The Sistine Secrets (23 page)

We can now analyze Michelangelo’s selection of subjects, as we follow the mandate of “ladies first” by beginning with the five sibyls.

Some say that the word
sibyl
comes from the ancient Greek word
sibylla,
which means “prophetess,” but it far more likely derives from the earlier Babylonian/Aramaic
sabba-il,
“ancient one of God.” Sibyls are technically not the same as prophetesses. A sibyl, or oracle, would only respond to a question submitted to her, whereas a prophet is a messenger or mouthpiece for heaven, speaking, blessing, cursing, and predicting the future without human prompting.

There were ten sibyls in the Classical world, with two more added later in Christian medieval lore. Their names and locations varied from nation to nation, and from writer to writer. However, the best-known ones, and the ones that Michelangelo was most likely to know about, were: Libyan, Persian, Hellespontine, Tiburtine, Cumaean, Delphic, Eritrean, Cimmerian, Phrygian, Samian, and Marpessan. The three pagan sibyls that were the commonly accepted prophesiers of the Church were the Tiburtine, the Hellespontine, and the Samian, which made them the top choices for sibyls on those infrequent occasions when they were portrayed in medieval art. The Tiburtine sibyl, from Tivoli near Rome, predicted to Augustus Caesar the Advent of Jesus, as well as revealing that the future emperor Constantine would convert to Christianity and that the Antichrist would be a Jew from the tribe of Dan (a legend often exploited by the anti-Semites of the day). The Hellespontine sibyl foretold the Crucifixion and for this reason is always portrayed with the cross. The Samian sibyl held an especially important place of honor for her very specific prediction that Jesus would be born in a stable. It is telling and quite remarkable that, despite the renown of these three,
Michelangelo refused to use a single one of these images in his work in the Sistine.

So, who are the five sibyls that Michelangelo chose instead to weave into his ceiling? And what was the reason for their selection in place of the seemingly far more logical choices? Let us follow the order in which he painted them, starting from the entrance wall of the chapel. The sequence we see is the Delphic sibyl, the Eritrean, the Cumaean, the Persian, and the Libyan.

THE DELPHIC SIBYL

The Delphic sibyl is at once both breathtakingly beautiful and very sexually ambiguous. If it were not for the quite unconvincing breasts and the few strands of hair that trail out from under her veil, she could easily be mistaken for a teenaged boy. (In fact, Michelangelo used well-built young men as models for all the sibyls.) Her expensively dyed clothes, when you see the actual fresco, have an almost metallic sheen to them—an amazing technical feat in plaster and paint five hundred years ago.

She is one of the earliest sibyls, from Delphi, in ancient Greece. She is not, however, to be confused with Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, who was most famous as the Oracle of Delphi, often a major character in Greek epics and tragedies. Michelangelo’s Delphic sibyl, like the other four sibyls in the Sistine, has no specific name; her identity is restricted to her geographic location. Her simple classic Grecian outfit underlines her origins. Her strands of golden hair show that she is supposed to be a daughter of the sun god Apollo. In Classical literature, as symbolized by the scroll she holds, she appears in Virgil’s epic poem the
Aeneid.

THE ERITREAN SIBYL

The Eritrean sibyl (or as Michelangelo spelled it, Erythraea) is actually Babylonian, born in Chaldea—the same land in which Abraham, the founder of Judaism, was born. Today, this area is part of Iraq. Like the Delphic sibyl, Eritrea is very masculine. Her arms would be the envy of any bodybuilder. Her right arm is reminiscent of the
David
’s in Florence. It seems that Michelangelo, missing his beloved life of sculpting while painting the ceiling, kept dreaming of his favorite works in marble.

Some historians credit the Eritrean sibyl with inventing the acrostic, since she wrote her prophesies on leaves. When put in the proper order, the first letters of the leaves would spell out a key word to understanding her prediction. In Michelangelo’s version, the leaf of the book that she is holding begins with a large illuminated letter
Q.

