The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain
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The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain
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Overview
While Spain is often thought to have taken little notice of the Scientific Revolution, García Santo-Tomás tells a different story, one that reveals Golden Age Spanish literature to be in close dialogue with the New Science. Drawing on the work of writers such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Quevedo, he helps us trace the influence of science and discovery on the rapidly developing and highly playful genre of the novel. Indeed, García Santo-Tomás makes a strong case that the rise of the novel cannot be fully understood without taking into account its relationship to the scientific discoveries of the period.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226465876 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/08/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 326 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Refracted Muse
Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain
By Enrique García Santo-Tomás
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-46587-6
CHAPTER 1
Observations
Yo aplaudo a los hombres sabios y prudentes que nos han traído el telescopio.
I applaud the sage and prudent men who have brought us the telescope.
ÁNGEL GANIVET
Galileo's telescope and the gaze of Spain
The history of the circulation of the telescope in seventeenth-century Europe is nothing less than a crucible of different events, at times unfolding almost simultaneously. At the time that Galileo began his studies at the University of Pisa, in 1589, Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was still an important reference, even if, despite the appearance of a second edition in Basel (1566), it did not seem quite as new as it once had. In fact, the most important scientist at the time was likely Tycho Brahe, who had determined that the planets orbit the sun, and that the sun in turn orbits the earth. This idea deeply concerned the Jesuits, as demonstrated by Giovanni Battista Riccioli's Almagestum novum (New almagest, 1651), which refined some of the points in Brahe's text and became for many the single most influential work until the publication of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (Mathematical principles of natural philosophy, 1687) (Shea, "Galileo the Copernican" 41–60). However, the social life of the telescope would also be determined by Kepler's aforementioned Ad Vitellionem paralipomena (Paralipomena to Witelo, 1604), whose theories about the image in the ocular retina demarcated the line between the eye as an instrument of perception and the exterior world, ruled by laws of physics and geometry, thus paving the way for future studies on distance and perspective, as well as for Cartesian rationalism. This was also a highly significant book in the history of ophthalmology, as it dealt with the functions of the eye, the crucial role of the retina, the process of refraction, and the first scientifically correct explanation of myopia.
We know that by the summer of 1609 the English astronomer Thomas Harriot was in London observing and drawing a new map of the moon, while almost simultaneously, Galileo was investigating — as he had since the 1590s — the possibility that the earth turns on its axis. This idea was considered controversial, if not outright heretical, given that this was a decade of ironclad ideological control defined by a series of famous condemnations, from the arrests of Giambattista della Porta, Cesare Cremonini, and Tommaso Campanella to the burning at the stake of Francisco Pucci and Giordano Bruno. However, the manipulation of concave and convex lenses beginning in the 1590s in Italy, arriving in the Low Countries around 1604, and spreading throughout all of Europe by 1609 — first as an instrument of navigation and later as an astronomical tool — radically changed the prevailing understanding of the cosmos such that, in just a few months, there were a variety of new proposals regarding the characteristics of the solar system.
There is also what might be called a prehistory of the long-range lens available to us. Today we have access to ancient testimonies about the existence of instruments in the Middle East that could have been used as spyglasses. We also know, for example, that the Church of St. Nicholas in Treviso was home to the first known representation of a person with glasses: Cardinal Hugh de Saint-Cher, in Provence, painted by Tommaso da Modena in 1352.
The first glasses were made for farsightedness and were convex. Concave lenses for myopia would appear a century later. A real revolution in book reading began with the invention of the printing press in 1436, and the demand for glasses rose along with it. At this point, lens production ceased to be a monastic art, and the first dedicated workshops cropped up in places like Nuremberg, Haarlem, and Venice. It was in Nuremberg that the first guild for master optical lens makers was founded in 1438. The literary history of Europe is, in fact, sprinkled with anecdotes about farsightedness and its sufferers; Petrarch, for example, wrote in 1364 that he needed to use glasses due to his age, and the French poet François Villon donated his reading glasses to the poor in 1461 (fig. 3).
