The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Spot the Galileo
This 17th-century painted puzzle is decoded with glorious eccentricity
THE GHOST OF GALILEO by JL Heilbron
520pp, OUP, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £16.66
The forgotten painting at the heart of The Ghost of Galileo would not strike many people as an obvious subject for a book. Neither the artist, Francis Cleyn, nor his sitters, John Bankes and his tutor Sir Maurice Williams, are much remembered today; and the painting itself does not make the forgetting seem unjust. It is the sort of piece art snobs might call “fine but undistinguished”: a 17th-century double portrait of a morose youth, lost and pallid beneath Cavalier curls, with an older man looking on, composedly grave. From the handsome clothes down to the obtrusive stagy clutter of up-todate learning in the left-hand corner – globe, telescope, the book casually disclosing its frontispiece – it is rather standard Caroline fare. You can see how it ended up where it hangs now, “a remote spot in a dark corridor” in the upmost reaches of the Bankes family’s former seat, Kingston Lacy.
What JL Heilbron does with this unpromising beginning, though, is another matter. Having “stumbled across” Cleyn’s picture in 2010, he
spotted something almost no one else would have. Fresh from writing his much-lauded English biography of Galileo, Heilbron was able to see and decipher what he calls a “hieroglyph” written into canvas: the frontispiece of the open book.
Despite the lack of a title or author, its three figures asymmetrically arranged in debate beneath a swooping banner made it clear to Heilbron that it was Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632) – the work that had brought the Inquisition to his door, and become a totem of Europe’s religious schisms. The question that The Ghost of Galileo sets out to answer is what exactly such a contentious work is doing in this otherwise innocuous portrait. The result is a book that is both learned and witty – and considerably more striking than its nominal subject.
Heilbron’s technique is suitably elliptic. Making no pretence to efficiency in his enquiries, he invokes Robert Burton’s hypertrophic
Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) as a model in “raking over all sorts of material, some perhaps not strictly pertinent to my inquiry”. The resulting tour takes the reader on an orbit that zooms far away from Cleyn and his sitters to survey, one by one, the interacting worlds of 17th-century Europe. Heilbron swings past Rome and Venice, the internecine conflicts of the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, early science, and thence on to the “mixed and muddy” government of Stuart Britain and its civil war, before finally entering the skies directly above the painting itself.
Heilbron’s long career as a scholar of the interactions between science, literature and religion gives him rare depth in just about every area. What makes it a joy, though, is his Puckish presentation of his knowledge. There are not many historians knowledgeable enough to draw up an authentic early modern horoscope for one of their subjects, and fewer still eccentric enough to bother. Despite his deep sympathy for the age – free of the ahistorical triumphalism that many lesser scholars of early science are apt to indulge in – he enjoys pointing out its absurdities. Candidates for the Royal College of Physicians, he notes, were examined “viva voce in Latin to check their ability to consult the dead if not to cure the living”.
Heilbron’s eye for the foibles of his cast is similarly sharp. James I, though possessed of a “random shrewdness”, exhibits what Heilbron ironically calls “the Stuart genius for compromise” by telling his outraged fellow Scots “they were barbarians for not kneeling to receive communion”. Heilbron quotes the polymathic lawyer and historian John Selden’s deathbed bon mot, that to “turn a man when he lies dying, is just like one who hath long time solicited a woman, and cannot obtain his end; at length he makes her drunk, and so lies with her”. Early modern intellectual history is not often this funny.
So what was Galileo’s book doing on John Bankes’s table? Heilbron is engagingly uncertain. He leaves it, finally, to the ghosts of Bankes, Williams and Cleyn to discuss the possibilities among themselves in an imagined dialogue – Galileo’s own favoured device, which Heilbron has used before. It is audacious, but in its way more scholarly than imagining that traditional academic procedures might settle things more clearly. Polyvalence was, as he points out, almost certainly the point.
Despite Heilbron’s humour and the unconventionality, The Ghost of Galileo is, finally, a work of serious scholarship, and for that reason alone unlikely to be everybody’s cup of tea. It is dense and compendious – I doubt I will be the only reader glad of the glossary of names. But it is brilliant, and unlike anything I expect to read all year.