In 1638, in a collision of such giants in their own worlds that their meeting is almost too good to be true, the young John Milton met Galileo at his villa in the hills outside Florence.
Galileo, now in his seventies, had been living under house arrest since his conviction for heresy in 1633. His astronomical studies had eventually gone too far for the church hierarchy despite his best attempts for many years to avoid controversy. He was found to be sufficiently suspect of heresy in promoting the Copernican view that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe, which was well-known as a theory by that time but not one that the church could officially countenance. He lived out his remaining days at his villa, receiving visitors and writing his book The Two New Sciences which summarised some of his earlier work. By the time Milton visited, he had recently gone blind and was suffering from a hernia, and he died in 1642.
The only account we have of this meeting is Milton’s own. He wrote that he had “found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought”. It’s a passing reference in his book Areopagitica, which was a defence of free speech – of the “liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience” - published in 1644. His intention was to use Galileo as an example of someone speaking out against authority, in the context of his argument that “Truth was never put to the worse in a free and open encounter.”
Because this account was inserted to illustrate an argument, and because there is no direct evidence of it, some scholars have doubted it took place, and perhaps the church would have tried to prevent Galileo from meeting a foreigner and a Protestant.
I think we can assume that they did meet. But what was Milton doing there?
This was on Milton’s only foreign tour, a visit to Italy via France in 1638-39. Aged 29 and with considerable reading under his belt, as well as mastery of the Italian language, Milton was an earnest academic in search of a purpose, and it was during this trip that his idea of writing an English epic poem began to crystalise. No doubt he was deeply influenced by the introductions he gained to many learned people and by his exposure to the southern European (and Catholic) ebullience of art and architecture. As a convinced Protestant, Milton was of course suspicious of the richness of the Catholic church, which he would later increasingly denounce, but he seems to have enjoyed his time in Italy, including in Rome itself, relishing an injection of intellectual and artistic novelty.
Galileo actually makes an appearance in Milton’s cosmic imagining of heaven, earth and hell in Paradise Lost. We see through the eyes of the angel Raphael: “As when by night the glass / Of Galileo, less assured, observes / Imagined lands and regions in the Moon”. Satan’s shield “Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views”. And there’s a reference elsewhere to an astronomer looking “through his glazed optic tube”. [PL 5.261, 1.287, 3.588]
Milton and Galileo would certainly have valued their conversation. While Milton was not yet famous, word was going round about him in Italy and he was well-known enough to pique Galileo’s interest. This was not just a passing encounter, but an arranged meeting that they would have anticipated keenly. Maybe Milton was shown and tried out Galileo’s telescope, and surely Milton would have asked about his observations, but cautiously as they touched on theological matters. And given that they had both grown up in musical households, they might have shared an enthusiasm for music. But Moshenska speculates that above all they might well have discussed poetry. Galileo was known as an excellent writer of prose and poetry himself. He had strong views on the relative merits of Ariosto and Tasso, the two preeminent Italian poets after Dante, and Milton was familiar with and took inspiration from all three.
Evidently Milton thought back to this encounter in later life, when he wrote Galileo into his great epic poem. And he may have imagined again the Tuscan sun on his back when he too was imprisoned for getting on the wrong side of the establishment, and when, by 1652, he had lost his own sight, “In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude” [PL 7.27-28].
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References
https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2017/08/25/milton-galileo-affinities-art-science/
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/milton-visiting-galileo-when-a-prisoner-of-the-inquisition-125949
