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Did Galileo really say “Eppur si muove”?

7 min read

Almost certainly not, at least not where the legend puts it. No record from the 1633 trial or from anyone who knew Galileo reports the words. “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”) first appears in print in Giuseppe Baretti's The Italian Library, London, 1757, more than a century after Galileo's death in 1642. A painting once dated 1643 or 1645 that shows the words now looks like a nineteenth century work.

The claim, and the verdict

The claim: on 22 June 1633, after kneeling before the cardinals of the Roman Inquisition and formally rejecting the idea that the Earth moves round the Sun, Galileo Galilei got to his feet and muttered “Eppur si muove”, meaning “And yet it moves”.

The verdict: there is no evidence for it, and good reason to doubt it. The trial records, the letters of Galileo's friends and his first biographers say nothing about it. To say it aloud in that room would have been dangerous: the Inquisition had burned Giordano Bruno in Rome in 1600, and Galileo, aged 69, had just escaped a harsher sentence by submitting. The words do capture what Galileo went on believing, which is why the legend survives. But as a report of something he said, it fails every test.

What happened at the trial in 1633

Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was published in Florence in February 1632. It presented the Sun-centred system of Copernicus so favourably that the Inquisition judged he had broken an order of 1616 not to hold or defend it. He was called to Rome and questioned in April 1633.

On 22 June 1633, at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, he was found “vehemently suspected of heresy”. Kneeling, he read a formal abjuration in which he said he abjured, cursed and detested his errors. The Dialogue was banned and he was sentenced to imprisonment, at once turned into house arrest. From December 1633 he lived at his villa at Arcetri, near Florence, where he died on 8 January 1642.

Nothing in the surviving trial documents, published in full in Antonio Favaro's National Edition of Galileo's works, records any defiant remark.

What the evidence shows: a dated source table

DateSourceWhat it shows
22 June 1633Sentence and abjuration, RomeGalileo abjures. No defiant words recorded.
1633 to 1642Letters of Galileo and his circle; his daughter Maria Celeste's letters to 1634No mention of the phrase.
1654 and laterVincenzo Viviani's life of Galileo (written 1654, printed 1717)His last pupil's biography says nothing of it.
1757Giuseppe Baretti, The Italian Library, LondonFirst known printed version. Galileo stamps his foot after his release and says “Eppur si muove”.
1800sEngravings, monuments and schoolbooksThe phrase spreads, usually moved to the moment of the abjuration.
1911Letter from Jules van Belle of Roeselare, Belgium, to Antonio FavaroReports a painting of Galileo in prison, apparently dated 1643 or 1645 and signed in a way that suggested Murillo, with the words on the wall.
2020Mario Livio, Galileo and the Science Deniers, and a Scientific American articleTraces the painting to a 2007 auction where it was judged nineteenth century, and finds a near twin in Sint-Niklaas painted in 1837 by Romaan-Eugeen Van Maldeghem.

Baretti, an Italian writer living in London, told the story with theatrical detail: Galileo, set at liberty, looks up at the sky and down at the ground, stamps his foot, and speaks the words. He gave no source. Note that even he does not place it in front of the inquisitors.

The painting looked, for most of the twentieth century, like strong evidence that the story was told within a year or two of Galileo's death. Favaro himself never saw it; the date and the signature were unclear, and specialists doubted the attribution to Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Mario Livio's detective work in 2020 showed that a nearly identical picture hangs in the Stedelijk Museum Sint-Niklaas and is documented as Van Maldeghem's work of 1837. If he is right, the painting is a copy or a version made two centuries after the trial, and it tells us nothing about the 1640s.

How the legend spread

In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment writers made Galileo the model of reason standing up to authority. A short, defiant line suited that story perfectly. By the nineteenth century “Eppur si muove” was printed under engravings, carved on monuments and quoted in schoolbooks, nearly always at the moment of the abjuration, the most dramatic and least likely setting.

Historians today warn against reading the whole affair as science against religion. Galileo was a believing Catholic who had friends among the cardinals, including the pope himself before 1632, and the case turned as much on politics, personal offence and church discipline as on astronomy. The phrase flattens all of that into a slogan. The Catholic Church formally acknowledged errors in the case in 1992, after a commission set up by Pope John Paul II.

What Galileo actually wrote about the Earth and the Bible

He did not need a muttered line: his views are in print. In the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, circulated in 1615, he argued that the Bible speaks in ordinary language to reach ordinary people and should not be used to settle questions about nature that can be decided by observation and demonstration. In the Dialogue of 1632 he used the example of a smoothly moving ship's cabin, where no experiment can show that the ship is moving, to explain why we cannot feel the Earth's motion. In the same book he mocked people who measure nature by human limits:

“It always seems to me extreme rashness on the part of some when they want to make human abilities the measure of what nature can do.”
Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), Day One

Under house arrest he kept working. His Discourses on Two New Sciences, on motion and the strength of materials, was smuggled out and printed in Leiden in 1638. In a letter to Élie Diodati of 4 July 1637 he described being confined to bed for five weeks, aged seventy-four. That book, written after the abjuration, is the real “and yet”.

You can ask him about the trial, Maria Celeste or the ship in the cabin by talking with Galileo in Yuga, by voice or text. It is an AI recreation drawn from his writings and the record, not Galileo, and it can be wrong, so cite the Dialogue and his letters directly.

How to test a quote that is too good to be true

  1. Look for the first appearance in print and measure the gap. Here it is 124 years after the trial.
  2. Ask who could have heard it. If the only possible witnesses were the people it insults, be suspicious.
  3. Treat images as sources that need dating too. A painting's date can be as uncertain as a quote's.
  4. Check whether the line suits a later cause. This one suited the Enlightenment.

The step by step version is in how to check if a quote is real. For more on Galileo, see questions to ask Galileo and Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo compared.

Questions people ask

What does “Eppur si muove” mean?
It is Italian for “And yet it moves”, often translated “Nevertheless, it moves”. “It” is the Earth. In the legend Galileo says it after being forced to deny that the Earth moves round the Sun, so it stands for a truth that cannot be silenced. The modern Italian spelling is “Eppur si muove”; Baretti printed it as “Eppur si move”.
When was the phrase first recorded?
The earliest known printed version is in Giuseppe Baretti's The Italian Library, published in London in 1757, about 124 years after the trial and 115 years after Galileo's death. A painting reported in 1911 seemed to show the words in the 1640s, but in 2020 Mario Livio argued convincingly that it was painted in the nineteenth century.
What did Galileo say at his trial?
On 22 June 1633 in Rome he read a formal abjuration, prepared for him, rejecting the view that the Sun is at the centre and the Earth moves, and promising not to teach it. In earlier questioning he claimed he had not really defended Copernicus in the Dialogue. No record shows him contradicting the court.
Was Galileo imprisoned or tortured?
He was threatened with torture in a formal questioning, as procedure required, but there is no evidence it was used. His sentence of imprisonment was turned at once into house arrest, first in Rome and Siena, then from December 1633 at his villa at Arcetri near Florence, where he lived until his death in 1642.

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