Some of the first real telescopes of which we know today appeared in Holland, with the first patent application filed in 1608 by Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen in Middleburg; Jacob Metius (or Jacob Adriaanszoon) soon joined them from Alkmaar. Galileo made a series of improvements on his own design in the following months, working parallel to the Jesuit Niccolò Zucchi, who would develop the reflecting telescope in 1616 using a curved mirror instead of a lens as an objective. It was Girolamo Sirtori, however, one of Galileo's students, who in 1618 wrote what is now considered the first treatise on telescopes (Telescopium sive Ars perficiendi novum illud Galilaei visorium instrumentum ad Sydera; Telescope, or a performance of the art and means to Galileo's new vision of the stars, in three volumes), in which he maintained that the first telescopes came not from the aforementioned Dutch astronomers but from Catalan lens makers. In his text, Sirtori recounts his European travels in 1609 and 1610 and his meeting with Joan Roget, a Catalan lens maker who died between 1617 and 1624. He comments that upon arriving in Girona he met with Roget, who showed him "the plating or the iron supports of a telescope completely eaten by rust" (la armadura o los hierros de un telescopio tomados de orín), and "the forms of the instrument outlined in a book" (las formas de un instrumento delieneadas en un libro), on which Sirtori took copious notes.
The terms that appear in both Castilian, "long-range glasses" (anteojos de larga vista), and Catalan, "long telescope embellished with brass" (ullera larga guarnida de llautó), "long-range telescope," and "tin telescope for viewing the moon" (ullera de llauna per mirar de lluny), are no doubt meaningful, and they speak to an established lens-making tradition in Catalonia that coincides with the terminology used in several inventories written in Barcelona between 1593 and 1613. In the same way, we know that Joan Benimelis, the Majorcan doctor, historian, and mathematician who died in 1616, had owned a "tube, for looking at the moon, and another tube" (trompa, de mirar de lluni i altre trompa) since the beginning of the century. The Sevillian poet Juan de Salinas (1559–1643) would sketch out this geographical trajectory in an interesting "riddle" in which he remarks in humorous terms on the innovations coming from this region:
News from Barcelona
(Riddle)
Two brothers arrived
Onshore in a ship
They came from foreign lands
To give Spain a sight
Of illustrious, ingenious, appearance,
and of very clear ancestry.
As their noble blazon
They carry two moons on their arms;
Of that splendid family
They are those that attend and protect
The great Lord on his throne
From traitorous traps.
With rigorous examinations,
They received their degrees in Italy,
And in every Department
They make obvious the most obscure things.
Oh, Great Queen of Sheba —
If you were to come to our age,
What a test you would give them,
And in what varied subjects!
With the great company
Of a splendid and lucid fleet
(which was a sight to be seen) they made
Their entry into Barcelona.
They have been well received
By princes and monarchs,
And the people by way of them
Achieve a thousand impossibilities.
GLASSES.
Nuevas de Barcelona
(Enigma)
Dos hermanos arribaron
en una nave a la playa,
que de tierras extranjeras
vienen a dar vista a España.
De ilustre ingenioso aspecto,
de clarísima prosapia,
que por blasón de nobleza
traen dos lunas en las armas;
de esta espléndida familia
son los que asisten y guardan
al gran Señor en su trono
de alevosas asechanzas.
Con examen riguroso
le dio sus grados Italia,
y en todas las Facultades
lo más oscuro declara.
¡Oh, tú, gran Reina Sabea,
si nuestra edad alcanzaras,
qué pruebas hicieras de ellos,
y en qué materias tan varias!
Con gran acompañamiento
de una muy lucida escuadra
(que eran para ver) hicieron
en Barcelona su entrada.
Han sido bien recibidos
de Príncipes y Monarcas,
y el pueblo por medio de ellos
mil imposibles alcanza.
