Galileo: On the Shoulders of Giants--DVD
From Devine Entertainment
Inventor Series
Galileo (Michael Moriarty) is on the verge of uncovering some of the mysteries of the universe but has to deal more with mundane problems as well; money, an idle, unemployed brother and a jealous rival. He finds support from an unexpected source, the pampered son of the powerful Medici family. Under Galileo’s tutelage, Cosimo de Medici finds that in searching for the stars, one has to have his feet firmly on the ground. The stakes mount as Galileo and his young protégé struggle for intellectual freedom. Challenging the scientific authorities in Padova in 1605 leads to intrigue and curious risks on the path to the invention of the first telescope.
The Story
A brief prologue sets the mood in Rome in 1600. Giordano Bruno, once a lecturer at the University of Padua, is dragged from a prison cell and taken to meet his inquisitor, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine. Bruno is ordered to recant his teachings. When he refuses, Bellarmine pronounces him a heretic, and Bruno is hauled away to his place of execution.
It is now 1605. At the University of Padua, Galileo Galilei addresses a packed lecture hall on the nature of a new comet, whose trajectory through the night skies proves that the earth is moving. His audience is perturbed by this claim--notably Ludovico de Colombe, a rival philosopher and scientist, who objects strenuously until Galileos debating skills and quick wit make him a laughingstock. Only one student, the Medici prince Cosimo, seems bored by the goings on. After the lecture, Galileo escapes the throng of admirers, but he cant shake his neer-do-well brother, Michelangelo, who wants to borrow money. Distracted, Galileo is in no mood to chat pointlessly with a fellow tutor, who wants to introduce young Cosimo. The tutor persists, and the introduction goes badly. Galileo is not impressed with the attitude of the young man, despite his lofty position in society.
In the courtyard of his home, Galileo is entertaining an old intellectual ally, Friar Sarpi. As they gaze at the stars, Sarpi cautions his friend about disseminating his radical theories. Unbeknownst to the two men, they are being spied upon by Colombe. Michelangelo is just hanging about, preying on his brothers generosity, although Galileo is clearly having financial problems. A letter arrives from Florence threatening his arrest for non-payment of his sisters dowry. Galileo needs to make some money fast, but is not consoled when Sarpi negoatiates a solution: tutoring the young Cosimo. Still, as Sarpi explains, doing so might encourage the Medici family to intercede favorably in the Florence litigation. Galileo reluctantly relents and goes to meet the Grand Duchess to finalize arrangements for her sons education.
Teacher and student do not get off to an auspicious start. For all his youth, Cosimo is strangely wedded to old Aristotelian ideas about the cosmos. Galileo resolves to open his pupils eyes and takes him to a high tower for an experiment with falling objects. Indeed, the results fundamentally shake Cosimos hidebound beliefs, although he tries to cling to them. During an astronomy lesson, Galileo inadvertently witnesses an optical revelation--an enlarged but distorted image of Cosimo through a water pitcher--that finally sweeps the pupil up in the spirit of discovery. At a friends glassmaking factory, they arduously fashion lens after lens and, finally, a primitive telescope. With this in hand, Galileo has visions of a brilliant future. He sends a note to Sarpi, begging his help in arranging an audience with the Doge of Venice. The crucial day arrives. Atop the palace balcony in Saint Marks Square, Galileo bestows his telescope upon the Doge. Its value is instantaneously obvious. The Doge rewards Galileo with a lifetime position at the university and a huge salary increase. In all the excitement, the words of a priest in attendance go virtually unnoticed: "Its bewitched."
