“Counterfeiters are like conjurers,” he says Nick Wildingthat of them tricks he understands. Georgia State University History Professor, in love with Galileo Galileiis known around the world for discovering false documents and manuscripts attributed to the scientist: in 2012 he unmasked the Italian De Caro, author of a (almost perfect) copy of A starry Messenger, the well-known astronomical treatise by Galileo; in 2017 he was among the scholars who questioned the authenticity of an alleged map of Martin Waldseemüller, famous German cartographer born in 1470; recently, however, he discovered the most extraordinary forgery: recently, however, he discovered the most extraordinary forgery: a document on which it was believed that Galileo Galilei had noted his earliest observations on Jupiter’s moons in 1610. For 84 years, those notes were the pride of the University of Michigan that kept them. But in reality those notes the scientist never wrote them.
Professor Wilding, how did you come to the conclusion that the document attributed to Galileo was a forgery?
“It is a single sheet with two different texts: the draft of a letter sent to the Doge in August 1609 and the observations of January 1610. The ink and pen seem uniform, while in Galileo’s manuscripts produced on different days they always change . Also some of the letter shapes are wrong, such as the contractions in the word ‘reco[n]say ‘with the’ d ’tilted to the left. Finally, the card is much more recent than Galileo’s discovery. You can guess from the shapes of the letters of the watermarks, belonging to the end of the 18th century ”.
Another key clue came from Italy, isn’t it?
“The 1610 document was authenticated by Cardinal Maffi (an archbishop of Pisa who died in 1931, ed) on the basis of two letters autographed by Galileo. I did some research and discovered that Maffi had got them from Tobia Nicotra. It was the coup de grace ”.
