A first edition of the “Sidereus Nuncius” (at left) has black etchings of the moon. A disputed copy (at right) has brown watercolors. Images from Left: Courtesy Library of Congress; Right: Courtesy Martayan Lan Rare Books

On the night of January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei, a resident of Padua, walked onto his balcony and tipped his telescope toward space. He spotted three stars near Jupiter and graphed their positions in a notebook. Six days later, he looked through his telescope again and found the same stars—but their positions had shifted. They were, he realized, moons orbiting Jupiter. Galileo had long believed Copernicus’ theory that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Now he had proof.

Two months later, a publisher in Venice printed Galileo’s findings, in a booklet ten inches tall, seven and a half inches wide, and sixty pages long. As was customary, the sheets were initially left unbound. Galileo called his work the “Sidereus Nuncius,” or “Starry Messenger.” In addition to offering insights on celestial movement, the book rebutted Aristotle, who had maintained that heavenly bodies were smooth and “perfect”; with his telescope, Galileo had also looked extensively at the Earth’s moon, and could see mountains and craters on its surface. To convey this point, Galileo included four copperplate etchings of the moon, each depicting a lunar phase and measuring roughly five and a half inches wide and six inches tall. Five hundred and fifty copies of the “Sidereus Nuncius” were printed in its first run. About a hundred and fifty still exist.

The “Sidereus Nuncius” launched Galileo’s career. According to one historian, the book contained “more discoveries that changed the world than anyone has ever made before or since.” Owen Gingerich, a professor emeritus of astronomy at Harvard, has called Galileo’s account of Jupiter’s moons “the most exciting single manuscript page in the history of science.”

Gingerich, who is eighty-three, is one of the world’s leading authorities on Galileo. In June of 2005, an old friend of his, Richard Lan, visited him at his office, not far from Harvard’s main campus. Lan owns an antiquarian bookshop in Manhattan. Howard Rootenberg, a Los Angeles dealer, recently told me, “Richard is a notch higher than other booksellers, in terms of knowledge and experience.” The universe of rare-book dealers is small, and reputation is paramount. Rootenberg explained, “With certain dealers, you never even question authenticity or title—it’s almost a given. Their word is sacrosanct. Certainly, Richard is one of those people.”

Expertise has its limits, however, and Lan occasionally asked Gingerich to assess books by early astronomers. (Gingerich has examined nearly every extant first- and second-edition copy—six hundred in all—of Copernicus’ “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.”) “You can put anything in front of him and learn something,” Lan told me.

That day, Lan arrived with two young Italians, Marino Massimo De Caro and Filippo Rotundo. The Italians were offering to sell Lan a remarkable copy of the “Sidereus Nuncius.” De Caro had provided Lan with documentation indicating that the book’s previous owner belonged to a Masonic organization active in Italy, Malta, and Argentina.

Lan had viewed many copies of the “Sidereus Nuncius” over the years. Although some had been in better condition, none contained the personal flourishes of this one. Galileo’s signature was on the title page. A stamp of a lynx indicated that the book came from the personal library of Federico Cesi, the founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, the scientific fraternity in Rome to which Galileo belonged. Instead of etchings, there were five lovely watercolor illustrations of the moon, presumably painted by Galileo. Lan suspected that the book would sell for millions of dollars, once he had established its provenance and authenticity.

Lan sat beside Gingerich and unwrapped the book’s vellum cover. Gingerich opened the book to the title page, which bore an inscription: “Io Galileo Galilei f.” In Italian, io means “I.” The Italians suggested that the f might be an abbreviated form of fare—“to make”—meaning that the inscription was shorthand for “I, Galileo Galilei, made this.” Galileo typically signed books as “The Author” or “Galileo Galilei Lincei”—a reference to the Accademia dei Lincei—and added the recipient’s name. But Gingerich recalls thinking that the book’s signature “looked O.K.”

On the fifteenth page—B4 recto, in bibliographic terminology—was a rust-hued watercolor of a first-quarter moon. Gingerich felt a shiver of recognition. He told Lan that the image, and the four watercolors that followed, strongly resembled ink-wash illustrations of the moon made by Galileo.

Soon after the meeting, Gingerich wrote to Lan that there was “a firm Galileo connection.” He added, “The drawings had either to be made by Galileo himself or with his supervision.”

Lan, buoyed by Gingerich’s endorsement, bought the book for half a million dollars.

Lan was eager to place the “Sidereus Nuncius” on the market, but he decided to seek other expert opinions. In July, 2005, he sent an e-mail to Horst Bredekamp, a scholar in Berlin who specialized in assessing art made by key figures in European intellectual history. “Ideas come through drawing,” Bredekamp once said. He had published books about Leibniz’s Baroque gardens and Darwin’s diagrams, and was writing one that touched on Galileo’s drawings. In 2009, Art Bulletin declared that Bredekamp had done “as much as anyone to reexamine the relation between art and science across history.”

In the e-mail, Lan attached a scan of the watercolor from B4 recto. When Bredekamp saw it, he later noted, he felt “simultaneously electrified and skeptical.” Lan asked him if he was interested in conducting a thorough study, and Bredekamp said yes. He began by comparing the Io Galileo Galilei f signature with dozens of Galileo letters that are preserved at the national library in Florence. He concluded that the inscription was “definitely authentic.”

That November, Lan brought his “Sidereus Nuncius” to Berlin and left it there for a month. As Bredekamp later wrote, after “a mere glance” at the book he concluded that the splotchy watercolors, with their “mixture of fidgetiness and precision,” were genuine Galileo sketches. This was a major claim, for it threatened the singularity of a famed set of Galileo drawings known as the Florence Sheet. Nearly all Galileo scholars agreed that the astronomer had sketched his first telescope-aided observations of the moon on the sheet, in ink wash. Rick Watson, an American bookseller based in London, called the Florence Sheet the equivalent of the “Declaration of Independence in the history of scientific discovery.” The sheet is considered to be a direct representation of what Galileo saw through his telescope. In contrast, the copperplate etchings that appeared in the first edition of the “Sidereus Nuncius,” which were made by a Venetian artisan, feature craters that are exaggerated for effect, and there are other distortions.

Bredekamp theorized that Lan’s “Sidereus Nuncius” was an embellished proof copy. It was known that the Venetian printer had sent Galileo thirty copies with blank spots indicating where etchings would be placed. As Bredekamp saw it, Galileo must have filled the blank spots in one such copy with the watercolors while observing the moon in subsequent weeks; the artisan who made the etchings then traced the rust-colored watercolors onto copperplates. “This was a big deal,” Watson said. If Bredekamp was right, the Florence Sheet was on its way to becoming a historical afterthought.

In 2007, Bredekamp presented these arguments in a book, “Galilei der Künstler,” or “Galilei the Artist.” A ceremony in Padua marked its publication. One of the speakers, William Shea, who has written five books on Galileo and is based in Zurich, said, “Galileo painted these watercolors, I’m convinced.” Lan called the “Sidereus Nuncius” the “acquisition of a lifetime,” and told Time that he planned to ask at least ten million dollars for it.

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In the spring of 2008, Lan mailed the book to Germany for another review. Bredekamp invited experts from fourteen institutions to Berlin. The scholars spent two months analyzing Lan’s book, using such tools as long-wave ultraviolet radiation (to identify inks) and X-ray fluorescence (to determine the paper’s composition). A curator from the Accademia dei Lincei authenticated the lynx stamp, and a conservator from the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, in Stuttgart, certified the paper and the binding.