Galileo returns to the lecture halls of Padua a certified visionary genius. But as he resumes teaching, his enemies are girding themselves for combat on the intellectual--and, ominously, theological--battlefield. Colombe, most of all, is stricken with envious anger. Cosimo, too, has ruffled feathers, since Galileo now seems too self-absorbed to continue tutoring him. But he has been spurred by recent events to start thinking for himself--to the point of actually challenging Galileos theory about falling objects. Cosimos demonstration--with a hammer and a feather--raises legitimate questions. Still, Galileo is light years ahead of him; with his latest telescope he shows Cosimo the surface of the moon. Seeing mountains and valleys, then the moons of Jupiter, Cosimo is thunderstruck. At last he begins to appreciate the need to observe carefully, weigh evidence, test old theories, consider new ones. When Colombe proposes "a duel" involving Aristotles principals of flotation, it is Cosimo who takes up the challenge--and wins. Giddy with elation, Galileos students throw Colombe into the water tank. Colombe storms away, vowing revenge.
Galileo is excited about his latest manuscript, which expands on the banned ideas of Copernicus. As he reads aloud to Sarpi from his draft, he is being overheard by the hidden Colombe. Galileos nemesis is something of a bumbler at subterfuge but nevertheless confronts Sarpi when the friar leaves Galileos house that night. Colombe hints that the last man who voiced such heretical notions--Giordano Bruno--was burned at the stake. Sarpi dismisses Colombe. Seeking leverage against Galileo, Colombe seizes upon Michelangelo. Posing as a publisher, he bribes the deadbeat brother to hand over the manuscript. As Galileo and Cosimo talk reflectively about their destinies, they are unaware that Michelangelo is, by stealing the manuscript, at that moment changing them forever. Colombes plot is revealed when a letter arrives from Cardinal Bellarmine, Brunos inquisitor, demanding Galileos presence. Michelangelo realized he has been duped. "It would have happened sooner or later," says a resigned Galileo. He declares that he will say whatever Bellarmine wants. Cosimo is disgusted by his mentors readiness to betray the truth.
In Rome, Bellarmine reminds Galileo that the Church supports the Aristotelian model. When Galileo tries to explain his discoveries, Bellarmine interrupts and issues an edict: Henceforth, Galileos writings are banned, and he is to be circumspect in his lectures. The Grand Duchess doesnt want her son associating with such a declared dangerous thinker, but Cosimo defies her in the name of intellectual freedom. He apologizes to Galileo for doubting him. In return, Galileo shows that he has been thinking about Cosimos falling-objects demonstration. Their mood of intellectual empathy is destroyed by Colombe, who bursts in to taunt Galileo. After a comic scuffle, Michelangelo, Cosimo and Galileo summarily eject Colombe and, like brothers in arms, get back to work.
In an epilogue, Galileos fate is explained: his arrest, trial, recantation and house arrest. We hear Galileo admit to heresy.
Yet we also hear how Sir Isaac Newton soon proved once and for all the theories of Copernicus and Galileo. And finally, we see a NASA astronaut drop a hammer and a feather on the moon, announcing, "How about that? Mr. Galileo was correct in his findings. Superb!"
Life and Times of Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei was born on February 15, 1564 in Pisa, Italy. He was the oldest of seven children of Vincenzo Galilei, a wool trader who aspired to be an innovative music teacher and composer against the wishes of his upper-class wife, who frequently made clear her feelings that she had married below her station in life. By all accounts she was a disgruntled and vocal woman, and the household cannot have been a pleasant place, yet Galileo came to value his fathers creative spirit and iconoclastic views. When the boy was young, the family moved to Florence. Galileo lived and was tutored at a nearby monastery, but at age 15 was withdrawn by his father, who fundamentally disapproved of a monastic future for his son. Galileo enrolled in the medical school at the University of Pisa but gradually became obsessed with mathematics. When rebellious behavior cost him a medical-school scholarship, he quit Pisa and became an itinerant math tutor. Such was his aptitude at this that, in 1589, the University of Pisa hired him back as a junior lecturer.
