Galileo's Eternal Salute

Galileo Galilei helped restore science to Europe with his telescopic exploration of the solar system and stars. The Holy Mother Church in Rome was confounded by his heliocentric beliefs that the Earth revolved around the Sun, which was contrary to geocentricism. His Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems attacked the ignorance of Pope Urban VIII's Vatican. The Pope had him tried for heresy by the Inquisition. Galileo was found guilty and sentenced to house arrest for life. For an additional punishment the Holy See required his reading seven penitential psalms once a week in the presence of papal representatives.

Upon his death in 1642 the Grand Duke of Tuscany wished to bury the great astronomer in splendor. The Pope refused him and Galileo's remains were stuck a small chamber of the Basilica of Santa Croce.

In 1737 his corpse was transported to better surroundings and during transportation his middle finger was snapped off for veneration.

Upright it says everything a heretic would want to say about the Church.

Which is 'Fuck you.'

Now more than ever.

See it at the Florence History of Science Museum.

It's there.

Among the more famous of its collections is the middle finger from the right hand of Galileo Galilei, which was removed when Galileo's remains were transported to a new burial spot on April 12, 1737.

Along with his thumb

It is a remarkable bit of irony, the finger: venerated, kept in a shrine, subjected to the same treatment as a saintly relic. But this finger belonged to no saint. It is the long bony finger of an enemy of the church, a heretic.

As with a fine wine, it took some years for Galileo’s finger to age into something worth snapping off his skeletal hand. The finger was removed by one Anton Francesco Gori on March 12, 1737, 95 years after Galileo’s death. Passed around for a couple hundred years it finally came to rest in the Florence History of Science Museum.

In 2009 two more fingers and a tooth belonging to Galileo were discovered at at auction. The spare parts had disappeared in 1905, not seen for 100 years. But then the purchaser was able to deduce their origin, and has returned them to the Science Museum where they match a detailed description from when they were last seen.

Today the middle finger sits in a small glass egg (presumably soon to be joined by the newly discovered fingers) among lodestones and telescopes, the only human fragment in a museum devoted entirely to scientific instruments. It is hard to know how Galileo would have felt about the final resting place of his finger. Whether the finger points upwards to the sky, where Galileo glimpsed the glory of the universe and saw God in mathematics, or if it sits eternally defiant to the church that condemned him, is for the viewer to decide.