A Georgia State University professor has proven that the University of Michigan’s Galileo manuscript is a 20th-century forgery.
The manuscript was first a 1609 draft of a letter offering the use of the then-new telescope to the Doge of Venice. Italian astronomer Galileo then used the bottom part of the document in 1610 to jot down notes describing the orbiting of moons around Jupiter.
The document, once described as “one of the great treasures of the University of Michigan Library … that helped to change our understanding of the universe,” in an item description on Michigan’s website, was apparently deemed a complete forgery on Aug. 17.
In the course of writing an upcoming biography on the astronomer, Georgia State University’s Nick Wilding raised some major qualms in May 2022 about the authenticity of the document.
“It just kind of jumps out as weird. This is supposedly two different documents that happen to be on one sheet of paper. Why is it all exactly the same color brown?” Mr. Wilding told The New York Times.
Mr. Wilding pinned the blame for the fraud on infamous 20th-century forger Tobia Nicotra.
The crux of his findings were watermarks from the making of the paper, one for the maker saying “AS” and one for the location of the mill saying “BMO” for Bergamo, Italy.
“No other BMO watermarked papers have been dated before 1770, after which they are quite common. Further, another forgery held in the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City has similar paper that has been securely dated to 1790,” the University of Michigan noted in an article on its website.
There is also no trace of the document’s existence before 1930. It would be auctioned off in 1934 to Detroit businessman Tracey McGregor, whose estate bequeathed the document to the university in 1938.
At the time, the manuscript was accompanied by a now-missing letter from Cardinal Pietro Maffi, then-Archbishop of Pisa, which compared it to two Galileo documents he had in his collection.
“Those two alleged Galileo documents have been investigated and found to be forgeries donated by Tobia Nicotra. Nicotra was sentenced to two years in jail and a hefty fine in 1934 for forgery, including Galileo documents,” the University of Michigan’s article concludes.
“As soon as I heard the word ‘Nicotra,’ I got the little ‘Spidey sense,’” Mr. Wilding told The Times.
Donna Hayward, interim dean of the University of Michigan libraries, told The Times that “It was pretty gut-wrenching when we first learned our Galileo was not actually a Galileo” but that “the forgery is a really good one. The discovery in some ways makes this a more fascinating item.”
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