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CHAPTER 1

The Florentine Opposition

The Roman Inquisition showed interest in Galileo several times before formal proceedings began in 1615. His mother may have denounced him to the Holy Office in Florence for calling her names.¹ Next, one of his household servants in Padua denounced him for practicing judicial astrology. The Venetians quashed the proceedings.² In 1611 during its protracted investigation of Galileo’s Paduan friend the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini, the Congregation ordered its archives searched to see what it had against Galileo.³ The Inquisition’s most serious interest came in 1612–1613 when it somewhat unusually subjected Galileo’s Sunspot Letters to prepublication censorship. It objected most seriously to Galileo’s attempt to interpret scripture.⁴ As always, Galileo paid the Inquisition’s interventions only as much heed as he had to and seems to have taken away nothing whatever by way of a lesson. The pattern for his trial was set.

The Florentine Opposition

Almost as soon as Galileo arrived in Florence from Padua in 1610, opposition arose to him and his ideas. It reached critical mass about eighteen months after the publication in 1613 of Sunspot Letters, its target. The conspiracy grew among a tight-knit group of Florentine Dominicans, probably with ramifications to the top of the Florentine social and economic hierarchy. The conspirators used two basic approaches: preaching, the Dominicans’ forte; and denunciation to the Inquisition in Rome, an institution they dominated.

Raffaello Delle Colombe

Pride of place in launching the campaign from the pulpit against Galileo has always gone to Tommaso Caccini (see the next chapter), but priority probably belongs to his fellow Florentine Dominican Raffaelo delle Colombe (1563–1627).⁵ Luigi Guerrini calls Delle Colombe “the most important Dominican active in Florence in the first two and a half decades of the seventeenth century” as well as “one of the principal collaborators” of Archbishop Alessandro Marzi Medici in both his general efforts to control Florentine culture and more specifically to rein in Galileo.⁶ His brother Ludovico delle Colombe, a more obscure figure, has usually been taken as the ringleader of the Florentine cabal.⁷ Raffaello Delle Colombe entered the Dominican order on 6 November 1577 at Santa Maria Novella, studying theology in Perugia before preaching there, in Rome, and elsewhere in the Roman province.⁸ He authored or contributed to three books, all of them about saints.⁹ He probably spent considerable time in Santa Maria Novella before taking up permanent residence in 1612.¹⁰ Elected prior in 1620, he resigned in 1623. The convent’s library benefited greatly from monetary donations he arranged from his brothers and the 7,000 books Archbishop Francesco Bonciani of Pisa bequeathed in late 1619.¹¹

Between 1613 and 1627, Delle Colombe published five large volumes of sermons, all by the Florentine house of Sermartelli. The first, dedicated to Marzi Medici’s nephew, Delle prediche sopra tutto gli Evangeli dell’anno (Sermons on all the Gospels of the Year), appeared in 1613 (IT\ICCU\RLZE\034354) (2nd ed. 1619; IT\ICCU\UM1E\004084), although its permissions date from 1609 and 1610, including one from Emanuele Ximenes, S.J., a prominent member of the opposition to Galileo, as we shall see in the next chapter.¹² Next came Prediche della Quaresima (Lent Sermons) (IT\ICCU\BVEE\056825), published in 1615, although all the approvals are of 1613. They are in themselves of interest. The first of 3 July 1613 is by Dominican Michele Arrighi (1567–1634), then prior of Santa Maria Novella and teacher and friend of Giacinto Stefani, the man who would review Galileo’s Dialogo in Florence.¹³ The Jesuit Claudio Seripando’s opinion at Archbishop Marzi Medici’s request is dated 31 August 1613; the archbishop’s own approval “if so it pleases the reverend master father inquisitor” rests on Seripando’s.¹⁴ Seripando had been involved with Rodrigo Alidosi during Alidosi’s legation to Prague in 1605–1607 and later cooperated with Lelio Medici, the inquisitor of Florence, in a proposed abjuration of one of Alidosi’s Bohemian Lutheran clients.¹⁵ Then “by order of the Holy Office,” comes an opinion dated 2 September 1613 “del nostro Collegio della Compagnia di Giesù,” Emanuele Ximenes again. All in all, a nicely balanced set of licenses. The second edition of 1622 (IT\ICCU\UM1E\004089) was dedicated to Federico Borromeo and included a third volume, Prediche aggiunte a quella della Quaresima [Sermons added to those for Lent] (IT\ICCU\TO0E\028863), dedicated to Desiderio Scaglia, another Dominican but much more important an Inquisitor. Volume 4, Prediche sopra le solennità della beatissima madre di Dio [Sermons for the Solemnities of the the Most Blessed Mother of God] (1619; IT\ICCU\CFIE\016595), was dedicated to another Dominican and Inquisitor Agostino Galamini, the man who directed Galileo’s prosecution in 1616. These two dedications cannot have been casual. Last came Dupplicato avvento di prediche [Doubled Advent Sermons, one set for religious, the other for the laity] (1627; IT\ICCU\CFIE\016608).¹⁶

