Vol. 41, No. 1, January 2012
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Tennis and the Scientific Revolution: Watson Seminar on the Material and Visual History of Science 2012
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Museo Galileo—Florence 15–16 June 2012
Organized by Marco Beretta and Alessandro Tosi
In the autumn of 1463 in the town of Orvieto, the German philosopher and astronomer Nicolò Cusano completed his treatise De ludo globi, in which he used the rules of a novel game played with a ball to describe a new vision of the universe. The impetus and movement of the ball became a metaphor for the complex design regulating the destiny of a new cosmos, from the orbit of the planets to the exercise of free will in men's actions.
A few decades later a new game, the gioco della palla corda (or jeu de paume), was embraced with enthusiasm by aristocrats at the principal courts in Renaissance Italy, gaining many devotees and becoming a significant cultural and social phenomenon. Soon the Medici in Florence, the Sforza in Milan, the Este in Ferrara and the Gonzaga in Mantova were ordering the construction of tennis courts on their sumptuous estates and a new fashion was created that rapidly spread across Europe. By the end of the 16th century, Paris counted more than two hundred and eighty jeu de paume courts—exceeding the number of churches in the French capital, as an ambassador from the Doge's court in Venice noted with amazement.
The game became so popular that in 1585 an Aristotelian philosopher, Antonio Scaino, wrote the first treatise laying out the principles of the game. Like his predecessor Cusano, however, Scaino could not resist engaging in a few digressions of a purely scientific nature. In particular, he noted the complexity of the tennis ball's motion and its relevance to the emerging science of ballistics, thus drawing a connection between the game and the fundamental principles of natural philosophy.
We do not know whether Galileo ever had occasion to read Scaino's treatise or to watch the students at the university in Padua (where he taught mathematics from 1592 to 1610) when they played a game of palla corda between lessons. But it is certainly striking that in his most important work, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632), Galileo chose an example that he knew would be familiar to all of his readers—the curved trajectory of a ball hit by an expert gamesman—to explain a scientific concept in his second dialogue—the combined rotational and translational motion of a mobile. And it is no coincidence that Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the nephew of Pope Urban VIII, had two palla corda courts constructed on the grounds of his palace in Rome. Galileo counted on these two powerful prelates, and on Ferdinando de' Medici in Florence (who was passionately fond of the game), to support him in the dissemination of his revolutionary scientific ideas.
Galileo's use of the image of the tennis ball in a scientific text should not be considered a mere captatio benevolentiae directed toward his high-born patrons. It represented the fruit of serious reflections on the physics of a game that would provide him with an effective model to explain the phenomenon of combined motion, while at the same time furnishing implicit corroboration of Copernicus' theory of the earth's double motion. Furthermore, the irregular movement of the tennis ball, with its often unpredictable trajectory, demonstrated clearly the limitations of Aristotle's theory of motion.
Thus, to communicate his ideas Galileo found a metaphor of extraordinary immediacy, a visual image drawn from the collective imagination that provided a lucid translation of his scientific language.
It is interesting to examine in this context a painting by the Flemish artist Frans Francken the Younger, which provides confirmation of the modernity of Galileo's approach and of his prose. Francken's Cabinet of a Collector (1617)—one of the earliest works in a genre that would gain great popularity among Flemish artists, that of the cabinet d'amateur—catalogues in exquisite detail the objects in a collector's private museum and includes—in a small scene depicting 'iconoclastic donkeys' destroying artworks, books, and scientific and musical instruments—two tennis racquets.
From this moment onward, tennis would occupy a permanent place in the symbolic universe of European culture and taste. Works by artists from Jan Breughel to Jan van Kessel, with intimations of Caravaggio along the way, testify to the popularity of the motif, and images of racquets, balls and game courts would be used by other protagonists in the history of modern science to illustrate a surprisingly wide variety of concepts.
The importance of Galileo's reference in the Dialogo and, as a consequence, the scientific value of the game of palla corda as a device to explain innovative scientific concepts, would be recognized by René Descartes. In his work Dioptrique (1638), the French philosopher and physicist included a number of curious engravings that show various possible movements of a tennis ball.
