Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism.

"Discoverers get power from their discoveries only through the institutions that legitimize them," writes Mario Biagioli in Galileo Courtier, (30) implicitly posing such provocative questions as what it meant for a discoverer, like Galileo, to "get power," and what it meant to "legitimize" his discoveries. The observation occurs in a section entitled "The Microphysics of Patronage," within a chapter entitled "Galileo's Self-fashioning." The respective references to Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt suggest the ambitious theoretical scaffolding upon which Biagioli builds his brilliantly elaborated, devastatingly revisionist, and perversely persuasive account of Galileo's career. Modestly, at first, Biagioli proposes that "a finely articulated notion of patronage may allow for a better integration of the social and conceptual dimensions of early modern science." (14) Then, more ambitiously, but also more cryptically: "I am suggesting that patronage is the key to understanding processes of identity and status formation that are the keys to understanding both the scientists' cognitive attitudes and career strategies." (14) The reader may require a moment to recognize that "the scientists' cognitive attitudes" is what we think of as the intellectual substance of science itself--which can only be properly understood with reference to patronage as the ultimate key. A little further along, Galileo's career is described as a "patronage-based trajectory of social and cognitive legitimation," (18) and, eventually, Biagioli puts his cards on the table in the form of a bold reversal: "I think it would be useful to suspend for a moment the 'natural' belief that Galileo, Kepler, and Clavius earned their titles simply because of the quality of their scientific work, and to consider, instead, that they also gained scientific credibility because of the titles and patrons they had." (59) In separating the issue of quality from that of credibility, Biagioli poses the paradox that attends his argument, for not only the scientist, but also the historian of science, must seek legitimation--and what is it that legitimates another book about Galileo if not his "quality" as a scientist? The brilliance of Biagioli's book is in the overturning of such scruples, by representing the brilliance of Galileo, not in his "cognitive attitudes," but rather in his "career strategies," as he goes about "getting power" from his discoveries.

Getting power, of course, was one of the most elaborate sciences of the Italian Renaissance, and, if the phrase surprises here, it is just that one is not necessarily accustomed to thinking of Galileo as that kind of a scientist. "New and controversial ideas are better supported by young patrons seeking an image for themselves," observes Biagioli, (33) writing about Galileo and Cosimo II, but slipping into the present tense and taking the tone of Machiavelli, as if citing some Renaissance manual for scientific success. In fact, Biagioli makes excellent use of such manuals on general courtiership (for instance, Matteo Pellegrini on "The Qualities of the Scholar which are Inconvenient to the Courtier"), and has immersed himself in the strategies of the courtier to the point that his own writing mimics at moments the Renaissance discourse (until the inelegant jargon of the twentieth century--with its "cognitive attitudes"--intrudes upon the beguiling academic illusion). Galileo, however, was not just getting ahead by the book, for Biagioli argues that he was creating for himself an unprecedented new identity when he moved from his professorship in mathematics at Padua to his new position at court in Florence as "Filosofo e Matematico Primario del Granduca." Making himself into a philosopher, he subverted the hierarchy of disciplines. "He successfully refashioned himself as an unusual type of philosopher, a type of identity for which there were no well-established social roles or images," writes Biagioli. "Although in doing so he borrowed from and renegotiated existing social roles and cultural codes, the socioprofessional identity he constructed for himself was definitely original." (2-3) Galileo, courtier, appears as the master of all those cultural codes that constituted strategic courtiership, and Biagioli offers us in historical retrospect the book that Galileo himself might have written on how to pursue a seventeenth-century career in science--if he had not been busy writing about other things, like comets and sunspots. One comes away from the book rather overwhelmed by Galileo's consummate worldliness, and likewise by Biagioli's erudite familiarity with that world.

