In this context, the implication of the phrase is: despite his recantation, the Inquisition's proclamations to the contrary, or any other conviction or doctrine of men, the Earth does, in fact, move (around the Sun, and not vice versa).

According to Stephen Hawking, some historians believe this episode might have happened upon Galileo's transfer from house arrest under the watch of Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini to "another home, in the hills above Florence".

The event was first reported in English print in 1757 by Giuseppe Baretti in his book The Italian Library:[6]: 357  The moment he was set at liberty, he looked up to the sky and down to the ground, and, stamping with his foot, in a contemplative mood, said, Eppur si muove, that is, still it moves, meaning the Earth.

[8] In 1911, the words E pur si muove were found on a painting which had just been acquired by an art collector, Jules van Belle, of Roeselare, Belgium.

The signature is unclear but van Belle attributed it to the seventeenth century Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.