Galileo's Finger
by Kevin Nance
SEPTEMBER 29, 2009 TAGS:
After hitting the Uffizi, the Duomo, the Palazzo Pitti and the Ponte Vecchio during a trip to Florence a few years ago, I found myself dipping into second-tier cultural attractions, including the Museo di Storia della Scienza (the Museum of the History of Science), where my gaze landed on the finger of Galileo Galilei.
The bones of the finger, to be exact, resting in an egg-shaped goblet and pointing skyward — appropriate, I thought, for the man who gave us modern astronomy. Once I realized that this was the middle finger of his right hand, another, rather impertinent thought occurred to me — that the finger was making a rude gesture at Pope Urban VIII, who had branded him a heretic (for advancing the then-blasphemous idea that the earth orbited the sun, rather than the other way around) and forced him to live his twilight years under house arrest. However anachronistic and juvenile it might have been, the thought of Galileo flipping off the Church left a big smile on my face.
It seemed that the artifact’s provenance traced back to 1737, when the Galileo remains were transferred from a small closet to a mausoleum inside the nearby church of Santa Croce. (By that time, the Vatican had decided that Galileo wasn’t such a bad guy after all.) The finger was removed from the rest of Galileo’s bones and exhibited at the Biblioteca Laurenziana for several years, then carted off to the Tribuna di Galileo for a while before ending up at the Museo.
And then I thought: It’s Galileo’s actual finger. He used it to write the book that ticked off the Pope. He used it to adjust his telescopes. He used it for . . . well, let’s not go there. Anyway, here it is, nearly four centuries later, right in front of me. A shiver ran down my back.
The Church, of course, was itself into the body-part business in a big way. The bodies of Saint Mark and Saint Antoninus are at the Basilica di San Marco and the Dominican Church of San Marco in Venice and Florence, respectively. And after she died in 1380, Saint Catherine of Siena’s body, believed to have healing powers, became a magnet for pilgrims. Some of her body parts, including her finger and her head, were removed before she was buried. Today they’re in a reliquary at San Domenico Church in Siena. The rest of her lies in a tomb in Rome’s Santa Maria Sopra Minerva.
Other religions get in on the act as well. After the death of the Buddha, for example, his remains were divided into eight parts and enshrined around Asia. One of his teeth is at the Sri Dalada Maligawa temple in Kandy, Sri Lanka.
If you’re the type of person who is slightly creeped out by public displays of human remains — but fascinated, too — it might interest you to know that there are quite a few bits and bobs of famous people in museums and other venues around the world.
One of the world’s best repositories for such items is the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. In 1863, Maj. Gen. Daniel Edgar Sickles, whose right leg had been amputated after being smashed by a cannonball in the Battle of Gettysburg, paid a surprise visit to what was then known as the Army Medical Museum. Sickles, a colorful rogue and hothead of national renown, presented museum officials with a startling donation. It was the partly shattered bone from his leg, solemnly preserved in a small box in the shape of a coffin. “With the compliments of Major General D.E.S.,” the visiting card was inscribed.
The museum was delighted to display the artifact, and for some years the general visited his beloved limb on the anniversary of its separation from his body. It remains at NMHM today, along with fragments from the skull of Abraham Lincoln (which doctors removed at Peterson’s Boarding House, across from the Ford’s Theater) and the bullet-punctured spine of his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Visitors can also view the vertebrae of another assassinated president, James A. Garfield.
In case this has intrigued you, here are a few more must-see stops on the Celebrity Grand Tour of Death:
Vladimir Lenin’s body. The embalmed body of the great socialist hero is on view in his famous mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. Nearly a century after his death, people wait in long lines every day to see him, free of charge.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s skull fragments. Parts of the great composer’s skull were stolen when his body was exhumed in 1863 and surfaced, more than a century later, in California. Now they are part of the collection at San Jose State University’s Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies.
Grover Cleveland's cancerous lesion and Chang and Eng’s liver. In 1893, surgeons removed a tumor from the president’s left upper jaw. You can view it, if you dare, at the Mutter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Also in the Mutter collection is the fused liver of Chang and Eng Bunker, the famous Siamese twins.
George Washington’s hair. A month after the general’s death in 1799, Eliza Wadsworth, an aunt of the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote to her father, a Philadelphia congressman, asking for a scrap of Washington’s handwriting. “Papa,” she added, “had he hair? A lock of that I should value more highly still.” Her father conveyed this request to the ex-president’s widow. Martha, touched rather than put off, honored the request. Eliza Wadsworth died two years later, and the hair eventually passed to her famous nephew, who had it enclosed into a locket. This was donated in 1899 to the Maine Historical Society in Portland, which has kept it ever since.
Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s hair. A lock of the Marxist revolutionary’s hair, said to have been removed from his head by a CIA agent after Guevara’s execution in Bolivia in 1967, was purchased at auction for $119,500 by the rare-book dealer and ’60s memorabilia buff Bill Butler for display at Butler & Sons Books in Rosenberg, Texas, outside Houston.
Jeremy Bentham’s body. In his will, the British philosopher asked that his body be preserved and displayed. His instructions were followed, and his remains — topped by a wax recreation of his head — can still be seen in the South Cloister of the University College of London. The actual head is in storage.