THE PERSIAN SIBYL

Little is known of the Persian sibyl except that she supposedly foresaw the exploits of Alexander the Great. In Michelangelo’s rendering, she is shown as aged and having to squint closely to read her book. The putti below her and her book are dumbstruck in darkness. Even though she is very old, she has an incredibly muscular, masculine arm that seems to belong more to a male statue than to a painting of an aged woman—a typical paradoxical Michelangelo touch.

THE LIBYAN SIBYL

In spite of her name the Libyan sibyl was from Egypt, specifically from an oasis in the area called the Libyan Desert. She is known in many ancient accounts, but certainly a version that Michelangelo would have seen was that of Plutarch. In that account, Alexander the Great came to consult her and she foretold that he would be a great conqueror and become the ruler of Egypt.

In her panel, the artist portrays her either picking up or putting away a large book, but one of the putti next to her is holding a scroll as well. The Libyan sibyl is especially famous for her quote about the “coming of the day when that which is hidden shall be revealed.” As he was painting her, Michelangelo may very well have been contemplating the day when his hidden messages in the Sistine would also finally be brought to light.

Michelangelo assuredly felt a strong kinship with Alexander the Great on many counts. Alexander, like Michelangelo, was friendly with the Jews and fascinated by their religion and culture. Through his passions for learning and conquest, Alexander was able to bridge pagan Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish culture. And on a personal level, both the artist and the ancient conqueror were lovers of men.

As an interesting aside, we have a rare surviving sketch from Michelangelo (see above right), made while he was preparing the Libyan sibyl panel, that proves he used only well-built young men to model for these women.

THE CUMAEAN SIBYL

We have saved the Cumaean sibyl for last, since she is the oldest and most famous of all the sibyls. Although Cumaea was located near modern-day Naples, she is considered the sibyl of Rome. It was Cumaea who wrote the Sibylline Books and sold them to Lucius Tarquinius the Proud, one of the legendary kings of Rome. As the story goes, every time she offered to sell him the books of prophecies about the future of Rome, he complained that the price was too high. Cumaea was an even tougher negotiator than the king. Each time he refused to buy, she burned some of the irreplaceable scrolls and then upped her asking price. By the time Tarquinius the Proud finally caved in, she sold him the surviving one-third of the books for four times the original price.

The Cumaean sibyl did have her comeuppance, however. The mythological god Apollo desired her for her beauty and wisdom. She asked him for a favor first: gathering up a fistful of sand, she told Apollo that she wanted to live as many years as the grains of sand in her hand. He granted her wish, but she then refused his advances. Apollo replied, “Very well, but you forgot to ask me to grant you extended youth along with extended life.” As the centuries passed, Cumaea held on to life but grew older and older, shrinking so much with age that she eventually fit inside an oil jar. Michelangelo portrays her—in spite of a massively muscular male body—as an ugly old crone whose head has already shrunk so that it is far too small for her body.

The real Sibylline Books, if they ever existed, were destroyed in a fire in 83 BCE. This means that the so-called Sibylline Books, blended together with the ancient ethical teachings of Pseudo-Phocylides that were studied at the time of Michelangelo, were medieval inventions. This did not stop the Church, though, from spreading the idea that Cumaea had prophesied about both the coming of Jesus and the divine choice of Julius II for pope. This is why Buonarroti, wanting to keep
Il Papa Terribile
appeased during this touchy project, gave the Roman sibyl’s clothing the della Rovere family colors of royal blue and gold, and placed her right in the middle of the wall across from the papal throne area. Cumaea is symbolizing Julius, the Vatican, and Rome. Yet, unable to completely contain his true feelings about the pope, Michelangelo inserted a not-so-angelic putto (the singular form of
putti
) giving the old lady “the fig” gesture, just as he did in the panel of Zechariah over the front door. This daring personal insult was so subtly placed that it was only discovered recently, during the cleaning and restoration of the Sistine. Now, five centuries later, we can see that the angry artist succeeded, amazingly enough, in giving Pope Julius II the finger not once, but
twice
—from his very own commissioned ceiling project.

The location of each of the sibyls has significance and helps to explain its message. Let us see where the other four are set.

