A Historian's Notebook: Presses, Paintings and Jupiter's Moons

Field Notes of Dr. Kwame Asante, Historian

1Mainz, Germany, Monday. At the printing museum I studied a page from a Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg in about 1455. His press, built around 1450, used small metal letters that could be set in rows, inked and pressed onto paper, then taken apart and reset for the next page. The letters look so much like handwriting that I had to lean in close. The red and blue decorations around the text were painted in by hand after printing. About 49 copies of this Bible survive, some only in part.

2Before presses, a scribe could spend many months copying one long book by hand. The museum guide told me historians estimate that by 1500, printers in more than 200 European towns had produced millions of books.

3Florence, Italy, Wednesday. Florence was a center of the Renaissance, a "rebirth" of interest in the art and learning of ancient Greece and Rome that began in Italian city-states in the 1300s and 1400s. Wealthy families such as the Medici paid artists and builders. In a church I stood before Masaccio's painting of the Trinity, made in about 1427. The lines of its painted ceiling meet at one point near my eye level, so the flat wall seems to open into a deep chapel. In the museum next door, older medieval paintings often set holy figures against flat gold backgrounds.

4Reminder for my lecture: the Renaissance scholars called humanists studied Greek and Roman writings closely. Many of those texts had been copied and kept by monks in medieval monasteries and by scholars in the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world.

5Florence, Thursday. At the science museum I saw a telescope built by Galileo Galilei. In 1609 Galileo heard of a Dutch spyglass and made his own, stronger ones. In January 1610 he watched Jupiter night after night and drew the small "stars" he saw beside it. I copied his record into a simple table.

6Galileo reported these and other findings, such as mountains on the Moon, in a short book, The Starry Messenger, printed in Venice in March 1610. Its first 550 copies reportedly sold out within about a week. Copies soon reached readers in other countries. Galileo later defended the idea of Nicolaus Copernicus, who argued in a book printed in 1543 that Earth and the planets move around the Sun. Many scholars and Church leaders held the older view that Earth stood still at the center. In 1633 a Church court found Galileo guilty, made him take back his view and kept him under house arrest until he died.