Baroque Art

Cigoli’s ImwMcoldta and Galileo’s Moon: Astronomy and the Virgin in Early Seicento Rome Steven F. Ostrow

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A fresco painted by Lodovico Cigoli in a papal chapel in Rome at the begin- ning of the second decade of the seventeenth century represents the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception “clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet,” just as Saint John the Evangelist describes the celestial woman in Apocalypse 12:1. What is noteworthy about this painting is the appearance of the moon itself: pitted and irregular, rather than pristine and perfectly smooth, reflecting what Galileo Galilei had observed through his telescope about a year before the fresco was begun. In its novel depiction of the moon, which followed, and ostensibly embodied, Galileo’s controversial discoveries, this image raises crucial questions about the relationship between science and the visual arts, on the one hand, and between science and Christianity, on the other.^

[. . .] The Early Christian basilica of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome was first built,

according to legend, in the fourth century by Pope Liberius, while history informs us that it was constructed in the fourth decade of the fifth century by Pope Sixtus III. One of five patriarchal basilicas of Rome, it is considered to this day to be the preeminent Marian shrine in the papal capital. Throughout its long history, it has played a unique role in the spiritual and liturgical life of the city. As the repository of numerous venerated relics, most notably the Presepio (Manger) of Christ and a miraculous image of the Virgin, the basilica was a compulsory pilgrimage stop for the faithful as well as the site for the stational masses of Christmas and the Assumption of the Virgin, feasts directly associated with its prized relics.

From the fifth century onward, S. Maria Maggiore was enlarged and enriched through papal donations and the patronage of clerics and private citizens of Rome. This practice reached its climax in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the post-Tridentine era, when, owing to a number of complex reasons, first Pope Sixtus V Peretti and then Pope Paul V Borghese focused on this

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Marian basilica as the site for the fullest visual expressions of their spiritual programs. In two separate, though interdependent, campaigns, they erected colossal papal chapels - the Sistine and Pauline Chapels, respectively - towering domed pendant structures built and decorated at enormous expense by teams of architects, painters, and sculptors.

The Pauline Chapel, or Paolina, was begun in 1605, the first year of Paul V’s pontificate, and virtually completed by 1615. Like its pendant and model, it was conceived as a setting for the tombs of two popes - its patron, Paul V, and his predecessors, Clement VIII. It was also conceived as a reliquary chapel for one of the basilica’s great cult objects, the icon of the Virgin, known as the Salus Populi Romani, which was installed in an elaborate altar tabernacle at the center of the chapel. Like the Sistina, the Paolina received a rich program of decoration, one that focuses on the Virgin and her roles as defender of the Church, vanquisher of heresy and intercessor for human salvation.

In the dome of the chapel, in a fresco completed in late 1612 by the Florentine painter Lodovico Cigoli (1559-1613), the Virgin appears as Queen of Heaven, wearing robes of red, blue, and gold, holding a scepter in her right hand, and enveloped in a mandorla of golden light (Illustration 24.1). With a crown of twelve stars above her head, Mary stands upon a lunar globe resting on a small bank of clouds that casts a shadow on a coiled serpent below. She is approached from the left and the right by four large angels, whose gestures draw attention to her radiance, and by six smaller angels offering her flowers. Surrounding the Celestial Queen is the realm of the heavenly Paradise, which rises from the cupola’s base to the lantern in nine concentric rings of golden light and clouds that are filled with the angelic hierarchies as described in Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Celestial Hierarchy. Accompanying Mary are the Apostles (each distinguished by his attribute), who stand or sit around the base of the cupola, the Archangel Michael (a faint figure opposite the Virgin), and God the Father, in the upper- most zone in the lantern.

Assisting us in our reading of the dome fresco is the extant program for the chapel, conceived and written by Tommaso Bozio (1548-1610), a learned theologian from Gubbio, one of the founding members of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, and a master of apologetics in the fields of ecclesiology, history and politics.^ Bozio’s text carefully prescribes how each subject is to be painted, giving an account of its historical sources, and it offers more information about the iconography of the dome fresco than about that of any other fresco in the chapel:^

In the cupola will be painted the Vision from the Apocalypse, chapter 12: that is, A Woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars, facing Saint Michael the Archangel in the form of a Com- batant, surrounded by the three hierarchies, each divided into three orders, [and] below [whom] emerges a serpent with its head crushed as in chapter 3 of Genesis. Around [are] the twelve Apostles.

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Illustration 24.1 Ludovico Cardi known as II Cigoli, The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, detail of dome fresco, 1612, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. Photo: Fotogra- fia Vasari. By permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

Having thus outlined the essential pictorial scheme, Bozio proceeds to illuminate its meaning and sources:

Such a Woman signifies the Church, as determined by Andrew Cesariense [«c] and Saint Methodius. And as Saint Bernard in [his commentary on] the said

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chapter 12 [states] along with many Latin [writers], the Madonna literally signifies nothing less than the Church, which is the Madonna, who fights from the Begin- ning of the World, manifested to the Angels through the Incarnation, to the end of the World, Triumphing in heaven. And thus, the first prophecy uttered in . . . the World “et ipsa conteret caput tuum” [and she shall crush thy head] against the serpent signifying the Demon, appertains to her.

Bozio provides a lucid, if somewhat dense, explanation of a theologically complex scheme, one that the artist carried out to the letter. In essence, this scheme presents a vision of the celestial paradise in which, assisted in her battle against evil by Archangel Michael and the Apostles, Mary - in a number of interrelated guises - triumphs over sin and death. As Bozio indicates, the Virgin appears simultaneously as the Church (Ecclesia), the Apocalyptic Woman, and the Queen of Heaven; and although he refrains from naming her as such, largely for ecclesiastico-political reasons, Mary also assumes the role of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, that is, conceived without the stain of Original Sin.^ She is thus a fusion of the Woman of Genesis 3:1 who crushes the serpent’s head, the Apocalyptic Woman, and the pure spouse of Canticle of Canticles, a plurisymbolic image rooted in scriptural exegesis and pictorial tradition.

[...] Despite the importance of Cigoli’s fresco for the development of illusionis-

tic painting, and notwithstanding its theological significance in the context of Counter-Reformation Rome, scholarly attention devoted to the dome has, by and large, focused on one exceptional detail: the moon under the Virgin’s feet. Erwin Panofsky may be credited with initiating this line of inquiry in his study of Galileo of 1954. Panofsky emphasized what had been long known, that the famous mathematician and natural philosopher from Pisa Galileo Galilei and the Florentine painter Lodovico Cigoli were “intimate and faithful friends”; that both men shared a deep interest in matters scientific and pictorial; and that they sustained a lively correspondence for a number of years. The most crucial passage for this discussion, however, is Panofsky’s observation with respect to Cigoli, that:

in his very last work, the Assumption of the Virgin in the dome of the papal chapel in S. M. Maggiore, the painter, as a “good and loyal friend,” paid tribute to the great scientist by representing the moon under the Virgin’s feet exactly as it had revealed itself to Galileo’s telescope - complete with that “jagged dividing line” and those “little islands” or craters which did so much to prove that the celestial bodies did not essentially differ, in form and substance, from our earth.^

Just over twenty years later, in one of his many articles on Cigoli, Miles Chappell echoed Panofsky’s remark:

Cigoli’s devotion to Galileo took visual form in the chapel built by Pope Paul V... in Santa Maria Maggiore; there in the dome fresco, Cigoli “published” one

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of Galileo’s highly debated discoveries, the uneven surface of the moon. In depict- ing the Madonna as the Immaculate Queen of Heaven, traditionally symbolized by a lunar crescent, Cigoli showed a moonscape of mountains and craters as it appeared through the telescope.®

[. . .] Cigoli’s moon, as I see it, begs an additional and fundamental question, which,

until recently, has been overlooked: what does it reveal about the relationship between science and religion? Or, more specifically, what are the theological implications of depicting the Apocalyptic Woman/Immaculate Virgin standing on a conspicuously maculate moon in a papal chapel? In pursuing possible answers to these questions, we need to consider two closely related issues: the epistemological significance of Galileo’s lunar discoveries in light of established astronomical beliefs; and the ways in which the Church understood and inter- preted the moon.

Long before Galileo provided empirical proof that the lunar surface was, in his words, “rough and uneven and, just as the face of the earth itself, crowded everywhere with vast prominences, deep chasms, and convolutions,”^ the moon’s terrestrial similarities had been repeatedly proposed. The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus had attributed the variegations on its surface to the existence of valleys and hills; Anaxagorus and Pythagorus had offered similar explanations; and Plutarch of Chaeronea, in his De facie in orbe lunae, written in the second century AD, had suggested that the moon was “cleft with many deep caves and ruptures.” The appearance of the “man in the moon,” created from the pattern of shadowed lunar plains or seas (maria) and illuminated mountains, was clearly evident to the naked eye, as is exemplified in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings.®

If, however, what was visible to the eye prompted various speculations on the topography of the moon, it was Aristotle’s thesis on the heavens that dominated the discourse on the subject during the Middle Ages and up through the seventeenth century, and Aristotle’s cosmology repudiated the possibility of a less-than-perfect moon. In the De caelo and in other texts, Aristotle argued that the heavens were immutable and incorruptible, eternal and perfect. As a celestial object, the moon was a perfect sphere, made of ether; and the appearance of a flawed lunar surface - of the maculae (stains) - was merely the result of reflec- tion, upon a flawless orb, of the earth’s mountains and oceans.^

During the Middle Ages, Aristotelian cosmology formed the basis of scholastic cosmological thought, and thus the idea of celestial perfection remained intact. The moon continued to be regarded as a perfectly smooth sphere, notwithstand- ing various new theories about its material nature. One widely held notion was that the appearance of unevenness in its surface resulted from uneven lumines- cence. Averroes, the great twelfth-century Arabic commentator on Aristotle and other Peripatetic writers, advanced this theory by proposing that the moon was composed of rare and dense parts, the former absorbing light and appearing

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darker, and the latter reflecting light and appearing lighter.^® Although this “rare and dense theory” did not challenge the notion of the moon’s flawlessness, some writers were nevertheless reluctant to accept that the moon was anything but absolutely uniform. The moon continued to be viewed as “a perfectly polished spherical body,” according to the fourteenth-century writer Nicole Oresme, or, as many others argued, transparent or diaphanous, and crystalline in nature.^

When Galileo trained his telescope on the moon, he observed that it was “most evidently not at all an even, smooth, and regular surface, as a great many people believe of it and of the other heavenly bodies”; moreover, he made this discovery with “an exquisite instrument, because of which we can believe to have been the first in the world to discover something about the heavenly bodies from so nearby and so distinctly.”^^ With these observations, which he recorded in a letter of January 7, 1610, Galileo shook the foundations of the established astronomical episteme. Clearly, the implications of his statement were far- reaching, both in terms of the discovery itself and the means by which he made it. For the first time in history, an optical instrument was used to furnish evidence about the materiality of the cosmos, the understanding of which had, until that point, derived almost entirely from philosophical thought. This is not to say that Galileo’s claims met with acceptance owing to their basis in empiricism. The telescope was itself at issue: it was new and many were skeptical of its reliability.^^ Furthermore, Galileo’s findings did more than oppose preexisting astronomical beliefs. In stating that the moon’s surface was irregular, the scientist challenged the long-cherished notion of the heavens’ perfection, and, by extension, the symbolic significance bestowed on the moon by the Church.