Delle Colombe’s preaching campaign had two phases according to Guerrini. Between 1608 and 1610 when Galileo arrived in Florence, he attacked Copernicans in general.¹⁷ In a sermon dating from before 1613, Delle Colombe broadened his criticism of worldly wisdom into harsh criticism of a long list of fools, ending with “Copernicans”:

The¹⁸ men of the world are so far from this humility that there is nothing they study more than to hide than their ignorance nor to show than “science;” and indeed human “science” if it is not tempered with the water of divine wisdom is nothing other than a drunkenness…. Pride has disturbed their vision…. Thus if whoever drinks the wine of the world’s science, if he does not mix some water of which it is written “she … will give him the water of wisdom to drink” [Ecclesiasticus 15.3] will give into a delirium and commit insanities. What greater insanity than to deny God as Pythagoras [did] or divine providence as Ibn Rush [did], and similar things? What greater foolishness than to make the soul mortal, as Galen [did]? … What [is] more reasonable than to see “You [Yahweh] have made the world, firm, unshakeable” [Ps. 92/3.2] and with all this that the Copernicans [Copernici] say that the earth moves and the heavens stay still, because the sun is the center of the earth, for which reason it can be said of these that they have dizziness, “On them Yahweh has poured out a spirit of giddiness … as a drunkard slithers in his vomit” [an edited version of Isaiah 19.14]

Beginning in 1612, Delle Colombe’s target became Galileo and—as Guerrini notes—specifically his ideas about sunspots.¹⁹ On at least two occasions, Delle Colombe inserted direct criticisms of them into his sermons, one explicit, the other thinly veiled.²⁰ The first came in a sermon for the second day of the first week of Lent, probably—given the dates of all the permissions for the volume of Lent sermons listed above—26 February 1613, just before Sunspot Letters appeared, suggesting a highly organized campaign.²¹ The printed version highlighted the target with a heavy-handed marginal reference to “Galileo in On Sunspots.” The passage comes near the sermon’s end, rhetorically its most important section:

While²² the world lasts our ignorance also lasts, we know little of others and nothing of our own selves. The time will come that the fabric will be explained, that the development of this heart will be unfolded, the hiding place of this brain will be opened. And as St. Peter Damian said “Everyone’s every secret will be revealed.”²³ That ingenious Florentine mathematician of ours [Galileo] laughs at the ancients who made the sun the most clear and clean of even the smallest spot, whence they formed the proverb “To seek a spot on the sun.”²⁴ But he, with the instrument called by him telescope makes visible that it has its regular spots, as by observations of days and months he had demonstrated. But this more truly God does, because “The heavens are not of the world in His sight.”²⁵ If spots are found in the suns of the just, do you think that they will be found in the moons of the unjust?²⁶

The indirect assault came in a more sensitive context, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, probably on 8 December 1615, just as the first phase of Galileo’s trial approached its denoument and from a much more prominent pulpit, that of the cathedral of Florence, the first time Delle Colombe preached there.

