Alleged Galileo Documents Proven To Be Fake

[EnolaGaia]

This story concerns an early draft document treasured as an authentic handwritten Galileo letter that is now demonstrated to be a modern forgery.

Document supposedly written by Galileo is a fake

A handwritten document thought to have been penned by Galileo Galilei is actually a forgery, the University of Michigan has announced.

The single piece of paper was a jewel of the collection of the University of Michigan Library, according to a statement from the library. But an internal investigation by a professor of history has found that it's a fake: Watermarks in the paper date back to no earlier than the 18th century, over a hundred years after the death of the famed astronomer. ...

The university has had the manuscript since 1938, when it was donated by the trustees of Tracy McGregor, a Detroit businessman who had acquired the document at the auction of another collector in 1934. The 1934 auction catalog claimed that Cardinal Pietro Maffi (1858-1931), the Archbishop of Pisa, had authenticated the manuscript by comparing it with other Galileo letters in his collection ...

The top of the manuscript is a draft of a letter that Galileo wrote before a presentation about a new telescope to the Doge of Venice in 1609. The famed astronomer really did write a version of this letter — a final draft is in the State Archive in Venezia, Italy. The lower half of the document is a set of notes on the moons of Jupiter, also based on real notes Galileo took. The final draft of those notes is also found in Italy, at the Florence National Central Library. ...

But when Nick Wilding, a historian at Georgia State University, saw an image of the document, he suspected something was off. The ink, the handwriting, and some of the word choices seemed odd for a 17th-century document ... Wilding emailed University of Michigan Library curator Pablo Alvarez in May 2022 with his concerns, and the University of Michigan launched an internal investigation. Three months later, the university announced that Wilding was right. The document was not penned by Galileo, but instead most likely by Tobia Nicotra, a prolific Italian forger who operated in the 1920s and 1930s.

Clinching the finding was the watermark in the paper. Old paper often contains watermarks identifying the paper's maker and the place of production ... The watermark on the Galileo paper reads "AS," the paper maker's initials, and "BMO," short for Bergamo, Italy. The earliest known papers with the BMO monogram date to 1770, meaning the document cannot be older than that. ...

What's more, the university could find no evidence that the Galileo document existed before the 1930s. Even worse, the two documents that Maffi claimed to have compared the manuscript to in order to authenticate it turned out to be Nicotra forgeries. According to a university statement, Wilding also discovered a similar Nicotra Galileo forgery (a letter supposedly from 1607) in the collections of The Morgan Library in New York City. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/galileo-document-fake

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here's a twist on the forged Galileo letter story ... In the course of research demonstrating the letter was a forgery an Italian researcher found documentation that seemingly proves Galileo was the pseudonymous author of a treatise with which he'd publicly denied any connection.

Forged Galileo manuscript leads experts to controversial book he secretly wrote

The revelation in August that a manuscript attributed to Galileo Galilei was a forgery has led to the discovery of a different book that the celebrated Italian astronomer actually did write, but under a pseudonym, a new investigation finds.

Previously unpublished notes by Galileo that were checked in the aftermath of the forgery's discovery indicate that he was the true author of a treatise titled the "Considerazioni Astronomiche di Alimberto Mauri" — Italian for the "Astronomical Considerations of Alimberto Mauri" — which was published in 1604.

Some other scholars at the time suspected Galileo was the author of the work when it was published, although it was attributed to the pseudonym Alimberto Mauri. At the time, writing under a pseudonym was a common practice to avoid controversy. Galileo is known to have published under other aliases, but his authorship of "Considerazioni Astronomiche" had not been confirmed until now. ...

"It's a full treatise, and it's written by one of the most brilliant minds of Western science," said Matteo Cosci ... , a researcher ... who made the latest discovery. ...


The treatise was published just a few years before Galileo's famous work "Sidereus Nuncius" (Italian for "Starry Messenger"), which in 1610 described his breakthrough observations of Earth's moon and four of Jupiter's moons through the first astronomical telescope on record.

"You may consider it as a prequel to 'Sidereus Nuncius,' which was the no-turning-back work that changed the history of astronomy and science in general," Cosci told Live Science. "For historians of philosophy like me, this is a treasure trove." ...

Galileo never admitted to writing the "Considerazioni Astronomiche di Alimberto Mauri" ... But earlier this year, Cosci discovered an unpublished note authentically written by Galileo in a library in Florence, in which the astronomer listed several places where the Italian scholar Ludovico delle Colombe had attacked his ideas. Among these, Galileo noted that delle Colombe had criticized "Considerazioni Astronomiche di Alimberto Mauri" — showing that Galileo felt personally attacked whenever "Alimberto Mauri" was criticized in print, Cosci said.

"When Galileo wrote in his private note that '[Lodovico delle Colombe] speaks of me with contempt,' he was recognizing himself as Mauri," Cosci said. ...

"It's safer to use a pseudonym, because if things don't fly right, then you don't get blamed," said Peter Barker ... , a professor of the history of science at the University of Oklahoma. "But if it does fly, you can then say, 'It was me all along.'" ...

Barker was not involved in the new discovery but said he's convinced by Cosci's research. The attribution of "Considerazioni Astronomiche" to Galileo has also been accepted by Nick Wilding ... , a historian at Georgia State University who detected the forgery of the University of Michigan manuscript. ...

FULL STORY (With Photos): https://www.livescience.com/anonymous-book-by-galileo-discovered