Essentially, Aristotelian and Christian cosmology were one and the same; both centered on the idea of celestial perfection. God, it was believed, was perfect, and the cosmos he created was, perforce, no less perfect and incorruptible. Equally important in this context is the fact that the cosmos was understood symbolically. In the words of Amos Funkenstein, a historian of religion:

The most natural way to perceive God’s presence the world was symbolical. Patris- tic and medieval theology were inevitably led toward an interpretation of the uni- verse as a sign, symbol, [and] picture of God.... Nature reveals God’s symbolic presence, and was seen as a system of symbols, of signatures of God.^'*

With respect to the cosmos, and according to his system of symbols, the sun, the noblest and most radiant of the celestial “planets,” signified Christ, and the Son of God, conversely, was equated with the sun, and called, to cite just three examples, Sol iustitiae (“Sun of BJghteousness”), Sol novus (“New Sun”), and Sol invictus (“Invincible Sun”).^^ The moon was also endowed with symbolic meaning: it was viewed as a symbol of the Virgin, and like the Virgin, was called the “Queen of Heaven” {Retina caeli)}^ Its beauty contributed to a reading

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of the spouse of Canticle of Canticles 6:9, “fair as the moon,” as Mary, the beautiful bride of Christ; the moon’s eternity matched the eternal destiny of the Virgin and the undying existence of the Church, which Mary signified; and, most important, the moon’s supposed purity, its unblemished nature, cor- responded to Mary as being immaculate and a virgin.^^ The moon’s crystalline substance, it was argued, was like that of the Virgin - sine macula (without stain) - and, as Eileen Reeves has recently shown, in Latin, Italian, and Spanish texts the very same terms were used to describe the moon and the Virgin: “pure”, “clean,” and “immaculate.”**

Within Christian thought, from at least the fourth century, the moon was read as a sign, an icon, of the Virgin, especially in her guise as the Immacolata, and it is no wonder that certain commentaries on Apocalypse 12:1 enriched the lunar association with her, particularly in regard to the Apocalyptic Woman’s being “clothed with the sun” {amicta sole). Saint Methodius of Olympus (d. 311), for example, wrote that she signified the Virgin-Church, who, like the moon (her “footstool”), reflected the brilliant light of Christ (the sun), illumi- nating the souls of the faithful;*’ Isidore of Seville, writing in the sixth century, stated that the moon symbolized the Virgin-Church, because it was illuminated by the sun just as the Church was illuminated by Christ;^” and Rupert of Deutz, in his twelfth-century commentary, declared, “for indeed, just as the moon shines forth and gives forth a light that is not hers, but is rather collected from the sun, so you. Most blessed Virgin, shine by a light that does not come from you yourself. . . but from divine grace.”^* In sum, Christian exegetes held to Aristotle’s teachings on the heavens, and reinforced these beliefs with symbolical interpretations of the cosmos.

In the visual arts, from the medieval period onward, when the moon was shown in conjunction with the Virgin it invariably appeared as a pristine orb or crescent, for to depict it as otherwise would have been tantamount to corrupting the Virgin’s image. As examples we may cite a miniature in the Rothschild Canticles of about 1300 and a manuscript image of about 1360 in Vienna, in which Maria-Ecclesia is depicted in the guise of the Apocalyptic Woman accompanied by or standing upon a perfect crescent moon.^^ [. . .] So closely related was the flawless moon to Mary’s identity that artists often portrayed it as her attribute even when depicting a vision of the Virgin different from that in the Apocalypse. Hence, in painting the vision of the Aracoeli (the Virgin and Child surrounded by a golden radiance that the Tiburtine Sibyl revealed to Emperor Augustus) in Les Tres Riches Heures, the Limbourg brothers repre- sented the heavenly apparition resting on a large and perfectly shaped crescent moon.^*

As the iconography of the Virgin evolved, enriched by late medieval spiritual poetry and Marian litanies, so did the Virgin’s attributes multiply, drawn from the Canticles, Genesis, Psalms, Ecclesiasticus, and Ecclesiastes, and each attribute was understood to refer to her purity and attest to her immaculacy. Along with the Cedar of Lebanon, the Tower of David, the closed garden, the speculum sine

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macula (the mirror without stain), and others, the moon appeared in crescent form or as a disk. [. . .] Once the iconography of the Immaculate Conception was codified in the sixteenth century, with the serpent-crushing woman of Genesis 3 combined with the pure spouse of the Canticle of Canticles and the Apocalyptic Woman, it was the crescent moon that emerged as the standard attribute. Thus, in defining a formula for painting the Immaculate Virgin in his El arte de la pintura (published in 1649 but completed earlier), Francisco Pacheco, the fervidly orthodox Spanish painter, gave special instructions for depicting the moon under the Virgin’s feet explaining:

I take the liberty of making it transparent. . .. The upper part is darkened to form a crescent moon with the points turned downward. . . . Especially with the moon I have followed the learned opinion of Father Luis del Alcazar,. . . who says, “Painters usually show the [crescent] moon upside down at the feet of this woman. But it is obvious to learned mathematicians, if the moon and the sun face each other, both points of the moon have to point downward. Thus the woman will stand on a convex instead of a concave surface.” This is necessary so that the moon, receiving its light from the sun, will illuminate the woman standing on it.^*

Pacheco was writing about an established iconographic convention, and his pre- scription would warrant little comment were it not for two rather surprising points. First, he does not mention that the moon must be depicted with an unmarred surface - something that he must have felt was utterly obvious. Second, he refers to scientific (mathematical) knowledge - “the learned opinion of Father Luis del Alcazar” - as the basis for his formula, thus designating science as the handmaiden of both theology and art. '

Luis del Alcazar was a highly respected Sevillian Jesuit, a theologian deeply interested in astronomical matters, who in 1614 published a commentary on the Apocalypse of some one thousand pages, entitled Vestigatio arcani sensus in Apocalypsi. According to Alcazar, who dedicated his volume to Pope Paul V, the configuration of the “woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet” of Apocalypse 12 conformed to that of a solar eclipse. And in the passage Pacheco revised for his text. Alcazar stated: “it is apparent to anyone skilled in astronomy that if the sun and moon are in conjunction [i.e., in a solar eclipse], and the moon is seen from below and from one side, the two horns or points of the moon will appear to point downwards.”^^ But Alcazar unlike most of his fellow Jesuits, did not believe the moon to be a perfectly spherical and trans- parent orb, as Reeves has shown. Rather, he argued that the moon was solid and opaque, and insisted that it did not possess the celestial nature of the other heavenly orbs. It is apparent, therefore, that Alcazar’s influence on Pacheco was limited, that the painter was highly selective in his reliance on “learned mathematicians,” for when he painted the moon in his Virgin of the Immaculate Conception with Miguel Cid in 1621 (Illustration 24.2), although he depicted its horns pointing downward, here represented it as an unquestionably transparent and immaculate form.^^

