Art News

Galileo Lost Tooth, Fingers Go on Show at Galileo Museum in Florence

FLORENCE (REUTERS).- A tooth, thumb and finger cut off from the body of renowned Italian scientist Galileo, who died in 1642, go on display this week in Florence after an art collector found them by chance last year. The body parts, along with another finger and a vertebrae, were cut from Galileo’s corpse by scientists and historians during a burial ceremony 95 years after his death. “The laymen and masons that were attending the ceremony thought that they should have some souvenir of Galileo’s body,” Paolo Galluzzi, director of Florence’s Galileo Museum, told Reuters in an interview. “They thought that having a piece of the man would have been a homage to his tradition. The idea of having relics of science is very similar, is a mirror of the relics of religion,” he said.