PART TWO
[IX]
MOST ILLUSTRIOUS LORD FATHER
The happiness I derived from the gift of the letters you sent me, Sire, written to you by that most distinguished Cardinal, now elevated to the exalted position of Supreme Pontiff, was ineffable, for his letters so clearly express the affection this great man has for you, and also show how highly he values your abilities. I have read and reread them, savoring them in private, and I return them to you, as you insist, without having shown them to anyone else except Suor Arcangela, who has joined me in drawing the utmost joy from seeing how much our father is favored by persons of such caliber. May it please the Lord to grant you the robust health you will need to fulfill your desire to visit His Holiness, so that you can be even more greatly esteemed by him; and, seeing how many promises he makes you in his letters, we can entertain the hope that the Pope will readily grant you some sort of assistance for our brother.
In the meantime, we shall not fail to pray the Lord, from whom all grace descends, to bless you by letting you achieve all that you desire, so long as that be for the best.
I can only imagine, Sire, what a magnificent letter you must have written to His Holiness, to congratulate him on the occasion of his reaching this exalted rank, and, because I am more than a little bit curious, I yearn to see a copy of that letter, if it would please you to show it, and I thank you so much for the ones you have already sent, as well as for the melons which we enjoyed most gratefully. I have dashed off this note in considerable haste, so I beg your pardon if I have for that reason been sloppy or spoken amiss. I send you loving greetings along with the others here who always ask to be remembered to you.
FROM SAN MATTEO, THE 10TH DAY OF AUGUST.
Most affectionate daughter,
S.M.C. 
Only four days previously, on August 6,1623, Maffeo Cardinal Barberini stood sweating in the Sistine Chapel, where he and more than fifty fellow cardinals had been locked together since mid-July in papal election proceedings. Absent the unified conviction, inspired by the Holy Spirit, that had led to the acclamatio selection of Gregory XV two years before, the Sacred College of Cardinals now prayed for guidance in the balloting. The members voted twice a day, morning and afternoon, each one prohibited from endorsing himself, and all of them disguising their handwriting to maintain the secrecy of the selection process. Every time the tabulation failed to produce the required two-thirds majority, the cardinal scrutineers bound the slips of paper and burned them in a special stove with wet straw, which sent up the black smoke of indecision. The typical heat and malaria that visited Rome every summer claimed the lives of six elderly cardinals in the conclave before the assembly at last cast fifty of its fifty-five ballots for Barberini as the new leader of the Church.
Florence in the late sixteenth century
“Do you, Most Reverend Lord Cardinal,” the chamberlain asked him face to face, “accept your election as Supreme Pontiff, which has been canonically carried out?”
“Accepto,” he answered with the only word required.
“By what name will you be known?” The choices included his own Christian name, Maffeo, or the name of any pope who had preceded him—except Peter, of course, which tradition forbade.
At a stroke, Maffeo Barberini metamorphosed into Pope Urban VIII. The ballots, burned with dry straw instead of wet this time, announced their white smoke signal to the crowds around the Vatican, and soon the declaration “We have a pope!” justified the crescendoing ecstasy of their cries.
Galileo, recognizing the potential personal boon of this turn of events, shared his excitement with Suor Maria Celeste by sending her a sheaf of letters that spanned a decade of pleasant exchanges. These dated from Cardinal Barberini’s first letter to Galileo in 1611, when he called him a virtuous and pious man of great value whose longevity could only improve the lives of others. The passing years had fanned the cardinal’s ardor, so that his 1620 poem, “Dangerous Adulation,” not only cited Galileo as the discoverer of wondrous new celestial phenomena but also used his sunspots as a metaphor for dark fears in the hearts of the mighty. In closing the cover letter to Galileo that accompanied this poetic tribute, the cardinal had signed himself—with noteworthy warmth—“as your brother.”
Galileo naturally took a more deferential tone in his responses, noting sentiments such as, “I am your humble servant, reverently kissing your hem and praying God that the greatest felicity shall be yours.” He wrote as often as necessary to keep Cardinal Barberini updated on his scientific work and sent him a copy of each of his books, as well as his unpublished “Treatise on the Tides,” and Guiduccfs Discourse on the Comets.
The most recent letter from the cardinal bore the date June 24, 1623, just weeks prior to his accession, in which he thanked Galileo for guiding a favorite nephew, Francesco Barberini, through the successful completion of doctoral studies at Pisa.
Galileo wanted nothing so much as to travel to Rome in August to kiss the feet of the new pope and march with his fellow Lyncean Academicians in Urban’s investiture procession. The exciting early days of the Barberini pontificate overflowed with promise for all artists and scientists, and particularly those from Urban’s native Florence. Striking now, Galileo thought he might well secure the pope’s blessing for his own most sensitive projects, and at the same time ensure his son’s future.
VRBANVS VIII. BARBERINVS PONT. MAX.
