ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Galileo’s legacy in the eighteenth century, starting with his reburial in the church of Santa Croce shortly before the death of Gian Gastone. Galileo’s partial rehabilitation was essential for the goals of an enlightened church under the papacy of Benedict XIV, but his reputation mattered on a far more personal level to the Florentines who transformed him into a secular saint and emblem of their own enlightenment. The eighteenth century was a great age of Galileo scholarship as Tuscan scholars worked to assemble and publish the Galileo archive, writing essays proclaiming him the Italian equivalent of Descartes and essential precursor to Newton. They sought to insert Galileo into the genealogies of the European Enlightenment, treating the relationship between his contributions to science and struggles with the Roman Inquisition as paradigmatic of his modernity. Peter Leopold encouraged his scientific advisors to see the history of Tuscan science as a subject worth documenting. Targioni Tozzetti dedicated his meticulous study of Galilean science and the Accademia del Cimento (1657-67) to the grand duke. One year after Peter Leopold’s death, Giovanni Battista Clemente Nelli’s two-volume Life and Literary Commerce of Galileo Galilei (1793) appeared, based on painstaking archival research and recuperation.
