Niccolò Riccardi (born at Genoa, 1585; died at Rome, 30 May 1639) was an Italian Dominican theologian, writer and preacher, known today mostly for his role in the Galileo affair.
He took part in the activities of the Accademia degli Umoristi and both Giovanni Andrea Rovetti and Marcello Giovanetti dedicated collections of sonnets to him, in 1625 and 1626 respectively.
His literary activities overlapped significantly with his church responsibilities; In 1622 he was in charge of revising Tommaso Stigliani's Canzoniero to pass censorship, and in 1626 he was chosen to supervise the corrections to Giambattista Marino's Adone, which the Accademia degli Umoristi wanted to publish.
[2] Riccardi maintained generally amiable relationships with the authors whose work he had to revise before the Church would authorise their publication; an exception was with fellow-Dominican Tommaso Campanella.
Campanella was a man of outspoken heterodox beliefs; denounced to the Inquisition, he was arrested in Padua in 1594 and cited before the Holy Office in Rome, he was confined in a convent until 1597.
[4] He was soon in prison again, this time for rebellion against Philip IV of Spain, King of Naples, where he remained for twenty-seven years until the personal intercession of Pope Urban VIII had him released.
The work was ostensibly an account of Campanella's personal journey from rationalism to sincere Christian belief, but the Church considered the arguments he put forward for atheism – before then refuting them – to be strongly persuasive.
In 1630 Giovanni Ciampoli, the Pope's secretary, wrote to Galileo, sending the compliments of Riccardi, recently appointed Master of the Sacred Palace, who now had authority over licensing books for printing.
As Riccardi had endorsed Il Saggiatore for publication a few years previously, this seemed a positive sign that new opportunities to publish his ideas would become available to Galileo.
Benedetto Castelli informed Riccardi that it was his appointment that had inspired Galileo to resume writing – which, given the size and complexity of the Dialogue was certainly not true.
Besides requiring a new title, Urban reiterated that the subject was to be treated only hypothetically, and that his own favoured argument about God's infinite capacity to organise the universe any way he liked must be inserted at the end.
The founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, Prince Cesi, died, meaning Galileo no longer had a patron to cover the cost of publication.
At the same time, the Church's 1616 ruling against Copernicanism meant that anything that appeared to argue for it was problematic, and the Jesuit order was determined to oppose Galileo in every way.
Eventually the Tuscan ambassador's wife, his cousin, was able to broker an arrangement in April 1631 whereby Riccardi agreed to issue a licence to print, subject to certain written conditions.
Riccardi wrote to Clemente Egidi, the Inquisitor of Florence, summarising the process so far from his point of view, and granting him authority to proceed – either to publish or not – as he thought best, thereby effectively washing his hands of the matter.