Urban VIII in the first year of his pontificate
Galileo had sent Vincenzio off to law school at the University of Pisa the previous year. Now he hoped to obtain a pension for him—a title as a canon that would guarantee Vincenzio a small annual base income for the rest of his life in exchange for little or no real work. Such sinecures influenced the economy of seventeenth-century Italy, often draining the revenues of small dioceses while filling the pockets of absentee landlords, at least half of whom were laymen. Despite the abuses of this system, however, Rome not only tolerated it but also supervised it, because the pensions supported so many more prelates than the papal treasury could afford to pay.
As for Suor Maria Celeste’s request to see a copy of her father’s congratulatory letter to Urban, Galileo denied it on the grounds that he had not written one. He explained to her that although he enjoyed a most cordial relationship of long standing with His Holiness—enabling him to dedicate his new book to the pope and confidently anticipate a private audience at the Vatican—protocol argued against a personal note on this occasion. Instead, he had proffered his congratulations through the proper channel of Urban’s nephew Francesco, who had been Galileo’s student.
“It was through your most gentle and loving letter,” Suor Maria Celeste confessed a few days later, “that I became fully aware of my backwardness, in assuming as I did that you, Sire, would perforce write right away to such a person, or, to put it better, to the loftiest lord in all the world. Therefore I thank you for pointing out my error, and at the same time I feel certain that you will, by the love you bear me, excuse my gross ignorance and as many other flaws as find expression in my character. I readily concede that you are the one to correct and advise me in all matters, just as I desire you to do and would so appreciate your doing, for I realize how little knowledge and ability I can justly call my own.”
The date of this letter, August 13, marked Suor Maria Celeste’s twenty-third birthday, although she made no reference to that fact. She reckoned the accumulation of her years now by the anniversary of her nun’s vows on October 4, and by the feast day of the Holy Virgin Mary, whose name she had taken, on September 8.
Within a week she learned that illness had scotched Galileo’s travel plans and forced him into Florence to the home of his late sister, where his recently widowed brother-in-law and his nephew were taking care of him. The news arrived via the steward of San Matteo, a hired man who lived on the convent grounds with his wife, helping the nuns by tending to the heavy work and the traffic with the outside world.
“This morning I learned from our steward that you find yourself ill in Florence, Sire,” she wrote on August 17, “and because it sounds to me like something outside your normal behavior to leave home when you are troubled by your pains, I am filled with apprehension, and fear that you are in much worse condition than usual.
“Therefore I beseech you to give the steward some account of your state, so that, if you do not fare as badly as we fear, we can calm our anxious spirits. And truly I never resent living cloistered as a nun, except when I hear that you are sick, because then I would like to be free to come to visit and care for you with all the diligence I could muster. But even though I cannot, I thank the Lord God for everything, knowing full well that not a leaf turns without His willing it so.”
Pope Urban VIII suddenly took sick, too. He contracted the fever that ran epidemic through Rome that summer of 1623, and was compelled to postpone his coronation until late September.
Barberini coat of arms
Even without the official ceremony, Urban had commenced the exercise of his new powers immediately upon accepting the vote of the conclave, as was his right. On the very day of his election, August 6, he issued the bulls of canonization that made saints of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, the Jesuit founders, and also Philip Neri, “the Apostle of Rome.”
Within weeks, Urban VIII began appointing his brothers and nephews to potent positions in his new regime—inviting detractors to quip that the three bees on the family escutcheon had led former lives as horseflies. The opportunistic Barberini, after all, laid no prior claim to nobility or wealth. Nevertheless, the Barberini pope now commanded the respect of all Christian princes and princes of the Church. Urban turned his married brother, Carlo, into commander in chief of the papal armies and made a cardinal of Carlo’s erudite eldest son, Francesco. This new cardinal nephew was the same Francesco Barberini who had just earned his doctorate at Pisa, having been a favored student of Benedetto Castelli and, through him, of Galileo as well. No sooner had the twenty-six-year-old graduate become His Eminence and chief lieutenant to His Holiness than he also found himself elected a member in good standing of the Lyncean Academy.
On September 29, the day of Urban’s coronation, the new pope is said to have displayed the dramatic devotional style that characterized his memorable twenty-year tenure. As he prepared to receive the white papal robes and the velvet Shoes of the Fisherman, he threw himself before the altar in the Chapel of Tears. Prostrate, he prayed for death to take him the moment his pontificate veered from the good of the Church—if such a thing should ever happen, God forbid.
Then Urban consented to be carried in the silk-upholstered sedia gestatoria, the capacious portable throne flanked by ostrich feather fans, into Saint Peter’s Basilica, where the Sacred College of Cardinals installed him according to the ancient ceremony:
Receive this tiara adorned with three crowns; know that thou art the father of princes and kings, victor of the whole world under the earth, the vicar of our Lord, Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory and honor without end.