As you will recall, the four fan-shaped panels in the chapel’s corners represent the four exiles that the Jews are fated to endure, according to predictions in the book of Daniel: Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and Greece. It is for these four exiles and subsequent redemptions that, according to many interpretations, Jews drink the four ceremonial cups of wine during the Passover seder. On the ceiling, Michelangelo juxtaposed each sibyl nearest the exile it represents. The Delphic sibyl is the symbol of Greek dominance; she is next to the Judith-and-Holofernes corner, which deals with the Hanukkah story in the book of Maccabees that recalls the liberation of the Jewish people from Greek (Hellenistic) dominance. Libya, who Buonarroti (thanks to his studies of Plutarch) surely knew was really from Egypt, is next to the corner panel of Moses’s copper serpent saving the Jews who had just been redeemed from Egypt.

Persia, naturally, is nearest to the corner dealing with the story of Esther, who saves the Jews of Persia from the genocidal Haman. Eritrea, who was really from Babylon, posed a problem to Michelangelo’s plan. The Babylonian exile was ended by Persian military conquest, not by a Jewish heroine or hero. This would have made for a confusing and not very religiously inspiring scene and would have disrupted the theme of Jewish redemption by a Jewish spiritual hero or heroine in all four corners. So, the next best spiritual symbol that the artist could choose was the liberation from the other oppressive Middle Eastern pagan nation that bordered ancient Israel—the Philistines. Thus, closest to Eritrea, the Middle Eastern sibyl, he depicts the Jewish hero David defeating Goliath, the Philistine giant.

This leaves us with Cumaea, the symbol of Rome. In Michelangelo’s lifetime, the Jews of the West were considered still to be in Roman exile, since they were living under the domination of the Church. This is why he shows the putto making an obscene gesture at Cumaea. She is a symbol of everything that Michelangelo detested about the abuses of power, the intolerance, and the hypocrisy of the Vatican. As he described it in his poem, the Vatican of his day had distorted and betrayed both Christ and Christianity. This is why he had to be so cunning and careful about hiding his messages in the Sistine. Michelangelo had promised the pope and his advisers that his theme for the ceiling would be the redemption of the world through the Church. Instead, he masterfully inserted his personal longing for the future redemption of the world
from
the dominance of the Church’s corrupt leadership of his day.

THE HEBREW PROPHETS

Now, let’s take a close look at the seven male Hebrew prophets. The first point is why Michelangelo chose this number. By now we know that there must be many symbolic reasons for just this number, since we are dealing with an artwork designed to express secretly a multilayered way of viewing the universe, as alluded to in the Talmud and the Kabbalah. What immediately comes to mind, of course, are the seven days of creation. According to Kabbalah, not only the material universe, but also Reality itself was brought into being during these seven days. This would certainly be appropriate for Michelangelo to emphasize in his ceiling design, which he hoped would create a new universal reality of spirit. All seven of these Jewish prophets were perfectly suited for this message as they foretold a future spiritual redemption, not just for the Jews but for all humanity.

Another key meaning to the number seven is its connection with the seven “lights” of the Holy Menorah, the golden seven-branched candelabra that was inside the Temple of Jerusalem. Even though there were already seven marble flames on top of the marble partition grill from the original fifteenth-century design of the Sistine, Michelangelo wanted to add his own version of the Menorah to this full-sized copy of the Holy Temple. It is a good thing that he did, considering that a generation after Michelangelo finished the ceiling, another pope would add an eighth marble flame to the partition, purposely ruining its correspondence to the Menorah. The prophet Zechariah envisioned the seven lights of the Holy Menorah as the “eyes of God,” looking in all directions. That is surely why Buonarroti spread out his seven prophets all over the ceiling, looking in all directions, to serve as the eyes of God witnessing what goes on in the Sistine and in the world at large. Similarly, the prophets are also reminiscent of the Midrash that identifies seven clouds of glory that protected the children of Israel while they wandered through the wilderness. Kabbalah explains that we are threatened from seven sides: east, west, north, and south, above and below—and finally from within our selves.

Yet another explanation is that the prophets represent the Seven Middot, the seven characteristics of the seven lower
s’firot,
or spheres (in the singular,
s’firah
), on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. These Seven Middot, in ascending order toward the Divine Unity, are: