The Sistine Secrets (35 page)

Buonarroti was later given the job of designing the huge dome of the new Basilica of St. Peter. It is well known how much he loved the simplicity and perfection of ancient Roman architecture. His favorite building of all was the Pantheon, the central shrine to the Greek and Roman idols, built by Hadrian in the first half of the second century. Michelangelo proposed to the pope that he make a large copy of the Pantheon dome on top of the new St. Peter’s. The horrified pontiff replied that Hadrian’s dome was
pagan
—the Vatican cathedral had to have a Christian-looking dome, like the one built in Florence a century before by Brunelleschi. The disappointed artist designed the famous egg-shaped dome that the whole world knows today…with one little detail that most of the world does
not
know.

It is a Catholic tradition that the
cupola,
or dome, of any city’s cathedral must be both the tallest structure and the widest dome, to show its authority.
*
When Michelangelo died at age eighty-nine, the massive
tamburro,
or drum-shaped base, for the dome had already been completed. Of course, construction was halted for several weeks. As any contractor or engineer will tell you, whenever there is a long pause in a building project, it is important to remeasure everything, because of possible shifting, contraction, or expansion of the structure. When they remeasured Michelangelo’s base for the dome, they discovered that he had once more outfoxed the Vatican. The diameter was a good foot and a half
narrower
than the pagan Pantheon. There was nothing to be done, except finish the dome and hope that nobody would find out. To this day, the Vatican dome is the
second
-widest dome in Rome.

In his last years, Michelangelo worked on new pietà sculptures—not for any pope, but for his own diversion and probably for his own tomb. His eyesight had never recovered from his torment on the ceiling of the Sistine, and by this point in his life he was almost blind. He was sculpting more by feel than by sight—and yet he persevered, even trying new carving techniques right up until six days before his death. His best-known pietà from this last period is the one now housed in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence. He had put all his remaining energy into the top of the sculpture, and by the time he had worked his way down more than halfway, he found more and more defects, both in the marble and in his own carving. Frustrated that his hands and eyes could no longer match what he envisioned in his mind, he smashed the legs of Jesus in a fit of rage and gave the pieces to his servant. Fortunately for us, the servant saved all the pieces and sold them to a merchant who had the whole thing put back together again.

We can also see why he had put all his energy into the top of the grouping. Holding up Jesus from behind is the hooded figure of Nicodemus. According to Christian tradition, he is the symbol of hiding one’s true faith in order to survive and serve God. Juan de Valdés had instructed his secret followers, the Spirituali, to practice what he called
nicodemismo,
disguising their underground illuminist faith, in an attempt to infiltrate the Church and reform it from the inside, while avoiding capture and execution by the Inquisition. When we take a good look at the face of Nicodemus, we see the last self-portrait of a man who hid so many of his true beliefs throughout his long life—Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Chapter Seventeen

“A WORLD TRANSFIGURED”

A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as
does failing to hear and see it.

—MICHELANGELO

Within the fall, we find the ascent.

—KABBALISTIC PROVERB

R
OME IN WINTER, 1564.

The great maestro Michelangelo Buonarroti, the last survivor of the golden age of Florence, lay dying at the age of eighty-nine. With him were being extinguished the last embers of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo, Raphael, Bramante, Botticelli, Lorenzo de’ Medici—all the other great figures had passed away long before. Now art and science were being stunted and censored, books burned in public, freethinking forced to go deep underground. The Jews of Rome were walled up alive in the prison known as the ghetto, and all their venerable sanctuaries and centers of learning outside the ghetto walls destroyed without a trace. Wars covered the face of Europe. It seemed that the world was sliding back into darkness. How had things fallen to such a depth?