In an opening flourish that Biagioli calls "epistolary anthropology," he analyzes the letters between Galileo and his patrons, with particular emphasis on the formalities, courtesies, and compliments that abound; these are revealed as far from perfunctory, but rather the careful code of the "microphysics of patronage" by which Galileo measured and modulated his social position. "When a client like Galileo wanted to test a patron or broker's availability, he would write extravagantly flattering letters and then study the response," observes Biagioli, as he studies those same responses, looking over Galileo's shoulder. "If the answer was a friendly rebuff of Galileo's cirimonie, it meant that he had been accepted as an 'intimate' client--a client with whom all those ceremonies would be out of place." (27) Biagioli underlines the weightiness of the moment when a client made his epistolary move, as in Galileo's first letter to Cosimo--"I have waited until now to write to Your Most Serene Highness being held back by a respectful concern of not wanting to present myself as presumptuous or arrogant" (20)--but also emphasizes the complementary interdependence of status and interest between client and patron, citing not only Galileo's correspondence but also Panfilo Persico's seventeenth-century advice on writing letters: "even patrons of great fortune who aim at having a great following of clients and courtiers do not lose the opportunity to congratulate even their inferiors because all friendships are useful at some point, especially if they have been cultivated." (26) The exchange of compliments could be accompanied by an exchange of gifts, and Biagioli shows us Galileo sending truffles to a powerful patron, and above all giving telescopes to grateful lords, like the Medici--who promise to repay "the necessary equivalent favor," and to remain "eternally obliged to find the occasion to serve you." (42-43) The important argument is that the moons of Jupiter, witnessed by telescope, hailed as the Medicean stars, must be understood as gifts, as very special truffles, that Galileo bestowed upon the Medici in taking up his position as court philosopher and mathematician. Biagioli makes the argument emphatically, insisting on a revisionist reversal of convention: "The place of gifts within the logic of patronage explains the role of spectacular scientific production in Galileo's career. Galileo needed to produce or discover things that could be used as gifts for his patrons." (48) Galileo makes the same point, giving so generously that the Medici were almost given credit for the discovery themselves: "Since under your auspices, Most Serene Cosimo, I discovered these stars unknown to all previous astronomers, I decided by the highest right to adorn them with the very august name of Your family." (132) Biagioli's academic resources are so manifold that he proceeds to trace the history of those Medicean stars in baroque court pageantry in Florence through the rest of the seventeenth century.

It is difficult for the reviewer to do justice to the extraordinary range of this book, in its materials and in its arguments. After a terrific analysis of what it meant to be a scientist at the Medici court, Biagioli moves on to an equally terrific discussion of academic life in papal Rome, with emphasis on the boom-and-bust mobility and instability of cultural life in a city that waited upon the unpredictable elections of new sovereigns at irregular intervals--Rome as a "volcanic archipelago" in which cultural islands emerged from and sank into the sea. (261) After an exceptionally insightful discussion of the patronage dynamics surrounding the Medicean stars and the Starry Messenger, Biagioli proceeds to an equally insightful analysis of the dynamics surrounding the dispute over buoyancy (conceived as "science at a cleared table," that is, "the lunchtime dispute on buoyancy at the table of the grand duke"), and, still later, the controversy over comets and the significance of the Assayer. After the theoretical analysis of Galileo's career in terms of the "microphysics of patronage," Biagioli offers an ambitious theoretical discussion of "the anthropology of incommensurability" in which the paradigmatic structure of scientific revolution is reconsidered as a problem of rhetorical strategies, socioprofessional identities, and the hierarchy of academic disciplines. This is not one of those stinting and meager books that marshal a few scant sources and eke out a barely discernible argument, tenuously sustained by the pretense of being "richly textured" and "sensitively nuanced." This is instead a marvelously generous book, overflowing with an abundance of interesting materials, bursting with provocative arguments--all under the evident control of a sharp historical intelligence and an impressive intellectual aplomb.

