Part 4

A couple of weeks earlier, before traveling to Europe, I had taken the short flight down the California coast to visit UC Irvine to present a research seminar.  The theoretical physics group there always worked to load their fall quarter seminar series with a number of relatively local graduate students, supporting that year’s defending crop during application season to beef up their CVs and provide a friendly, unprejudiced audience for practice.  As physics questions and answers died down on the drive from campus to dinner, my hosts asked if I had other travel planned and I responded that I would be visiting Florence for the first time.  Recommendations rained on me from the driver’s seat, galleries and salons and paintings that were strictly unignorable, experiences that were requirements of an enlightened education on Western civilization, or tended sculpture gardens that immersed one into the classical Florence of the Romans.  Amongst this barrage of nostalgia, I mentioned that I was particularly interested in the trip because I had read La Divina Commedia that summer, but any further elaboration on my part was drowned out by condolences, anecdotes of excruciating intellectual suffering through Inferno in high school, and never mustering up the interest to climb Purgatorio nor to reach Paradiso.  While they droned on, I meekly eked out, “I liked it.”

Looking up from the basin, in white with the blessed water streaming over his forehead in cadence with the gentle prayer, Dante would have seen the gothic mosaic ceiling, a golden backdrop on which the ordered hierarchy of the heavens was portrayed.  His beautiful San Giovanni was the baptistry of the city for nearly a millennium, hundreds of years older than the extant Duomo, and thick with Christian numerology from its eight sides to the four levels of the dead to the seven folds on which the Christ rested.  Dante would have walked up and down the hills of Oltrarno, around the area designated as Piazzale Michelangelo and adjacent to the colonia felina protetta, slouching up the stone steps toward the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte like the souls on Mount Purgatory, whose reference from Canto XII of Purgatorio is now etched in stone.  Exiled from his beloved home under penalty of death, Dante completed Comedìa as a nomad, wandering city-states of northern Italy, until eternally resting in Ravenna.  Only once formally pardoned by the city five centuries after his death was a memorial constructed, an empty tomb in Santa Croce among the filled tombs of Florentine peers, Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, but his statue, shrouded and glaring, adorned with the classical laurel wreath, turns its back on the basilica.

My wanderings around the city this weekend led me through the Uffizi and its vast collection of pre-Renaissance religious art, where baby Jesus’s chubby and cherubic body with the clean-shaven face of a grown man was carried aloft by His Mother in the center panel of a two-dimensional tryptic, choirs of saints merely stacked upon one another to either side. Then, through the Accademia and into the hall lined by prisoners locked for now five centuries in marble, never set free by their jailer, and framing David, tall, muscular, masculine, illuminated from above and front by a skylight that seemed to hold him aloft, staring off toward the enemy at the horizon.  The pedestrian-only paths and piazzas were thick with canopy tents, sheltering vendor after vendor displaying wines, oils, jellies, or honeys from the threat of a mid-autumn rain, and from where I purchased a red leather-bound journal, deeply stamped with the giaggiolo on the cushioned cover, for my girlfriend.  Exhausted from the morning’s excursion, I retreated to the city’s most venerated gelateria, recharging for the afternoon with a cup filled with a scoop each of black sesame and lemon.

The remainder of the day was devoted to the Museo Galileo, a science museum especially dedicated to celebrating the birth of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment, led of course by Galileo but financed for generations by the House of Medici and for whom many of the artifacts were created to impress.  There were beautifully elaborate ramps, carved out of a piece of mahogany, with a small channel in which a steel ball could roll and toll small bells spaced at ever increasing intervals that would chime with fixed meter as the ball accelerated.  There were a pair of ramps to demonstrate the solution to the brachistochrone problem, that the shape on which a ball should travel to reach a destination displaced laterally and below its origin in the shortest time is on a cycloid, the path traced out by a pebble wedged in the tracks of a tire as it rolls on level ground, and not on a diagonal.  There were astrolabes on astrolabes, some exploded to show in detail the mechanisms, golden sextants likely mostly practically useless on the open sea but would complement the decor in a sitting room, and maps and both terrestrial and celestial globes including an extravagant armillary sphere that tracks Aristotelian and Ptolemyan epicyles of hundreds of bodies in the firmament, all surfaces richly covered in gold leaf with each of the Zodiac delicately painted on the ecliptic cycle and all of this universe held aloft by the heads of four sirens.

As a scientist, the most intriguing pieces were small, hollow metal spheres, the size of a modern-day baseball, with a single hole with tight-fitting cap, and every one of the dozens in the collection were lightly dented on the side opposite the opening.  Experimentation in the mid-second millennium was rather crude but nevertheless effective, as the curious developed a consistent logical framework from the ground up for establishing with certainty the mysterious hows of nature.  A particularly visceral empirical technique for determining the dependence of a body’s energy of motion on its speed was to launch a solid metal ball into a wall of clay and measure the depth of the resulting crater.  By doubling the speed of the ball by, say, increasing the tension of a bowstring and thereby increasing the pull weight on the bow, the ball would penetrate the clay four times deeper, evidence of a squared relationship between speed and energy of motion.  These now-hollow spheres were of similar simplicity, once filled to the brim with water and capped off, but then thrown to the ground or some other hard surface.  The hypothesis was that, as long as there was nearly no air in the sphere, the ability or inability to dent the sphere would be directly proportional to the compressibility of water as a dent would necessarily decrease its volume.  Water, it turns out, is extremely challenging to compress, to which the minimal denting testified.

The gems, however, in the museum’s collection crown were Galilean relics set in an oval room with an alabaster marble bust carved only years after its sitter’s death at its center, the scientist gazing right and clutching his inventions of the geometric and military compass and telescope tight to the robes of his chest.  A few second-class relics were found here, original telescopes and objective lenses through which he first observed the four largest Jovian moons, and subsequently initiated the tradition of naming heavenly objects after patrons, the inversion of the telescope into the compound microscope for viewing the miniature universe, and original compasses presented to the Medicis. Numerous third-class relics filled out the shelves behind glass, items created by students of Galileo or improved designs of his inventions in the generations that followed.  Not to be overshadowed by the reliquary of the Duomo which housed the finger that John the Baptist pointed while declaring Agnus Dei, here too was the middle finger of Galileo’s right hand, which, allowing an anachronistic mythology and provenance, was used to tell off Pope Urban VIII in Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo.