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286 Germano Maifreda

referred to the astronomer’s merits; «to whose discoveries», he noted,
28
«geography owes much» . With an attentive evaluation of current
opinion and an analysis of the historic data, Frisi aimed directly at re-
establishing Galileo’s key role in the history of science.
«Italians», he declared directly, «might perhaps be suspected of
some partiality if they barged in choosing between the two opinions we
have outlined and immediately proclaimed the divine Galileo as the
greatest genius who, second only to Newton, has honored human
kind». The real unacknowledged theme underlying Frisi’s synthesis
was, however, the question of the ancient primacy of Italian science on
the European scene and the consequences of the Holy Office’s 1633
condemnation to abjure, both in terms of an irreversible change in the
political and social climate within which scientific research was carried
out in the peninsula and in the fact that freedom of scientific inquiry
had been undermined for the following century. Though caution
induced Father Frisi (a heated adversary of the Jesuits, against whose
«literary and scientific merits» he had leveled a ferocious attack in an
Elogio del [Bonaventura] Cavalieri, which remained unpublished for
many years) not to center his remarks upon the Dialogo sopra i due
massimi sistemi in his analysis of Galileo’s work, treating instead his
successes and failures as the founder of modern mechanics, the un-
derlying framework – made explicit in Frisi’s subsequent work – allows
us to discern the deeper sense of his intellectual project and of his
29
philosophical/mathematical applications extended to economic culture .
In the historic context in which the Lombard Enlightenment elabo-
rated its deductions and its epistemological proposals – and, as well
(above all), in the fields of humanistic and social knowledge, engaging
in science might then also mean tacitly claiming national pasts of
which one was justly proud and, thus, a return to pondering the
problem of method. A problem in which some correctly identified one
of the basic challenges of the new season of political reform – and
which they addressed with acute and mature philosophic awareness.

28 Ibid.
29 Frisi first reordered and enlarged his considerations in the Elogio a Galileo Galilei,
written in 1774, when he was already a professor at the Scuole Palatine in Milan, royal
censor and a protagonist of the second wave of reform as one of those charged with the
technical supervision of the network of Lombard canals. “The militant scientist”,
concludes Casini, «protagonist of the Theresian reforms, was spurred by an active faith
in the enlightened view. This faith was nourished by a coherent conception of scientific
reason and had in the very progress of the experimental method its core […]. Frisi’s
lucid outline was equal to the times. It reopened Galileo’s case and marked a decisive
turning point in his posthumous history, laying down the foundations of a subsequent
critical historiography» (P. Casini, Frisi e Galileo, cit.).

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XV - Agosto 2018 n.43
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)