Galileo Galilei signature

Who Galileo Galilei was

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa in 1564 and died at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence, in 1642. He improved the telescope, discovered the four large moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the mountains of the Moon, and laid foundations for the modern science of motion.

His support for the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun brought him before the Roman Inquisition, and some of his most famous signatures come from that conflict.

The story of the signature

Galileo usually signed with his full name, “Galileo Galilei”, in a fluent Italian hand. His surviving letters, drafts and notes, most of them in the National Central Library in Florence, show a practised writer who used the same hand for mathematics, observations and correspondence. Even after he went blind in his last years, letters went out under his name, written by assistants.

In June 1633, after his trial in Rome, he was made to kneel and read a formal abjuration of his views, and then sign it. The record of the trial, now in the Vatican Apostolic Archive, includes the abjuration with a short declaration in his own hand confirming that he had abjured, followed by his signature. The famous “Eppur si muove” (“and yet it moves”) does not appear in any document from the trial and is a later legend.

Galileo’s fame has also attracted forgers. In 2022 the University of Michigan Library announced that one of its treasures, a manuscript believed to be Galileo’s draft notes on the moons of Jupiter, was a twentieth-century forgery, probably by the Italian forger Tobia Nicotra. Researchers noticed, among other things, that the paper carried a watermark from a later date. It is a reminder that a convincing signature alone proves nothing.

What makes it distinctive

How to give your signature a similar feel

• In the signature generator Type tab, try Pinyon Script or Italianno with a Slant of about 6° for a rounded Italian line.
• Write your name in full if it has a pleasing rhythm, as “Galileo Galilei” does with its repeated sounds.
• Keep your signature consistent on important documents. Consistency is what experts compare when they judge whether a signature is genuine.
• Save your finished signature as a transparent PNG and use the same file every time you sign digitally.

Where to see the original

These links lead to archives, libraries, museums and Wikimedia Commons.

• Wikimedia Commons: Galileo’s signed autograph letter from Arcetri, 12 May 1635, identified as written to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (scanned)
• Wikimedia Commons: Galileo’s signature traced from a document in the Vatican Apostolic Archive