Jurgen Renn, ed. Galileo in Context.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pbk. 431 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $25. ISBN: 0-521-00103-X.

This collection of essays is intended to dispel the myth of Gaileo as isolated genius. Three contexts are explored: artisans and engineers, artists and the arts, and the church, patrons, and colleagues.

In "Galileo Engineer: Art and Modern Science," Wolfgang Lefevre argues, contra Koyre, that Galileo's science was intimately linked to the world of mechanics and engineers and that there was no substantial difference between Galileo and figures such as Niccolo Tartaglia, Giovanni Battista Benedetti, and Guidobaldo del Monte. In by far the longest essay in the volume, "The Hunting of the White Elephant: When and How did Galileo Discover the Law of Fall," Jurgen Renn, Peter Damerow, and Simone Reger contend that we need to understand scientific discoveries as part of an interconnected series of events in the careers of a scientist such as Galileo and those of his colleagues and fellow workers, such as del Monte. Only then can we truly understand how "discoveries" come about. Also, they raise important questions concerning how "discoveries" in the sciences are to be understood. In the case of the development of classical mechanics, the authors conclude that one should not focus on an individual's "discoveries" but on "a collective process of constructing a new body of knowledge that made his activities meaningful" (131).

The section devoted to the arts contains two excellent essays, one by Horst Bredekamp, "Gazing Hands and Blind Spots: Galileo as Draftsman," and one by Sara Booth and Albert van Helden, "The Virgin and the Telescope: The Moons of Cigoli and Galileo." The first essay details Galileo's works in the arts and his creations and gives a valuable discussion of his moon drawings, their reliability and their functions. Bredekamp praises Galileo for the accuracy of his moon drawings and sees them as tools of argumentation for those more attuned to images than to words. Bredekamp concludes his analysis with a restatement of Panofsky's argument that Galileo rejected Kepler's elliptical orbits because of Galileo's aesthetic principles. Bredekamp also argues that Albert Einstein, in his discussions in the 1920s with Aby Warburg, refused to see the connection between aesthetics and cosmological assertions. It is for this reason, Bredekamp claims, that Einstein was also blind to Panofsky's thesis. Although Bredekamp gives the reader food for thought on this issue, he does not add anything new to Panofsky's argument and this reviewer remains unconvinced that aesthetics determined Galileo's "ignorance" of Kepler's ellipses. The second essay in this section is an especially fascinating mixture of the history of art, science, and biblical exegesis. Booth and Van Helden dissect a 1612 fresco painted by Lodovico Cigoli, Galileo's friend, for the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. This fresco representing Apocalypse 12 shows a woman clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet. Cigoli painted the moon with spots. Why did Cigoli's rejection of the traditional view of the perfection of the moon and his "support" of Galileo's recent discoveries not cause consternation? The authors reject the view of some art historians that this painting be entitled either the Assumption of the Virgin or The Immaculate Conception. Instead, they argue that this is a painting of the Virgin as Church Militant, crushing sin and heresy. The moon can therefore be the Galilean moon of spots, for it represents those very sins and evils. This is a wonderful example of interdisciplinary scholarship and should be studied closely by all.

In the third section of the book, Rivka Feldhay's "Recent Narratives on Galileo and The Church or The Three Dogmas of the Counter-Reformation," inveighs against scholars and their use of totalitarian, fundamentalist, and fictionalist categories to interpret Counter-Reformation theologians and astronomers at the time of Galileo. Notable among her targets are Fantoli, Blackwell, and McMullin. Paolo Galluzzi offers a study of another Galileo affair centered on his laws of motion in "Gassendi and l'Affaire Galilee of the Laws of Motion." Finally, Mario Biagioli, ever the revisionist, in "Replication or Monopoly? The Economics of Invention and Discovery in Galileo's Discoveries of 1610," asserts that Galileo went out of his way to prevent others from duplicating his telescope and confirming his discoveries in order to protect his own "monopoly."

The book ends with a valuable appendix of selected translated excerpts from the writings of Raffaello Caverni, Antonio Favaro, and Emil Wohlwill on the formulation of Galileo's new laws of motion. Each essay is preceded by a short precis and followed by a pertinent bibliography. All involved in producing this book are also to be commended for the excellent illustrations.

I have two bones to pick with the editor. Renn is too strident in his judgment of previous scholars with whom he disagrees, such as Stillman Drake. He is also wrongheaded in his evaluation of the "present state of Galileo studies" when he asserts that works by giants such as Duhem, Maier (whose name is misspelled), and Dijksterhuis "had no substantial impact on the specialized scholarly literature" (4). Otherwise, he is to be congratulated for offering the reader such a collection of important essays.

IRVING A. KELTER 

University of St. Thomas 

Houston