Giordano Bruno Page 10

  When Bruno’s first chance arose to teach philosophy, then, it was natural philosophy—specifically, astronomy for interested amateurs who must have heard about or seen the new star that appeared in the heavens in 1572. This sudden and evident change in the night sky (it must have been a supernova) threatened to overturn some basic beliefs about the heavens. The stars, in the first place, were supposed to have been fixed to the eighth sphere of the universe, every one of them, ever since the moment of creation. Second, Aristotle claimed that the stars, like the other heavenly bodies and unlike Earth, were made of a special, incorruptible fifth element immune from birth, death, or change. Yet here was a star appearing from one day to the next, to prove that change happened in the heavens after all. The stargazers of Europe rushed to provide an explanation, from Tycho Brahe on his Danish island of Hveen to Christoph Clavius in Rome, not to mention a raft of astrologers in between who tried to explain not only what had happened but also, more importantly, what it meant. In Naples, Bernardino Telesio took the new star as proof that the heavens were made of the same four elements as Earth; the object’s sudden appearance was one more episode in the endless battle between heat and cold that kept the universe in motion. From San Domenico Maggiore, Fra Giordano Bruno watched and listened.

  Bruno does not say what version or versions of Sacrobosco’s On the Sphere he used with his adult students in Noli four years later, but Eugenio Canone suggests that it may well have been an Italian vernacular translation by the Servite friar Mauro Fiorentino, whose Notes on Reading Sacrobosco of 1550 also contained some of Fra Mauro’s own essays and illustrations. The images, the accessible language, and the Platonic slant of Notes on Reading Sacrobosco would have appealed both to Bruno and to his gentlemen students, so much so that Bruno would later poach two of the illustrations for his own work.

  General books on technical subjects, especially in vernacular, sold well among the growing number of middle-class readers in the sixteenth century. Fra Mauro Fiorentino dedicated the first edition of his Sacrobosco translation, The Vernacular Sphere of 1537, to another popular writer, the Spanish mathematician Juan de Ortega, whose Introduction to Mathematics (first printed in 1514) dispensed advice about computation in Spanish-accented Italian to aspiring businessmen. The gentlemen of Noli who decided to learn astronomy from a wandering ex-friar stood somewhere between Ortega’s potential readers, refreshing their memories about long division, and the natural philosophers who gathered at the house of Bernardino Telesio in Naples to discuss the composition of the universe.

  The wandering ex-friar, for his part, devoted a conscious effort to improving on the teaching methods of the asini pedanti he hated with such passion. “Teaching The Sphere” implied giving an elementary course in astronomy (as he would later do again in Toulouse): showing his gentlemen how to identify constellations, read star charts, and cast elementary horoscopes. We have no way now of knowing whether Bruno took his students stargazing or kept them in the classroom, whether he departed from his textbook, or, if he did depart from it, how bold his departures were. We know only that Sacrobosco’s On the Sphere was one of the subjects on which sixteenth-century teachers could build reliably as they tried to improve on the ancient methods of their own teachers.

  Bruno would certainly have known the edition of Sacrobosco put out in 1570 by his sometime neighbor at the Jesuits’ Roman College, Christoph Clavius, and he may not have approved of it. The Society of Jesus encouraged following Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle in all matters of natural philosophy, and hence in the first edition of his Commentary on the Sphere, Clavius, a young, still uncertain professor, raised vocal doubts about Copernicus:

  Many absurd and erroneous things are contained in the position of Copernicus, namely that the earth is not in the center of the world, and that it is moved by a triple motion … and that the sun is situated at the center of the world, and lacks all motion, all of which goes against the common teachings of philosophers and astronomers, and can be seen to contradict those who teach Scripture on several points.

