Essay Review: Sidereus Nuncius Debated, Galileo's O., Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius: A Comparison of the Proof Copy (New York) with other Paradigmatic Copies, Galileo Makes a Book: The First Edition of the Sidereus Nuncius, Venice 1610:

SIDEREUS NUNCIUS DEBATED Galileo 's O. Edited by Horst Bredekamp. Vol. i: Galileo 's Sidereus Nuncius: A Comparison of the Proof Copy (New York) with Other Paradigmatic Copies. Edited by Irene Briickle and Oliver Hahn. Vol. ii: Galileo Makes a Book: The First Edition of the Sidereus Nuncius, Venice 1610. Paul Needham (Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2011). Pp. 188 + 249. euro128. ISBN 978-3-05-005095-9.The discovery in 2005 of a copy of Galileo's Sidereus nuncius (1610) containing wash drawings instead of the usual etchings has garnered attention out of proportion to its historical significance. That is owing partly to commercial interest and partly to scholarly compulsion. The elaborate books under review contain the latest contributions to the printing history of Galileo's masterpiece and the provenance of the odd copy.In Galileo 's Sidereus nuncius, Horst Bredekamp and a team of experts support his earlier findings that the odd copy (labelled "ML" after the initials of its owners) is a bound proof documenting a stage in the printing and that its washes guided the etcher. Bredekamp's further judgements, based on his expertise in Galileo's style of drawing, that the author himself did the washes and, perhaps, also the etchings, while not confirmed, remain alive.The ML illustrations are in general closer to the etchings than to either of the other two sets of drawings previously considered as the etchings' antecedents. These are the figures in a letter to an unknown correspondent dated 7 January 1610 ("JL" for "January letter") and on the familiar bifolium preserved among Galileo's papers in Florence ("FB" for "Florence bifolium"). FB has no date; JL is known from two seventeenth-century copies, one now lost, of a lost original. JL's date and illustrations, which include depictions of the progressive illumination of a huge crater that appears combined with other views on the etchings, suggest the chronological sequence JL, ML, etchings. That leaves the bistre washes of FB, whose single crater stands apart in a miniature all to itself, disconnected from the printing history of Sidereus nuncius. This conclusion, which Bredekamp reached in his Galilei der Kunstler (2007), is reinforced by Paul Needham's Galileo makes a book.Needham gives a masterful account of the composition, make-up, ingrethents, and printing of Sidereus nuncius (SN). His apt diagrams guide the reader through details about signatures, additions, subtractions, watermarks, layouts, papers, presses, and printing. One learns why and when Galileo decided to impose his out-of-scale crater on a terminator where he probably had not seen it. It was to save space. The original design of SN had called for seven depictions of the Moon's surface for which only five spaces could be found after Galileo added sections concerning the Moon's silhouette and the height of lunar mountains, perhaps in order to pre-empt objections that had occurred to him when reviewing his draft.1Needham was able to put together so intricate an account because the original draft of SN, with its corrections and expansions, has survived. So have a fair copy of about half of it and a good many of the 550 standard copies of the book originally printed. Add to these the dated letters Galileo wrote while seeing it through the press and inferences from watermarks, and the relevant documentation dwarfs that available for all of Shakespeare's plays. Needham remarks that no other early printed book except Gutenberg's bible lends itself to, or has received, the elaborate analysis he has given Sidereus nuncius.Several astronomers previously sought to identify the dates and even hours when Galileo made the observations apparently recorded on FB. The rapidly changing inventory of features visible near the terminator makes this exercise practicable and its results probable. If, however, FB does not belong in the pre-printing sequence but, as Bredekamp suggests, to preparations for the second edition of Sidereus nuncius that Galileo advertised but did not issue, the identifications rest on a false assumption. …