CONTENTS

When Viviani died childless in 1703 at the age of eighty-one, he left all his worldlygoods—including the solemn responsibility for relocating Galileo’s grave—in the hands of anephew who never accomplished the plan in the remaining three decades of his own life. Viviani’sproperty, along with the duty it implied, passed eventually by family inheritance to a senator ofFlorence, Giovanni Battista Clemente de Nelli, who enjoyed the triumphant satisfaction of finallyseeing the Galileo tomb project through to completion in 1737, thanks in part to the accession ofLorenzo Corsini as Pope Clement XII. With a Florentine pontiff once more ensconced on the throneof Saint Peter, Galileo would finally claim his proper due.The mausoleum had first taken form in Ferdinando’s and Viviani’s envisionings as a match for theornate monument to Michelangelo Buonarroti, another fellow Tuscan, near the entrance to SantaCroce. There against the south wall of the church, Michelangelo’s highly perched bust oversees themarble forms of the muses of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, who sit around his coffin inmourning. Not only did Ferdinando and Viviani view Galileo’s genius as the scientific counterpointto Michelangelo’s art, but Viviani also promulgated the belief that Michelangelo’s spirit had leapedlike an inspiration from his aged, failing body to the infant Galileo in the brief span of hoursseparating the former’s death from the latter’s birth.The original design for Galileo’s monument called for three female forms to attend him—the musesof Astronomy, Geometry, and Philosophy, who would stand symmetrically opposed toMichelangelo’s three seated muses of the arts. In the tomb’s eventual execution, however, only twosuch statues, Astronomy and Geometry, emerged to flank the bust of Galileo, who holds in his righthand a telescope, while his left rests on a globe and an assortment of books. Philosophy wasomitted, either on instructions from the Holy Office or out of fear that her presence would recallunfortunate memories of Galileo’s condemnation. And yet there is a third female figureincorporated into the tomb—in such a way that she remains invisible to even the most carefulobserver.On the evening of March 12, 1737, after permission had been granted to move Galileo’s body fromits first interment site to the marble sarcophagus of the nearly completed monument, a distinguishedcongregation—part ecclesiastic, mostly civic—assembled discreetly with torches and candles in thechurch of Santa Croce. Their task that long night involved elements of demolition work, religiousceremony, mortuary identification, and hero veneration as they exhumed the body of Galileo. Thisoccasion also saw the ritual removal of a single vertebra from the venerated scientist, along withthree fingers of his right hand and a tooth—and surely would have included the preservation of hisbrain as well, if by some miracle that organ had still survived.The closet-sized room under the campanile, where Galileo had lain buried for ninety-five years, nowcontained two brick biers: one belonging to Galileo and the other to his disciple, Vincenzio Viviani,who had asked in his will to share the master’s grave.The few men who could fit inside the tiny room broke open the more recent brickwork, laid at thetime of Viviani’s death in 1703, and extracted a wood coffin. According to an eyewitness reportfiled by a notary, they carried this into the Novice’s Chapel, where everyone could watch as the lidwas lifted to reveal a lead plate identifying the corpse as Viviani’s. Several sculptors and scientistsin the party covered the bier with a black cloth, and lifting the draped coffin to their shoulders, theybore it through the long passageway from the chapel and across the cavernous basilica. Theirchanted prayers for the dead reverberated off the wooden columns, which towered over theunattended procession, and the stone walls that had been frescoed by Giotto to trace the life of SaintFrancis.The assembly placed the body at the new site, then returned to the little chapel and set aboutrepeating the procedure—smashing the older brick container under the 1674 memorial Viviani hadmounted for Galileo, and pulling out another wooden coffin. This one had apparently been damagedover time, its lid bashed in and littered with broken pieces of plaster. As the men dragged the bierfrom the bricks, they were startled to discover another almost identical wooden box lying directlybeneath it. Galileo’s grave contained two coffins, two skeletons, and no lead nameplate on either