  Fame, both for his work on the Gregorian calendar and for his stable of former students scattered from Rome to Beijing, would encourage Clavius to express his own opinions with greater freedom. Later editions of his Commentary took careful note of Tycho Brahe’s experiments and softened his stance on Copernicus. Years later a fellow Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, would assert that Clavius’s real convictions lay entirely on the side of the Polish astronomer: “Father Malaperti and Father Clavius themselves in no way disapproved the opinion of Copernicus—indeed they would have espoused it openly had they not been pressed and obliged to write according to the premises of Aristotle.”

  On the other hand, it is not clear what Bruno himself thought about the universe in 1576. Between his time at San Domenico Maggiore and the moment when he published his first surviving books, in 1582, he had changed his mind completely about its structure: in his own words, he gave up a “puerile” Aristotelian worldview for the sun-centered cosmos of Copernicus, and then, more radically still, for an infinite universe without center or limits of any kind. As he moved north from Genoa, he must have been in transit in every possible sense, physical, philosophical, and personal.

  After a few months of isolated stability (he may well have stayed longer than he admitted to the inquisitors), Bruno longed for more sophisticated students than the “kids,” or even the gentlemen, of Noli. As the threat of plague receded from the Italian Riviera, he set out for Savona, the second-largest port in the region, and then, after a fortnight, for Turin, where the prospects for work and lodging proved equally unpromising. There, too, at the foot of the Alps, Bruno, accustomed to the warm sun of Naples, may also have begun to get his first taste of real cold weather.

  Driven by want, he boarded a flat-bottomed boat to float down the river Po toward Venice, where the plague, still endemic, loomed as a less immediate threat than his own lack of a job. He told his Venetian inquisitors: “There I stayed for a month and a half in Frezzaria in a room rented by someone from the Arsenal, whose name I don’t know, and while I was there, I published a certain pamphlet called On the Signs of the Times, and had this book printed so that I could gather up a little money to live on. And first I had the Reverend Father Remigio of Florence take a look at it.”

  To improve potential sales, Bruno wrote On the Signs of the Times in vernacular, aiming at readers like his gentlemen students in Noli. The title is our only surviving clue to the booklet’s content. On the face of it, On the Signs of the Times sounds like an almanac or a book of astrological predictions; these issued in cheap editions from Italian presses several times a year, using the position of the stars, monstrous births, and other strange phenomena to make predictions of the weather and of future events. Some were single broadsheets, like the Swiss writer Sebastian Brant’s illustrated page dedicated to the fall of the Ensisheim meteorite in 1492. Slightly longer works looked like Gerolamo Cardano’s modest pamphlet of predictions, the Pronostico (Prognostication) of 1534, which offered inside information on the long-term trends of history and detailed reports on forthcoming weather, all based on reading the face of the heavens. “I say in general that men must become worse than they are now, so far as the faith is concerned,” he said, while conceding that the Church would begin to improve in 1764; a planetary conjunction in 1564 “denoted the renovation of all the religions, the Christian and the Muslim.” According to the Pronostico, the emperor Charles V was doomed to perish (instead he thrived) and Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, destined to thrive (instead he perished); drought would strike between July 6 and August 9 of 1536, fog and storms on August 25, 1537. Aiming at a popular readership, Cardano wrote his little almanac in Italian vernacular, with enough of an erudite sprinkling of Latin to lend him academic credibility, and he made sure that he acquired clear-cut privileges, the forerunner of copyright, for the work in both Milan and Venice. It was an unassuming start, and it sank virtually without notice. In 1538, however, Cardano, writing i
n Latin this time, displayed both his grasp of astronomical theory and his practical ability at prediction, in Two Little Books. Unlike most of his fellow astrologers, he drew up his own tables of planetary motion from which to produce the data allegedly showing heavenly influences on human character and behavior; at the same time, he performed such eminently astrological operations as tracing the origins of modern religion to the former action of the stars on ancient peoples. Most important for his future, he used the dedication of Two Little Books to curry the favor of a well-placed patron, the Milanese-born governor of Rome, while aiming at a patron still more august, the pope.

