A history professor at Georgia State University has discovered that an alleged manuscript written by Galileo Galilei was actually a 20th century 'fake' by prolific Italian forger Tobia Nicotra, known for inventing texts by Christopher Columbus, Leonardo da Vinci , Abraham Lincoln, the Marquis de Lafayette, Martin Luther, Michelangelo or George Washington.
Galilei's paper has been one of the jewels of the University of Michigan Library for nearly a century. The upper half contains a draft of a letter telling of the presentation of a newly constructed telescope to the Duke of Venice on August 24, 1609. The lower part contains notes on Galileo's telescopic observations of Jupiter's moons from August 7 to 15. January 1610.
The manuscript first came to public attention in May 1934, when the American Art Anderson Galleries auction firm was selling the library of the late Roderick Terry, a wealthy collector of early printed books. According to the auction catalogue, the text was authenticated by the Archbishop of Pisa, Cardinal Pietro Maffi (1858-1931), who compared the sheet to a letter by Galileo from his own collection.
A Detroit businessman named Tracy McGregor was the one who finally acquired the document. After his death, the trustees of the McGregor Fund bequeathed the manuscript to the University of Michigan in 1938, in special recognition of the services to astronomy of Professor Heber D. Curtis, known for advocating the idea that the universe was not made up of a single galaxy.
In May of this year, however, the curator of the University of Michigan Library, Pablo Álvarez, received an email from Professor Nick Wilding. The Georgia State University historian wondered about the watermark on the paper and also about the provenance of the manuscript.
Back in the days when only the manual press existed, papermakers often used distinctive watermarks to identify their works. This allows researchers to date the documents, as they can be associated with a particular mill during a specific period.
The watermark on the Galileo manuscript contains monograms for the manufacturer's initials "AS" and the place of production "BMO" (Bergamo). The thing is, no BMO watermarked paper has been dated before 1770. After that they're pretty common. The problem is that Galileo Galilei died in 1642.
There is, for example, another forgery that is in the Morgan Library Museum in New York that has a similar paper that has been safely dated to 1790. Wilding already expressed to Álvarez his doubts about the authenticity of the Galileo letter. , prompting experts at the University of Michigan to conduct their own analysis. His conclusion was the same: it was a forgery made in the 20th century.
There was another detail that helped in this task. Nobody could find any trace of the document before 1930, despite the very complete National Edition of the Works of Galileo Galilei (1890-1909). During the 1934 auction, the manuscript was accompanied by a letter from Archbishop Maffi, but it has now disappeared.
All indications point to the fact that both the document attributed to Galileo and the Maffi text were the creations of Tobia Nicotra, who with the money he obtained from the sale of these and many other forgeries was able to rent up to seven apartments in Milan, each one for one of his her lovers.
Many of his inventions were sold in the United States during his visits in the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1934, however, he was sentenced to two years in jail in Italy and a heavy fine. But it wasn't long before he was released by the National Fascist Party to forge signatures for them.
"We are grateful to Professor Wilding for sharing his findings, and we are already reconsidering the role of the manuscript in our collection," the University of Michigan Library said in a statement. The original version of the letter is in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia and the notes on the moons of Jupiter are part of the Dossier Sidereus Nuncius of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.
