Published by Harvard University Press 2011

352 p.

ISBN 9780674059726

28.95 US$

File jad19_4.pdf contains this review in pdf format.

Galileo's Muse is a book that focuses on the life and thought of Galileo Galilei. The Prologue consists of a first chapter on Galileo the humanist and deals with Galileo's influence on his student Vincenzo Viviani (who wrote a biography of Galileo). This introductory chapter is followed by a very nice chapter that describes the classical legacy: Pythagoreanism and Platonism, Euclid and Archimedes, and Plutarch and Ptolemy. The author explicates the distinction between Greek and Roman contributions to the classical legacy, an explanation that is crucial for understanding Galileo and Renaissance mathematics.

The following eleven chapters of this book arranged in a kind of quadrivium, viz., Poetry, Painting, Music, Architecture present arguments to support the author's thesis that the driver for Galileo's genius was not Renaissance science as is generally accepted but Renaissance arts brought forth by poets, painters, musicians, and architects. These four sets of chapters describe the underlying mathematics in poetry, visual arts, music and architecture. Likewise, Peterson stresses the impact of the philosophical overtones present in geometry, but absent in algebra and its equations.

Basically, the author writes about Galileo, while trying to ignore the Copernican controversy, which he sees as distracting attention from Galileo's scientific legacy. As such, his story deviates from the standard myth on Galileo. But the book also looks at other eminent characters, such as Galileo's father Vincenzo (who cultivated music and music theory), the painter Piero della Francesca (who featured elaborate perspectives in his work), Dante Alighieri (author of the Divina Commedia), Filippo Brunelleschi (who engineered the dome of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Johannes Kepler (a strong supporter of Galileo's Copernicanism), etc.

This book is very well documented: it offers, for each chapter, a wide selection of excellent biographical notes, and includes a fine index. This work can serve as a reference handbook for anyone teaching the history of Renaissance sciences, and in particular, the history of Renaissance astronomy.

The graphics (about two dozen geometrical figures, and one reproduction from a 16th-century book) are adequate, but the figures in the book are not numbered. What I find disturbing, though, is the author's habit to cite Renaissance (and more ancient) publications with their translated titles only.