Lussu file #5: Other river, lake and rich champaign
In which the Author quotes Ariosto and talks about Galileo and his depictions of the Moon and the Medicean planets
This Lussu file is the translation of a chapter from his latest book, which has already been object of our attention in Lussu file #1, but this time the subject is something that apparently has little to do with design, writing and the like: the great scientist Galileo Galilei.
There are several reasons why Lussu holds Galileo in such high esteem and they induce us to believe that some investigation of his work is worthwhile. Galileo embodies a rare combination of scientific and manual skills. He was able to manage the production of marks at different levels (Lussu would say: ‘the production of writing’), from watercolour reproductions to complex editorial projects. Galileo is essential to Western culture, he laid the foundations of scientific thought, of inductive reasoning applied to knowledge.
We must remember that fundamentally Lussu is a positivist and rationalist, and Galileo is one of the world champions in this particular field. Indeed, in an unpublished fragment drawn from his notes, Lussu quotes the following sentence from the Italian philosopher Ludovico Geymonat: ‘It was the Enlightenment that gathered the most vital and fertile seeds of the legacy of Galileo, that drew real and fruitful lessons from all his work; and I do not mean only from his brilliant scientific and methodological ideas, but also from his own political-cultural programme, the failure of which constituted a decisive experience for European civilisation: a bitter experience, but necessary to “dispel” errors and prejudices of which Galileo was supporter and victim.’
Moreover, Galileo exemplifies what Lussu has done and said throughout his life, notably his contributions to a new theory of writing as discussed in Lussu file #4. And, finally, his Sidereus Nuncius is a clear example of what Lussu has always maintained: that generic graphic designers are ultimately useless, and that scientists and scholars have all the tools to learn how to design things themselves—‘but that would be true if they had brains like Galileo’s’, says Lussu’s pupil Luciano Perondi.
Giovanni Lussu: Other river, lake and rich champaign
Excerpt from Altri fiumi, altri laghi, altre campagne (Viterbo 2014, pp. 24–46). English version by editorial staff.
The title of this article is a line from Orlando Furioso (canto 34, verse 72, first hendecasyllable), in which the Moon is described as seen by Astolfo.
The text is based on the talk I gave in late September 2012 in Treviso at the end of the Design e scienza conference held by the Italian visual communication design association AIAP (I was not quite the last speaker, Michael Stroll also spoke after me).
01. The Moon
02. From the life of Galileo
03. What Astolfo saw
04. Ancient science
05. Shopping list
06. The sidereal messenger
07. Evolution and knowledge
08. The Medicean planets
Appendix: Astolfo on the Moon
01. The Moon
In the days that followed 25 August 2012, the day Neil Armstrong died, the image of the first footprint made on the Moon on 21 July 1969 was shown widely, and the now famous words ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ were repeated many times.
But possibly an even greater leap, a necessary forerunner to the one in 1969, was made more than three and a half centuries earlier, on 13 March 1610, when the printer Tommaso Baglioni, ‘in the late evening’ (it was a Saturday), arrived in Venice to print out the first 550 copies of Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo Galilei.
The pamphlet (‘sidereal messenger’, or ‘starry messenger’) proclaimed three very recent discoveries, the results of the painstaking observations made in the cold nights of the preceding months with the perspicillum, the telescope Galileo had made with his own hands. The observations were that the Moon had mountains, and possibly seas, that the Milky Way was made of stars, and that Jupiter had satellites. The Florentine Galileo — at that time professor of mathematics at the University of Padua — named them the ‘Medicean planets’, to ingratiate himself with Cosimo dei Medici with a view to returning to the city of his birth; nonetheless, this did him no good in the long run, as it put him within reach of the Inquisition — with the consequences we all know.
Of the three observations, the discovery of the mountains on the Moon was by far the most radically revolutionary.
02. From the life of Galileo
Galilei does not seem to have been a very Faustian character, nor much of a ‘mad scientist’, as described in romantic literature, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the disturbing characters of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe.
Nor did he have much in common with a bizarre figure like the great Isaac Newton, Unitarian heretic and compulsive writer of endless treatises on esoteric Old Testament exegesis.
The passionate and profoundly human scholar of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo seems in fact to have been a rather normal fellow, like the protagonist of Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson, and even the unscrupulous character who emerges from Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method (though this is possibly a little disparaging in some ways).
