Forged Galileo Letter Discovered Thanks to Watermark and Spider Sense

Galileo Galilei was looking through a new telescope in 1610 when he noticed something strange: several bright objects sparking around the planet Jupiter that seemed to change position every night. His discovery of the moons orbiting Jupiter seriously undermined the idea, widely held since antiquity, that everything in the universe revolved around the Earth.

Condemned by the Catholic Church, the discovery helped prove the theory of a solar system centered on the Sun.

The University of Michigan Library has held a manuscript related to this discovery with great fondness for decades, describing it as “one of the great treasures” in its collection. At the top is a draft of a letter signed by Galileo describing the new telescope, and at the bottom are drawings denoting the positions of the moons around Jupiter. The library describes the manuscript as “the first observational data that showed objects orbiting a body other than Earth”.

Or, at least, that’s what it would be if it were authentic. After Georgia State University historian Nick Wilding discovered evidence suggesting the manuscript was a fake, the library investigated and determined he was right. On Wednesday the university announced that it had concluded that its prized manuscript “is actually a forgery made in the 20th century”.

“It was devastating when we first discovered that our Galileo manuscript is not really Galileo’s,” Donna L. Hayward, acting director of the university’s libraries, said in an interview. But since the purpose of any library is to expand knowledge, she said, the university decided to be frank about its findings and publicly announce the forgery. “Sweeping it under the rug would go against what we stand for,” she explained.

Wilding, who is writing a biography of Galileo, has discovered forged works by Galileo before: he has previously found evidence that a copy of Galileo’s 1610 treatise “Sidereus Nuncius” (“Sidereal Messenger”), with several watercolor paintings, was forged. .

He became suspicious of the Michigan manuscript in May when he examined an image online. Some of the letterforms and words used seemed strange to her, and despite the top and bottom supposedly being written months apart, the ink looked surprisingly similar.

“It’s something that jumps out at you, it’s strange,” Wilding said. “They’re supposed to be two different documents that happen to be on the same sheet of paper. Why is everything exactly the same shade of brown?”

Wilding teaches a summer course on forgery at the University of Virginia’s School of Rare Books. He began researching the University of Michigan document and found that there is no record of it in Italian archives. It first appeared for auction in 1934, when it was purchased by a Detroit businessman, and donated to the university in 1938, after his death. In May Wilding contacted the library by email to ask for more information about the manuscript’s origin and to request an image of its watermark — an insignia visible when the paper is held against the light and which can indicate where and when the paper was made.

Pablo Alvarez, curator of the library’s Special Collections Research Center, recalled how apprehensive he was when he saw Wilding’s name in the email, aware of Wilding’s reputation for exposing fraud. He retrieved the document and photographed its watermark, a circle with a three-leaf clover and the monogram “AS/BMO”.

The provenance information raised alarms: the auction catalog said that the document had been authenticated by Cardinal Pietro Maffi, Archbishop of Pisa, Italy, who died in 1931 and that he would have compared it with two autographed documents by Galileo in his collection. Wilding discovered that these two documents had been given to the cardinal by Tobia Nicotra, a notorious 20th-century Milanese forger.

“As soon as I heard the word ‘Nicotra,’ my ‘spider sense’ went into high gear,” Wilding said.

Alvarez took the document to the University of Michigan’s conservation lab, where Amy Crist, the library’s book and paper conservator, opined that the ink and paper were period befitting — offering Alvarez the faint hope that the document was authentic. .

Wilding’s search for the monogram brought up another document by Galileo at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York that had a slightly different watermark with the same monogram. This document, a 1607 letter to an unknown recipient, corresponded almost exactly to a letter Wilding had discovered in Italian archives—a fact that aroused his suspicions. He took his suspicions to the Morgan Museum as well.

In early June, Wilding had determined that “BMO” was used as an abbreviation for Bergamo, an Italian city, and found a reference work entitled “The Ancient Paper Mills of the Former Austro-Hungarian Empire and Its Watermarks”, with information about the paper manufactured in the city.

The Michigan and Morgan libraries had copies of the book, he discovered. Wilding contacted Alvarez and Philip S. Palmer, chief curator of the department of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan Library, telling them that the answer was there.

Rushing to examine the book, Alvarez discovered the Morgan Library letter’s watermark, which corresponded to 1790 documents in the reference book. He did not find the exact type of watermark found in the Michigan Library manuscript, but no other documents with an “AS/BMO” watermark appeared before 1770, making it highly unlikely that Galileo could have used the paper longer than 1770. 150 years ago.

Alvarez was disappointed. “Checkmate”, he thought.

Although the Michigan document had been authenticated by Galileo scholars in the past, he felt responsible for not having recognized the fraud sooner. “The basis of science is observation,” he said, and lamented that he had not “really done what Galileo actually did.”

Interviewed, Palmer of the Morgan Library said he accepted Wilding’s conclusion that the 1607 letter is not a legitimate Galileo document and that the library will update its catalog to highlight that it was “previously attributed to Galileo”.

The revelation of the forgeries does not fundamentally change Galileo’s discovery, which is amply documented. But it eliminates what appeared to be an intriguing first draft of the discovery, which appeared to show the scientist questioning his observations in real time.

Some scholars had trouble understanding exactly what Galileo would have drawn in the Michigan document; now that the manuscript has been declared false, it seems that any mystery may be derived from the forger’s confusion, not the scientist’s. “What we’re left with is a simpler, more direct account,” Wilding said. “There’s no longer the distraction of having to explain this argument that didn’t quite fit.”

Now the Michigan library team is discussing ways to use the object to study the methods and motivations of forgeries. The manuscript may become the central artifact of a future symposium or exhibition on the topic.

“Forgery is really good,” Hayward said. “Its discovery somehow makes this artifact even more fascinating.”

In his investigation of Nicotra, Wilding discovered that the Italian had started selling forged letters and musical manuscripts in order to support his seven mistresses. An investigation into a dubious Mozart manuscript led the police to break into Nicotra’s Milan apartment in 1934 and find there a veritable “counterfeit factory”, with guards ripped from old books and forgeries of texts by Lorenzo de Medici, Christopher Columbus and other historical figures.

Scholars warn that there are likely to be more false documents in the collections, yet to be discovered.

“There are certainly more forgeries out there,” said Hannah Marcus, a professor in the history of science department at Harvard University, who is writing a book with Paula Findlen of Stanford University on Galileo’s correspondence. She praised Wilding for his work exposing fakes. “Not everything needs to be read with suspicion,” she said, “but everything should be read with a careful eye.”

^{Translation by Clara Allain}