The Sistine Secrets (18 page)

And every road to virtue here is closed.
⁴

The man who penned these lines would not have toiled four and a half years under horrible conditions in order to create a paean of praise and glory to the holiness of the Church under Pope Julius. In the following chapters, we are going to take you on an unprecedented private tour—a step-by-step explanation of what Michelangelo
really
put up on that ceiling.

BOOK TWO

A Private Tour of the Sistine Temple

Chapter Seven

CROSSING THE THRESHOLD

Without having seen the Sistine Chapel
one can form no appreciable idea of what
one man is capable of achieving.

—GOETHE

Y
OU DON’T ENTER the same way anymore.

Today, your first view of the magnificent frescoes is far from what Michelangelo had in mind. The great portal of the pontiffs is closed to the average visitor. Instead, you pass through a narrow acolytes’ doorway at the far end of the hall. If you have a moment to look back, you will notice that you have just passed beneath the family crest of Alexander Borgia, the “poisoner pope,” and under the crotch of King Minos, condemned to have his genitals chewed eternally by a poisonous serpent in the fresco of
The Last Judgment.

Harried guards immediately direct you to get off the altar area. You are unceremoniously hustled onto the main floor, which is completely filled by the feet of thousands of tired visitors who have just made it through the labyrinth of the Vatican Museums complex. You are immersed in a mob of overwhelmed tourists and pilgrims, harsh cries of “Silence…No photos, no video” from the staff, and arrogant visitors who nonetheless insist on taking photos and videos. You look up and crane your neck to try to grasp visually what you have only seen in photographs and illustrations, but you are simply overwhelmed by the hundreds of swirling figures, shapes, and bright colors.

You last perhaps ten or fifteen minutes in the presence of this massive sensory overload before you exit—having seen most of it upside down and backward from the direction of Michelangelo’s design.

And this is the way that most visitors experience the great Sistine Chapel.

Small wonder, then, that most of the profound meaning and messages of Michelangelo remain unnoticed by the average tourist. Even scholars have misinterpreted or overlooked many of the ceiling’s secrets for centuries. To appreciate fully the miracle that is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, a viewer needs to understand Michelangelo’s motivations, his background, his early years of intellectual ferment with private tutors in the Palazzo de’ Medici in Florence, and—perhaps the most unrecognized influence on his entire career—his fascination with Judaism and the mystical teachings of the Kabbalah. Did he himself come up with every bit of this forbidden knowledge that he then incorporated into the Sistine? We have already indicated some potential “suspects,” such as the pope’s Jewish physician Schmuel Sarfati and the Christian Kabbalist Tommaso Inghirami, but we will never know for sure. What we do know is that Pope Julius II, ill with syphilis and burdened with other affairs, finally did leave the design of the ceiling project to the argumentative Michelangelo. In a private letter eleven years after the project was finished, Michelangelo recounted that when he and the pope could not agree about the design (“It seemed it would not turn out well”), Julius finally capitulated—the first time in history that a pope had yielded to a painter. Surprisingly, Julius granted Buonarroti “a new commission that I should do what I wanted.” Whatever his source of Jewish knowledge—his own studies or advice from others behind the scenes—it was the sculptor-turned-painter-under-duress who ultimately risked his art and his very life by choosing and embedding these messages in his master plan.

What is this plan, then? What does the great ceiling really mean? To understand it fully, we have to experience it the way that Michelangelo created it and meant it to be interpreted: step by step, layer by layer.

It is important to keep in mind that originally all visitors to the chapel entered through the front door, to experience the sanctuary as an organic whole, first seeing the entire length of the hall from the portal and then slowly immersing themselves in the imagery, step by step. Michelangelo’s purpose was twofold: On the one hand, the impact of the large-scale all-encompassing view served as powerful inspiration; one could not help but be overwhelmed, both visually and emotionally. But there is another function—a brilliant technique to conceal the deeper and more dangerous messages in his work. Michelangelo put so many different ingredients into the mix that the average viewer is distracted, unsettled, and ultimately disoriented.