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Illustration 24.2 Francesco Pacheco. The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception with Miguel Cid^ oil on canvas, 1624, Cathedral of Seville. Photo: Arxiu Mas. By permission and with the Collaboration of the Cathedral of Seville, Spain

Steven F. Ostrow

Both before and after the publication of Pacheco’s text, artists in Spain and Italy regularly diverged from his prescription by painting the moon’s crescent pointing upward, as seen in Guido Reni’s Immaculate Conception of 1627 and Bartolome Murillo’s Inmaculada of 1678.^^ No painter, however, took greater licence with iconographic tradition than did Lodovico Cigoli. Departing from a rigidly symbolic formula, one formalized by theology and pictorial tradition, he painted the moon neither as a perfect crescent nor as a transparent crystalline orb, but as a cratered sphere, much as it appears in one of the engravings in Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius (Messenger from the stars) published in 1610 (Illustration 24.3), and in the scientist’s original sepia-wash drawings of the moon (Illustration 24.4), which Galileo could have shown the painter during his visit to Rome in the spring of 1611, just when Cigoli was painting the dome.^* Like Galileo in both drawings and engraving, Cigoli rendered the waxing moon, probably on the fourth or fifth day after the new moon, and Cigoli’s lunar globe conforms rather closely to the following description in Galileo’s Latin text:

the surface of the Moon [is] not smooth, even, and perfectly spherical. .., but, on the contrary [is] uneven, rough, and crowded with depressions and bulges. .. . On the fourth or fifth day after conjunction [i.e., a new moon], when the Moon dis- plays herself to us with brilliant horns, the boundary dividing the bright from the dark part [the terminator] does not form a uniformly oval line, as would happen in a perfectly spherical solid, but is marked by an uneven, rough .. . line.^^

Edgerton has argued that Cigoli’s moon was “no doubt inspired by one of Galileo’s original drawings,”^® but a comparison between them immediately reveals that the painter did not, in fact, faithfully copy any of the drawings (compare Illustration 24.1 with 24.3 and 24.4) or, for that matter, any of the engravings published in the Sidereus nuncius. In light of Cigoli’s professed diffi- culty with Latin, it is also unlikely that he relied on Galileo’s written description. We do know, however, that by early 1612 Cigoli was in possession of a telescope, through which, as he proudly informed Galileo, he saw the moon “very well.” He may, therefore, have made his own drawings of the moon in conjunction with his work on the fresco, inspired by what he had learned from Galileo and perhaps, too, in an effort to corroborate his friend’s discoveries in the face of mounting criticism in Rome.^^ Whatever the source for Cigoli’s depiction of the moon, it is obvious that he took considerable liberties with it. Perhaps concerned that he was straying too far from tradition, he turned the moon on its side, to make it appear more like the conventional crescent with its horns pointing down- ward, and he illuminated the top of the sphere as if it were receiving the radiance of the Virgin and her solar mantle. Despite his own scientific inclinations and his close friendship with Galileo, Cigoli seems to have wrestled with the issue of rendering the moon in such a dramatically new guise. Looking at Cigoli’s Galilean moon, in fact, one is reminded of Gombrich’s “will-to-make-conform” axiom, that any new shape will be assimilated to familiar schemata and patterns.

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or, in his words, that “the familiar will always remain the likely starting point for rendering the unfamiliar.”^^

Cigoli’s moon, then, was not exactly a “publication” of Galileo’s lunar discover- ies, as Chappell argued, nor does it appear “exactly as it had revealed itself to

Illustration 24.4 Galileo Galilei, The Moon, wash drawings, c.1609. Biblioteca Nazio- nale Centrale, Florence, MS Gal. 4, fol. 28r. By permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attiviti Culturali, Florence

CigoWs Immacolata and Galileans Moon

Galileo’s telescope,” as Panofsky stated. It conforms, as I have suggested, more closely to traditional depictions of the Immacolata’s moon, in its orientation and illumination, than has previously been recognized. Yet there is no denying that its “uneven” and “rough” surface, “crowded everywhere with vast prominences, [and] deep chasms,” in Galileo’s words, radically departs from the traditional, smooth moonscape. There can also be no question that the moon in Cigoli’s fresco would have been recognized by the cognoscenti for its Galilean connections, and by all as an iconographic novelty within Immaculate Conception imagery. But was it viewed, especially by Paul V whose chapel it adorned, as undermining Scripture, or Catholic tradition, or as an affront to the Virgin, as one might suppose?

White, in his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, was the first to draw attention to Cigoli’s fresco within the context of the Church’s response to Galileo. After stating that the scientist’s lunar observations were rejected by the Church, he wrote: “To make the matter worse, a painter, placing the moon in a religious picture in its usual position beneath the feet of the blessed Virgin, outlined on its surface mountains and valleys; [and] this was denounced as a sacrilege logically resulting from the astronomer’s heresy.”^^ In fact, there is no evidence that Cigoli’s fresco was denounced. In a letter written by the painter to Galileo in April 1612, shortly before the fresco’s official unveiling, he stated that “everything [except for the Apostles] is finished, the heavens, the Madonna, all the angels, and the rest, and to the satisfaction of Cardinal Serra and the others. Now for the hard part, that is, the reaction of His Holiness.”^^ This letter provides clear evidence, in other words, that a cardinal of the Church, Jacopo Serra, who was entrusted by the pope with overseeing the decoration of his chapel, found no problem with the rough and uneven moon beneath the Virgin’s feet.^® And if Paul V had harbored misgivings about the moon’s appearance, if he had reacted negatively, there is no doubt that he would have prevailed upon Cigoli, or some other artist, to alter it, as he did with another fresco in the chapel that was considered to be iconographically inaccurate.