It²⁷ was Seneca’s thought that the mirror was invented to allow contemplating the sun. It did not seem a fitting thing that man could not consider the beauty of the greatest light that appears in the theatre of the world. But because the mortal eye, for the weaknesses of its vision, cannot fix its gaze on it for its too great light, at least it can be stared at in a clear crystal behind which the sun presents to us its beautiful image. Therefore an ingenious Academic took for his device a mirror in the face of the sun with the motto “It shows what is received.” [“Receptum exhibet.”]²⁸ That means that he had carved in his spirit I do not know what kind of beloved sun. But what would be better for Mary? Who could fixedly look at the infinite light of the Divine Sun, were it not for this virginal mirror, that in itself conceives it [the light] and renders it to the world? “Born to us, given to us from an intact virgin?”²⁹ This is “let what is received be shown.” For one who seeks defects where there are none, is it not to be said to him “he seeks a spot in the sun?” The sun is without spot, and the mother of the sun without spot. “From whom Jesus was born.”³⁰

Yet like Domenico Gori, Delle Colombe was not entirely an old unreconstruct. While he often referred to traditional cosmology, he also cited the work of the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Clavius.³¹

Dominican Science and Theology

That Delle Colombe knew Clavius’s work should not surprise us. Florentine Dominicans enjoyed a deep theological and scientific culture, as Guerrini has shown in two books devoted to broadening our understanding of that culture and its role in the opposition to Galileo, especially in the preaching campaign of Delle Colombe, Caccini, and Niccolò Lorini (the last not much more than mentioned). Following Eugenio Garin, Guerrini emphasizes the quality of science available at both San Marco and Santa Maria Novella right through the early seventeenth century.³² The key figure in the construction of the Dominicans’ distinctive anti-Copernicanism is Giovanni Maria Tolosani who in his “De veritate sacrae scripturae” (1546) had provided all the ammunition his confreres needed to attack Copernicus.³³ Guerrini stresses, almost certainly too much, that Tolosani’s work provided “the theoretical basis on which the discourse of the censors (for the most part Dominicans) was developed in the proceeding [against Galileo] of 1616.”³⁴ As Tolosani’s work’s title suggests, the problem lay in the contradiction between De revolutionibus and scripture.³⁵

Niccolò Lorini, Turbulent Priest

As damaging as Delle Colombe’s sermons might have been and however important his role in the conspiracy against Galileo, he never took as active a role as two other Florentine Dominicans. The most egregious of them was Tommaso Caccini (see the next two chapters). Lorini had greater stature (ca. 1544–?after 1617).³⁶ He was much older than Caccini, but age never made him diplomatic. Born to a Florentine noble family probably from Mugello, after entering the Dominican order at San Marco (not Santa Maria Novella as is universally said) in 1561, he next appears in Genoa in 1577, probably preaching against the plague.³⁷ If so, this was the first of a number of sermons he delivered in his youth, including one for the first Sunday of Advent 1585 in the Sistine Chapel before the pope himself that earned him an appointment as apostolic preacher; he was already a reader and general preacher in the Dominicans’ Roman province.³⁸ The text was published at least twice, originally by the papal printer.³⁹ This was Lorini’s second printed sermon, the first coming the previous year after being preached on All Souls (given the delays of printing possibly 1583) in Santa Maria del Fiore.⁴⁰

