In the first book of his epic poem Paradise Lost, John Milton mentions a “Tuscan Artist” who views the moon’s orb through optic glass. He is referring, somewhat perplexingly, to Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist famed for his telescopic observations and study of fundamental physical laws.
Today, it might seem odd that Milton’s description of the so-called “father of modern science” was first and foremost an artist. In their context, however, it makes perfect sense — both men lived during the Renaissance, a period of fervent innovation in politics, culture, art and science. To them, it seemed far more natural to blend the many fields of inquiry than to compartmentalize them.
In short, if there is a border between Galileo’s intellectual endeavors, it is often too fine to distinguish.
What Is Galileo Known For?
We remember Galileo today mainly for his pivotal contributions to astronomy, physics and mathematics.
The Italian thinker emphasized a methodical approach to the study of the universe, and inspired the modern scientific method that remains a bedrock of scientific inquiry even 380 years after his death. Beyond that, his astronomical observations completely upended the way we think about the cosmos. In short, we mostly think of Galileo as one of the greatest scientists of all time
In reality, however, his accomplishments and expertise — including music, literature and visual arts — ranged as widely as those of other quintessential Renaissance figures, like Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battisa Alberti, the latter of whom proclaimed the ideal of the era: “A man can do all things if he will.”
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Facts About Galileo and His Love For Music
With a childhood like Galileo’s, a love for the arts was all but guaranteed. His father, Vincenzo, a talented composer and iconoclastic music theorist, instilled in him both a taste for beauty and a penchant for free-thinking. Science writer David Whitehouse writes in Renaissance Genius: Galileo Galilei & His Legacy to Modern Science that Galileo “grew up in a household full of music and, most importantly, full of questions and a disrespect for authority.”
As a young boy, Galileo's diverse aptitudes had already begun to blossom. Vincenzo, a master lutist, gave Galileo musical lessons beginning around age 8; before long, his son “became so skilful with the lute as to excel him,” as John Joseph Fahie writes in Galileo, His Life and Work. He was apparently respectable on a couple other instruments as well, including the organ.
Throughout his adolescence and early adulthood, as Galileo absorbed all of contemporary physics and mathematics, his appreciation for music deepened. He explored the links between the two intellectual worlds, and his growing knowledge advanced his father’s work on technical problems, such as acoustics.
“The marriage of music and science became a subject for animated conversation between them,” journalist James Reston writes in Galileo: A Life.
After the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his views on heliocentrism (the then-heretical theory that Earth revolves around the sun), he spent much of his final decade under house arrest, blind and ailing. In those dark days, the aging scientist again found solace in his lute — it was, as Italian science journalist Pietro Greco writes in Galileo Galilei, the Tuscan Artist, a “faithful companion during his last years.”
Galileo Moon Drawings
If the end of Galileo's life bore the poignant stamp of art, so did its beginning.
To this day, on the facade of a Florentine palace, a plaque commissioned by Galileo's disciple and biographer Vincenzo Viviani commemorates his mentor. Alongside a list of scientific feats, it notes (incorrectly, by a week) that Galileo entered the world the same day Michelangelo left it.
Viviani deemed the Tuscan Artist a fair exchange for Italy’s archetypal Renaissance man: “God himself compensated you,” the plaque reads, “and enhanced your glorious annals with the birth of your patrician Galileo.”
This hint at reincarnation is especially fitting in light of Galileo’s early artistic ambitions — long before he turned his hand to lenses and pendulums, he flourished with the tools of a draftsman, or someone who draws plans and sketches. He likely learned these skills as a young man at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, or Academy of Drawing Arts, and went on to apply them in illustrations of the moons, sunspots and other celestial phenomena he witnessed through his telescope.
As German art historian Horst Bredekamp writes in Galileo’s Thinking Hand, “his artistic training enabled him, throughout his life, to pursue all issues of visualization expertly and sensitively and to create art himself.”
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His revolutionary works featured engravings he made from his own drawings. Art surely influenced Galileo’s science, but his science, in turn, influenced art. In the 1580s, he formed a close friendship with Lodovico Cardi, better known as Cigoli, a renowned painter and architect in Florence; the latter was known to say that “whatever credit he enjoyed as a painter was owing to [Galileo’s] advice and encouragement,” especially when it came to mathematical aspects like perspective, according to Fahie.
Galileo went on to advise many of Italy’s creative luminaries. He was in such demand as an art critic, Bredekamp writes, that “he can be regarded as one of the leading figures of the Florentine Baroque.” Though he considered a career as a painter in his youth, he settled for nurturing the careers of others.
Blending Art and Science
The diverse strands of Galileo’s intellect sometimes intertwined in unexpected ways. Once, in his early 20s, he lectured to an audience of literary scholars on the mathematical structure of Dante’s Inferno, pairing deep technical knowledge with refined insight into the work of his country’s greatest poet.
Commentators often praise Galileo’s prose, but his own poetry hardly measures up to the greats he studied and relished — it has been said of his sonnets that “we are lucky there are not more of them,” according to science historian John L. Heilbron, writing in Galileo.
Nevertheless, Galileo shone as a critic and connoisseur. As a young man, he weighed in perceptively on the literary debates of his time, most notably regarding the relative merits of Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto, the era’s poetic superstars; he could recite vast passages from their oeuvres, as well as from Petrarch and Dante.
And once again, Galileo’s aesthetic education can be detected in his scientific discourse. Years of reading these poets taught him to write clearly and believably about even the most foreign concepts, as he did in defending the heliocentric model of the universe against deeply entrenched beliefs, not to mention commonsense.
Throughout life, Galileo wielded the gamut of his gifts to full effect. He required a scientist’s keen eye to discern the secrets of the universe, and an artist’s to make them intelligible to the world.
As Heilbron puts it, “if ever a discoverer was perfectly prepared to make and exploit his discovery, it was the dexterous humanist Galileo aiming his first telescope at the sky.”
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