Vincenzo Viviani, assistant to Galileo from 1639 until 1642, the year of his death, left a beautiful biography, the Racconto istorico della vita di Galileo Galilei (Historical Account of the Life of Galileo Galilei), written in 1654.
He paints a picture of a completely normal person who grew up in a favourable environment, in which, as unfortunately rarely happens, the best conditions were met for man’s natural predisposition for knowledge and ‘creativity’, as determined by biological evolution, to develop in a completely natural way.
His home was the intellectual and artistic environment of a Florence that was mindful of the glories of the Renaissance. According to Viviani, Galileo’s father Vincenzo was ‘very well versed in mathematics and mainly in speculative music, of which he had such excellent knowledge that there is perhaps nobody of note among modern theoreticians who is better or who has written more eruditely.’ However, he also ‘combined the perfection of theory with practice, and played various sorts of instrument, particularly the lute, for which he was much celebrated in his time.’
[Galileo] showed the vivacity of his genius in the first years of his childhood, when in his leisure hours he occupied himself with making various instruments and machines, copying and making little models of constructions he saw, such as mills and galleys […] If he needed something for one of his models he would invent, using whalebones instead of iron springs, or other things as he needed them, adapting new ideas and playful movements to the machine, so that it did not remain imperfect and he could make it work.
He spent some years of his youth studying the humanities in Florence with a teacher of ill repute, as his father, burdened by a large family and having very little money, could not provide anything better […] But the young man, knowing the precariousness of his position and wanting to raise himself, decided to make up for the poverty of his fate with diligence in his studies.
Before he was sent to Pisa at the age of sixteen to study medicine,
one of his many favourite entertainments was practising music and playing the keyboard and the lute, at which, with the example and teaching of his father, he achieved great excellence […] becoming even better than his father in the gentleness and grace of his playing; that gentleness of manner stayed with him to the end of his days. He amused himself with great delight and with admirable profit in drawing; in which he had so much genius and talent, that he himself used to say to his friends that, if he had been able to choose his profession, he would certainly have chosen painting.
This propensity for painting, as we shall see, would play a crucial role in the dissemination of Sidereus Nuncius.
Viviani tells us:
He particularly enjoyed the exquisiteness and variety of the wines of every country […] and such was his delight in the delicacy of wines and grapes and in the way of keeping vines, that he pruned them and tied them with his own hands in the gardens of his villas, with more than ordinary care, diligence and industry […] He was quick to anger, but quicker to be appeased. In conversation he was universally most amiable, for when speaking on serious matters he was full of deeply thoughtful opinions and ideas, and when speaking on lighter matters he was not lacking in wit.
And finally:
he had in his memory […] almost the whole poem of Lodovico Ariosto, who was always his favourite author and celebrated above other poets […] He spoke of Ariosto with various judgments of esteem and admiration, and when asked his opinion of the two poems of Ariosto and Tasso, he said that Tasso seemed more beautiful to him, but that he liked Ariosto better, adding that one said words, and the other things.
03. What Astolfo saw
One cannot help but imagine, given this predilection for Orlando Furioso so magnificently articulated, that on those cold nights of observation at the telescope Galileo thought over and over again of that octave (canto 34, verse 72) in which the surface of the Moon is described as it appears to the knight Astolfo, as he arrived there together with John the Evangelist on the chariot of the prophet Elijah, in search of Orlando’s lost wits:
Here other river, lake, and rich champaign
Are seen, than those which are below described;
Here other valley, other hill and plain,
With towns and cities of their own supplied;
Which mansions of such mighty size contain,
Such never he before or after spied.
Here spacious hold and lonely forest lay,
Where nymphs for ever chased the panting prey.
04. Ancient science
The radical nature of Sidereus Nuncius in fact lies precisely in the revelation of the mountains of the Moon, for the first time manifested to mankind by means of ‘sensible experiences’, in other words through the senses.
Greek astronomy, made up of conjectures on observations with the naked eye, had often advanced bold hypotheses on the nature and shape of celestial bodies.
Suffice it to recall the heliocentric theory proposed by Aristarchus of Samos in the Third Century BCE, and the amazing measurement of the earth’s circumference made, according to some scholars, by Eratosthenes of Cyrene a few years later.
