileo as a Critic of the Arts by Erwin PanofskyReview by: Edward RosenIsis, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Mar., 1956), pp. 78-80Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/227560 .

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78 BOOK REVIEWS

the trial of Galileo a significance that Pro- fessor de Santillana has missed; perhaps one of the members of the maligned Society of Jesus might even today advance interpreta- tions different from his; but this does not detract here and now from the merit of this book, which should be in the hands of every historian of science.

F. SHERWOOD TAYLOR t Science Museum, London

We regret to have to inform our readers that Dr. Sherwood Taylor died on 5 January i956 and was unable to correct proof of his review.

ERWIN PANOFSKY: GalUleo as a Critic of the Arts. 41 PP., ig fig. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954. 6.75 gld. (about $x.80).

Galileo's immortal achievements in the natural sciences are familiar to everybody. But his deft skill and excellent taste as an astute judge of matters aesthetic are not so widely known. These less familiar attain- ments form the subject of the fascinating little book under review. The main focus of its attention is a letter written by Galileo to a painter, who had been assailed with argu- ments maintaining the superiority of sculpture over painting. In response to his request for assistance in overcoming these arguments, Galileo sent him a reply upholding the greater merits of painting. This reply is now re- printed by Panofsky, who translates it into English and elucidates its contents by a masterly historical and critical analysis, richly illustrated.

Some minor imperfections, however, must be pointed out. For example, the Latin word "moechus" means an adulterer, not a bastard (p. 2). A fresco in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome (pp. 5-6) is misattributed to Santa Maria del Popolo (Fig. 2). It was not the painter himself (p. 5), but others, who criticized the title of a book by Galileo; for the painter told Galileo: "I haven't seen the book, and even if I had, I wouldn't understand it because it's in Latin."1 Galileo was born in Pisa, not Florence (p. 5), and not "on the same day on which Michelangelo

1Le opere di Galileo Galilei, national edition (Florence: Barbera, i89o-I909; reprinted 1929- 39); cited hereafter as "NE"; X, 442.i6-17.

died" (p. i6). A correspondent's comments to Galileo about Kepler are translated by Panofsky (p. 23) as follows:

I believe with Kepler that to confine the planets to the rigorous precision of circles would mean to tie them to a treadmill against their will .... I know, as you do, that many motions are not concentric in relation to either the earth or the sun ... . And that this is true of all of them if their orbit is elliptical as Kepler claims it to be.

Panofsky's translation makes this corres- pondent say that Kepler's elliptical planetary orbits are not concentric in relation to the sun; in other words, the center of the orbits is not the sun. Yet according to Panofsky (p. 2I), Kepler showed "that the center of the planetary revolutions is . . . the center of the sun's very body." Did Galileo's cor- respondent misunderstand Kepler or did Panofsky misunderstand the correspondent? The second group of three dots in Panofsky's translation indicates the omission of some Italian words. If we put them back, we see what Galileo's correspondent really meant:

I know, as you do, that many motions have their center neither in the sun nor in the earth [he is thinking of Jupiter's satellites]; some have their center in the earth [here he refers to the moon]; some have their center in the sun [he has Mercury and Venus in mind]; and perhaps all the motions have their center in the sun if the orbit of the planets is elliptical, as Kepler claims.

Then all the Keplerian planetary orbits do have their center in the sun, according to the correspondent, who is misconstrued by Panof- sky as saying just the opposite.

Panofsky asserts (p. 20) that Kepler, like Galileo, belonged to the Accademia dei Lincei. But Kepler never became a member of that organization. Why didn't Galileo ever lift a finger to obtain membership for him? In his Dialogue Galileo called Kepler a great man "of open and acute mind."8 But along- side this passage he put the marginal note "Kepler is respectfully reproached," and added at once that Kepler "gave his ear and

sArchivio storico italiano, I9I6, 74, 2: 129- 130.