The game of palla corda or jeu de paume would later serve to illustrate the mechanics of phenomena such as reflection and refraction, by means of images that any layperson could recognize and understand. The different angles of incidence of light rays, for example, were analogous to the oblique hits (referred to as "cutting" or "slicing") used by players to put a particular spin on the ball. In addition, the almost infinite number of ways in which the tennis ball could bounce offered a model to explain the physical phenomena involved in the science of optics, thus allowing scientists to bypass the abstract and outdated notions of traditional optics.
Not many decades later, when Isaac Newton sought to describe his groundbreaking discoveries regarding the refraction of light in a rainbow, he wrote:
Then I began to suspect, whether the Rays, after their trajection through the Prisme, did not move in curve lines, and according to their more or less curvity tend to divers parts of the wall. And it increased my suspition, when I remembred that I had often seen a Tennis ball, struck with an oblique Racket, describe such a curve line. For, a circular as well as a progressive motion being communicated to it by that stroak, its parts on that side, where the motions conspire, must press and beat the contiguous Air more violently than on the other, and there excite a reluctancy and reaction of the Air proportionably greater.
In this celebrated passage the English mathematician focused on yet another aspect of the motion of the tennis ball—the fact that, due to the laws of fluid mechanics, the trajectory of the ball will be modified by the fluid (i.e., the air) through which it is traveling.
The practitioners of early modern science could not remain indifferent to the authoritative influence of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, and the motion of the tennis ball, like the complicated rules of the game itself, would continue to be used to illustrate the most disparate ideas, from probability theory to iatromechanics. During the 18th century the Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris included the Jeu de paume in the monumental Description des arts et metiers (1767) and in several scientific textbooks (Jean Nollet's a.o.) the game was still taken as a model for the explanation of natural phenomena.
The Neale W. Watson Seminar on the Material and Visual History of Science will explore these ideas. The preliminary program is as follows:
- Annarita Angelini (University of Bologna): Praecisio and Conjecture: Cusanus's Ball Game and the 'Learned Ignorance' of the World (Commentator: Antonio Clericuzio—University of Cassino
- Marco Beretta (University of Bologna—Museo Galileo): Training Tennis Players with Natural Philosophy. From Scaino's Trattato to the Art du paumier (Commentator: Claudio Pogliano—University of Pisa
- Concetta Pennuto (University of Tours): Jeu de la paume: Health of the Body and of the Mind in Early Modern Medicine (Commentator: Maria Conforti—La Sapienza)
- Michele Camerota (University of Cagliari): 'Cutting the Ball.' How Galileo Played Tennis in the Dialogue (Commentator: Stefano Gattei—IMT Lucca)
- Alessandro Tosi (University of Pisa): Tennis in Early Modern Visual Culture (Commentator: Claus Zittel—Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie, Berlin)
- Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis (University of Twente): Jeu de Paume in Dutch Culture: Descartes, Van Schooten and the Huygenses; Images, Moves and Models (Commentator: Larry Principe—The Johns Hopkins University)
- D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University): Keep Your Eye on the Ball: Optics and the Metaphors of the Court (Commentator: Dario Tessicini—Villa I Tatti, Firenze)
- Edith Sylla (North Carolina State University): Jacob Bernoulli on Conjecturing the Outcomes of Tennis Matches (Commentator: Niccolò Guicciardini—University of Bergamo)
A game of palla corda being played by the students of the Studio of Padua (1610, private collection).
Frans Francken the Younger, Cabinet of a Collector, London, Royal Collection.
Jan Breughel, The Vanity of Human Life, Turin, Sabauda Gallery.
Jan van Kessel, Europe, Munich, Alte Pinakothek (with an enlarged detail of the central panel above).
"Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton … Containing his New Theory about Light and Colors", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, no. 80 (19 February 1671/2), pp. 3075-3087.
School of Caravaggio, The Death of Hyacinth, Cherbourg, Musée des Beaux-Arts Thomas Henry