Decorazione interna navata Chiesa di San Francesco (G. Bettini, Comune di Pisa)
Church of San Francesco
Chiesa e Chiostro di San Francesco dai tetti (A. Matteucci)Galileo's moon:the first altar on the left inside the church shows the large canvas of the Nativity by Ludovico Cardi (1602), nicknamed il Cigoli, friend and adviser of Galileo Galilei, called his lunaris nuncius. Observing the pale moon that almost hides behind the choir of angels, we note that, while maintaining a circular aspect, it is represented during one of its phases. It is from this detail that we understand that Cigoli was already aware of the first theories on the light reflected from the Earth on the Moon, as reported in Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo published only 8 years after the painting. The astronomical treatise was the result of Galilei’s experiments carried out in Padua and from the Campanile di San Marco in Venice, from which, thanks to the improvement of the telescope (Flemish invention), he was able to identify the roughness on the surface of the Moon. In addition to the Pisan painting, Cigoli paid homage to Galileo's discoveries when painting the dome of the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, where at the foot of the Virgin there is an exact reproduction of the Galilean Moon.