'NE VII, 486.30-33; Dialogue on the great world systems, ed. G. de Santillana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 469; Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems -Ptolemaic and Copernican, tr. S. Drake (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of Califor- nia Press, 1953), p. 462.

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BOOK REVIEWS 79 assent . . . to occult qualities and similar infantile notions." Galileo had previously referred by implication to Kepler's book about Mars as proof that planetary theory had not yet been worked out satisfactorily.4 Galileo thereby showed that he had utterly missed the significance of what we now recognize as Kepler's first and second laws of planetary motion. According to Panofsky (pp. 24-25), the reason for Galileo's obtuse- ness was his addiction to the traditional prin- ciple that the heavenly motions must be circular. Kepler also long adhered to this principle.! Panofsky declares (p. 30) that Kepler departed from it "when such a devia- tion was required by what he had established as the laws of nature." Actually he abandoned it several years before he thought of elliptical orbits.' What made him give it up was not a law of nature but the realization that no circle would fit the observations at his dis- posal, whereupon he concluded that "the planet's orbit is not a circle but an oval figure." 7

If we wish to understand more fully why Galileo overlooked Kepler's planetary laws, we should recall four appraisals of Kepler which Galileo made over a period of two decades. In I6I4 he remarked to a French- man who had come to visit him that a book by Kepler was "so obscure that apparently the author did not know what he was talk- ing about." 8 Regarding the Appendix to an- other of Kepler's works, in I626 Galileo con- fided to a correspondent: "If I must give you my frank opinion, it seems very weak to me. True, I understand only the tiniest part of the Appendix. I don't know whether this lack of comprehension is due to my limited intelligence or to the extravagance of the author's style"; and again Galileo doubted whether what Kepler wrote "can be under- stood by anybody else, perhaps not by Kepler himself."' Eight years later Galileo affirmed: "I have always considered Kepler a subtle and open mind (perhaps too open). But my

4NE VII, 480.30-35; ed. Santillana, p. 462; tr. Drake, p. 455.

5sAstronomia nova, ch. 40; Gesammelte werke, ed. W. v. Dyck and Max Caspar (Mu- nich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1937- ), III, 263.10-I1.

6Werke, XV, 247-251. 'Astronomia nova, ch. 44; Werke, III,

287.35-36. 'NE XIX, 590.46-47. 9NE XIII, 301-302.

philosophizing is very different from his. Maybe when we wrote about the same sub- jects (but only in the case of the heavenly motions) we at times hit upon similar ideas (just a few) so that we attributed to some true effect the same true cause. Yet this will not be found to be so for more than one per cent of my thoughts."'" Shortly after the publication of his Dialogue in I632 Galileo remarked that he regarded the thoughts of a certain Belgian astronomer and "some of Kepler's thoughts as tending to weaken rather than strengthen Copernicus' theory. These men appear to me to have been too eager (as the saying goes). Hence many people, in judging some of their fantasies and perhaps believing these to be Copernicus' own ideas, will make fun of the Copernican system, not unreasonably as it seems to me."' It is clear then that Galileo did not altogether relish having Kepler as an ally in the struggle to win acceptance for the Copernican as- tronomy. The German's obscurity, prolixity and mysticism were so repulsive to Galileo that he was disinclined to go digging for the nuggets of real gold hidden away in Kepler's heap of dross.

In the frontispiece of Galileo's Dialogue three men were shown engaged in earnest conversation; with a nonchalant disregard of chronology, they were labeled "Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus." Reproducing this en- graving as the frontispiece of his own book. Panofsky says that Copernicus is "represented in the guise of Galileo." Now while the artist probably had little or no idea of the actual appearance of the three interlocutors, he certainly was familiar with the features of Galileo. These bear not the faintest resem- blance to the figure marked "Copernicus" in the frontispiece. Nor would Galileo have per- mitted them to do so. For the Roman Catholic decree denouncing Copernicus' doc- trine as false and suppressing all books which expounded it was described by Galileo as a "salutary edict." a He most anxiously sought to avoid being identified with the condemned man, and would therefore never have allowed the engraver to draw Copernicus "in the guise of Galileo."

