Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo's Italy by Rebecca Cypess

Author:Rebecca Cypess [Cypess, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226319582
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Galileo, Bellarmino, and the Uses of Augustine

It was not until the 1660s that Christiaan Huygens, son of the diplomat and amateur musician Constantijn Huygens, developed a portable watch with a level of reliability that might have satisfied Banchieri.39 But a generation earlier, Galileo Galilei—also the son of a musician—had made numerous attempts to develop instruments and processes that would allow for the accurate and consistent measurement of time.40 Although Galileo had noted the isochrony of the pendulum as early as 1602, he did not try to apply this technology to a clock until the 1630s, and the first successful pendulum clock was not developed until after his death.41 Nevertheless, he worked on solutions for the accurate measurement of time throughout his career.

The experience of time through instruments was a subject of concern throughout Europe in the years around the publication of Frescobaldi’s first book of toccatas. When Galileo Galilei was summoned to Rome in 1616 for his first encounter with the Inquisition over the heresy of his Copernican views, he took the opportunity to renew his petition to the Spanish ambassador for a reward for the invention of a mechanism that would allow for accurate timekeeping by navigators at sea.42 Although the subject of time was not the central concern of Galileo’s inquisitor, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, it was in the periphery of their encounter. Bellarmino held up as proof of Galileo’s heresy a biblical passage that had already been cited by Galileo’s attackers numerous times: Joshua 10:12–13, which describes the miracle at Gibeon:

Then spoke Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the men of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel,

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