Works on Galileo have essentially shown us two views of his life and work—Galileo the astronomer and martyr of science, and Galileo the precursor of Newton. Mark Peterson’s new book, Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts, gives us a third view. Peterson’s is a Galileo with a more expansive understanding of mathematics than the other two familiar Galileos, one who is capable of a synthesis of the artistic and the mathematical in his own person, a Galileo interested in and indebted to Hellenistic culture.
Peterson, a Professor of Physics and Mathematics, explains the book’s origins:
The beginnings of this project were some observations about mathematics and the arts in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. I was especially intrigued by some mathematical ideas that I had noticed in Dante, unexpected mathematical sophistication centuries before Galileo. I also became fascinated with Galileo, and I began to wonder where he had come from. This question seemed to organize my thoughts. What was Galileo’s intellectual inheritance, and how did it form him? Galileo’s education was in the humanities and the arts, so the question is a sprawling one. And even that is not enough, because Galileo’s ultimate enthusiasm was for mathematics, and that is another broad intellectual stream. Where all these streams mixed, that is where Galileo came from, or so I imagined. To understand it, I had to follow the streams back to their sources.
The book summarizes the classical legacy in mathematics and the sciences, and contains chapters on the Renaissance arts of poetry, painting, music, and architecture. We learn, for instance, that Galileo’s favorite poem was Orlando Furioso, Ludovico Ariosto’s epic of love, chivalry, and madness. The thread connecting the book’s sections, writes Peterson, is mathematics: “Implicitly I ask, what did mathematics mean for the arts? And what did the arts mean for mathematics?”
The sections come together with Peterson’s reconsideration of Galileo himself, in light of all this background material on the various artistic traditions of which he was a product. What we have in Galileo’s Muse, then, is the surprising and extraordinary claim that it was the mathematics of Renaissance arts, not Renaissance sciences, that became modern science. And, what’s more, Peterson presents a dramatic and convincing claim that the Oratione de Mathematicae Laudibus, a 1627 book attributed to Galileo’s young protégé Niccolo Aggiunti was actually written by Galileo himself, and should be read as confirmation of this “third” Galileo.
Mark Peterson spoke with us about Galileo’s Muse for an episode of the Harvard Press Podcast. You can listen here.