In further gauging the contemporary response to the fresco we are somewhat at a loss, for we have only one explicit written comment on Cigoli’s cratered moon. This came from the pen of Prince Federico Cesi, the founder, in 1603, of the Accademia dei Lincei, the first international society of scientists in Rome, and an ardent supporter of Galileo, whom he named a member of the Lincei when the scientist visited Rome in 1611. In a letter dated December 23, 1612, Cesi informed Galileo about the progress of his friend’s cupola fresco, stating:

Signor Cigoli has carried himself divinely in the cupola in the chapel of His Holi- ness in S. Maria Maggiore, and as a good and loyal friend has, beneath the image of the Blessed Virgin, painted the moon in the way it has been revealed by your Lordship, with the jagged dividing line and its little islands.^*

As Galileo’s advocate and one acutely sensitive to scientific matters, Cesi had good reason to comment upon Cigoli’s cratered moon: he viewed it, as the

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painter no doubt did as well, as homage to Galileo and as an expression of support for his lunar findings. And Galileo responded accordingly, in a letter to Cesi of January 5, 1613, expressing his gratitude to both Cesi and Cigoli for defending his views against slander.^^

Why do we lack any additional commentary? One could speculate that, despite the fact that within the light-flooded dome the cratered surface of Cigoli’s moon is plainly visible from ground level, viewers simply saw what they expected to §ee - a perfectly smooth and unflawed moon. As Gombrich put it, “We notice only when we look/or something,” and, conversely, “Expectation create [s] illusion.”^* Another possibility is that the moon’s uneven surface need not have been under- stood as signifying its imperfection. It was, after all, a matter of interpretation and intellectual discrimination, and for those unversed in or opposed to Galileo’s “reading” of the spots on the lunar surface as evidence of its terrestrial similari- ties, the uneven moonscape - observed since antiquity - could easily have been explained in terms of the previously discussed “rare and dense theory,” as many of Galileo’s critics in fact did.^® Thus, how Cigoli’s moon was perceived way well have depended on its particular audience.

If a definitive answer to the question - why only Cesi? - eludes us, we can still, I think, propose more concrete answers to the questions raised earlier: whether or not Cigoli’s Galilean moon was seen by Paul V as an affront to the Virgin and if it was perceived as undermining Scripture or Catholic tradition. It is in this context that the Church’s response to the discoveries Galileo published in his Sidereus nuncius has to be considered; and it should be recognized that Galileo’s little book made much bigger claims than the irregularity of the moon’s surface. It also announced his discovery that Jupiter had its own movable stars, that is, four of its own satellites; that Saturn was not a “simple star,” but what Galileo believed to be three stars joined together; that Venus changed its shape, waxing and waning like the moon; and that there was not a fixed number of stars, but, as the Milky Way reveals, an infinite number. In other words, Galileo tacitly advanced in the Sidereus nuncius the Copernican heliocentric view of the cosmos.

How did the Church respond? The imprimatur of the Sidereus nuncius unequivocally states that “in the book ... by Galileo Galilei there is nothing contrary to the Holy Catholic Faith, Principles, or good customs,” proving that it passed the scrutiny of representatives of the Venetian government and the Venetian Inquisitor.^® More revealing, perhaps, is the fact that during Galileo’s visit to Rome in the spring of I6II, Paul V granted him an audience and warmly declared his unvarying good will.^^ One manifestation of that good will, we may surmise, was allowing Cigoli to depict the Galilean moon in the papal chapel. In addition, the visitor was feted at the villa of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Bandini, one of the most influential members of the College of Cardinals; as Galileo wrote to a friend, “I have been shown favor by many illustrious cardinals, prelates, and princes” of the city.'^^ The greatest test Galileo faced, however, was from the Jesuits of Rome, particularly the Jesuit scientists at the Collegio

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Romano; among them Christopher Clavius and Odo van Maelcote. That Galileo was also honored at the Jesuit College in May 1611 in a grand ceremony attended by a number of cardinals, aristocrats, and the leading intellectuals of Rome would certainly tend to confirm that his discoveries were well received.'*^

Shortly before Galileo’s reception at the Collegio Romano, however. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the head of the college and one of the leading theologians in Rome, expressed his concern over the scientist’s discoveries and their theo- logical implications. On April 19, 1611, he issued a memorandum to four Jesuit scholars, Clavius, Maelcote, Christopher Grienberger, and Giovanni Paolo Lembo, asking that they, as men “skilled in the mathematical sciences,” confirm certain of the propositions made by Galileo, specifically those about the number of stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, the nature and shape of Saturn, and the surface of the moon. Less than a week later Maelcote responded to Bellarmine on behalf of all four. Remarkably, they accepted as true the first four of Galileo’s discoveries. Concerning the moon, however, no consensus was reached, for, as Maelcote wrote, Clavius - one of the most highly respected astronomers in Europe - rejected Galileo’s claim that its surface was rough and covered with craters, despite having viewed it with his own eyes through a telescope. Apparently unwilling to relinquish his Aristotelian views, Clavius, although he acknowledged that the moon appeared pocked and flawed, main- tained - as did a number of other critics of Galileo - that the moon had rarer and denser parts and was in fact surrounded by a transparent mantle, like a smooth glass envelope, pure and immaculate^^ - a conclusion that prompted Cigoli to call Clavius “not only a mediocre mathematician, but also a man without eyes.”^^

It is notable that all of Galileo’s discoveries discussed in the Sidereus nuncius were deemed acceptable by the Jesuit scholars, with the sole exception of the one about the lunar surface. It seems likely that at the heart of Clavius’s resistance to the idea of the moon’s imperfection was his and his order’s loyalty to the Virgin, whose symbol was the pure moon, for the Jesuits were among the most ardent champions of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, having offi- cially adopted it as early as 1593.^*^ To Clavius it must have seemed an outright blasphemy to doubt the perfection of the moon, and, although he accepted Galileo’s other discoveries, when it came to the moon he seems to have clung steadfastly to the words of Saint Augustine:

When it is asked what we ought to believe in matters of religion, the answer is not to be sought in the exploration of the nature of things, after the manner of those . . . called “physicists.” Nor should we be dismayed if Christians are ignorant about the properties and the number of the basic elements of nature, or about... the map of the heavens... and the myriad other things which these “physicists” have come to understand, or think they have. . .. For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator.^^

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The Church’s response to Galileo’s selenographic discoveries was, however, not a unified one. Notwithstanding Clavius’s skepticism, many cardinals, and especially Pope Paul V, appear to have accepted Galileo’s conclusions about an imperfect moon. They did so despite Spain’s desire for the Sidereus nuncius to be suppressed for being “pernicious to the [Catholic] religion.”^* They did so, too, in the face of the satirical response from the Protestant North, exemplified by John Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave^ published in 1611, which claimed - with unintentional irony, in view of the Jesuit position - that the notion of an irregular and imperfect moon was nothing but a Jesuit plot:

I will write the Bishop of Rome: he shall call Galileo the Florentine who by this time hath thoroughly instructed himself of all the hills, woods, and cities in the moon. And now being grown to more perfection in his art, he shall have made new glasses, and with these having received a hallowing from the pope, he may draw the moon, floating like a boat upon the water, as near the earth as he will. And thither (because they ever claim that those employments of discovery belong to them) shall the Jesuits be transferred, and easily unite and reconcile the Lunatique Church to the Roman Church.^’

Galileo’s discoveries about the moon had, in fact, far fewer implications for the Church than his observations about the other planets, not to mention the solar spots, which were known by this time.^“ That the moon possessed “cavities and prominences” like those of the earth, although it challenged Aristotle’s concept of celestial perfection, was a less threatening notion than the Copernican helio- centric view, which posited an immobile sun at the center of the universe with the earth moving continuously around it. As I indicated earlier, Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius implied his heliocentric beliefs, and later publications asserted them explicitly, resulting, in 1616, in his being summoned before the Holy Office and formally forbidden to “hold, teach or defend ... in any way whatsoever” what the Church viewed as the heresy of Copernicus.®^ Nevertheless, Galileo’s discov- eries about the moon were potentially dangerous, for, if not contrary to Scripture - and no scriptural passage specifically speaks of the moon as a perfectly smooth sphere - they were contrary to tradition, which, as defined by the Council of Trent, was deemed equal to Scripture and no less a divinely revealed truth. What was at stake, therefore, was the conflict or the accommodation of theologi- cal tradition with the new cosmology.

How, then, are we to understand the appearance and acceptance, in Milton’s words, of “the Moon, whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views”®® - an imperfect and maculate moon - in an image of the Immaculate Conception in a papal chapel.> A good part of the answer lies, I believe, in the tradition of exegetical commentary, specifically in the interpretation of the moon under the woman’s feet as described in Apocalypse 12. As I indicated earlier, some com- mentators on Apocalypse saw the moon of Saint John’s vision in the same way that the lunar sphere (that is, as a celestial object) had traditionally been viewed: as an extension and symbol of the Virgin, and thus as pure and immaculate.

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Surprisingly, however, the majority of commentators, from the sixth through the seventeenth centuries, offered a diametrically opposed interpretation of the Apocalyptic moon, seeing it as corrupt and mutable, and, therefore, as something over which Maria-Ecclesia triumphs. Gregory the Great, for example, described the moon beneath the woman’s feet as the emblem of everything the Church despised, as representing “all fallen, mutable, and earthly things.”®^ Similarly, the Venerable Bede in the late seventh century, the Benedictine Haimo of Auxerre in the ninth century, and Rupert of Deutz in the early twelfth century all viewed the moon as a symbol of mutability and stupidity. In the Glossa ordinaria we read that the moon symbolizes the mundane and corrupt world which, though it sustains the Church, does not affect her;®^ and Caesarius of Heisterbach (ca. 1180-1240) wrote that “the moon, that is the world, is beneath her feet to show her contempt for earthly glory.”^^ Most exegetes, in other words, saw the Apocalyptic Woman and her lunar pedestal in terms of contrast, opposing the Virgin’s purity to the moon’s unclean and inconstant form. As one seventeenth-century commentator put it:

The moon, because it has certain blemishes on its body, and undergoes eclipse, and scatters darkness here and there, signifies the failings and faults of corrupt [human] nature. Therefore the victorious Virgin rightly crushes the moon beneath her feet, because she has triumphed in glory over every vice . . . [and] she is unable to be touched, even ever so lightly, by any defect.®*

Particularly noteworthy in this context are the words of a certain Andrea Vittorelli, a doctor of theology originally from Bassano. In 1616, just three years after the unveiling of Cigoli’s fresco, Vittorelli published a volume on the Pauline Chapel, dedicated to Paul V, in which, among other things, he provided a detailed explanation of every single image. In writing about the dome fresco, although he makes no specific mention of the moon’s impure form, he declares that the moon reveals the “defect of corruption,” and, therefore, is placed below the Virgin. The moon, he also writes, symbolizes “insanity of mind” {pazzia di mente), and he further links the moon to the serpent, as emblems of sin and evil, over which the Virgin triumphs.®’

Vittorelli’s explanation of the fresco, then, was clearly informed by the commentary tradition on Apocalypse 12; and that he had nothing critical to say about the appearance of Galileo’s spotted moon within an image of the Immacolata suggests that he - together, it would seem, with Paul V, to whom he was closely allied - was willing to accommodate theological tradition to the new cosmology. It is worth noting, in this regard, that Vittorelli was an exceed- ingly learned man, well versed in literature and science, who had, in fact, read Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius. This is evident from one of his earlier writings, Dei ministerii, et operationi an^eliche, published in 1611, in which he writes, in regard to the rabbinical opinion that the seven principal angels attend to the seven planets:

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All this is uncertain, though not impossible; but if to the seven planets that have been known until now are added the four discovered by Signor Galilei... with the benefit of a most perfect eye-piece of his invention (as he affirms in his little book titled Sidereus nuncius), what will the Rabbis and others say about this important opinion?®”

Before writing his book on the Pauline Chapel, as this passage makes clear, Vittorelli had already grappled with scientific incursions into theology, and it appears that he allowed for the possibility of rethinking theological positions according to new scientific discoveries - in this case, the four moons of Jupiter, then called planets, which Galileo discovered and named the Medicean stars, and discussed in his Sidereus nuncius.

