Galileo built an organ for Jacopo Corsi in 1585 and borrowed 200 scudi from him as late as 1598. After Giovanni de' Bardi's death, associates of his group remained heavily involved in Medici displays; see CarterTim, “Music and patronage in late sixteenth-century Florence: The case of Jacopo Corsi (1561–1602)”, I Tatti studies: Essays in the Renaissance, i (1985), 64–65,93,97, 98; and NaglerA. M., Theater festivals of the Medici, 1539–1637 (New Haven, 1964), chaps. 5, 6, 8.
2.
“Obviously, I am not claiming that Galileo was Urban's favorite” (p. 331). “Galileo was not Urban's political favorite, but he certainly was his intellectual one” (p. 333). Finally, referring to Galileo, “the falling favorite could not be given a fair hearing” (p. 342) and “Urban's favorite” (p. 352).
3.
WalkerD. P., Spiritual and demonic magic from Ficino to Campanella (Studies of the Warburg Institute, xxii; London, 1958), 206–10; ScottBeldon John, Images of nepotism: The painted ceilings of the Palazzo Barberini (Princeton, 1991), chaps. 5–6, esp. pp. 74ff, 88ff.
4.
“Dico che essendo Saturno pianeta del duca Cosimo…”, VasariGiorgio, “Ragionamenti”, in MilanesiGaetano (ed.), Le opere di Giorgio Vasari (Florence, 1882), viii, 46. See also WestmanRobert, “Two cultures or one? A second look at Kuhn's The Copemican Revolution”, Isis, lxxxv (1994), 103.
5.
Milanesi, (ed.), op. cit. (ref 4), 85. See also p. 62: “P[rincipe]:… che chiamasti voi questa? G[iorgio]: Chiamasi la camera di Giove, il quale fu figliuolo di Opi e Saturno….”
6.
CampbellMalcolm, Pietro da Cortona and the Pitti Palace: A study of the planetary rooms and related projects (Princeton, 1977), 130–2, 148–52. Pietro da Cortona's relation to his various patrons deserves close examination. He not only is alleged to have painted the portrait of Bellarmine that Redondi brought to our attention, but also painted the Divine Wisdom fresco (“Surpassed in size only by Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling”) that decorated the ceiling of the Barberini palace in Rome (formerly the Palazzo Sforza). See RedondiPietro, Galileo heretic (Princeton, 1987), 4; Scott, Images of nepotism, 18.
Galileo introduces the fable with the following words: “Long experience has taught me that with regard to intellectual matters, this is the status of mankind: The less people know and understand about such matters, the more positively they attempt to reason about them….” And at the conclusion, among other remarks: “The difficulty of understanding how the cicada's song is formed even when we have it singing to us right in our hands is more than enough to excuse us for not knowing how a comet is formed at such an immense distance.” DrakeS. and O'MalleyC. D. (transl.), The controversy on the comets of 1618 (Philadelphia, 1960), 234f, 237 (my italics).
10.
Plato's Phaedrus links the cicadas with the Muses, with music and mathematics, and with the problem of using similarity as an epistemological tool without prior knowledge of the basis of comparison (Phaedrus, 258E-262). Ficino's commentary on the Phaedrus identifies cicadas with airy demons that are agents of the Muses and mediate sound from their spiritual bodies to the spiritual body of the hearer; see AllenMichael, The Plalonism of Marsilio Ficirto: A study of his Phaedrus commentary (Berkeley, 1984), 21–28.
11.
For his uneasiness with the court etiquette of gift giving and petitioning, see AndersenChristian Hans, The fairy tale of my life: An autobiography (London and New York, 1975), 79–80.
