Unmasking a Galileo Forgery

The museum was part of the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, under the direction of Paolo Galluzzi.

In the Galilean configuration with its concave eyepiece, the focal length of the objective is longer than the telescope; in the Keplerian configuration with a compound eyepiece, the focal length of the objective is considerably shorter than the length of the telescope. All lenses of this instrument were therefore replacement lenses of a later date.

To date, two forged copies have been discovered, one in the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University, and one in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. Both copies came from Martayan-Lan in New York. Lan reimbursed both institutions.

Nick Wilding discovered the copy in the Library of the Biblioteca del Seminario Vescovile in Padua, and this in turn led to the discovery of the second copy in the Biblioteca del Monumento Nazionale di Montecassino.

For reference, on 17 June 2008 an authentic copy of the Compasso was auctioned by Christie’s, New York, for $506,500. In that same sale a copy of Sidereus nuncius was sold for $290,500 (Sale 2013, lots 130 and 132).

Galileo to Belisario Vinta, 19 March 1610, Le opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale, x, 300. Of the edition of 550, none was left in Venice. Of the 30 author’s copies, Galileo had received only 6. The remainder he had left with the printer because they lacked the etchings.

The copy in the Bibliothèque Universitaire in Liège was issued in facsimile by Éditions Culture et Civilisation, Brussels, in 1967.

Lan Richard , personal communication.

At the time, both De Caro and Rotundo were members of the Associazone dei Librai Antiquari d’Italia. Rotundo still is.

Opere, iii, 48.

Mowery J. Frank , Comparative analysis of several copies of Galileo Galilei’s Le operazioni del compasso geometrico e militare (privately printed, Washington, DC, 2006).

Richard Lan , personal communication.

Freedberg David , The eye of the lynx: Galileo, his friends, and the beginnings of modern natural history (Chicago, 2002).

Bredekamp Horst (ed.), Galileo’s O (Berlin, 2011). Vol. i: Brückle Irene Hahn Oliver (eds), Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius: A comparison of the proof copy (New York) with other paradigmatic copies (hereafter O1); vol. ii: Needham Paul , Galileo makes a book: The first edition of Sidereus nuncius, Venice 1610 (hereafter O2). O1, 7.

The Latin form of the word, Florentino appears on the title page of Sidereus nuncius, see Fig. 1, but no signature of Galileo exists followed by the word.

See Biagetti Maria Teresa , La biblioteca di Federico Cesi (Rome, 2008).

See also the otherwise very positive review by Cole Michael , The art bulletin, xci (2009), 381–5.

JHA , ix (1978), 155–69.

Gingerich, “The curious case of the M-L Sidereus nuncius”, Galilaeana, vi (2009), 141–65, p. 165. See also Shea William R. , “Owen Gingerich’s curious case”, Galilaeana, vii (2010), 97–110.

See ref. 14.

Personal email, 21 November 2011.

E.g. Reeves Eileen , Isis, ciii (2012), 583–5; Gattei Stefano , Nuncius, xxvii (2012), 491–5.

Heilbron J. L. , “Sidereus muncius debated”, Journal for the history of astronomy, xliii (2012), 244–6.

Renaissance quarterly, lxv (2012), 217–18.

See also Needham Paul , “Authenticity and facsimile”, in The starry messenger, Venice 1610: From doubt to astonishment, ed. by Hessler John W. de Simone Daniel (Delray Beach, FL, 2013), 153–64, pp. 154–5.

See, for instance, Bredekamp Horst , “Gazing hands and blind spots: Galileo as a draftsman”, Science in context, xiii (2000), 423–62, reprinted in Galileo in context, ed. by Jürgen Renn (Cambridge, 2001), 153–92.

Bredekamp Horst , private communication. For a slightly different account of how the SNML drawings were made, see Schmidle Nicholas , “A very rare book: The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo’s pivotal treatise”, The New Yorker, 16 December 2013, 62–73, pp. 71–2.