The Sistine Secrets (19 page)

Chapter Eight

THE VAULT OF HEAVEN

As below, so above: as above, so below.

—KABBALISTIC PROVERB

O
NE OF MICHELANGELO’s many objections to painting the Sistine ceiling was its lack of Classic architectural details. The chapel, even though it follows the exact measurements and proportions of the original Holy Temple, has a simple, medieval feel. The ceiling is a plain barrel vault, its austerity relieved only by the twelve triangles around the edge. This was entirely the opposite of Michelangelo’s taste. He loved pagan Roman design: the Pantheon, the muscular male Greco-Roman statues being discovered all over Rome, the details from broken cornices found in the Forum, and the coffered ceilings of the Basilica of Maxentius, just to name a few examples. A barrel-vault design from the Middle Ages would not have suited his taste at all.

There is a story told about him when he was very old, famous, and wealthy. A cardinal was passing by in a fancy carriage on a snowy winter day and noticed the great artist trudging through the slush and mud, heading toward the Colosseum and the Forum. (Back then, the Forum was called the
campus bovinus,
the “cow field,” since only a few of the tallest remnants of the ancient glories of Rome were sticking up through the dirt.) The cardinal ordered his coachman to pull up alongside Michelangelo and offered him a ride. The proud Florentine refused the offer, saying, “Thank you, but I am on my way to school.” “School?” replied the puzzled cardinal. “You are the great Buonarroti. What school could possibly have anything to teach you?” Michelangelo pointed to the Colosseum and the few battered remains of the Forum. “This,” he answered, “this is my school.”

When Michelangelo planned the great ceiling project, one of the first parts of his concept was a trompe l’oeuil architectural structure, not only to appear to hold up the vault, but also to frame the huge variety of panels and images, much like an art gallery sixty-five feet up in the air. The faux structure has several other functions as well. In spite of seeming to be heavy marble, it lightens up the massive barrel-vault ceiling and appears to lift it toward the heavens. When you stand at the main entrance to the chapel, in front of the great
portone
of the popes, the ceiling does not seem flat, but rather like an airplane taking off into the sky. To add to this effect, Michelangelo inserted two tiny slits of faux sky at either end of the vault, subliminally making the viewer feel as if the whole fresco were an open, airy framework. It also signals the viewer that the ceiling is not a “minestrone” of floating bits of unrelated images, but a true unified, organic system of thought, much like the Neoplatonic unifying philosophy that had so absorbed Michelangelo in his youth.

The school of Neoplatonism offers us a clear explanation for the faux Roman architecture that forms the skeletal frame of Michelangelo’s work. Pico della Mirandola and the other teachers of the de’ Medici circle were enamored of Philo of Alexandria, an early Jewish philosopher who developed a profoundly influential system of Kabbalistic thought early in the first century CE. In fact, many theologians and religious historians credit Philo’s writings with having a major formative effect on the beginnings of Christianity. In one of his better-known works,
De Opificio Mundi
(On the creation of the world), Philo describes God as the “Great Architect” of the universe.

When any city is founded through the exceeding ambition of some king or leader who lays claim to absolute authority, and is at the same time a man of brilliant imagination, eager to display his good fortune, then it happens at times that some man coming up who, from his education, is skillful in architecture, and he, seeing the advantageous character and beauty of the situation, first of all sketches out in his own mind nearly all the parts of the city which is about to be completed…. then having received in his own mind, as on a waxen tablet, the form of each building, he carries in his heart the image of a city…. like a good workman, keeping his eyes fixed on his model, he begins to raise the city of stones and wood, making the corporeal substances to resemble each of the incorporeal ideas. Now, we must form a somewhat similar opinion of God, Who, having determined to found a mighty state (the Universe), first of all conceived its form in his mind, according to which form he made a world perceptible only by the intellect, and then completed one visible to the external senses, using the first one as a model.
¹

This beautifully describes not only the process for an architect, but also for a Renaissance artist, particularly one preparing to create a fresco. The painter first had to conceive of the entire project, mapping it out in his head, then making sketches and preparatory full-size drawings on paper, which were then finally transferred onto the permanent plaster surface.