To give you an idea of how much Michelangelo included in the chapel ceiling, here is just a small list of its major components:

• Trompe l’oeuil architecture
  
• The four salvations of the Jews
  
• The genealogy of the ancestral Jews
  
• Prophets
  
• Sibyls
  
• Medallions
  
• Garlands
  
• Giant nudes
  
• Bronze nudes
  
• Putti
  
• The first two Torah sections of the book of Genesis—event by event
  

There is so much information and decoration that this, the world’s largest fresco painting at about twelve thousand square feet, seems overstuffed and overdone. Let us be clear: it
is
—and on purpose. Think of a master magician performing sleight-of-hand tricks. The prestidigitator will be making so many flourishes, grandiose gestures, and distracting movements with one hand that you will never notice the real operation happening in the other hand. So it is with the artwork in the Sistine Chapel.

Of course, one can find significance in every element in the frescoes, but even the most casual comparison with the austere simplicity of Michelangelo’s sculpture and architecture—for example, the
David,
the Campidoglio Piazza, the
Pietà,
and the de’ Medici Chapel—suggests that the sensory overload of the Sistine is the result of a conscious decision on the part of the artist. Michelangelo’s genius was in allowing the viewer to see a great deal—in order
not
to show what is best left secret, except to the knowledgeable few. In other words, he put in so many trees that we cannot see the forest.

To view the chapel ceiling in the private way that the artist intended for his inner circle, imagine that you enter with your eyes closed, that someone guides you down the altar steps and across the length of the room, through the marble partition, to the far end where you turn around and open your eyes. This is an apt image, since to understand all of Michelangelo’s secret messages, you will need to close your eyes to the standard interpretations, go bravely forward, turn your mind-set around, and open your eyes to a new reality.

To unveil and understand the Sistine secrets, we will need to proceed with care, in a Neoplatonic, Kabbalistic way: starting from the edges and working our way in, element by element, toward the central core of meaning.

Turn your gaze now directly over the large wooden
portone
(great door) of the pope and you will see the first of seven Jewish prophets on the ceiling—Zechariah. Whenever the pope enters the chapel through the main entrance, Zechariah is sitting right over his head,
in the very spot where Pope Julius II had wanted Michelangelo to place Jesus.

Why one of the later, lesser-known Jewish prophets over the front door of the Sistine? Michelangelo must have selected Zechariah for a variety of reasons—again, there are multiple layers of meaning, so integral to Talmudic and Kabbalistic thought, and so dear to Michelangelo. First of all, Zechariah warned the corrupt priesthood of the Second Holy Temple: “Open your doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour your cedars” (Zechariah 11:1). This was a prophecy that if the priesthood did not cease its corrupt, unspiritual behavior, the doors of the sanctuary would be broken open by attacking foes and the Temple, built partly of cedarwood from Lebanon, would be burned down. And here is the author of that warning, right over the doors of Pope Julius’s sanctuary.

Zechariah is also the prophet of consolation and redemption. He is the one who urges the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem and the Holy Temple: “Thus says the Lord of hosts; My cities shall again overflow with prosperity; and the Lord shall yet comfort Zion, and shall yet choose Jerusalem” (Zechariah 1:17). In his own way, Buonarroti is clueing us in on the fact that he knows what the Sistine is—a full-sized copy of the
heichal,
the long rectangular back end of the Jewish Holy Temple. At the same time, however, he is letting us know that he does not subscribe to the Church’s theology of successionism; he does not believe that Jerusalem can be replaced by a copy of the Temple in a foreign land.

Another vision of Zechariah involves “four horns” that will afflict Israel. These are four exiles under oppressive foreign regimes: Egypt, which had already ended; Babylon, which was just ending during Zechariah’s time; Persia, which had just conquered Babylon; and finally Greece. These four horns are reflected in the four curved panels in the corners of the ceiling, which surround Zechariah and which contain so many secrets that they merit an upcoming chapter.