Grigori Rasputin’s penis. The authenticity and provenance of the Russian mystic’s 11.8-inch member, thought to have been hacked off postmortem and currently displayed in a jar of formaldehyde at the Museum of Erotica in St. Petersburg, can’t be definitively proved. (Some suspect it’s actually a desiccated sea cucumber.) But from what we know of the man — a big schmuck if there ever was one — the display is at least symbolically potent.
The bones of the finger, to be exact, resting in an egg-shaped goblet and pointing skyward — appropriate, I thought, for the man who gave us modern astronomy. Once I realized that this was the middle finger of his right hand, another, rather impertinent thought occurred to me — that the finger was making a rude gesture at Pope Urban VIII, who had branded him a heretic (for advancing the then-blasphemous idea that the earth orbited the sun, rather than the other way around) and forced him to live his twilight years under house arrest. However anachronistic and juvenile it might have been, the thought of Galileo flipping off the Church left a big smile on my face. It seemed that the artifact’s provenance traced back to 1737, when the Galileo remains were transferred from a small closet to a mausoleum inside the nearby church of Santa Croce. (By that time, the Vatican had decided that Galileo wasn’t such a bad guy after all.) The finger was removed from the rest of Galileo’s bones and exhibited at the Biblioteca Laurenziana for several years, then carted off to the Tribuna di Galileo for a while before ending up at the Museo.
And then I thought: It’s Galileo’s actual finger. He used it to write the book that ticked off the Pope. He used it to adjust his telescopes. He used it for . . . well, let’s not go there. Anyway, here it is, nearly four centuries later, right in front of me. A shiver ran down my back.
The Church, of course, was itself into the body-part business in a big way. The bodies of Saint Mark and Saint Antoninus are at the Basilica di San Marco and the Dominican Church of San Marco in Venice and Florence, respectively. And after she died in 1380, Saint Catherine of Siena’s body, believed to have healing powers, became a magnet for pilgrims. Some of her body parts, including her finger and her head, were removed before she was buried. Today they’re in a reliquary at San Domenico Church in Siena. The rest of her lies in a tomb in Rome’s Santa Maria Sopra Minerva.
Other religions get in on the act as well. After the death of the Buddha, for example, his remains were divided into eight parts and enshrined around Asia. One of his teeth is at the Sri Dalada Maligawa temple in Kandy, Sri Lanka.
If you’re the type of person who is slightly creeped out by public displays of human remains — but fascinated, too — it might interest you to know that there are quite a few bits and bobs of famous people in museums and other venues around the world.
One of the world’s best repositories for such items is the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. In 1863, Maj. Gen. Daniel Edgar Sickles, whose right leg had been amputated after being smashed by a cannonball in the Battle of Gettysburg, paid a surprise visit to what was then known as the Army Medical Museum. Sickles, a colorful rogue and hothead of national renown, presented museum officials with a startling donation. It was the partly shattered bone from his leg, solemnly preserved in a small box in the shape of a coffin. “With the compliments of Major General D.E.S.,” the visiting card was inscribed.
The museum was delighted to display the artifact, and for some years the general visited his beloved limb on the anniversary of its separation from his body. It remains at NMHM today, along with fragments from the skull of Abraham Lincoln (which doctors removed at Peterson’s Boarding House, across from the Ford’s Theater) and the bullet-punctured spine of his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Visitors can also view the vertebrae of another assassinated president, James A. Garfield.
In case this has intrigued you, here are a few more must-see stops on the Celebrity Grand Tour of Death:Vladimir Lenin’s body. The embalmed body of the great socialist hero is on view in his famous mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. Nearly a century after his death, people wait in long lines every day to see him, free of charge.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s skull fragments. Parts of the great composer’s skull were stolen when his body was exhumed in 1863 and surfaced, more than a century later, in California. Now they are part of the collection at San Jose State University’s Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies.
Grover Cleveland's cancerous lesion and Chang and Eng’s liver. In 1893, surgeons removed a tumor from the president’s left upper jaw. You can view it, if you dare, at the Mutter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Also in the Mutter collection is the fused liver of Chang and Eng Bunker, the famous Siamese twins.
George Washington’s hair. A month after the general’s death in 1799, Eliza Wadsworth, an aunt of the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote to her father, a Philadelphia congressman, asking for a scrap of Washington’s handwriting. “Papa,” she added, “had he hair? A lock of that I should value more highly still.” Her father conveyed this request to the ex-president’s widow. Martha, touched rather than put off, honored the request. Eliza Wadsworth died two years later, and the hair eventually passed to her famous nephew, who had it enclosed into a locket. This was donated in 1899 to the Maine Historical Society in Portland, which has kept it ever since.
Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s hair. A lock of the Marxist revolutionary’s hair, said to have been removed from his head by a CIA agent after Guevara’s execution in Bolivia in 1967, was purchased at auction for $119,500 by the rare-book dealer and ’60s memorabilia buff Bill Butler for display at Butler & Sons Books in Rosenberg, Texas, outside Houston.Jeremy Bentham’s body. In his will, the British philosopher asked that his body be preserved and displayed. His instructions were followed, and his remains — topped by a wax recreation of his head — can still be seen in the South Cloister of the University College of London. The actual head is in storage.
Grigori Rasputin’s penis. The authenticity and provenance of the Russian mystic’s 11.8-inch member, thought to have been hacked off postmortem and currently displayed in a jar of formaldehyde at the Museum of Erotica in St. Petersburg, can’t be definitively proved. (Some suspect it’s actually a desiccated sea cucumber.) But from what we know of the man — a big schmuck if there ever was one — the display is at least symbolically potent.
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