Back in the 1540s, Pope Paul III had started the repressive measures of the Counter-Reformation to crack down on the growth of reformers, Lutherans, and freethinkers in the Catholic world. One impetus for this puritanical backlash was the outrage expressed by fundamentalists in response to the unveiling of Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment,
with its hundreds of stark-naked figures right in the heart of the Vatican. The relentless Cardinal Carafa and his spies started hunting down the Spirituali all over Europe. Those who were not arrested and executed had to run for their lives and died in exile. The lucky ones, such as Giulia Gonzaga and Vittoria Colonna, died of natural illnesses before they could be rounded up and burned in public. The Spirituali’s last hope had been Cardinal Reginald Pole, their man deep inside the Church hierarchy. When the Council of Trent was convened, he led the large contingent of reformist delegates. They had hoped to meet with Martin Luther in person and somehow reach an accord that would have allowed the two faiths, Catholic and Protestant, to merge again into one new Church. The Vatican hardliners, however, were able to stall the proceedings so long that Luther died shortly after the opening session. That was the beginning of the end.

When Pole saw that Vatican rejectionists had taken over the council, he pretended to be ill and fled before he could be arrested. The Council of Trent became the death knell for any reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics. It also destroyed any hopes of tolerance for the Jews of Europe. The Inquisition gained much more power, and soon the dreaded Cardinal Carafa was able to establish the Index of Forbidden Books, as well as torture chambers in the heart of Rome. Artwork was also condemned, and a large amount of the council’s time and energy was spent discussing Michelangelo’s “obscenities and heresies” in his Sistine frescoes. The Holy Inquisition was revitalized and expanded, to terrorize most of Europe, publicly burning copies of the Talmud as well as paintings, together with freethinkers, Jews, artists, and homosexuals.

There had been one last-ditch attempt at reconciliation in 1549. When Pope Paul III Farnese died, the conclave stood poised to elect none other than Cardinal Pole, the secret member of the Spirituali, as the new pope. He had the necessary two-thirds majority of cardinals about to vote him into office when, at the last moment, late-arriving cardinals from France brought about a stalemate. Amid a flurry of bribes, politicking, and at least one possible poisoning, a compromise pope was elected—Julius III del Monte. This new Julius did not care about religious reform or art—or anything intellectual, for that matter. He had fallen in love with a thirteen-year-old boy of the streets four years earlier and forced his wealthy brother to adopt the lad. His first act upon being crowned pope was to ordain the boy, now seventeen, with his adoptive name, as Cardinal Nephew Innocent Ciocchi del Monte. While the Inquisition was persecuting and burning homosexuals around Europe, the pope and his almost illiterate teenaged lover were holding private parties in their newly constructed pleasure palace of Villa Giulia (today the Etruscan Museum in Rome). During this do-nothing papacy, the fanatical Cardinal Carafa became more and more influential, leading Cardinal Pole, in fear for his life, to return to England in 1554, when the Catholic Queen Mary took the throne. Under Mary’s reign, Pole abandoned the ideals of the Spirituali and wreaked his revenge on the Protestants, whom he blamed for the torture and murder of his family. The man who might have been the great reforming and reconciling pope died instead as a mass murderer in 1558. Pietro Aretino, Michelangelo’s other surviving ally from the underground group, turned against the artist publicly and vociferously condemned him for the very same
Last Judgment
in which he had been immortalized as Saint Bartholomew, and for which he had earlier praised Buonarroti. Julius III’s papacy was also the first time in fifty years that Michelangelo’s talents in sculpting and painting were ignored by the Vatican. Only his architectural work for the cathedral under Paul III was allowed to continue; other than that, the aged artist was ignominiously shunted aside.

The last ramparts of free art and free thinking fell in 1555. When Julius III died, the next conclave elected Cardinal Marcello Cervini. Cervini was the last great hope of the Renaissance and the reformers. He was a brilliant, modest, open-minded Tuscan, respected by all and poised to clean the Vatican and make peace with the Protestants. A desperate conclave of cardinals immediately and unanimously elected him on the first ballot. To the horror of his supporters, the humble Marcello announced that in spite of his new power he would not change his name as pontiff. For centuries, it had been the custom for a cardinal to assume a new name as pope, since it was considered bad luck to retain one’s original name (past popes who had kept their birth names had all had disastrous papacies). Marcello rejected superstition, and was crowned Pope Marcellus II. Instead of indulging in coronation parties and banquets, he gave all the celebration funds to the poor. Hope sprang up again. At last, here was a pope who seemed capable and determined to redeem the Vatican, bring back the Renaissance of ideas, and create peace between the conflicting faiths. He proclaimed that there would be a new Church, returning to Scripture and spirituality. Twenty-two days later, he was dead—according to official sources, from “exhaustion.” Suffice it to say that Marcellus was the very last pope to refuse to change his name.