It was known that, at noon on the summer solstice, in Syene (modern Aswan, located on the Tropic of Cancer), the Sun illuminated the bottom of a well, that is it was at the zenith, or as they say, at perpendicular incidence; on the same day and at the same time, the shadow of an obelisk in Alexandria, about 800 km north of Syene, showed that the Sun’s rays had an inclination of just over 7°.
Assuming that the rays of the Sun between Alexandria and Syene were parallel, which is essentially correct given the distance of the Sun, a simple trigonometric calculation applied to the length of the shadow with respect to the height of the obelisk made it possible to calculate the radius of the Earth, with great accuracy.
Lucretius, in the great De Rerum Natura, condenses the legacy of Greek rationalism through Epicurus.
Since there is so much matter and space is available, Lucretius argues in a passage from the poem, things can only unfold and multiply, and he continues (II, 1070–76):
Nunc et seminibus si tanta est copia quantam
enumerare aetas animantum non queat omnis,
quis eadem natura manet, quae semina rerum
conicere in loca quaeque queat simili ratione
atque huc sunt coniecta,
(so if there are so many atoms — seeds—that they cannot be counted in the whole life of all living beings, that have the same characteristics, and combine in a similar way to how they are combined here)
necesse est confiteare
esse alios aliis terrarum in partibus orbis
et varia hominum gentis et saecla ferarum
(it must be admitted that in other parts of the universe there are other Earths, and different species of men and animals)
And referring both explicitly to Lucretius and implicitly to the undercurrents of heterodox thought, some years before Sidereus Nuncius the hapless Giordano Bruno had written in his De l’infinito, universo et mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), published in London in 1584:
Cotal spacio, lo diciamo infinito, perché non è raggione, convenienza, possibilità, senso o natura che debba finirlo; in esso sono infiniti mondi simili a questo.
(This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception or nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds similar to our own, and of the same kind.)
But these ideas of Lucretius and Bruno were pure intellectual speculations, explorations of the mind, yearnings for the liberation of knowledge, for emancipation from superstition, and certainly in no way real anticipations of those infinite worlds, except in suggestive fantasies like those of Ariosto.
05. The shopping list
Let’s look at some of the adventures of Galileo and the telescope.
We’ll start with the ‘shopping list’ jotted on a letter sent to him by Ottavio Brenzoni from Verona on 23 November 1609 [above, fig. I]: alongside slippers (‘scarfarotti’) and a hat for his son Vincenzo, ivory combs for his partner Marina Gamba and food supplies (lentils, chickpeas, rice, spelt [an ancient type of grain], raisins, sugar, pepper, cloves, cinnamon, spices, jams and oranges) we also see, at first sight somewhat disconcertingly, two artillery balls, a tin organ pipe, flat ‘German’ glass, pieces of mirror, iron bowls, Greek pitch, and so on.
These are actually the things necessary to grind lenses, while the organ pipe makes the support and the external casing.
Having meticulously gathered information in the shops of Venetian opticians, Galileo was continuing his childhood passion for constructing devices and machines, and preparing to set up an advanced telescope, with which he would make his discoveries.
06. The sidereal messenger
Sidereus Nuncius, written in Latin in the certainty of a wide European readership, proclaimed that
Pulcherrimum atque visu iucundissimum est […] lunare corpus […] ex tam propinquo intueri […]
(It is a most beautiful and delightful sight to behold … the body of the Moon … so near)
ex quo deinde sensata certitudine quispiam intelligat, Lunam superficie leni et perpolita nequaquam esse indutam, sed aspera et inaequali; ac veluti ipsiumet Telluris facies, ingentibus tumoribus, profundis lacunis atque anfractibus undiquaque confertam existere
(and consequently anyone may know, with the certainty that is due to the use of our senses, that the Moon certainly does not possess a smooth and polished surface, but one rough and uneven, and, just like the face of the Earth itself, is everywhere full of vast protuberance, deep chasms, and sinuosities)
The pamphlet contained five engravings that depicted the surface of the Moon [fig. C–H], hastily worked by an anonymous craftsman on the basis of Galileo’s watercolours [below, fig. J] executed ‘live’ from 30 November 1609.
These splendid pictures, made possible by Galileo’s early passion for painting, are therefore inseparable from the extraordinary fortune of the work, which in a few weeks would reach all the major European cultural centres, from Naples to Prague, Paris, Cologne, London; and not only are they inseparable, but they are, as sure representations of ‘sensible experiences’, the heart and the soul of the work.