Shortly before that Lorini had begun to manifest another facet of his career, stirring up controversy, at first through preaching. In January 1583, the chronicler Giuliano de’ Ricci noted that, in the midst of a campaign by the Dominicans to canonize a former prior of Santa Maria Novella, Lorini attacked the Conventual Franciscans, who opposed the canonization, for setting a bad example and not following their rule.⁴¹ He seems to have suffered no consequences, but he did three years later. This time in another fiery sermon de’ Ricci heard (describing it as exaggerated “according to his usual”), Lorini had attacked “the many thefts and homicides that had been done in this state [the grand duchy of Tuscany] and the few that were punished,” and went on to name names, saying that “Annibale’s brother did more damage at present in Tuscany by freeing prisoners than the same Hannibal had done in all of Italy.” “[A]ll the people” understood Annibale to mean Annibale da Pescia, and his brother—or at least relative—Lorenzo, secretary of the Florentine criminal magistracy, the Otto di Balìa.⁴² This charge, which turned out to be true, led to Lorini being prohibited first from preaching in the cathedral of Florence and then its entire diocese.⁴³ Lorini took an MA in 1592, but there is no evidence he ever taught.⁴⁴

Now things become really interesting. In 1602, at age fifty-seven, Lorini was banned by the Roman Inquisition from the diocese of Florence for objecting to the Council of Trent’s prohibition of public confession.⁴⁵ The trouble blew up before 18 May 1602 when the Jesuit general Claudio Acquaviva wrote from Rome that there was to be no response to Lorini’s provocation that Acquaviva was addressing “by another road.”⁴⁶ He sent a more detailed version of this order to the Jesuit rector four days later. The Jesuits were to ignore Lorini’s preaching, leaving it to Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici, archbishop of Florence, to take action once his vicar had informed him of the problem.⁴⁷ The nuncio seems to have superseded Acquaviva’s plan, in the process providing more detail about what happened. Lorini had tried to attack Antonio Santarelli, reader in the Jesuit house, over a sermon considering whether it was possible to confess via letter or messenger. An “ordine” from the archiepiscopal vicar had been put in place preventing him from doing so, which he circumvented by proposing to “read” in his own convent, San Marco, where the vicar had no jurisdiction. He planned to invite people to attend. The nuncio, Ascanio Jacovacci or Giacovazzi, seeing a scandal brewing and the prospect of worse, had issued a precept to both Lorini and Santarelli and to their superiors. The precept’s prohibition was remarkably similar to Galileo’s (see Chapter 3). It read that “in the future either of them [Lorini and Santarelli] not dare, nor in any way whatsover presume both in preaching and in readings or otherwise to discuss or in another manner treat the article, often brought into controversy by them in recent days by preaching, that is, whether sacramental confession can be done through writing or a messenger.” The penalty was excommunication latae sententiae.⁴⁸ Lorini reacted by complaining publicly about the “prohibitione” and “precetto” and threatening to go to preach in Lucca outside the nuncio’s jurisdiction. He also alleged that Galileo’s enemy Giovanni de’ Medici put the nuncio up to his action.⁴⁹ Jacovacci closed by reminding the cardinal’s nephew, Pietro Aldobrandini, and Pope Clement VIII that they knew Lorini well and “how freely and imprudently he speaks,” suggesting a history of trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome.⁵⁰

Jacovacci’s precept had little effect. On 11 August, he complained that a Jesuit had preached in their house of S. Giovanni about a papal decree on confessors. One of two Dominicans in the audience (Lorini?) had “struck his hands together with a great shout” and walked out, which understandably caused surprise, including to the nuncio who thought matters settled by the pope and by his precept. He summoned the Jesuit rector, who claimed he was merely publishing the papal decree that the Dominicans took as aimed at them. Jacovazzi told him to do no more and also told the priors of Santa Maria Novella and San Marco not to deal with the matter on the following Sunday.⁵¹

