Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo.

Eileen Reeves. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. x + 8 pls. + 2 figs. + 310 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-691-04398-1.

"Pulcherrimum atque visu iocundissium est, Lunare Corpus . . ." (Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, 1610) The moon, this most beautiful and pleasing sight of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius, dominates Painting the Heavens, in which Eileen Reeves presents the role of the art of painting in the moon's discovery and in its defense when it became the battleground between the new astronomy and religious tradition.

Reeves develops her study chronologically beginning with the period from 1597 to 1607, Galileo's active years of discovery in astronomy - long before his observation through the telescope in 1610. As early as 1600, Galileo had begun to transfer his artist's knowledge of reflection and secondary light to his study of the moon and its mysterious ashen light. He was, perhaps, among the first to realize that it was reflected light from the earth - the light of the sun to the earth reflected back to the moon. This momentous new conception, according to Reeves, was "an argument for the earth's status as a planet"(90); consequently, it was a step toward a Copernican heliocentric system, the ultimate aim of Galileo's astronomy.

The evolution of Galileo's thought is mirrored in a series of paintings that create an extraordinary drama. Six are religious paintings, four by Lodovico Cigoli, Galileo's life-long friend and confidant, and one each by the Spanish painters, Francisco Pacheco and Diego Velazquez, his son-in-law; last is one on an obviously different subject, by Peter Paul Rubens, Self-Portrait in a Circle of Friends. Reeves chooses religious paintings as representations of religious belief and as evidence of the artist's information and knowledge of his contemporary world.

The moon in Cigoli's Adoration of the Shepherds (1599) antedates changes in Galileo's ideas. A conventional small figure in a crescent phase off in the right-hand corner, it is very likely to be missed by the observer. In Cigoli's Adoration of the Shepherds (1602) the moon has a darker center and is surrounded by a luminous circle of clouds. This image reflects ancient ideas as far back as the Chaldeans. It does, however, show Galileo's focus on a more complex body and on secondary light.

Rubens's Self-Portrait in a Circle of Friends (1604) is apart in the series but has tantalizing evidence of the association of Galileo and Rubens, which the presence of Galileo (newly identified as the bearded central figure) confirms. It is rich in its association with other evidence of Galileo's thinking in 1604 (the exciting year of the appearance of "the new star"), with its portrait of a Neo-Stoic group, sympathetic to Galileo for its heliocentrism, and its brilliant representation at the painting's center of the reflection of the aurora borealis over Mantua very possibly inspired by Galileo.

Cigoli's Deposition (1607) is positive and exciting evidence for Galileo's growing assurance about the moon and its secondary light, shown as a plausible shading in the right-hand section of the painting and, again, in the luminous circle of clouds that surround it. (In all three of Cigoli's paintings, the two Adorations and the Deposition, "Cigoli, like Galileo, attributed secondary light to the earth and to whatever clouds clustered about the lunar body"[168].) In further emphasis the diagonals of the painting focus the viewer's eye on the moon, as does the gesture toward the moon of the turbaned figure of Nicodemus and the position of Christ's left arm directly above it.

In 1610 Galileo shocked the world with Sidereus Nuncius and its astounding revelations through the telescope of the Milky Way, the satellites of Jupiter, and an imperfect moon with a rough uneven surface of hills and lake-like indentations.

Two years later Cigoli completed the Immacolata, the height of the drama about the moon presented in his art. It reiterates the challenge of Sidereus Nunc/us within the sacred precinct of Paul V's chapel in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The moon, on which the Virgin stands, is central in the painting. She is surrounded, quite as usual, by her traditional ikons. Most startling of all, the moon is an exact copy of Galileo's drawing of the moon for Sidereus Nuncius - a craggy, hill-pocked moon with multiple lake-like indentations. With the Immacolata, Cigoli joined the battle over the moon.

To realize the revolutionary force of Galileo's moon in Sidereus Nuncius and in Cigoli's challenge, one has to consider the background - the cult of the Virgin that had existed as long as Christianity, and the purity of the images and ikons associated with her. One of the strongest of the Marian beliefs was the purity of the moon. Often represented in paintings as the Virgin's footstool, the moon was believed to be an immaculate transparent ball in which no imperfections were possible.