Compared with the elderly Paul and the sickly Gregory of recent memory, the fifty-five-year-old Urban cut a youthful, almost military, figure, especially when seen riding on horseback through the Vatican Gardens. If the pope resembled a general, he showed he could strategize like one, too. Indeed, history provoked him to use this talent repeatedly over the next two decades in the waging of wars for the defense of the Italian peninsula and the integrity of the Papal States.
Urban would also battle the Protestant Reformation, which still continued to erode the power of the Roman Church, by stepping up Catholic Reform measures in his own style. He foresaw improved ecclesiastical education and networks of foreign missions radiating from a Roman base.
“This is a city upon a hill,” Urban pronounced in announcing a thorough investigation of Rome’s own religious health, “which is exposed for the whole world to gaze upon.”
Urban intended also to gild and glorify the physical beauty of the Holy See with new building projects and monuments. Their construction would employ armies of architects, sculptors, and painters—and invent Urban’s reputation as a great patron of the arts. Upon hearing that a group of admirers had expressed the wish to commission a monument in the pope’s honor during his lifetime, instead of after his death as was customary, Urban affirmed: “Let them. I am not an ordinary Pope either.”
As bookish as he was bold, Urban peopled his curia with literati. He chose for his Master of Pontifical Ceremonies Monsignor Virginio Cesarini, Lyncean, who wrote acclaimed poetry and had pursued the study of mathematics after hearing an inspirational lecture by Galileo. It was from Cesarini that Galileo had received observations of the 1618 comets, and to Cesarini that Galileo addressed his ultimate reply to the Jesuit Father Grassi in The Assayer. Immediately upon this book’s long-awaited publication in Rome in late October 1623, Cesarini began reading it aloud to Urban at mealtimes.
Urban, who had studied under the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano, could not help admiring the style with which Galileo skewered Grassi, via “Sarsi,” on his similes: “I believe that good philosophers fly alone, like eagles,” Galileo said in The Assayer, “and not in flocks like starlings. It is true that because eagles are rare birds they are little seen and less heard, while birds that fly like starlings fill the sky with shrieks and cries, and wherever they settle befoul the earth beneath them.”
Charmed, Urban declared himself all eagerness for Galileo to come to see him. But the great Florentine philosopher remained ill through the autumn, and in the winter the harsh weather restrained him. While Urban awaited Galileo’s arrival, he continued to have Galileo’s words read aloud at table: “The crowd of fools who know nothing, Sarsi, is infinite. Those who know very little of philosophy are numerous. Few indeed are they who really know some part of it, and only One knows all.”
Pope Urban found his favorite passage from The Assayer in Galileo’s parable about the song of the cicada, which demonstrated the boundless creativity of God in the bounty of Nature. “Once upon a time, in a very lonely place,” this story began,
there lived a man endowed by Nature with extraordinary curiosity and a very penetrating mind. For a pastime he raised birds, whose songs he much enjoyed; and he observed with great admiration the happy contrivance by which they could transform at will the very air they breathed into a variety of sweet songs.
One night this man chanced to hear a delicate song close to his house, and being unable to connect it with anything but some small bird he set out to capture it. When he arrived at a road he found a shepherd boy who was blowing into a kind of hollow stick while moving his fingers about on the wood, thus drawing from it a variety of notes similar to those of a bird, though by quite a different method. Puzzled, but impelled by his natural curiosity, he gave the boy a calf in exchange for this flute and returned to solitude. But realizing that if he had not chanced to meet the boy he would never have learned of the existence of a new method of forming musical notes and the sweetest songs, he decided to travel to distant places in the hope of meeting with some new adventure.
As the man roved, he encountered songs made by “a bow . . . sawing upon some fibers stretched over a hollowed piece of wood,” by the hinges of a temple gate, by “a man rubbing his fingertip around the rim of a goblet,” and by the beating wings of wasps.
And as his wonder grew, his conviction proportionately diminished that he knew how sounds were produced; nor would all his previous experiences have sufficed to teach him or even allow him to believe that crickets derive their sweet and sonorous shrilling by scraping their wings together, particularly as they cannot fly at all.
Well, after this man had come to believe that no more ways of forming tones could possibly exist . . . he suddenly found himself once more plunged deeper into ignorance and bafflement than ever. For having captured in his hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise either by closing its mouth or stopping its wings, yet he could not see it move the scales that covered its body, or any other thing. At last he lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw some thin hard ligaments beneath; thinking the sound might come from their vibration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But nothing happened until his needle drove too deep, and transfixing the creature he took away its life with its voice, so that he was still unable to determine whether the song had originated in those ligaments. And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created he used to answer tolerantly that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable.
This section of The Assayer delighted Urban with its graceful language and poetic conceit, and even more because it expressed his own philosophy of science. To wit: As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic—that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension.