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Galilean argumentation and the inauthenticity of the Cigoli letter on painting vs. sculpture

2011; Elsevier BV; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.shpsa.2011.08.001

1879-2510

Maurice A. Finocchiaro,

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

This essay is partly a case study of the role of logic in historiography. It is also partly a test case for the thesis of a Galilean correspondence between aesthetic attitude and scientific thought, advanced by Panofsky, Koyré, and Heilbron. Intrinsically, it is a discussion of the authenticity of the letter to Cigoli dated 26 June 1612, widely attributed to Galileo, containing argumentation about the relative aesthetic merits of painting and sculpture. I undertake a systematic analysis of the letter's method of argument, comparing and contrasting it with Galileo's. I argue that the letter does have some Galilean characteristics: critical reasoning; ad hominem argumentation, in the seventeenth-century sense; and appeal to experimentation. However, the letter falls short of the typical Galilean open-mindedness, fair-mindedness, and clarity; crucially, it uses several illative terms which Galileo never uses, and does not use the one he uses most often. The latter features outweigh the former. Moreover, I discuss some aspects of the letter's substantive content, primarily a theory of vision that disregards the dynamics of perspective and the faculty of binocularity, which Galileo understood and exploited very well. My novel argument vindicates an old judgment of Favaro, who doubted the letter's authenticity.