07. Evolution and knowledge
There is no doubt that this was one of the greatest acquisitions of knowledge of the human species.
And to go further, fully applying the evolutionist paradigm, the most powerful we have today, it can still be said that in those days the entire human species took a crucial step in its evolutionary history: and if the knowledge of the surrounding environment is the obvious and indispensable premise to the ability to survive in it by managing to modify it (radioactive waste included), and since equally obviously evolution favours this ability, then it is the whole of nature itself that took a crucial step, it is the universe itself, by means of evolutionary processes, that in those days became aware of itself.
If we assume this titanic and terrible picture around the Sidereus Nuncius, then necesse est confiteari, as Lucretius would say, ‘it is necessary to admit’ that the techniques of graphic representation are a powerful evolutionary tool, developed through the ages to better manage the search for knowledge and to guarantee greater possibilities of survival and success.
Thus, at this rate, we could lay the foundations for something like an ‘evolutionist graphic’, a ‘Darwinist design’ that investigates and produces those forms of writing and representation, from pictures to notations in their multiple interrelations with language, which are more directly functional to the progress of the human species, and therefore of the universe itself.
08. The Medicean Planets
Before leaving Galileo, we must mention another document associated with Sidereus Nuncius, this time relating to the Moons of Jupiter, later named Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa.
The various notes and letters describing Jupiter and its satellites, represented as asterisks, are well known; some show perhaps the earliest uses of the arrow sign to indicate direction [above, fig. K].
The already-mentioned and never over-praised Galileo’s Telescope by Bucciantini, Camerota and Giudice is often described, though it is not at all well-known and was first published in 2012. It gives the very first annotation of the very first observation of satellites [below, fig. L]. This comes from a letter sent to Galileo by his friend Giovan Francesco Sagredo, who was to be one of the protagonists of the Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World, to appear in print in 1632.
The letter is dated 28 October 1609, but from other documents we know that it was written on the night of 7 January 1610 (only two months before publication!); in this representation, evidently done there and then, on the first piece of paper to hand, the satellites are simple crosses and Jupiter is a small circle.
On the same piece of paper is another list, this time less evident than the shopping list: little boxes, money, thin board, mask.
Also worth mentioning is the indication of the addressee (‘To the illustrious and most excellent Mr Galileo Galilei, mathematician of Padua’), written with a pointed quill, presumably by a secretary of Sagredo’s, in the purest style of another Giovan Francesco, the great Cresci, examples of which can be seen in his treatise on the perfect cursive italic Il perfetto cancellaresco corsivo, printed in Rome in 1579.
Appendix: Astolfo on the Moon
How is the Moon represented as it appeared to the English knight Astolfo in Orlando Furioso?
The first illustrated edition, with a small horizontal woodcut at the beginning of each canto, was printed in Venice in 1530 (two years before Ariosto’s death) by Niccolò d’Aristotile, known as Zoppino.
In the opening of canto 34 we see John the Evangelist showing Astolfo the flasks containing Orlando’s wits; however, the caption says ‘paradise’, while in the poem we should be on the Moon, so the illustrator did not properly read the text to be represented, or it was not explained to him properly, as often happens today.
1542 is the date of the edition, again printed in Venice, by Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari.
This also has a small woodcut (about 48 x 86 mm) for each canto.
The one that opens canto 34 [above, fig. M] depicts Astolfo and John the Evangelist on the chariot of the prophet Elijah heading towards the Moon, incongruently depicted as a slice or sickle, but solid, with a thickness: ‘The chariot, towering, threads the fiery sphere, | And rises thence into the lunar reign.’
In the lunar sky, under the chariot, we seem to be able to recognise the heaps of snakes, ruins, bladders and hooks, metaphors of all the things lost on Earth, which in fact, according to Ariosto’s description, should be in a valley.
The palace at the bottom left is undoubtedly that of the Fates, on the Moon: you can clearly see the Fate holding the spindle, and then there is also Time running up.
The woodcut above [fig. N] is from the edition of Giovanni Andrea Valvassori, known as Guadagnino (Venezia 1553).
At the centre is the palace of Earthly Paradise, on top of the world; from the right enter Astolfo on the hippogriff (although it looks like an ordinary horse), being welcomed by John the Evangelist.
