On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Two Views of the Moon, in Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger)
Galileo Galilei Italian
Not on view
Over the course of nineteen nights in 1609, Galileo trained his homemade telescope on the heavens. His observations, recorded and disseminated in his 1610 book Starry Messenger, transformed human understanding of the moon. While Renaissance science had inherited an ancient view of the moon as a perfectly spherical and unblemished orb, Galileo’s drawings revealed its surface to be more like that of our planet: rugged and uneven, marked by valleys, craters, and mountains.
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