Michelangelo’s project surely brought Philo’s all-incorporating philosophy to mind. Just as the Divine Architect mapped out the entire master plan of the creation, the artist must first map out the planned unity of his project.

In Michelangelo’s study of Midrash, the collection of oral lore connected to the Jewish Scriptures, he almost certainly came upon the famous dictum that “The Creator used the Torah as the blueprint of the universe.” In the order of creation, the Torah came first. “I was in the mind of the Holy One,” the Torah is quoted as saying, “like the overall design in the mind of a craftsman.” The Midrash continues: “In the way of the world, when a king of flesh and blood builds a palace, he builds it not according to his own whim, but according to the idea of an architect. Moreover, the architect does not build it out of his own head; he has [a design]—plans and diagrams to know how to lay out the chambers and where to put in wicket doors. Even so the Holy One looked into the Torah as He created the world” (B’resheet Rabbah, 1:2).

Architectural design as a metaphor is so important in classic Jewish thought—later adopted by the Neoplatonic school—that it is linked with the beginning of monotheism and Abraham’s discovery of God. How did Abraham come to the startling conclusion that there must be a single, unique Creator? The Midrash explains that Abraham, living in a pagan world, at first could not conceive of a Higher Power. One day, however, “Abraham passed a palace with beautifully constructed rooms, magnificently tended lawns and intricately planned surroundings and suddenly said to himself, ‘Is it possible that all this came into being on its own without builder or architect? Of course that is absurd. And so too must be the case with this world. Its ingenious design bespeaks a Designer’” (B’resheet Rabbah, 39:1). It was the concept of a Divine Architect that brought the idea of One God to humanity.

For Michelangelo the faux architectural framework he created for the Sistine ceiling allowed him to express not only a correspondence between the divine and the human architect but also to illustrate an important principle of Kabbalistic harmonizing unity. It is yet another secret that almost no visitor to the Sistine knows. To demonstrate Philo’s philosophy that all faiths and cultures come from One Source and lead to One Source, Michelangelo pulled off the most amazing feat of perspective in the Renaissance. The large panels on the central strip of the ceiling are framed by giant naked youths, the
ignudi.
These ignudi are seated with their feet or toes resting on square trompe l’oeuil pedestals with pairs of small naked putti carved into the stone. When anyone looks at the square bases all over the vault, their angles are askew. No matter where you stand in the chapel, the pedestals seem to pop out at many disorderly angles.

There is one spot, however, on the smallest but most central of the porphyry disks in the middle of the mosaic floor, that creates a different perspective. Stand on precisely that spot and all the square bases suddenly align themselves perfectly and point
directly at your head.

What is truly amazing is that Michelangelo executed this so perfectly from sixty-five feet above the chapel floor, visualizing the sight lines through an obstacle course of scaffolding and canvas drop cloths, over a period of four long years and without the aid of computers or laser aligning devices.

Why did Michelangelo pick this particular porphyry disk on the floor for this fantastic effect? This was the disk upon which the pope himself knelt during many rites in the chapel. Back then, the white marble grill was in the center of the chapel, immediately
after
this disk when one entered from the great portal. This was another reminder from the original designers of the chapel, marking the exact spot in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem where the High Priest passed through the Veil to enter the Holy of Holies. Just before crossing through the Sistine’s partition and entering the inner part of the sanctuary, the ruler of the Catholic Church would have to kneel down on the last of the ceremonial disks, the small central core of ten concentric circles, akin to the Ten S’firot (spheres of the universe) of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Michelangelo, in his fresco, added the crowning touch. If the pope looked up, the entire unity of the Alexandrian architecture would bear down on his head, a truly humbling experience for those in the know who have actually stood on this spot. (However, knowing Julius II’s ego, he probably thought it was proof that the entire universe revolved around him.)

Whether the visual effect was meant to be humbling or exalting, Michelangelo almost magically pulled together the earlier paving of the sanctuary with his sixteenth-century ceiling. In fact, this is just about the only spot where one can experience the chapel as a harmonized whole instead of an overwhelming visual bombardment. In this way, Michelangelo managed to join the preexisting flooring with his new ceiling design into a unique statement. The result was an uncanny illustration of the ancient Kabbalistic tenet “As below, so above; as above, so below.” In other words, the spiritual design of the floor reflected the spiritual design of the ceiling, and vice versa. Michelangelo had fully absorbed the mystical teaching from ancient Judaic sources that our actions on earth, whether good or evil, can indeed influence the universe. Here was a concept that appealed to Michelangelo as a disciple of the school of Neoplatonism as well.

In his biography of Plotinus, Porphyry records the last words of his teacher to his students: “Strive to bring back the god in yourselves to the God in the All.”
²
That final legacy of the master of Neoplatonic philosophy left its mark in Michelangelo’s incredible unification of the lower and upper spheres in the Sistine Chapel.

Years after Michelangelo had created this effect in the Sistine, the same as-below-so-above reflection was echoed in other great structures in Rome. Two prime examples are the Palazzo Farnese (in which Buonarroti himself had a hand) and the Church of Sant’Ivo by the Baroque architect Borromini, who in the seventeenth century followed in Michelangelo’s footsteps by embedding a great deal of hidden Kabbalistic and even Masonic imagery in his works for the church. In this case, the shapes of both the floor of Sant’Ivo and the cupola above contain the same camouflaged design—the Kabbalistic Seal of Solomon, better known today as the Star of David. As in the Renaissance, so in the Baroque.

So far, we have looked at only the underlying faux architectural “foundation” of the ceiling and the very first panel over the front door. Already Michelangelo has used ancient Kabbalistic design to unify the chapel, has buttered up the dangerous Julius II to his face and cursed him behind his back…and the cunning artist is just getting warmed up.

At this point, your eyes are being drawn ever more strongly to the famous panels in the center of the ceiling, but as Buonarroti himself said, “Genius is in eternal patience.” We need to proceed
a cipolla
—onion-style, layer by layer. The next elements are among the most ignored parts of the giant fresco, but they hold the keys to some of the biggest secrets in the whole Sistine.

Chapter Nine

THE HOUSE OF DAVID

A sign between Me and you throughout
your generations…

—EXODUS 31:13

Y
OU WILL REMEMBER that the original commission for the ceiling was a plan designed by the pope and his closest advisers. Jesus was to have been the focal point of the project, surrounded by his apostles and probably also Mary and John the Baptist. This commission was especially dear to the pope’s heart, since the chapel had originally been built by his uncle Sixtus IV and would be an eternal monument to their family’s glory. Now Michelangelo was about to subvert the entire project to secretly promote his own beliefs, especially those of humanism, Neoplatonism, and universal tolerance. He had already somewhat appeased the pope with his ploy of putting him in the place of Jesus—but how was he going to get the pope to pay for the world’s largest Catholic fresco without a single Christian figure in it? And how would he get his design past the papal censors? The Vatican explains the underlying concept for the ceiling—indeed the whole chapel—as all of earlier religious history, composed of paganism and Judaism, leading up to the coming of Jesus the Messiah. In fact, though, it is the
Hebrew
Bible’s heroes and heroines who have the starring roles on the ceiling.

To resolve this dilemma, Michelangelo created the panels known as
The Ancestors,
set in the walls beneath the central ceiling frescoes. Here Michelangelo at least minimally fulfilled the terms of his contract by tracing the lineage of Christ according to the Gospel of Matthew, the first verses of the Christian Bible. This genealogy follows the Vulgate, the Latinized version of the original names in the text, and is arguably the only Christian element in the entire work, even though it is just a barely noticeable series of names without any Christian imagery. Yet even with his choice of Christian
text,
the antiestablishment artist was already blazing his own trail. Up until Michelangelo, the preferred source for the lineage of Jesus was the Gospel of Luke, which begins with Adam, not Abraham. Indeed, many medieval and Renaissance images of the Crucifixion show the skull of Adam at the foot of the cross, symbolizing that Christ’s sacrifice had graced humanity with a way to expiate the Original Sin of the first man and woman. In the Sistine, though, the people named in Jesus’s family tree are all Jews.