Galileo Galilei famously stood trial for his insistence—based on astronomical observations through his telescopes—that the Copernican model of the Solar System was correct. The Earth revolved around the Sun, not the other way around, contrary to the Catholic Church's teachings at the time. He was never formally charged with heresy, but he was forced to recant his stance. Legend has it that after he did so, he muttered, 'E pur si muove' ('And yet it moves'), meaning the Earth.
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As with many such legends, it's probably too good to be true. 'It would have been crazy for Galileo to say that in front of the Inquisitor,' astrophysicist Mario Livio told Ars. Livio is the author of a new biography of the famous scientist, Galileo and the Science Deniers, and while researching the book, he found himself captivated by the longstanding debate about whether or not Galileo really spoke those words. It resulted in a separate academic paper about his findings.
The earliest biography of Galileo was written by his protege, Vincenzo Viviana in 1655-1656, with no mention of the phrase. According to Livio, the first mention in print is in a single paragraph in the 1757 book, The Italian Library, by Giuseppe Baretti, written over 100 years after Galileo's death. That would point to the story being a myth. But then a science historian named Antonio Favaro spent four decades studying Galileo's life and work, publishing a massive tome, The Works of Galileo Galilei. In 1911, he also published several articles detailing his efforts to determine the origin of the famous phrase.
That year, Favaro received a letter from a man in Belgium named Jules Van Belle, claiming to own a painting, circa 1643—shortly after Galileo's death in 1642—that depicted Galileo in prison, holding a nail in his right hand, having traced the Earth moving around the Sun. Written underneath was the famous motto. The painting was attributed to a Spanish painter named Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and Van Belle thought it may have once belonged to an army commander named Ottavio Piccolomini, brother of the Archbishop of Siena. Galileo served the first six months of his house arrest at the archbishop's home.
That raised the possibility that Galileo had said those words, just not in front of the Inquisitor. Yet the painting was never examined by any independent art historians. When Livio decided to follow up on Favaro's work more than a century later, he found that nobody knew the current location of the Murillo painting. He consulted with four art experts specializing in Murillo's art, and all determined, based on photographs of the canvas, that it was not the Spanish artist's work.
After about a year hunting down various clues, Livio finally rediscovered Van Belle's painting. It had been sold to a private collector in 2007 by one of Van Belle's descendants. The auction house had dated the painting to the 19th century. So it is still far more likely that the famous phrase is just a legend that emerged sometime in the mid-18th century. But no final determination can be made unless the new owner agrees to let the painting be examined by art historians.
And Yet It Moves Ost
AdvertisementNonetheless, 'Even if Galileo never spoke those words, they have some relevance for our current troubled times, when even provable facts are under attack by science deniers,' Livio recently wrote at Scientific American. 'Galileo's legendary intellectual defiance—'in spite of what you believe, these are the facts'—becomes more important than ever.' Ars sat down with Livio to learn more.
Ars: Perhaps Galileo never actually said 'And yet it moves.' But one of the most famous genuine quotes attributed to Galileo is this: 'The book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics.'
Livio: That was one of his incredible intuitions. Today, this is so natural to us. We still don't exactly understand it, but it's very natural that all the laws of physics are written as mathematical expressions or equations. But in his time, those laws were not written in any way. So how did he get this intuition that it is all written in the language of mathematics? To me, this is absolutely incredible that he thought about that. In fact, he formulated the very first laws of physics, with the slight exception of Archimedes maybe.
Ars Technica: Galileo is one of the most famous scientists in history, and there have been so many books published about his life and work. What led you to write your own take?
And Yet It Moves Quote
Mario Livio: One reason is that all the existing biographies of Galileo, at least the serious biographies, were written mostly by science historians or science writers. None was written by an active researcher in astronomy or astrophysics. So I did think that I can perhaps put his discoveries in the context of what we know today. A second reason is that the very best biographies that exist are not that accessible for a general audience. They are scholarly biographies. So my goal was to write a somewhat shorter, more accessible, focused biography, but I did my best to still keep it entirely accurate.
Finally, I always knew this, but it just struck me even more so recently, that at the end of the day, Galileo was fighting science deniers, and we are unfortunately encountering a rampant science denial today. So I thought that this would be an important book to write. A fight that Galileo fought already 400 years ago, and truly, eventually won, it seems we somehow need to fight again.