Do we find the same reconciliation of science and theological tradition when it comes to Cigoli’s fresco? The answer, I believe, is yes, and that it was the commentary tradition on Apocalypse 12, which viewed the woman’s lunar pedestal as a symbol of corruption, that permitted the appearance of Galileo’s moon in a papal chapel and accounts for what Edgerton has seen (with respect to this fresco) as the Catholic Church’s “quickjness] to co-opt the new dis- covery.””^ In other words, to those who accepted Galileo’s claims, a corrupt and spotted moon was perfectly compatible with and, indeed, ideally suited to the time-honored reading of Apocalypse 12. It was certainly not the moon that Bozio had in mind when he formulated the chapel’s program; but it gained papal acceptance nevertheless, through a process, perhaps, of ex post facto reasoning, that is, by the application of a particular exegetical tradition.”^

[...] To be sure, the Galilean moon in Cigoli’s fresco is an equivocal image, open

to a variety of readings, and its very indeterminateness speaks directly to the interpretive debate that surrounded the new cosmology in the early seventeenth century. However, from the perspective of those versed in the exegetical tradition outlined above and who accepted Galileo’s claims about an irregular moon, Cigoli’s lunar orb, I believe, resonated with specific meaning, and one that served the Catholic Church well. Saint John’s vision of the Virgin-Church was thus informed by and reconciled to the most recent scientific discovery; the Revelation of the Bible was accommodated to a new revelation - the moon as revealed through Galileo’s telescope - the one a product of faith, the other a product of reason, both of which were now beyond any doubt.

Such a reconciliation must have pleased Galileo (a Catholic, it should not be forgotten), for he firmly believed, at least so he said, that science and religion were perfectly compatible. As he wrote in 1613 in a letter to his protege, Benedetto Castelli, in response to theological objections to some of his arguments:

It is not possible for Sacred Scripture ever to deceive or to err ..., nevertheless some of its interpreters and expositors can . . . and in various ways. Granting ... that two truths can never be contrary to each other, it is the task of wise

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expositors to try to find the true meanings of sacred passages [and here we should add sacred traditions] in accordance with natural conclusions which... have been rendered certain and secure by manifest sensation or by necessary, demonstration.

Galileo must have been delighted, too, that “his” moon had found a home in the chapel of the pope, translated there through the hand of his friend Cigoli. He may even have construed its prominent place in the Paolina as a kind of papal endorsement of his discovery. By 1616 Paul V would have become suspicious of Galileo’s teachings and would call him before the Holy Office (and for this reason, perhaps, Galileo’s moon never again appeared in an image of the Immac- ulate Conception); but late in 1612, when Cigoli’s fresco was unveiled, it is likely that the pope took pride in being the exclusive patron of the “New Heaven” in which the Virgin remained Queen, an image in which age-old Christian tradi- tions and the new science were brought together in an effective and meaningful union.

Notes --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 This essay is a much revised and expanded discussion of a subject I treat in nuce in my book. Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome: The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in S. Maria Ma^gpiore, Cambridge/New York, 1996.

2 Ostrow (as in n. 1), chap. 4. 3 The program exists in manuscript in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Rome, MS 0.57,

fols, 377r-378v. 4 R. Laurentin, “The Role of the Papal Magisterium in the Development of the

Dogma of the Immaculate Conception,” in The Do^ma of the Immaculate Concep- tion, ed. E. O’Connor, Notre Dame, Ind., 1958, 271-324, esp. 274-6, 298-302; and W. Sebastian, “The Controversy over the Immaculate Conception from after Scotus to the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in ibid., 213-70, esp. 234-8, 264-7.

5 E. Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, The Hague, 1954, 5-6. 6 M. Chappell, “Cigoli, Galileo and Tnvidia,’” Art Bulletin, LVII, 1975, 93. 7 Galilei/Van Helden, 36. 8 G. Reaves and C. Pedretti, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Drawings of the Surface Features

of the Moon,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, XVIII, 1987, 55-8. 9 W. K. C. Guthrie, Aristotle On the Heavens, Loeb Classical Library, London/

Cambridge, Mass., 1960. See also D. R. Dicks, Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle, Ithaca, NY, 1970, 194fF; and E. Grant, “Celestial Perfection from the Middle Ages to the Late Seventeenth Century,” in Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richards S. Westfall, ed. M. 1. Osier and P. L. Farber, Cambridge/New York, 1985, 137-62.

10 R. Ariew, “Galileo’s Lunar Observations in the Context of Medieval Lunar Theory,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 1984, 213-26; and Grant, 459-66.

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11 N. Oresme, Le Livre du del et du monde, ed. A. D. Menut and A. J. Denomy, trans. A. D. Menut, Madison, Wis., 1968, 459. See also Grant, 463.

12 Galilei/Van Helden, 11-12. 13 See Galilei/Van Helden, 88-9. 14 A. Funkenstein, Theology and the Sdentific Imagination from the Middle A^es to the

Seventeenth Century, Princeton, NJ, 1986, 49. 15 H. Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, trans. B. Battershaw, New York/

Evanston, Ill., 89-154. 16 So named, e.g., by Albertus Magnus, De caelo et mundo, as noted in Grant, 452-3.