Zechariah also had another prophetic vision, of the Holy Menorah, or golden seven-branched candelabra, in the Temple. Even though it had seven branches, they were all made from a single piece of beaten gold, and all their lights leaned together toward the center. This is the reason that the original partition grill in the Sistine had seven candle flames of marble sculpted on top—it symbolized the Menorah, placed right before the image of Zechariah. These seven lights, according to his prophecy, are “the eyes of the Lord” (4:10) that watch over the whole of creation.

This symbol of all the different branches stemming from a single piece of gold is the core of Zechariah’s teaching, and also of Michelangelo’s message. It means that even though there are many various branches of belief, and many names for God, all come together in the end, to one common Light. No one People of the Book has the right to try to dominate, subdue, invalidate, or convert another. “‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts,’ proclaims the prophet” (Zechariah 4:6). Right at the outset of decorating the pope’s supremacist, exclusionary sanctuary of the One True Church, Michelangelo painted one of the most universalist, inclusionary figures of the Hebrew Scriptures, in the hope that one day his message would be heard and heeded even in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel: “…and on that day the Lord shall be One, and His Name—One” (Zechariah 14:9).

Still, the rebellious artist had placed a minor Jewish prophet in the important spot where the pope had wanted Jesus. How did Michelangelo imagine he would avoid the pope’s wrath in openly defying his wishes? Replacing Jesus with a minor prophet might have doomed any other commissioned artist, but Michelangelo found a brilliant way to appease his patron. The
Zechariah
panel is not simply an idealized portrait of a biblical figure. Michelangelo superimposed a portrait of Pope Julius II on the ancient Hebrew prophet. Not only that, but Michelangelo portrayed Zechariah dressed in a mantle of royal blue and gold—the traditional colors of the della Rovere clan, the family of both Pope Sixtus IV and his nephew Pope Julius II. Replacing the image of Jesus Christ with a portrait of the pontiff? This was no problem for the egomaniacal Julius. It placed his visage permanently over the entrance to this glorious new sanctuary for all future popes and commemorated his family’s role as its builders.

The juxtaposition of Julius over the royal entranceway was a masterful psychological stroke by Michelangelo. At the very beginning of the great project, it must have helped ease the pope’s fears about the rebellious artist’s behavior. It is not hard to imagine that Michelangelo counted on this sop to the pope’s gigantic ego to help gain him pardon for subsequently abandoning the pope’s design of an entirely Christian ceiling.

But Michelangelo couldn’t entirely subdue his true feelings toward his patron. He was distraught at the prospect of several lonely years up on ladders and scaffolding, doing the type of art he most disdained—painting—and not being able to pursue his greatest passion in life—sculpting. So he incorporated yet another message in the supposed tribute to the pope that leaves us with a totally different perspective.

The putti, or little angelic figures, in the panel with Zechariah serve as “supporting characters,” created by Michelangelo to “whisper” subtly to the informed viewer the real thoughts of the artist. In this case, they are looking over the prophet’s shoulder, casually reading his book. One angel leans on his companion; they look for all the world like two modern Italian soccer fans reading the latest match results in someone else’s newspaper on the subway. What is very hard to see is that the little innocent golden-haired angel who is resting on the other is making an extremely obscene hand gesture at the back of Pope Julius’s head. He has made a fist, with his thumb stuck between his index and middle fingers. This is called “making the fig”—and it is the medieval and Renaissance version of what we would call today “giving someone the finger” or more colloquially, “flipping the bird.” It is a bit blurred and shadowy on purpose, since if the elderly pope had seen it clearly, Michelangelo’s career—and most probably his life—would have ended right there.

True, hardly anyone realizes it, but to this day when a papal procession enters through the giant portal for a rare mass in the chapel, the pontiff passes right under a portrait of his predecessor getting the finger from Michelangelo.