Ars: Galileo is still a powerful symbol of intellectual freedom (scientific or otherwise). Why has Galileo captured our imaginations for so long?
Livio: There are many reasons for that. Galileo, by writing the Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, attracted a lot of attention. He was perhaps the best known scientist in Europe because of his discoveries in astronomy. So his book attracted the wrath of the Inquisition and the Pope, and he was put on trial for this and was humiliated and suspected of heresy and put on house arrest for eight and a half years. This is pretty incredible. We are now in lockdown for what, a couple of months, and we're going crazy.
So he became the symbol for the fight for intellectual freedom. It was not, as sometimes it is portrayed, the fight between science and religion. Galileo was a religious person, like everybody else at that time. All his point was that the Bible is not a science book, and we shouldn't therefore interpret literally what is said there as if these are scientific facts. 'The Bible was written for our salvation,' he said, 'Not as a science book.'
AdvertisementIf there is an apparent conflict between a literal interpretation of the text in scripture and what experiments or observations tell us, then it means that we didn't understand and we need to change the interpretation. As long as the conclusions of science concerning physical reality are accepted, with no intervention of religious beliefs and no denouncing of provable facts, no conflict between the two realms can exist.
It had also to do with his personal characteristics, of which stubbornness was a chief one, as well as a high degree of self-righteousness. Galileo advocated that there were only three things one needs to do to determine truths about the world: experiments, observations, and reasoning based on data from those. He also said that he didn't believe that the same God who has given us our senses, intelligence, and reasoning wanted us to abandon their use. So his tongue could be sharp, and his pen even sharper.
Ars: Conversely, Galileo's example has been twisted by various cranks and crackpots into the exact opposite of what Galileo stood for. I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's observation: 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.'
Livio: This is the Galileo fallacy. It is really a complete twist of logic. There are people who say, 'Look, Galileo also was alone among all those people who disagreed with him, and he turned out to be right. So if I have my opinion and it's against everybody else, then I am right too.' But that really doesn't apply. Galileo was right because he was right, not because he was alone against everybody else. Most people who are alone against everybody else are wrong. Putting Galileo on trial, finding him guilty, and condemning him to house arrest would have been wrong even had he been wrong about his model of the Solar System. He expressed a different scientific view. So what?
Ars: Science builds on what came before, and we've come a long way since Galileo. So let's talk about the connection between the past and the present in terms of his work.
Livio: Galileo wasn't always right. For instance, because he was a mechanical person, it was very foreign to him to think of forces that act mysteriously across distance. So he didn't really think about gravity the way we think about it today, not even in the way that Newton thought about it. Kepler, for example, had written about the moon perhaps having an influence on the tides, which is correct. Galileo ignored that. He suggested this model that had to do with the Earth's speed and its revolution about the Sun, with those two motions combining to generate the tides. This was an interesting mechanical model, only it's incorrect and didn't really work.
He also never accepted Kepler's elliptical orbits of planets, based on false impressions from the Greeks about things being perfectly symmetrical. So he thought orbits should be circles and not ellipses. But when you talk about symmetry, it's not the symmetry of the shapes that counts, it's the symmetry of the law. In other words, the orbit can be elliptical, but the ellipse can have any orientation in space.
Trust in science. That's my main message. What is good about science is that it self-corrects. The self-correction sometimes takes a very short time and sometimes take a very long time. It could take sometimes decades, or maybe even centuries, but eventually it self-corrects. It is generally not wise to bet against the judgement of science. In a case such as climate change, or a pandemic, when the fate of life on our planet is at stake, it is absolutely insane.
“And yet it moves.” This may be the most famous line attributed to the renowned scientist Galileo Galilei. The “it” in the quote refers to Earth. “It moves” was a startling denial of the notion, adopted by the Catholic Church at the time, that Earth was at the center of the universe and therefore stood still. Galileo was convinced that model was wrong. Although he could not prove it, his astronomical observations and his experiments in mechanics led him to conclude that Earth and the other planets were revolving around the sun.
That brings us to “and yet.” As much as Galileo may have hoped to convince the Church that in moving Earth from its anointed position, he was not contradicting Scripture, he did not fully appreciate that Church officials could not accept what they regarded as his impudent invasion into their exclusive province: theology.
During his trial for suspicion of heresy, Galileo chose his words carefully. It was only after the trial, angered by his conviction no doubt, that he was said to have muttered to the inquisitors, “Eppur si muove”(“And yet it moves)”, as if to say that they may have won this battle, but in the end, truth would win out.
