From 'Tilt'

Galileo was by then aged, infirm, nearly totally blind and
living the interior exile imposed by the Inquisition in 1633
for being “vehemently suspected of heresy.’.’* The master
was still lucid, however, and desperately in need of a
secretary-scribe. Recognizing this, his inquisitors lifted the
str-ict seclusion to which he had been sentenced in order to
admit Viviani. For three years, Galileo rambled and
recited as Viviani furiously took down everything—corre-
spondence, dialogues, mathematical problems, physical
theories, discourses, and, all the while, the recollections of a
long life marked by equal measures of triumph and humil-
iation.
By all accounts, Viviani was as exemplary and devoted a
disciple as any master could hope to find, and not just dur-
ing those few years by Galileo’s side. For although Viviani
would go -on to achieve considerable fame in his own right,
becoming court mathematician to the grand duke of Tus-
cany and publishing a good many competent, if less than
pioneering, works on geometry, throughout his life he
dedicated much of his energies to vindicating his mentor’s
name and propagating Galilean scientific theories. It was
Viviani who edited the first collection of Galileo’s works
and wrote the first biography of the astronomer, mathe-
matician, and physicist, the Vita di Galileo, which became
(Galileo-was condemned of heresy in I633 by the tribunal of the Inqui-
sition in the basilica of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome. The
charge arose from Galileo’s defense of the Copernican theory of the
solar system which he published in The Dialogue Concerning the Two
Chief World Systems, Florence, 1632.)
something of a best-seller throughout Europe. Moreover,
Viviani was the driving force behind Leopold de’ Medici’s
establishment of the Accademia del Cimento, a scientific
institution dedicated to experimenting with the theories of
the late, great master, in Florence in 1657. The ever-
grateful Viviani even left money in his will for the con-
struction of a sepulchral monument to Galileo in
Florence’s church of Santa Croce, to place Galileo along-
side Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Leonardo Bruni. And
finally, and not least significantly, it was Vincenzo Viviani
who first placed Galileo atop the Tower of Pisa, a place
where he would remain more or less fixed, at least in the
collective Western imagination, for centuries to come-
this despite the fact that in none of Galileo’s writings, nor
any, of his personal correspondence, is the Pisan carnpanile
mentioned, never mind anything about conducting a single
experiment from its heights. Nor, for that matter, did any‘
of the other “teachers and philosophers, and the whole
assembly of students” from the university of Pisa whom
Viviani places there have anything at all to say on the mat-
ter. Perhaps the only plausible explanation for such
resounding silence aboutGalileo’s groundbreaking, and
quite public, scientific discovery at the tower-—here, after
all, was a lone genius‘ shattering an Aristotelian dictum
honored for millennia, all before a veritable throng, and,
what’s more, “with repeated experiments”——is that the
events, quite simply, never took place. In all likelihood, the
timeworn and assiduously reported image of Galileo drop-
ping objects from the summit of the Tower is the stuff of pure myth.