  Other printers published full-fledged works of natural philosophy, like Tycho Brahe’s opinion on the new star of 1572, written in Latin, the only language with real international authority, and Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, whose groundbreaking theory lies among page after page of mathematical tables.

  Never an author to shy away from new literary forms, Bruno may have used the title of his own booklet to suggest that it would contain a set of predictions—and then offered his readers something completely different. The phrase “the signs of the times” recalled a passage in the Bible where Jesus turns on the scribes and Pharisees: “When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?”

  Within a few years, Bruno would come to doubt his contemporaries’ ability even to “discern the face of the sky,” although he may not have said so openly in The Signs of the Times. Yet the seeds of that doubt must already have been sown in Noli, as he and his gentlemen went over the centuries-old text of Sacrobosco. Every one of them knew that since Sacrobosco had written about his earth of three continents and his heaven of fixed stars, a Genoese captain named Christopher Columbus had brought Spanish ships to the New World, adding the Americas to the number of continents, and a new star had appeared in the heavens. Were these the signs of the times that Bruno saw around him?

  Certainly, The Signs of the Times, the published booklet, provided one important signpost for Bruno himself: although he had lost the steady daily rhythms and physical security of the convent, he could still focus his mind on thinking, writing, and maintaining his skill with the artificial memory. The structures he had forged within his own head were strong enough to withstand the pressures of constant travel. As he would write in 1585:

  Above the clouds, upon that lofty site,

  When, in my vagrant thoughts, I flash and flare,

  For my spirit’s refreshment and delight

  I build a fiery castle in the air.

  In his own description, then, his thoughts were as swift, changeable, and potentially explosive as fire, not only the individual images and sense impressions with which he filled his head, but especially the “castle” of memory in which he filed them all away.

  Yet in one of the apparent contradictions that make up his character, Bruno, no matter how novel the signs of the times and how volatile his own thinking, would always claim that there was nothing really new under the sun. The biblical verse that he inscribed in several of his books, bought at different times in different places and then discarded along the way, comes from that most world-weary of voices, Ecclesiastes, but as so often with this master of memory, slightly transformed: “What is? What was. What was? What is. There is nothing new under the sun.”

  For a man trained in Scholastic philosophy and Christian Platonism, old books were still good books. When Bruno taught astronomy again, he continued to use Sacrobosco’s On the Sphere, just as he continued to read Aquinas, the Bible, and the ancient philosophers. Now that he was free from the convent, he could also devote special attention to Lucretius’s great Latin poem On the Nature of Things, which had been consigned, along with the works of Luther, Calvin, and Erasmus, to the Index of Forbidden Books. In Venice, full of cosmopolitan traders and conveniently set near the borders of Germany, Austria, and Dalmatia, it was easier to find indexed works than anywhere Bruno had ever been. Ever since the invention of printing, the city’s economy depended significantly on publishing, and thus the aristocratic clans who ruled the city let the long arm of the Holy Office reach only so far. A copy of Lucretius could surely be found in the bookshop of Aldo Manuzio the Younger, either the edition printed in 1515 by his famous grandfather, Aldo Manuzio, or one of the newer editions printed in Lyon and Paris; Bruno eventually owned a copy edited by Hubertus Grifanius. Bruno made a habit of seeking out bookshops wherever he went; they were good places to exchange news, and places where learned men in need of work might hear about jobs. In Venice, those bookshops were both plentiful and well stocked with merchandise.