But did Galileo really utter those famous words? There is no doubt that he thought along those lines. His bitterness about the trial; the fact that he had been forced to abjure and recant his life’s work; the humiliating reality that his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems had been put on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books; and his deep contempt for the inquisitors who judged him continually occupied his mind for all the years following the trial. We can also be certain that he did not (as legend has it) mutter that phrase in front of the inquisitors. Doing so would have been insanely risky. But did he say it at all? If not, when and how did the myth about this motto start circulating?
Science historian Antonio Favaro dedicated four decades to the study and contextualization of Galileo’s life and work, eventually producing the monumental book Le Opere di Galileo Galilei (The Works of Galileo Galilei). As part of that Herculean effort, in 1911 he also published a few articles describing his extensive research devoted to uncovering the origins of the motto. Favaro determined that the earliest mention of the phrase in print was in a book entitled The Italian Library, published in London in 1757 by Italian author Giuseppe Baretti.
Baretti colorfully wrote, “This is the celebrated Galileo, who was in the inquisition for six years, and put to the torture, for saying, that the earth moved. The moment he was set at liberty, he looked up to the sky and down to the ground, and, stamping with his foot, in contemplative mood, said, Eppur si move; that is, still it moves, meaning the earth.”
Even if we were to disregard the unhistorical embellishments in this account, it would be difficult to accept the testimony of a book that appeared more than a century after Galileo’s death as evidence of the veracity of the quote. Favaro was equally skeptical initially—until an unexpected event caused him to reconsider the question.
An Intriguing Painting
In 1911 Favaro received a letter from a certain Jules Van Belle, who lived in Roeselare, Belgium. Van Belle claimed to own a painting that had been painted in 1643 or 1645 that contained the famous motto. If true, this assertion would have meant that the phrase was already known very shortly after Galileo’s death in 1642.
The painting, of which Favaro saw only a photograph, showed Galileo in prison. He held a nail in his right hand, with which he had apparently traced Earth moving around the sun on the wall with the words “E pur si move” written underneath.
Based on an unclear signature, Van Belle attributed the painting to the 17th-century Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. And he speculated that it had originally belonged to the Spanish army commander Ottavio Piccolomini, brother of the Archbishop of Siena, in whose home Galileo served the first six months of his house arrest.
Favaro publicized this story of the presumed discovery of a portrait of Galileo dating to the 17th century and containing the celebrated motto, and the tale made it to the pages of several newspapers. Belgian physicist Eugene Lagrange even went to Roeselare to see the painting with his own eyes, which he reported in the Belgian newspaper L’Etoile Belge on January 13, 1912.
The discovery of the painting definitely had an impact. Until then most historians had considered the famous phrase to be a myth, but the new finding caused a number of Galileo scholars to change their minds. Science historian John Joseph Fahie wrote in 1929, “We must revise our judgments, and conclude that Galileo did utter these words, not, however, in the awful chamber of the Inquisition, as the fable has it, but to some sympathetic friend outside, from one of whom, doubtless, Piccolomini had them.” Renowned Galileo scholar Stillman Drake also concluded, “In any case there is no doubt now that the famous words were attributed to Galileo before his death, not invented a century later merely to fit his character.”
Strangely, in spite of its great value for the history of science, Van Belle’s painting has never been subjected to any independent examination by experts. When I wanted to initiate such a scrutiny, I was astonished to discover that not only was the current location of the painting unknown but that, as far as I could initially determine, no science or art historian had even seen it after 1912. Naturally, I decided to search for it.
The Hunt
First, I wanted to get an expert opinion on the attribution to Murillo. To this end, I sent a copy of the photograph of the painting to four Murillo specialists (two in Spain, one in the U.K. and one in the U.S.). They all independently responded that although it is difficult to provide conclusive opinions based on a photograph, when considering the style, subject matter and relevant historical facts, they were quite convinced that Murillo did not paint this portrait. One said that the painter was probably not Spanish, and another suggested that the painting was from the 19th century.
Motivated to continue to investigate by these unanimous, unexpected judgments, I discovered that an article about the painting appeared simultaneously in two Belgian newspapers (De Halle and De Poperinghenaar) on February 23, 1936. The feature reported that an important portrait of Galileo had been exhibited at Museum Vleeshuis in Antwerp, Belgium.