In the final chapter Biagioli turns to Galileo's trial, and argues that "the dynamics that led to Galileo's troubles were typical of a princely court: they resembled what was known as the fall of the favorite." (313) The phrase, "The Fall of the Favorite," was a chapter title in Pellegrini's handbook on courtiership, described as a natural stage in the life cycle of courtiers, and Biagioli argues that "Pellegrini was indicating a structural rather than accidental feature of court society." Therefore, Galileo, who avidly pursued an ascent as a courtier was always at risk for a fall, all the more in the "volcanic archipelago" of Rome--quite apart from any progressive evolution of his ideas about science and cosmology, and not essentially connected to his Copernican convictions. From the beginning Biagioli downplays the significance of any such convictions, arguing that "depending on one's beliefs, socioprofessional identity, and patronage outlook, the Copernican dimensions of the discoveries could be legitimately emphasized or effaced." (95) In the period of the Starry Messenger, "Galileo was not attacked because he was a Copernican but because of his (and his discoveries') extreme visibility and his success in becoming the mathematician and philosopher of the grand duke," and when he was charged with Copernicanism it was only one of the many means deployed in aiming at such a visible target. (98) Copernicanism is thus treated as almost accidental to the "patronage-based trajectory," which was governed by a gravity that Galileo would surely have recognized--determining that what goes up must come down. Interestingly, in arguing against the significance of Copernicanism for Galileo's fall, Biagioli's Galileo Courtier stands quite close to Pietro Redondi's Galileo Heretic. For Biagioli the crucial issue in Galileo's fall was the dynamics of patronage, for Redondi it was the chemistry of transubstantiation, but both would agree that Copernicanism in itself has been overrated as the fundamental factor. While Redondi believes that the religious concerns of the case went even deeper than Copernican cosmology, Biagioli downplays the significance of religion in general, not only for Galileo but even for his Jesuit antagonists. For Biagioli the Jesuits were just busily bidding for patronage in the Roman cultural sweepstakes. "As an individual, Galileo was definitely much more famous than any of the Jesuits, but, as a network they had many more resources than he," writes Biagioli, on the controversy over comets. "Moreover, the Jesuits had begun to display their wares in the courtly market that, until then, Galileo may have seen as his own." (276) One subject that might bear further consideration concerns Galileo and the nature of scientific celebrity in the seventeenth century.

Biagioli argues that scientific controversies were "good sport," even theatrical events, in seventeenth-century court life, and that the patron reserved for himself the position of an uncommitted spectator who took no side and, therefore, could never be wrong. Concerning the controversy over comets, Giovanni Ciampoli wrote about Galileo's Assayer that "I, who understand little, can admire it better than argue about it"--and thus, according to Biagioli, "tended not to commit himself about the truth-value of Galileo's empirical claims." (78) Maffeo Barberini was just such a non-committal patron, and Biagioli shows him present as a cardinal, admiring Galileo, at the lunchtime dispute about buoyancy in Florence. Later, as Urban VIII, he could no longer sustain that patronly pose in the face of Galileo's Dialogue, and so the client had to fall, for having compromised his patron in a controversy where "truth-value" could not be evaded in a suspended judgment. "The condemnation of Galileo exonerated Urban from a possible scandal, and might have helped him refute insinuations about his weakness against heretics," writes Biagioli, seeming to leave the door open in the end to an interpretation of the trial in terms of heresy; there is room for Redondi's version or even, more traditionally, that of Giorgio de Santillana. The courtier, after all, may be a heretic, and vice versa.

If one expects Biagioli's book to offer as the ultimate payoff an entirely new understanding of the trial (and to some extent he encourages that expectation), one may be disappointed; in fact, however, the more important lesson of the book is how wrong-headed it is to try to understand Galileo's whole career retrospectively in the light of the trial and condemnation. Biagioli offers a more direct view of the career in its "patronage-based trajectory," as Galileo pursued it, fashioning himself as he went along. Furthermore, just as Biagioli does not interpret the whole trajectory in the light of its ultimate collapse, in accordance with the values of seventeenth-century patronage he does not place a retrospective premium on the "quality" or "truth-value" of Galileo's Copernicanism, one of those "cognitive attitudes" that just happened to be, well, true. Biagioli offers a bracingly interesting and largely convincing account of seventeenth-century science, as he follows Galileo in pursuit of his career. "What was new about Galileo's translation of scientific marvels into the discourse of the court (or of a specific dynasty, as in the case of the satellites of Jupiter)," writes Biagioli, "was that he did so both to show that natural philosophy was not necessarily an uncourtly activity, and to legitimize scientific discoveries and theories by linking them to the power image of the prince." (124-25) Biagioli scrupulously explicates Galileo's career in the context of early modern culture, showing what it meant for science to be "not necessarily an uncourtly activity" in the seventeenth century. When one considers how dexterously Galileo exploited the presentation of mere moons at the Medici court, one can imagine all too well what good use he might have made of Copernican heliocentrism, in courtly tribute to the power image of an early modern prince.