On the Virgin as Luna, see Rahner (as in n. 15), 155-76. 17 M. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976),

New York, 1983, 255-62. 18 Reeves, chap. 3. 19 Saint Methodius, The Symposium: A Treatise on Chastity, trans. and annotated H.

Musurillo, London, 1958, 110-11. 20 Isidore of Seville, De natura rerum, in Pat. Lat., LXXXIII, col. 992; cf. Isidore

de Seville, Traiti de la nature, ed. and trans. J. Fontaine, Bordeaux, 1960, 242.

21 Rupert of Deutz, Commentaria in Cantica Canticorum, in Pat. Lat., CLXVIII, col. 937.

22 On the image in the Rothschild Canticles, see J. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flander and the Rhineland circa 1300, New Haven/ London, 1990, 101-4; on the Viennese image, see E. M. Vetter, “Mulier Amicta Sole und Mater Salvatoris,” Munchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, IX—X, 1958- 9, 32-3.

23 P. Verdier, “La Naissance a Rome de la vision de I’Ara Coeli,” Melanges d’archeolopfie et d’histoire de Pecole frangaise de Rome: Moyen Age-Temps Modernes, XCIV, 1982, 85-119, esp. 111-15.

24 F. Pacheco, Arte de lapintura (Seville, 1649), ed. and intro. B. Bassegoda i Hugas, Madrid, 1990, 576-7.

25 L. del Alcazar, Vestigatio arcani sensus in Apocalypsi, Antwerp, 1614, 453. 26 Stratton, 77-8. 27 H. Hibbard, “Guido Reni’s Painting of the Immaculate Conception,” Bulletin

of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, XXVIII, 1969, 19-32. Stratton, 106-8, fig. 68.

28 Galileo arrived in Rome in late Mar. 1611 and remained there until June of that year. Cigoli began his dome fresco in Sept. 1610 and completed it by the. end of 1612. On the dates of Galileo’s lunar observations, see G. Righini, “New Light on Galileo’s Lunar Observations,” in Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. L. Righini Bonelli and W. R. Shea, New York, 1975, 59-76.

29 Galilei/Van Helden, 40. 30 Edgerton, 253, M. M. Byard, “A New Heaven: Galileo and the Artists,” History

Today, XXXVIII, 1988, 34. 31 A. Matteoli, ed., “Macchie di sole e pittura: Carteggio Cigoli - Galilei, 1609-1613,”

Bollettino della Accademia degli Euteleti della cittd di San Miniato, XXXII, 1959, 11-87.

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32 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representa- tion (1960), Bollingen Series XXXV, 5, Princeton, NJ, 1969, 77-82.

33 A. D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, New York, 1896,1, 132-3.

34 Galilei, XI, 291. 35 Ostrow (as in n. 1), chap. 3. 36 Galilei, XI, 449. 37 Galilei, XI, 461. 38 Gombrich (as in n. 32), 172, 204. 39 Edgerton, 231ff. 40 Galilei/Van Helden, 34. 41 Galilei, XI, 89; L. von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle

Ages, 40 vols., St. Louis, Mo., 1893-1953, xxv, 287. 42 Galilei, XI, 89. 43 J. A. F. Orbaan, Documenti sul Barocco in Roma, Rome, 1920, 284. 44 Galilei, XI, 87-8, 92-3; see also Galilei/Van Helden, 110-11. 45 Galilei, XI, 168. 46 Two of the most prominent Jesuit theologians, Peter Canisius and Bellarmine,

ardently promoted Mary’s immaculacy in their writings. The former devoted four chapters of his De Maria Vergine incomparabili, et Dei Genetrice sacrosancta (Ingolstadt, 1577) to Mary’s Immaculate Conception and the latter, in his Dottrina cristiana breve of 1588, declared Mary “exempt from all sin, original or actual.”

47 Augustine, Enchiridion, trans. A. C. Outlet, in The Library of Christian Classics, VII, Philadelphia, 1955, 341-2.

48 Galilei, x, 418. 49 Edgerton, 251-3. n. 40. 50 S. Drake, trans.. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, Garden City, NY, 1957, 81-5

(and 89-144 for the text of the Letters). 51 J.J. Langford, Galileo, Science and the Church, rev. ed., Ann Arbor, Mich., 1971,92. 52 H. J. Schroeder, trans. and intro.. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent

(1941), Rockford, Ill., 1978, 17-20. 53 John Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 1,11. 287-8. 54 Gregory, Moralia, in Pat. Lat., LXXVI, col. 731. 55 Bede, Explanatio Apocalypsis, in Pat. Lat., XCIII, cols. 165-6; Haimo of Auxerre,

Expositionis in Apocalypsim, in Pat. Lat., CXVII, col, 1081; Rupert of Deutz, Com- mentaria in Apocalypsim, in Pat. Lat., CLXIX, col. 1041.

56 In Pat. Lat., CXIV, col. 752. 57 Cesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von E. Scott and

C. C. Swinton Bland, London, 1929, I, 453. 58 J. da Sylveira, Commentarii in Apocalypsim, Lyon, 1694, II, 23. 59 A. Vittorelli, Gloriose Memorie della B.ma Vergine Madre di Dio... Rome, 1616,

224-8. 60 A. Vittorelli, Dei ministerii, et operationi angeliche, Vicenza, 1611, 233-4. 61 , Edgerton, 253. 62 I owe this point to Eric Frank. 63 R. J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and The Bible, Notre Dame, Ind./London,

1991.

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Frequently Cited Sources

Edgerton, Jr., S.Y. The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry^ Ithaca, NY/London, 1991. Galilei, G., Opere, ed. A Favaro, 20 vols., Florence, 1890-1909. Galilei/Van Helden: Galilei, G., Sidereus nuncius, or, The Siderenl Messenger, trans. with

introduction, conclusion, and notes by A. Van Helden, Chicago/London, 1989. Grant, E., Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200—1687, Cambridge/New

York, 1994. Reeves, E., The Tuscan Artist, Princeton, NJ, forthcoming. Stratton, S., The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art, Cambridge/New York, 1994.

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