The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor said Wednesday that a document it thought Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei composed in the 17th century is in fact a forgery dating back to the 20th century.
The school said it began investigating the manuscript earlier this year after they were told by Nick Wilding, the researcher working on Galileo’s biography. Wilding told the University of Michigan librarian he believed the forged document was the work of Tobia Nicotra, which according to 1934 time Reportalso forged the autographs of Christopher Columbus, Warren G. Harding, Lorenzo de’ Medici and others, and was sentenced to two years in prison.
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“After our experts studied [Wilding’s] The university said in statement.
Until this year, the University of Michigan believed it was keeping Galileo’s notes of his 1610 discovery of Jupiter’s four moons, which he viewed through a recently developed telescope. The school said it was believed to be “one of the gems in the University of Michigan library”.
A watermark on the paper reading “BMO” – a reference to the Italian city of Bergamo – gave the document the status of a forger. According to the University of Michigan, no other documents with this watermark have been dated to prior to 1770, more than a century after the manuscript was assumed to have been created.
The source of the document also posed a problem. The school said it acquired Galileo’s manuscript in 1938, after the death of Tracy McGregor, a Detroit book collector. MacGregor bought it at an auction where it was sold along with two other Galileo documents. These papers were detected as forgeries in Nicotra as well, however, there is no record of the whereabouts of the purported Galileo manuscript prior to 1930, according to the university.
Despite the firm belief that the document was a forgery, the university library said it was still valuable.
“In the future, it may come to serve the research, learning and teaching interests of counterfeiting, counterfeiting and deception, an immortal discipline that has never been more relevant,” Lynne Rawley, an editor at the University of Michigan, said in a statement.
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