At Pisa, Galileo began to blossom as a radical thinker. He conducted, for example, groundbreaking experiments from atop the citys Leaning Tower, proving that objects fell at a rate that was not a function of weight or mass. But he was a proud and argumentative man who even used physical dishevelvment to bespeak his contempt for authority. His three-year contract was not renewed. 1n 1592, he landed a post teaching mathematics at the University of Padua; by doing so, he entered the orbit of the Venetian state, which was to be his protector during many tribulations to come. He enjoyed the salon crowd of Gianvincenzio Pinelli and the Venetian playboy Gianfrancesco Sagredo (through whom he met the Murano glassmaker who would later craft his optical lenses), and struck up a lifelong friendship with a canny cleric, Friar Sarpi, who figures prominently in Galileo: On The Shoulders of Giants.
Galileo supported numerous relatives (notably his lazy brother Michelangelo and family), and his finances were often precarious; he also embarked on a temptestuous relationship with a woman named Marina Gamba, with whom he had three children. To stave off the bill collector, Galileo applied his intellectual versatility to military engineering for his Venetian masters. He also agreed to tutor Prince Cosimo, the son of Grand Duchess Christine of Tuscany, who helped erase some of his mounting debts. (This unenviable task figures prominently in the film.)
In 1604, Galileos lectures about a new star in Sagittarius--and his conclusion that the Earth was moving--flew in the face of accepted Aristotelian dogma, despite his prominent position as Philosopher-Mathematician to Cosimo II, his former pupil. By 1606, his Venetian protectors were also in hot water--excommunicated by Pope Paul V. In 1609, Galileo heard talk of a Dutch telescope and moved quickly to construct one himself. He presented his prototype to the Doge of Venice in August of 1609 and was rewarded with a lifetime appointment at the university. But ironically, with this new gadget came greater trouble than he had envisioned. After scrutinizing Earths moon and then the moons of Jupiter, he confidently began to denounce the findings of Aristotle and Ptolemy and declared, through lectures and his writings, that Copernicus was right--that the earth moved around the sun. This galvanized his enemies, particularly Ludovico De Colombe, a rival mathematician-philosopher of remarkable tunnel vision. In their debates, Galileo resolutely espoused Copernican thinking. By 1614, Colombe was pressuring Rome to denounce Galileo, forcing the Vatican to side publicly with either science or faith. To Galileos detriment, it predictably did so. In February of 1616, Galileo traveled to Rome to defend his ideas. There, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine warned him that formal charges were pending unless he abandoned his Copernican ways. In March, Copernican theories were declared banned, but somehow Galileo misread--or ignored--the warning.
Over most of the next decade and a half, he missed few opportunities to enrage the Church, and particularly the dreaded Jesuits. In the mid-1620s, he tried to bring alongside the new Pope, Urban VIII, a supposedly liberal thinker who also disliked the Jesuits, but this was a fateful miscalculation, as was his definitive book, "The Dialogue Concerning the Chief Two World Systems." Supposedly a balanced discussion, the 1632 opus was clearly a spirited and unrepentant defence of Copernicus with which Urban VIII, also detecting personal mockery, took ultimate offence. In October of 1632, Galileo was ordered to appear in front of the dreaded Inquisition.
His health now failing, Galileo complied. His interrogation began in April of 1633. Facing torture and execution, Galileo made the agonizing decision to distance himself from his lifes work, and on May 10 he admitted in writing to heresy and on June 22 made a full public confession. He was sentenced to indefinite imprisonment and told to be grateful that he could serve his time under house arrest near Florence. From there, he surreptitiously encouraged the foreign publication of his books (the Dutch lionized him, much to the Vaticans irritation) and continued to write until his eyesight failed. By 1636, blind and crippled with arthritis, he hosted such prestigious foreign visitors as Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. Fevered and striken with pain, he died at home in January, 1642.
It was not until three hundred and fifty years later, in 1992, that the Vatican pardoned Galileo and officially admitted that he had been right all along.
6 DVD Set, $89.98
All 6 DVDs, if purchased separately, would be $119.88
(This saves $29.90 off that price)
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