The pope who followed was none other than Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa. As we have already noted, he turned out to be a monster for Catholics and Jews alike. For Michelangelo, it was his worst nightmare come to life. Carafa, as Pope Paul IV, established the Index of Forbidden Books, banned all women from entering the Vatican, burnt volumes of Talmud and Kabbalah, threw the Jews of Rome into the ghetto, drained the Church’s savings while overtaxing the faithful in order to enrich his nephews and mistress, tortured and burned homosexuals in public, ordained two nephews (ages fourteen and sixteen) as cardinals, and banned the potato—recently brought to Europe from the New World by Sir Francis Drake—as a fruit of lust sent by Satan. In the Sistine, Paul IV Carafa wreaked more havoc. He ordered the partition grill, symbol of the Veil of the Holy of Holies, to be uprooted and moved several feet east, to break the chapel’s perfect correspondence with the Jewish Holy Temple. He hauled in Michelangelo, commanding the aged maestro to make the naked figures in
The Last Judgment
“suitable” for the papal chapel. Michelangelo hotly replied: “Let His Holiness make the world a more suitable place, and then the painting will follow suit.” That was the last time Buonarroti had anything to do with Carafa. The next pope, Pius IV, was no better. The only project Michelangelo was commissioned to do for him was a new gate to the city of Rome, the Porta Pia.

Begun two years before the artist’s death, the Porta bears Pius’s name, plus an unusual design element—strange circular indentations with tassels.

It took the Vatican more than a century to find out that, with these designs, the artist-architect was insulting yet another pope. Pius IV, in spite of his pretensions, came from a modest family background: his father was a barber and blood-letter. The unusual decorative motif on the Porta Pia was discovered to be none other than an itinerant barber’s basin, with a towel draped over it. Michelangelo had taken one more slap at an inflated papal ego. Pius, even though ignorant of this public reminder of his humble roots, was responsible for a horrible affront to the great artist. As Michelangelo lay on his deathbed, his last surviving student and assistant, Daniele da Volterra, was given an unthinkable ultimatum. Since the Council of Trent had actually taken much valuable time and energy to condemn formally the “various obscenities and heresies” in
The Last Judgment
in the Sistine, Volterra was offered two choices: either witness the utter destruction of the masterpiece or censor it himself. With a heavy heart, Daniele began the awful job of adding loincloths and drapery over the objectionable parts of his mentor’s masterpiece. This was the beginning of the “cover-up” of Michelangelo’s secret messages to the world. The already world-famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was also under threat of censorship or destruction, but in the end it remained untouched, for one reason only. Nobody could figure out how to reconstruct Michelangelo’s futuristic “flying bridge” scaffolding, the only way to work on the ceiling without putting the entire chapel out of commission for years. Michelangelo’s masterpiece of painting was saved by his extraordinary engineering skill.

The hidden messages’ next descending step into darkness came from the dying man himself. At his side at the end in his simple apartment were only four or five of his most intimate friends and assistants, including the love of his life, Tommaso dei Cavalieri (now married with children). One of his deathbed requests was that they burn all his notes and designs. Priceless sketchbooks, codices, writings, and images thus went up in smoke. His poems were already being altered and censored by his own nephew so that they could be published. The final insult to the Florentine’s memory was his funeral arrangements. His body was prepared to be entombed as a
Roman
artist in the nearby Church of the Holy Apostles—built by Sixtus IV and Baccio Pontelli, the very same pope and architect who had constructed the Sistine Chapel, the source of the worst tortures in his long life. