"Until about 1600, the posture of the Venetian Party toward science was one of more or less open hostility, favoring black magic. But in the early 1600s, the group around Sarpi succeeded in changing their public profile from being the enemies of science to being the embodiment of the most advanced and sophisticated science. For several centuries after this, the Venetians would work inside the scientific community to take it over. They would claim to represent the highest expression of scientific values. In this way, they could institutionalize the dead hand of formalism and the fetishism of authority, so as to stifle the process of discovery.
The chief of Venetian intelligence who made this possible was Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi and his friend Fulgenzio Micanzio were Servite monks. Sarpi was part of an important Venetian salon of the day, the Ridotti Morosini, which met for discussions in the palace of the Morosini family on the Grand Canal. The Morosini were the direct ideological heirs of Gasparo Contarini. The Morosini salon centered on a discussion of science, and it became the nucleus for the youthful faction of the Venetian oligarchy, the so-called Giovani, who became powerful after 1582. The Giovani favored a policy of cooperation with Holland, England, and France in conflicts with the Austrian and Spanish Hapsburgs and the papacy. The Vecchi, the oldies, serviced the Venetian networks on the Spanish and papal side, which were also quite extensive.
We have told in other locations how Sarpi organized and unleashed the Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe, using agents like Max von Thurn und Taxis, Christian von Anhalt, Christoph von Dona, and the Elector Palatine Frederick, the so-called Winter King. In this sense, Paolo Sarpi personally exterminated about one-third of the entire population of Europe, and about one-half of the population of Germany and surrounding areas. Sarpi also caused the assassination of King Henry IV of France when Henry opposed Sarpi’s designs and exposed him as an atheist. Paolo Sarpi, we see, is a worthy predecessor to Bertrand Russell.
But Sarpi in his own time was considered an eminent mathematician. One contemporary wrote of him: “…I can say about him without any exaggeration whatsoever that no one in Europe excels him in the knowledge of [mathematical] sciences.” This is the view of Sarpi held by Galileo Galilei.
Sarpi’s companions at the Ridotto Morosini during the 1590s included the influential mystic Giordano Bruno. Starting in 1592, there was also a professor of mathematics at the nearby University of Padua: Galileo Galilei, a native of Florence. Galileo taught mathematics in Padua from 1592 to 1610, and it was during his stay on Venetian territory that he became a celebrity. Galileo was a paid agent of Sarpi and, after Sarpi’s death, of Sarpi’s right-hand man Micanzio. There is a correspondence on scientific subjects between Sarpi and Galileo, including on magnetism, which was Sarpi’s favorite, because he found it occult. Galileo proposed some of his first ideas on falling bodies to Sarpi, who enthused that Galileo had been born to solve the question of motion.
Galileo’s fame was procured when he used a small telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the phases of Venus. He reported these sightings in his essay The Starry Messenger, which instantly made him the premier scientist in Europe and thus a very important agent of influence for the Venetian Party. This entire telescope operation had been devised by Paolo Sarpi.
The first telescope had been built by Leonardo da Vinci about a hundred years before Galileo. Susan Welsh has called attention to the research of Domenico Argentieri on Leonardo’s optical manuscripts, which demonstrates that Leonardo’s telescope had a convex lens at one end and a concave lens at the other. Its magnifying power was rather weak, but it was a telescope. There are reports of a telescope made in Italy in 1590. By 1608, telescopes began to turn up in Holland, and Galileo says he was encouraged by reports of them to build his own telescope in 1609.
Sarpi’s version of these events is more revealing. He wrote on March 16, 1610 that a telescope had been found in Holland two years before, therefore in spring 1608. “Once this was found,” wrote Sarpi, “our mathematician of Padua [Galileo] and some of our other people who are not ignorant of these arts began to use the telescope on celestial bodies, adjusting it and refining it for the purpose….” Notice: Galileo “and some of our other people.” It would appear that the observations were made not from Padua, but from Paolo Sarpi’s Servite monastery in Venice. Sarpi wrote about Galileo as “our mathematician,” saying that he had “frequently discussed with him at the time” about the results of the telescopic observations, and did not need to read what Galileo had written about them.
In 1611, a Polish visitor to Venice, Rey, wrote that Galileo had not really been the inventor of the telescope, but that the “adviser, author, and director” of the telescope project had been Father Paolo Sarpi, “who is considered the greatest mathematician here.”
In 1597, Johannes Kepler had sent a copy of his new book, Mysterium Cosmographicum, to Galileo. This was the work in which Kepler proposed the Platonic solids as the basis for understanding the harmonic ordering of the planetary orbits around the Sun. Galileo thereupon sent a letter to Kepler, explaining that he, too, was a follower of the Copernican or heliocentric view, but that he “had not dared” to come forward with this view because of fear, and preferred to sit on the whole business because of the climate of opinion. Kepler had written back urging Galileo to be confident and to go forward with the struggle for truth, offering to find publishers in Germany if the Italian climate were too oppressive. Galileo did not do this, and refused to comment in detail on Kepler’s book. According to Kepler’s biographer Max Caspar, in the following years Galileo used material from Kepler in his lectures, but without giving Kepler credit.
Kepler and Galileo were in frequent contact for over 30 years. Kepler commented with benevolent interest – and with subtle polemics – about Galileo’s published works. But Galileo never commented systematically on Kepler’s laws. In 1609, Kepler published his Astronomia Nova, expounding his first and second laws of planetary motion – that the planets move in ellipses of which the Sun is one focus, and that the planets sweep out equal areas in equal times between themselves and the Sun as they revolve. In Galileo’s Dialogues on the Two Great World Systems, published in 1533, Kepler is hardly mentioned, while the discussion centers on Copernicus, with his perfect circle orbits of the planets around the Sun, which had no hope of accounting for the observed positions of the planets. At the end, one of the characters says that he is surprised at Kepler for being so “puerile” as to attribute the tides to the attraction of the Moon.
During the first years of the pontificate of Pope Urban VIII Barberini, Galileo was the semi-official scientist for the pope. But in 1631, when the Swedish Protestant army of Gustavus Adolphus fought its way through Germany, reached the Alps, and seemed ready to sweep down on Rome, Urban VIII turned abruptly from a pro-French to a pro-Spanish policy. The Spanish ascendancy is the backdrop for the trial of Galileo carried out by the Dominicans with Jesuit support. Some years earlier, Sarpi had forecast that if Galileo went to Rome, the Jesuits and others were likely to “turn … the question of physics and astronomy into a theological question,” so as to condemn Galileo as “an excommunicated heretic” and force him to “recant all his views on this subject.” Sarpi in 1616 seemed to know very well what would happen more than 15 years later, well after his own death. It is evident that the scenario sketched here corresponded to Sarpi’s own long-term plan. For Galileo, the trial was one of the greatest public relations successes of all time. The gesture of repression against Galileo carried out by the Dominicans of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome established the equation Galileo=modern experimental science struggling against benighted obscurantism. That equation has stood ever since, and this tragic misunderstanding has had terrible consequences for human thought. Lost in the brouhaha about Galileo is the more relevant fact that Kepler had been condemned by the Inquisition more than a decade before.
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