He had Mazzoleni’s crew cover the exterior of the best tube with red leather, embossed with decorative patterns in gold filigree. Mazzoleni also adapted a tripod stand that they sold as an accessory to the military compass, so that they would have something to hold the spyglass steady. A joint on top of the tripod was made of a metal ball held captive in a hemispherical cup, with one screw through the cup to tension the ball, which was screwed on top into a brass sleeve wrapping the spyglass. Using the tripod one did not have to hold the glass steady while looking through it, something no one could do for more than a second or two. It vastly improved the view through the glass.
The resulting arrangement was a handsome thing, standing there gleaming in the sunlight, strange but purposeful, immediately intriguing, pleasing to both eye and mind. A month earlier there had been no such thing in the world.
On 21st August, 1609, he ferried in to Venice on the morning barge, the looking glass and its stand in a long leather case slung from a strap over his shoulder. Its shape was suggestive of a pair of swords, and he saw the glances of people looking at it and thought, Yes, I’m going in to cut the Gordian knot. I’m going in to cut the world in two.
Venice stood on the lagoon, its usual grubby midday self. Magnificence at low tide. Galileo got off the ferry at the molo at San Marco, and was greeted there by Fra Paolo. The great friar looked gaunt in his best robes, his face still a wreck, as it always would be; but his crooked smile remained kindly, his look still penetrating.
Galileo kissed his hand. Sarpi patted the case gently: ‘So this is your new occhialino?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very good. Your audience is assembled in the Anticollegio. It’s everyone who matters, you’ll be happy to know.’
An honour guard assembled in response to Sarpi’s nod, and escorted them into the Signoria, up the Golden Staircase into the Anticollegio, which was the anteroom to the Signoria’s bigger halls. It was a tall chamber, sumptuously decorated overhead in the usual Venetian style, its octagonal ceiling covered with giltframed paintings allegorizing the origin myth of Venice, while the floor underfoot was painted like the pebbled bed of a mountain stream. Galileo had always found it a strange space, in which he had trouble focusing his eyes.
Now it was stuffed with dignitaries. Better yet, as Galileo soon learned, the Doge himself, Leonardo Dona, was waiting in the Sala del Collegio, the larger assembly hall next door that was the most sumptuous room in the Signoria. As he entered the room he saw Dona and the Savi, his six closest advisors, along with the Grand Chancellor and other state officials, all gathered under the long painting of the battle of Lepanto. Sarpi had outdone himself.
Now the great Servite led Galileo to the Doge, and after a cordial greeting Dona led the entire group into the Sala delle Quattro Porte, then to the Sala del Senato, where many more senators stood in their purple around tables loaded with food. Under the intricacy of crowded paintings and gilt trim that covered every wall and ceiling, Galileo pulled the two parts of his device from their case, and screwed the spyglass on top of the tripod. His hands moved without a quiver; twenty years of lecturing to audiences large and small had burned all possibility of stage fright out of him, and it was also true that it was never that difficult to speak to a crowd to which you felt innately superior. So even though all his hundreds of lectures were now only the prelude to this culmination, he was calm and at ease as he described the work done to make the device, indicating its various features as he pointed it at Tintoretto’s ‘Triumph of Venice’ on the ceiling at the far end of the room, fixing the image in the glass so that it revealed the tiny face of an angel enlarged to the point that it stood out even more vividly than Mazzoleni’s had on that first night of work.
With a sweep of his hand he invited the Doge to have a look. The Doge looked; pulled away to gaze at Galileo, his eyebrows shot high onto his forehead; looked again. The two big clocks on the long side wall marked ten minutes’ passage as he bumped the glass from one view to another. Ten more minutes passed as one purple-robed man after another took a look through the glass. Galileo answered every question they had about how it was made, although failing to bring up the ratios he had discovered, which they did not even know to ask about. He volunteered often that the process being now clear to him, future improvements were certain to follow, and also (trying to hide a growing impatience) that it was not the kind of device that could best be demonstrated in a room, even a room as big and magnificent as the Sala del Senato. Finally the Doge himself echoed this point, and Sarpi was quick to suggest that they take the device to the top of the campanile of San Marco to give it a thorough airing. Dona agreed to this, and suddenly the whole assembly was following him out of the building and across the Piazzetta between the Signoria and the campanile, then inside the great bell tower, winding up the tight iron staircases to the open observation floor under the bells. Here Galileo reassembled the device.
The floor of the viewing chamber stood a hundred braccia above the Piazza. It was a place all of them had been up to many times; from here one could overlook the whole of Venice and the lagoon, and spot the passageway through the Lido at San Niccolo, the only navigable channel into the Adriatic. Also visible to the west was a long stretch of the mainland’s marshy shore, and on clear days one could even see the Alps to the north. A better place to display the powers of the new spyglass could not have been found, and to aim it Galileo looked through the device with as much interest as anyone else, or even more; he had not yet had an opportunity like this, and what could be seen through the glass was as new to him as the next man. He told them as much as he worked, and they liked that. They were part of the experiment. He stabilized and sighted the glass very carefully, feeling that a little delay at this moment was not a bad thing, in theatrical terms. As always, the image in the eyepiece shimmered a little, as if it were something conjured in a crystal ball by a magician-not an effect he wanted, but there was nothing he had been able to do about it. Feeling a sharp curiosity, he tried to spot Padua itself; on earlier visits to the campanile he had marked the vague tower of smoke coming from the town, and knew precisely where it lay.
When he got Padua’s tower of San Giustina centred in the glass, as clear as if he were on Padua’s city wall staring at it, he suppressed any shout, any smile, and merely bowed to the Doge and moved aside, so Dona and then the others could have a look. A little touch of the mage’s silent majesty was not inappropriate at this point, he judged.
For the view was in fact astonishing. ‘Ho!’ the Doge exclaimed when he saw San Giustina. ‘Look at that!’ After a minute or two he gave over the glass to his people, and after that the rush was on. Exclamations, cries, incredulous laughter: it sounded like Carnivale. Galileo stood proudly by the tube, readjusting it when it was bumped. After everyone had had a first look, he spotted terra ferma towns even more distant than Padua, which itself was twenty-five miles away: Chioggia to the south, Treviso to the west, even Conegliano, nestled in the foothills more than fifty miles away.
Moving to the northern arches, he trained the glass on various parts of the lagoon. These views made it clear that many of the senators were even more amazed to see people brought close than they had been buildings; perhaps their minds had leaped as quickly as Galileo’s servants to the uses of such an ability. They gazed at worshippers entering the church of San Giacomo in Murano, or getting into gondolas at the mouth of the Rio de’ Verieri, just west of Murano. Once one of them even recognized a woman he knew.
After that round of viewing Galileo lifted the device, helped now by as many hands as could touch the tripod, and the whole assembly shifted together to the easternmost arch on the southern side of the campanile, where the glass could be directed over the Lido and the fuzzy blue Adriatic. For a long time Galileo tapped the tube gently from side to side, searching the horizon. Then happily he spotted the sails of a little fleet of galleys, making their final approach to the Serenissima.
‘Look to sea,’ he instructed them as he straightened and made room for the Doge. He had to restrain himself to remain serious, to hide his euphoria. ‘See how using one’s plain sight, one sees nothing out there. But using the glass…’
‘A fleet!’ the Doge exclaimed. He straightened and looked at the crowd,