Above the fiery sphere Elijah’s chariot arrives in the lunar sky, the highest circle.
To the left the mountains of the Moon, on the right the heaps of lost things.
The image below [fig. O], by far the most complex, opens canto 34 of Orlando Furioso in the edition published in Venice in 1556 by Vincenzo Valgrisi (and reprinted several times) and pictures the entire story all at once.
Astolfo dismounts from the hippogriff (1), ties it to a tree (2) and descends into the cave (3), where he meets the spirit of Lydia (4); he comes outside again (5) and cuts the branches of a tree (6), which he uses to close the entrance to the cave to keep the Harpies inside (7); then he washes himself at a spring (8) and, fully clothed and armoured, remounts the hippogriff (9).
He then flies (10) to the Earthly Paradise, on top of the Earth, and arrives in front of a building (11), where he is welcomed by John the Evangelist (12) and then meets the prophets Enoch and Elijah (13).
John explains to Astolfo that they are going to the Moon, then they climb together onto Elijah’s chariot drawn by horses redder than flame (14) and cross the fiery sphere (15); arriving in the lunar sky they pass over rivers, valleys, open countryside, cities and castles (16).
Still flying, they enter the valley of lost things (17), including the flask marked ‘Orlando’s wits.’
Finally they arrive at the Palace of the Fates, who incessantly spin human destinies (18), which Time, an old man, always running, brings to their end (19).
The heaps of wreckage in the valley of lost things are barely discernible; according to the site made by Lina Bolzoni (www.orlandofurioso.org) we can identify the bladders of forgotten kingdoms (verse 76), the hooks thrown to obtain favours (77), the gold knots of unhappy loves, the eagle’s talons of authorities granted in vain and the bellows of concessions to favourites (78), the ruins of violated treaties and the serpents with female faces, of counterfeiters (79).
As in the Valvassori edition, the Moon is a sphere, behind and above the sphere of the Earth.
. . .
Acknowledgements
English translation of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius by Edward Stafford Carlos, edited by Peter Barker; Lucretius’ De rerum Natura by William Ellery Leonard; Giordano Bruno’s De l’infinito, universo et mondi by Scott Gosnell.
English translation of Orlando Furioso by William Stewart Rose, edited, proofed, and prepared for the electronic version by Douglas B. Killings.
English translation of the excerpts from Vincenzo Viviani’s Racconto istorico della vita di Galileo Galilei by the editorial staff.
A short bibliography on Galileo
By Giovanni Lussu and editorial staff
Banfi, Antonio. Vita di Galileo Galilei (Feltrinelli, 1962). Republished several times, the latest by Cuem, Milan 2010. Spanish translation: Vida de Galileo Galilei (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1967)
Bellone, Enrico. Il sogno di Galileo. Oggetti e immagini della ragione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980)
Bellone, Enrico. La stella nuova. L’evoluzione e il caso Galilei (Torino: Einaudi, 2003)
Brecht, Bertolt. Life of Galileo (original title: Leben des Galilei). The best edition for Italian readers is: Vita di Galileo (Torino: Einaudi, 2005)
Bucciantini, Massimo, Michele Camerota & Franco Giudice, Galileo’s Telescope (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015). This text was originally published in Italian: Il telescopio di Galileo: una storia europea (Torino: Einaudi, 2012).
Drake, Stillman. Galileo (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980)
Drake, Stillman. Galileo: pioneer scientist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990)
Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975)
Galilei, Galileo. Sidereus Nuncius (1610). A page by page translation based on the version by Edward Stafford Carlo was published by Rivingtons (London: 1880) and newly edited and corrected by Peter Barker for Byzantium Press (Oklahoma City: 2004). It was translated into Italian by Maria Timpanaro Cardini (Florence: Sansoni, 1948). Reprinted by Marsilio (Venice: 1993). A copy of the first edition of Galileo’s book is provided by Gallica, but it lacks the illustrations of the Moon.
Geymonat, Ludovico. Galileo Galilei: A biography and inquiry into his philosophy of science (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). This text was originally published in Italian: Galileo Galilei (Turin: Einaudi, 1957)
Stanley Robinson, Kim. Galileo’s Dream (London: Harper, 2009),
Wootton, David. Galileo: Watcher of the Skies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)