Inquiry at Vleeshuis revealed that on September 13, 1933, Van Belle had indeed loaned it a painting entitled Galileo in Prison. The loan was also reported (with the title Galileo and His “E pur si muove”) in the Gazet Van Antwerpen on September 15, 1933. Further inquiries uncovered the surprising fact that Stedelijk Museum Sint-Niklaas (SteM Sint-Niklaas) in Belgium has in its collection a painting that appears to be identical to the one loaned to Vleeshuis. Moreover, a close inspection of the wall in front of Galileo in this painting revealed a drawing of Earth orbiting the sun, a few other drawings (possibly of Saturn or the phases of Venus) and the famous motto. This portrait was documented as having been painted in 1837 by the Flemish painter Romaan-Eugeen Van Maldeghem. It was donated to the city of Sint-Niklaas by art collector Lodewijk Verstraeten. And the museum obtained it after his wife’s death in 1904 or 1905.
This development created a very interesting situation. There were two virtually identical paintings. One, owned by Van Belle, was claimed to have been painted in 1643 or 1645. The other, by Van Maldeghem, was painted in 1837. The Van Belle painting made its first documented public appearance in 1911. It was loaned to Vleeshuis in 1933 and was exhibited there in 1936. Since then its whereabouts have been unknown. The second painting has been in the collection of SteM Sint-Niklaas since 1904 or 1905. The extreme similarity of the two paintings left no doubt that either Van Maldeghem copied an earlier painting or that someone copied Van Maldeghem’s painting, either in the 19th or early 20th century.
To complicate things further, I discovered that in 2000 the Antwerp auction house Bernaerts Auctioneers took bids on a painting entitled Galileo in Prison. It was listed as having been painted by Flemish painter Henrij Gregoir in 1837—the same year in which Van Maldeghem painted his portrait of Galileo with the same title. Fortunately, I was able to obtain a photograph of the painting, and although the title is the same, the artwork is very different.
Eureka!
To make further progress, I tried to uncover more information about Van Maldeghem and his painting. Two Flemish books on the lives and works of Flemish and Dutch artists—one by J. Immerzeel, Jr., from 1842, and another by Christiaan Kramm from 1859—listed Galileo in Prison as one of Van Maldeghem’s original paintings , without any hint or suggestion that it might have been a copy. Significantly, these two books were published while Van Maldeghem was still alive, when all the information concerning the painting was still readily available. It was difficult, therefore, to avoid the impression that his painting was the original after all. This feeling was further enhanced by the realization that the theme of Galileo’s conflict with the Inquisition became quite popular with painters only in the 19th century. And it was also entirely consistent with the opinions previously expressed by the Murillo experts. Recall that one suggested that the painter was not Spanish, and another judged that the painting was from the 19th century.
All of this, however, still did not explain what happened to Van Belle’s painting after 1936. I could think of three main possibilities: The painting could have been sold by Jules Van Belle himself. Or it could have been inherited by a relative (and perhaps sold later). Or it might have been destroyed during World War II. Following this line of thought, I decided to attempt some genealogy research.
To make a very long story short, with a serious effort, considerable help and quite a bit of luck, I managed to find a living great-grandson of Van Belle’s niece. And through him, I discovered that in 2007 his grandmother sold a collection of paintings via the Campo & Campo auction house and gallery in Antwerp. Lot number 213 on the list was entitled Galileo in Prison. The auction house’s photograph shows it to be the very painting I was searching for. I rediscovered Van Belle’s painting!
Common practice in the art world prevents auction houses from revealing the identity of buyers, but I did find out that the painting was bought by a private collector and not by a dealer. There were two other noteworthy pieces of information that were revealed in the auction. First, Campo & Campo judged the painting to be from the 19th century. Second, a close inspection did not find any date or signature. This observation was confirmed by a representative from the auction house.
So what can we say about the question of whether Galileo said those famous words? The historical evidence points to the story first appearing (or at least being documented) only in the middle of the 18th century—long after Galileo’s death. This makes the motto much more likely to be apocryphal. Nevertheless, it would be thrilling if (perhaps as a result of the present article) the current owner of Galileo in Prison will allow it to be thoroughly examined to determine its exact age.
Even if Galileo never spoke those words, they have some relevance for our current troubled times, when even provable facts are under attack by science deniers. Galileo’s legendary intellectual defiance—“in spite of what you believe, these are the facts”—becomes more important than ever.