  Venice may have kept the Holy Office at a distance, but the city nonetheless conformed, at least in name, to all its dictates about publishing. So did Bruno, who submitted his own manuscript, On the Signs of the Times, for examination by an eminent Dominican before taking it off to the printer. Fra Remigio Nannini had spent his novitiate and early career at the convent of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. In 1564, his reputation as a scholar and teacher already established, he transferred to the Venetian convent of San Zanipolo (“Saint Johnandpaul,” Venetian dialect for Santi Giovanni e Paolo), a Gothic redoubt whose wealth of doges’ tombs proclaimed its authority within the city. So did its location: the church shares its spacious paved campo with the marble-encrusted facade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco (once the home of the city’s most important confraternity). Between the two buildings, Andrea del Verrocchio’s bronze statue of the mercenary captain Bartolomeo Colleoni sits regally astride a powerful, spirited warhorse. Colleoni claimed to have three testicles (coglioni); they figure on his coat of arms, and it is no coincidence that the pedestal lofting his statue to the heavens has three pillars. Bruno said nothing about these marvels to his inquisitors (who were Venetians, after all), or about the mosaics of San Marco, the sculpture of the Doge’s Palace, Titian’s altarpieces, the canals, or the gondolas. But of course he noticed them. His trip in 1577 was only the first time he braved certain danger just to come to Venice. Neither did he reveal to his questioners whether he could afford the city’s other delights on this first visit, the seafood and spices and the willing female companionship, although he would soon shock them by asserting that the sins of the flesh were no sin at all.

  The Inquisition of Venice was housed not in the aristocratic halls of San Zanipolo but rather in the outlying convent of San Domenico di Castello, surrounded by members of the Venetian working class. Bruno’s ability to strike up a relationship with Fra Remigio Nannini, one of the most prominent members of the city’s most rarefied Dominican congregation, reveals, once again, how thoroughly the friars of San Domenico Maggiore had prepared him to move within the highest levels of society. He may already have been weighing a return to religious life when he passed his manuscript to a man who might, under other circumstances, have been his colleague.

  Venice provided the wanderer with a wealth of other contacts as well. Bruno’s landlord worked at the Arsenal, perhaps the most developed industrial organization in the sixteenth-century world. Its technological marvels were a state secret, hidden behind massive walls, but inside, its crews could reportedly build and rig a ship within a single day. Outside marble lions stood guard, many of them looted from ancient Greek sites. One still bears the runic graffiti of Viking visitors. Jews and Protestants, both German and Italian, mixed into the crowd alongside turbaned pashas from Ottoman lands and their veiled consorts, all of them enjoying a rare degree of freedom to associate and to discuss ideas.

  Typically, too, the Venetian Inquisition was a milder version of that institution than most. Four years before Bruno’s arrival in the city, the painter Paolo Veronese had appeared before them because he had put a dog and two dissolute soldiers into a painting of the Last Supper—for the convent of San Zanipolo. The
prior of the convent accused Veronese of sacrilege; the painter defended himself by pleading artistic license:

  We painters take the same license that poets and madmen do, and I made those two halberdiers, the one who is drinking and the one who is eating by the stairs, and put them where they could be handy, and it seemed appropriate to me, because I had been told that the owner of the house was great and rich, and he ought to have that kind of servant.

  The inquisitors ordered him to replace the soldiers with something more decorous, but they refused to entertain any charges of sacrilege (instead, Veronese simply changed the title of his painting from The Last Supper to Banquet in the House of Levi). In his own visits to Fra Remigio, Bruno would have seen the “improved” altarpiece amid San Zanipolo’s other artistic treasures (it is now in Venice’s Galleria dell’Accademia).

  With Fra Remigio’s imprimatur in hand, meanwhile, Bruno took his first close look at the craft of publishing, from the details of setting type and cutting the wooden blocks for illustrations to the inside gossip about the Frankfurt book fair, already a twice-yearly European institution. Sadly, the pamphlet The Signs of the Times does not survive, nor does the name of its publisher; Bruno carefully omitted giving his inquisitors that information as well.

  Once he had consigned his booklet to the press, however, he still needed work. The University of Padua lay on the mainland, just across the lagoon from Venice, and Bruno decided to try his luck there.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Lonely Sparrow

  GENEVA, 1579

  Go forth, then: I hope you find

  A nobler fate, and have a god to guide you:

  The one the sightless dare to say is blind.

  Go; and find beside you

  Each deity of this masterful design;

  And don’t return to me unless you’re mine.