Il Copernico del "primo" Galileo

"The early Galileo’s Copernicus": The French historian Maurice Clavelin coined the expression 'copernicianisme silencieux' (silent Copernicanism) to define Galileo’s relationship with the legacy of Copernicus in the years before the publication of Sidereus Nuncius. The available evidence is indeed scarce, but not entirely absent. This chapter analyzes the ways in which Galileo Galilei embraced Copernicus’ heliocentrism during the first phase of his intellectual journey and, in particular, during his fruitful years in Padua (1592-1610). A review of these eighteen years (the best of his life, according to Galileo himself) allows us to retrieve and collect several elements in favour of a significant and consistent presence of Copernicus in the mathematician’s work. in order to properly understand these cagey references and to exclude an alleged “semi-Copernican phase” in Galileo’s cosmology, this article proposes to distinguish between public Copernicanism (absent in this time period), private Copernicanism (certainly present), and semi-private or semi-public Copernicanism (also present, for instance in Galileo’s correspondence and pseudonymous works).