LOS ANTOJOS
This lens was an essential instrument in the development of science of the time — for example, in his Sidereus nuncius Galileo already had made mention of the French scientist Jacques Badovère's important role in the adoption of the telescope (Lewis 91–112; Baumgartner). Since July 1609, Galileo had been in Venice attempting to convince the wealthy patrons who controlled the University of Padua to increase his salary, and it was there that he learned that Maurice of Nassau had received as a gift a device that allowed faraway objects to be seen with uncommon detail. By the time he returned to Venice, on August 21, Galileo already had an instrument that allowed for eight times magnification. Even so, some of his contemporaries, like his enemy Cesare Cremonini, refused to look through it. However, Galileo would continue to perfect his rudimentary instrument — with which he was able to achieve up to thirty times magnification — and he would continue to observe the heavens. His telescope would be a refractive model, relying on a system of lenses to refract the light rays and make them converge on a focal plane, using a convex lens in the objective and a concave lens in the eyepiece. He did not know that he would not be the first to adopt such tools, just as he did not know that his embryonic telescope was already far superior to existing ones. But it did present him with a new challenge, as Pimentel has noted:
In 1610 Galileo's observation of sunspots alone could not overthrow the theory of the incorruptibility of the celestial spheres. He had to demonstrate how to look through his telescope, he had to discipline his sight, and he had to relocate the origin point of authority on the natural world. Instruments had no credibility; all credibility belonged to witnesses, depending on who they were, along with the Bible and whoever held the monopoly on its interpretation.
En 1610 la observación de Galileo de manchas solares no podía derribar por sí sola la incorruptibilidad de las esferas celestes. Había que enseñar a mirar por su telescopio, había que disciplinar la vista, había que reubicar el lugar de donde manaba el flujo de la autoridad sobre el mundo natural. Los instrumentos no tenían credibilidad; los testigos, depende quién; la Biblia y quien detentaba el monopolio de su interpretación, la tenían toda. (56)
These months, then, constituted a crucial period as much in the life of Galileo as in the larger sphere of European science. Because of its novel character, this "new mechanism" made a very convenient form of social and economic capital, particularly as a gift that could be used to strengthen alliances and forge new friendships. The limitations of this early optical device were rapidly resolved in an empirical sense by Kepler, who designed another model of the refracting telescope more suited to astronomical use. By the end of 1610, to give just two examples, observations made with the telescopes of the Roman College (Collegio Romano) and in the Convent of St. Anthony in Lisbon. As such, it is not surprising that telescopes began to be commissioned very soon after by many of the great statesmen of the moment, like Maximilian I, Duke and Elector of Bavaria, as well as Ernest of Bavaria, archbishop and Prince-Elector of Cologne, and even Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. Galileo quickly sensed the possibility of a handsome payoff from this fascination with the heavens, whether it stemmed from suspicion or amusement. With the permission of Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, he attempted to send five telescopes to the respective heads of state of Spain, France, Poland, Austria, and the papal state of Urbino, taking advantage of the frenzy — well documented by William Shea (Galileo in Rome) — that the telescope had caused among European nobility and royalty. From Rudolph II of Prague to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of the pope; from Cardinal Alessandro Peretti of Montalto to Queen Marie de' Medici; from Cardinal Odoardo Farnese to the French court, which would request that a new planet be named in honor of King Henry IV — everyone wanted to enjoy the new realities promised by such an appealing invention (fig. 4).