Then the Inquisition took a hand. On 21 August 1602, after hearing complaints from both sides, the Jesuit one about Lorini (for what not said), it ordered Jacovacci and the vicar to investigate.⁵² In the following day’s meeting with the pope (a coram), the Congregation read the letters again, and the pope issued the proposed order to investigate Lorini and his new Jesuit antagonist.⁵³ The nuncio’s report was delayed until 15 September, but when it was read in another coram on 26 September, the pope ordered the Dominican general “to have removed from the city and diocese of Florence Fra Niccolò Lorini and order (praecipiat) him not to speak or treat of this matter (“ut removere faciat a civitate ac diocesi Florentiae fratrem Nicolaum Lorinum, eique praecipiat ne loquatur, ne tractet de hac materia”).⁵⁴ The nuncio had to defend himself for allegedly having begun judicial process in the case, although Lorini was not specifically mentioned. In fact, he disappears from the record, suggesting that he had indeed finally accepted the Inquisition’s precept and gone into exile.

Lorini’s “exile” did not prevent him from serving as prior of S. Domenico, Pistoia, from at least 9 February 1604; he was replaced by 22 January 1606.⁵⁵ In the fall of 1605 (and possibly the following year as well), Lorini preached at least one more set of Advent sermons in Rome. The sermons were published in 1615 with a dedication to the Florentine Cardinal Luigi Capponi, new legate of Bologna, another home of Galileo’s enemies, suspiciously dated the day after Caccini’s reading.⁵⁶ In the preface Lorini claimed that he would bring out the “moral sense, and the points addressed to the soul will all be taken from the proper bowels of the letter” (“il senso morale, e gl’avvertimenti nell’anima saranno tolti tutti di peso dalle proprie viscere della lettera”); in other words, he rooted his preaching in the literal sense of scripture. Interestingly enough, the first sermon has a lot to say about the sun and the heavens in both a natural and metaphorical sense. Preaching on one of the prescribed texts for 1 Advent “There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars” (Luke 21.25), he told his hearers that they well knew “that really in these bodies and globes and celestial planets will be caused many unusual things, which will multiply so much, the noises and crashes, that it will appear that the same bodies and celestial globes, that is, the stars, fall down and disappear or do not appear because of the thick fogs or darkest clouds, it will be exactly as if they had fallen, losing especially their usual influence” (“che realmente in questi corpi, e globi, e Pianeti celesti faranno cagionate molte cose disusate, a talche tanto si multiplicaranno, i rumori, e fracassi, che egli parrà, che gli stessi corpi, e globi celesti, cioe le stelle caschino, e sparendo, o non si appalesando per rispetto alle nebbie folte, o oscurissime nugole sarà proprio, come se fossero cadute, mancando massimo da loro consueti influssi”).

The regular motions of “the celestial orders” would be altered such that the end would come. But not because the heaven’s intrinsic motion given it by God had failed, which by its nature it never could, but because of that same God’s extrinsic action to stop that motion.⁵⁷ Although the apocalyptic and astrological overtones and content are clear, Lorini’s point was that Christian philosophers and theologians offered the same explanation of these phenomena, as did astrologers and physicians, no matter how their language might differ.⁵⁸ The absence of astronomers, whom Lorini would have called mathematicians, might have struck his audience.

In several sermons of another collection published two years later, Elogii delle più principali sante donne del sagro calendario [Praises of all the Principal Sainted Women of the Sacred Calendar], dedicated to the grand duke’s wife and proclaiming Lorini his preacher on the title page, the now seventy-three-year-old Dominican often came closer than he had in 1605 to leveling criticisms as Caccini had of “mathematicians” and on one occasion in a sermon perhaps given to his fellow Dominicans (the audience is addressed as “fratelli”) explicitly faulted Copernicus for saying the earth moved.⁵⁹ The dedication helped explain why such ideas were so dangerous. Lorini told the grand duchess that he often thought about why Jesus likened the church to the heaven and concluded that it was because “just as the aforesaid heaven for His greater beauty and our greater utility has been by nature, not wanderingly (errante) so egregiously adorned with planets or masculine and feminine names and by so many other splendid lights, so His church by Him in resemblance to these lights of the heaven should have been adorned by His Divine Majesty with most select men and most prefect women, lights no less resplendent than those” (“si come il predetto Cielo per maggior bellezza di lui, e utilità di noi, è stato dalla Natura, non errante, tanto egregiamente adornato di Pianeti, di nome maschile, e femminile, e di tant’altri splendentissimi lumi, così la sua Chiesa di lui a somiglianza di essi lumi del Cielo, sia stata di S. D. M. adornata d’huomini sceltissimi, e di perfettisime donne, lumi non meno risplendenti di quelli”).⁶⁰

