On Gianfrancesco Sagredo, Galilean Science and Venetian diplomacy

Abstract

Gianfrancesco Sagredo (1571–1620) was the Venetian nobleman, student and friend of Galileo immortalised as one of the characters of the Dialogue and of the Two New Sciences. Always fond of his friend, Galileo remembered him as his ‘‘idol’’ 16 years after his premature death. While the Italian word refers to a ‘‘mental image or beloved object’’ (147), Francis Bacon’s distorted representations (idola) may also come to mind as an appropriate point of entry to the content of this book, which is often concerned with the manipulation of texts and meanings, with smokescreens and hoaxes and with other less than exemplary activities that are not so often associated with the making of natural philosophical knowledge. In fact, this study deals primarily with Sagredo’s strategies in creating, circulating and manipulating texts and information for political purposes, and with how the same or similar strategies are sometimes to be found as part of the making and circulation of Galilean texts. As such, the book aims to put into question a crystallised view of the relations between authorship, scientific texts and truth claims by developing lines of research opened up by the history of political communication and the history of the printing press. This combination has already produced seminal results for the history of Venice during the Interdict (De Vivo 2012, from which Wilding draws). Conversely, historians of science can refer to Bucciantini et al. (2012) and to Reeves (2014), who is animated by similar interests in the history of information and of its distortions. Although Galileo’s Idol evades the conventions of the biographical genre, it contains new information on Sagredo’s historical persona. The first chapter is dedicated to his image and to an account of the identification of no less than three portraits, two of which can be seen at the Zhytomyr Regional Museum (Ukraine) and at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (available online at the Museum’s