Divine Universe
While it is not an image that appears onstage, the image of Aristotle's concept of the universe conjures a specific image of what the Catholic church believed the universe must look like. One of the church's Aristotelean philosophers describes its properties poetically, invoking a "mystical music of its spheres and its crystal vaults, the orbits of its heavenly bodies, the slanting angle of the sun’s course, the secrets of moon tables, the starry richness catalogued in the southern hemisphere” and so on. The universe is perceived not as an unknown territory, but as just another divine creation. Church philosophers invoke flowery images of the universe as a way of aligning it with the Biblical depiction of God's creation of "the heavens."
Mrs. Sarti's description of scientists
Mrs. Sarti has already worked for scientists, so she knows the characters and peculiarities of people in the field. She remembers that she once “spent four years in service with Monsignor Filippo without ever managing to get all his library dusted.” She remembers “leather bound of books up to the ceiling—and no slop volumes of poetry either.” The poor woman also recollects that “good Monsignor had a whole cluster of sores on his bottom from sitting and poring over all that learning." This imagery gives a reader a chance to look at a scholar’s library and his lifestyle.
The Carnival
During the time in which the government grows more and more skeptical of Galileo's findings, there is a carnival, in which a ballad singer sings a satirical song about Galileo. After beating the drum and announcing, "You will now see Galileo Galilei's amazing discovery: the earth circling round the sun!" a woman steps forward holding a crude drawing of the sun, while a young child, with a pumpkin over its head, circles around her. This shows the irreverence that most people feel towards Galileo's discovery.
Galileo as a prisoner
After years of working independently as a researcher, Galileo is forced to live out his dotage in a house in the country near Florence, a prisoner of the Inquisition. There, he becomes a half-blind old man, and toils over a bent wooden rail and a ball of wood, continuing to conduct experiments, but with his faculties compromised by age.