Lorini spun out another long metaphor in a sermon for the feast of Sant’Agnese, 21 January. This time he raised the seemingly threatening possibility that the worthless, lowly earth might compete with “the heaven, the firmament and the pavement of God’s feet” and the heaven agree to comparison with the earth in certain respects. The stars in the heaven were like flames on earth, and both were full of flowers.⁶¹ The sun, “the queen of heaven,” was like a carbuncle (the gem, not a sore) on earth:⁶²

Much proportion is found between virtues and jewels, since jewels are nothing other than vapor and a dry exhalation from the earth, frozen, or petrified by the cold by virtue of the heaven and operation of the sun and reduced by them to the highest digestion, from which the heaven and the sun receive the variety of colors and beauties and various properties and virtues; because finding [them] in the earth they are however generated by the goodness and virtue of heaven, as virtues are on earth in saintly souls, by God’s gift.”⁶³

Lorini closed with what seems a veiled criticism of the Copernicans. The stars served to show human weakness “that could not rise to accomplish the tiniest thing in the starry heaven.”⁶⁴

Lorini’s sermon on St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgins began with a metaphor promising more reflections on the relations between heaven and earth. Likening Ursula’s legendary battle with the Huns under the walls of Cologne to conflict or war between inanimate objects and “flowers of that great garden of the firmament,” he described the stars assembled into troops, then into battle array, and finally an army that naturally defeated the enemy. They did this without leaving their “order.” Lorini cited the examples of the combats between St. Michael and the dragon and the angels and Pharoah, as well as the Exodus, before observing “that the stars, standing firm, without leaving the firmament, should have battled, this is completely unheard of” (“che le stelle, stando ferme, senza partirsi del firmamento abbiano battagliato, questo è al tutto inaudito”).⁶⁵ He amplified the point by comparing the stars to Ursula’s virgins, calling them “stars of the ecclesiastical firmament” (“stelle del firmamento ecclesiastico”).

Sometime after giving these sermons, Lorini returned from exile, reentering the convent of San Marco, where Caccini lived and the house the Medici particularly favored. He was also made preacher to Grand Duke Cosimo II (ruled 1609–1621) and allegedly reader in ecclesiastical history at the fledgling University of Florence.⁶⁶ Lorini had good reason to regard sermons as his best weapon. Relying on it ten years after his banning, he tried exactly the same gambit as Caccini, attacking Galileo from the pulpit; his sermon has been lost.⁶⁷ Later that same year Galileo called Lorini out and forced him to apologize for raising objections in conversation (or just possibly in another sermon) to “Ipernicus, or whatever his name is.”⁶⁸ If Lorini really did not know Copernicus’s name, this suggests that he may not yet have been cooperating closely with Caccini, or that Caccini had not yet imbibed his anti-Copernican views, or some combination of the two. It is worth noting that, as of 1612, Galileo’s position was strong enough to force Lorini to crawl to him. Not that Lorini went quietly. The last sentence of his letter with its dark mutterings about “the Companies of Piano and Ghighnoni” suppressed long ago and its perhaps ironic assurance “that all our [Florentine] nobility is optimally catholic” made a barely implicit threat.⁶⁹

Whatever Lorini may have said on “la mattina dei Morti” (probably 1 November 1612), and even if the points in his sermons were not directed, even implicitly, at Copernicus, and certainly not at Galileo, given the sermons’ early date, they serve to explain how Lorini could become violently opposed to both men’s ideas. He soon had help from Caccini.