Personas and Personifications: Galileo Compared

Galileo Galilei’s contemporaries repeatedly compared him to other famous men, such as Archimedes, Columbus, Vespucci, and Michelangelo. With these comparisons, contemporaries enhanced Galileo's fame, status and credibility, while also creating possibilities of understanding Galileo and his scholarship. In this paper I connect these comparisons to the concept of the scholarly persona, as developed by (among others) Daston, Sibum, and Algazi. The paper studies the significance of these comparisons as attempts to contribute to, shape and negotiate Galileo's scholarly persona. To better understand this mechanism, the paper first examines the various comparisons in the textual and material contexts in which they arose. The paper analyses the different personae assigned to Galileo, and the extent to which these were complementing or conflicting in nature. Secondly, the paper investigates the inherent tension with regard to these comparisons: while they helped advance Galileo's status as an individual scholar by embedding him in a tradition of great men, they simultaneously detracted from his unique genius by doing so. As such, the paper leads to a better understanding of the importance of fame for scholars, in particular in relation to their careers and credibility. Finally, by also taking the mythological figures Galileo was compared with into account, the paper highlights the different traditions at the basis of the cultures of scholarship and fame in early modern Europe. As such, it not only sheds light on the development and significance of Galileo's fame, but also on the developing persona of the seventeenth-century scholar in general.