Galileo presented the telescope to the Venetian Senate on August 21, 1609. He mounted his optical device on the bell tower of the Piazza San Marco, to the delight of those in attendance. The islands of Murano, situated at a distance of about a mile and a half, appeared to be only about nine hundred feet away. He willed the rights to the telescope to the Republic of Venice, which was very interested in its possible military applications. In a letter to Leonardo Donato, doge of Venice, dated August 24, 1609, Galileo explained the uses of his cannocchiale to spot enemy ships "from a distance of two hours before they are visible with the naked eye," and he promised Donato that he would keep it a secret. With the telescope he analyzed the moon and its phases in detail, realizing that it was not the perfect sphere described by Aristotelian theory. This new vision of the lunar surface not only broke with astronomical belief but also troubled the theological waters; as Frederick A. de Armas reminds us from the perspective of literary history: "the moon could not contain true spots, seas or craters, since its light and purity stood for both the perfection of the planetary spheres and the immaculate conception of the Virgin" ("Maculate" 60). Galileo affirmed that the transition between shadow and light on the surface of the moon was irregular, which proved the existence of a mountainous surface rather than a perfectly spherical and smooth surface like the one depicted by Aristotle. He also discovered the nature of the Milky Way, where he was able to count stars in the nebula of Orion to find that certain objects taken to be stars were in fact clusters of smaller stars. As his observations continued, he discovered the phases of Venus — for him definitive proof of Copernicus's heliocentric hypothesis. However, the most notable discovery of all was that of the existence of four small stars near the planet Jupiter, which, after several days of observation, were taken to be four satellites orbiting the great planet: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. For Galileo this was proof that Jupiter and its satellites formed a small model of the solar system. As Beltrán Mari (Talento y poder) reminds us:
The epicycles are real, as demonstrated by the movement of the Medicean planets around Jupiter, and of Mercury and Venus around the Sun, that is to say, the movements around a center that is not the Earth. The same thing happens with the orbital eccentricities, which are proven because the movements of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn include the Earth's orbit but do not orbit around the Earth.
Los epiciclos son reales en cuanto designan los movimientos de los planetas mediceos en torno a Júpiter, de Mercurio y Venus en torno al Sol, es decir, los movimientos en torno a un centro distinto de la Tierra. Lo mismo sucede con las excéntricas, que son reales en cuanto los movimientos de Marte, Júpiter y Saturno comprenden a la Tierra pero no orbitan con centro en ésta. (225)
Galileo then attempted to demonstrate that Aristotle's perfect circular orbits did not exist and that the heavenly bodies did not orbit the earth. He would name these new stars Mediceas, in honor of the family of the ruling prince, Cosimo II. Shortly after, he undertook the writing of the text that would become Sidereus nuncius, published in Venice on March 13, 1610. If his fame spread in Italian political life to the point at which he became legendary among his contemporaries, his achievements also spurred a wide range of international tributes, like Scot Thomas Seggeth's "Laudatory in Nine Epigrams," published in the appendix of Kepler's Narratio de Observatis a sequatuor Iovis sattelitibus erronibus (Account of my observations of Jupiter's satellites), or the verses in an introduction to Il saggiatore undertaken by the German Johann Faber (Shea, "Galileo the Copernican" 49). There was also, as María Bayarri has noted in "Universos poéticos" and "Galileu Galilei" (56–57), an interesting correspondence between Galileo and the writer Margherita Sarrocchi (1560–1618), as well as the writing of a number of poetic compositions by Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653), another friend of his. Additionally, there are fascinating references to Galileo's work in other disciplines, such as the frescoes in the Salone della Meridiana painted by Anton Domenico Gabbiani in 1692–1693 and designed by Vincenzo Viviani, who was not only Galileo's student and his secretary in his last years but also the official mathematician of the Grand Duke of Tuscany after Evangelista Torricelli (Frangerberg). But these were, as we know, turbulent years of active anticlerical agitation in Venice, especially against the Roman Curia and against the Jesuits, entrenched as the vanguard of the Counter-Reformation. Theological polemics between Paolo Sarpi (Venice) and Cardinal Bellarmine (Rome) were also taking place during these months. The Society of Jesus would do everything possible to discredit the University of Padua as a stronghold of heretics, although without necessarily mentioning Galileo himself. The communication between the two camps reached extraordinary levels of intensity, a true "rite of dissimulation" (rito de disimulación) in the words of Antonio Beltrán Marí (Talento y poder 264). Although Galileo has been thought of at times as a martyr of science, he always avoided that condition. As scholars such as Arturo Fernández Luzón have argued, his condemnation was much more a product of Pope Urban VIII's personality than of the challenge that his works presented.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Preface IntroductionI. Writing on the firmament
1. Observations
II. Galileo and his Spanish contemporaries
2. Foundations
3. Assimilations
4. Inscriptions
III. The science of satire
5. Situations
6. Explorations
IV. The refracted muse
7. Interventions
8. Reverberations
Conclusions Notes
Works cited
Index