I have discussed these few faults of detail

'NE XVI, I63.31-37. 11NE XIV, 340.34-341-39. " NE VII, 29.2; ed. Santillana, p. 5; tr.

Drake, p. 5.

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8o BOOK REVIEWS

in Panofsky's book only because I am con- vinced that it will appeal so strongly to several different classes of readers that he will soon have to prepare a second edition, in which he may wish to modify some of his present statements.

City College, New York EDWARD ROSEN

* * *

PERRY MILLER: The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Reissue. 528 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I954. $6.5o. London: Oxford Uni- versity Press, I954. 52S.

The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. 5I3 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I954. $6.50. London: Oxford University Press, I954. 52S.

Two volumes of Perry Miller's monu- mental history, The New England Mind, are now available. The first, Thle Seventeenth Century, originally was published in I939. Since then it has come to be regarded as a classic among studies of ideas in America. To its influence may be attributed much of the new respect in recent years for the coherence and vigor of Puritan thought. The influence of the book, though great, might have been greater had it been less difficult to obtain. Fortunately, it has been reissued by the Harvard University Press along with its sequel, From Colony to Province. To- gether the two volumes provide an analysis of the complex system of ideas brought to this land in I630, and an account of the decline of the system during the next cen- tury. Mr. Miller's study of this change is made dramatic by his emphasis on the fact that Puritanism began its American history under conditions eminently favorable to longevity. Nevertheless, within forty years the underpinnings of this impressive intel- lectual edifice were patently weakening, and within a century they had virtually col- lapsed. By I730 most of the vitality and imagination New England had directed toward religion was bestowed elsewhere. How to account for so rapid a disintegration of a firmly established culture? Mr. Miller answers the question in his more recent volume, a case study of the emergence within a few generations of a prudential, middle-class, empirical order out of a tightly

controlled, aristocratic, Christian colony. From Colony to Province describes the secu- larization of European thought under Ameri- can conditions.

Needless to say, the scientific revolution of the century forms a part of the story. But in Mr. Miller's view the new science does not fit in quite as one might expect. Given the distance between theology and science in our time, we might think to find Newtonian physics enlisted as an ideological partisan of those who were increasingly hostile to religious rule. Mr. Miller's meticu- lous scrutiny of the stages of declension does not support any such inference. On the contrary, many of the theocracy's leaders, including such "conservatives" (Mr. Miller deplores this label) as Cotton Mather, were enthusiastically receptive to the new science. As a matter of fact, in the one political crisis which actually turned upon a scientific issue, the more "advanced" position - in support of inoculation for smallpox - was held by the more orthodox faction. If this is sur- prising today, it is doubtless because we tend to take the Darwinian controversy of the recent past as a model for such confronta- tions of science and theology. The New England Mind demonstrates the dangers of any facile use of the concept of a "war" be- tween science and religion. The Puritan lead- ers, far from regarding the expanding uni- verse of science as a threat to piety, found it a bulwark against secularization.

The Puritans had never been hostile to the exercise of reason. In their view the study of the physical universe was perfectly con- sonant with piety. To be sure, the reason of natural man was warped by his corrupt will. But with grace his capacity for effi- cient rational activity was, at least up to a point, restored; then his mind might func- tion according to received logical standards. Reason, that is, was identified with Aristo- telian logic, or with the Puritan's favored Ramist modification of Aristotle. At the be- ginning of the eighteenth century, when the new science made itself felt, the old logic was abandoned. Though the connotations of the word "reason" changed radically, the scientific study of nature continued to be regarded as a pious endeavor. If Newtonian physics did not raise the specter of a natural- istic universe, it was, Mr. Miller maintains, because the intensity of the Puritan faith

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