After 1610 the whole armamentarium of the Church was gradually arrayed against Galileo's discoveries, especially against the "novelty" of the facts about the moon that believers were commanded to ignore. The Jesuits, the voice of the Church's belief, attacked with ideas that depended heavily on paintings and art. Lodovico delle Colombe, Galileo's long-time enemy, imagined the moon painted as a crystal ball; within it was a little world in enamel that incorporated the features Galileo had seen. Giulio Lagalla, among others, clung to the fact that the moon's features were simply illusion, "the mountains and craters that Galileo had observed on the lunar body, were like objects depicted on canvas, an optical illusion of the sort practised by painters"(160).

It is difficult to believe how exaggerated the theories of the Marian cult became. (Did they become more extreme with the increase in astronomical knowledge?) In their fiats for believers, the Jesuits were told, "I will believe that the black that I see is white, if the hierarchical Church so defines" (197). The moon, the Virgin's footstool, remained the chief bone of contention. It was immaculate, a pure transparent ball, in complete opposition to what had been seen through the telescope, by now a popular instrument. Even more fantastic were ideas about the Virgin herself; they have the fascination of science fiction: she was likened to King Solomon's couch, or equated with Jesus and even with God. Again, the art of painting was a chief means of instruction. The hills and protuberances on the moon were imagined as a string of rosary beads. Dark spots on the moon were accounted for as shading in a painting, or as an optical illusion from the light of sunlit clouds. The moon as discovered by Galileo was gradually "bleached" out; "its rough and dark features were erased one by one" (206).

Reeves finds evidence in Spain of this "bleaching" in two of its most notable painters, Francisco Pacheco and his son-in-law Diego Velazquez. Pacheco, the art theorist and painter, accepted some of the new discoveries in theory "with all due respect," but his Immaculada con Miguel Cid (ca. 1619) is a thoroughly complicated version that includes elements of the maculate and immaculate moon, indicating that he was aware of recent discoveries. The Virgin is standing on a transparent moon within which the river and buildings of Seville are represented. To further conserve tradition, in the landscape beyond are artifacts associated with the Virgin.

The Immaculada (ca. 1619) of Velazquez gives a somewhat different impression but is still true to the idea of a pure and transparent moon: "Somewhere within the globe a small boat hovers on a shadowy body of water"(195). Included are suggestions of maculist ideas - the clouds to the Virgin's right, for example, may represent the cratered moon surface.

Up to this point, Reeves is concerned with the effect of the new astronomy on the artists of the period and the attempt of the great artist Cigoli, among others, to reconcile belief and reality. She concludes with the opposite, the response of astronomers to the Church's elaborate denials of scientific fact and especially to the cult of the Virgin and her transparent immaculate moon.

Two brilliantly chosen documents by Galileo and Giuseppe Biancani conclude Painting the Heavens. In his Letter to Gallanzone Gallanzoni, we see Galileo at his best as a great stylist and wit. He turns the arguments of the Jesuits and his other opponents back against them. It is the maculate moon that is ancient, and the transparent immaculate moon they were proposing is the "novelty." Such an immaculate moon might exist in some heavenly realm, not in ours. His whole reasoning is witty and characteristic, but his extensive refutation shows that the case for immaculacy had to be argued.

The second is by Giuseppe Biancani, Jesuit and mathematician. His Sphaera Mundi, "published only months before the Church's decree against Copernicanism, gave an overwhelmingly favorable support to Galileo and a new heliocentric universe" (222). Biancani quite wonderfully claimed that Galileo's discoveries about the moon were a new Revelation and fundamental to the canon of belief. All the traditions associated with the Virgin and the moon should therefore be fully reinterpreted: A crater in the moon, for example, would be represented as her enclosed garden. His ingenuity in substituting an entirely new understanding, in turning scientific observation into evidence for a new religious belief, is a brilliant tour de force. In the battle for the moon in Painting the Heavens, Galileo and Biancani have the last word.

With this lively reversal Reeves concludes her remarkable book, which is encyclopaedic, as would be expected of a specialist in seventeenth-century scientific literature. Reeves's greatest interest is the role of art; she strongly and effectively maintains an analysis of its role in the complex struggle between science and religion. Painting the Heavens is eminently satisfactory for its ingenious design and brilliant illumination of the concubinage of art and science, a concubinage that existed perhaps for the last time in the early seventeenth century.

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