Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Blaðsíða 257
mended Tasso, “in many circumstances”15. In fact, it is not true that
he commends him ‘in many circumstances’; on the contrary,
galileo praises few verses of the poet and very seldom:
a detailed analysis of all the defects of this work would take
too much time; in general, one can say that the style almost
always is weak, forced and ill-conceived, so that, to be
briefer, we will rather notice those parts (there are some) in
which the author did something good […]16
With polemic intent, he often compares those few verses to the
numerous other ones that he frequently stigmatizes with the term
‘pedantic’ (It. pedanteschi).
But the aim of the present essay is not to discuss whether
galileo’s judgments and critical interpretations of Tasso’s poem are
pertinent. This preamble intends to introduce an analysis of the par-
ticular stylistic and rhetoric procedure adopted by the Tuscan sci-
entist in his Considerazioni al Tasso, a procedure which is, in
important respects, similar to the one galileo will adopt, more than
ten years later, in The Assayer, one of his most successful and cel-
ebrated scientific works.
3. Considerazioni al Tasso and The Assayer
The excellence of galileo’s prose places him among the best of
Italian and European writers of the period. Yet this excellence does
not appear in his literary works, but rather in his scientific ones. It is
a given that The Assayer embodies one of the apogees of galileo’s
body of work. The scientist displays absolute mastery of the ‘medi-
um’ in that work. On the one hand, he shows peculiar connotative
and rhetorical creativity, for example in the irony with which he does
STEFanO rOSaTTI
257
15 “in parecchi luoghi altamente il commenda”, ibid, p. VII.
16 “Troppo lunga manifattura sarebbe il volere andar notando a cosa per cosa tutto quello, che in
quest’opera è di mendoso, però in universale si dice lo stile esser quasi sempre languido, sfor-
zato e male spressivo, sì che per maggior brevità andremo più tosto notando quei luoghi dove
l’autore ha del buono, che pur pur ce ne sono alcuni”, gaileo galilei: Considerazioni al Tasso,
from Edizione digitale delle opere complete di Galileo Galilei, Vol. IX, p. 66, http://pinakes.
imss.fi.it:8080/pinakestext/home.jsf (accessed november 6, 2010).
Milli mála 2011_Milli mála 1-218 6/28/11 1:39 PM Page 257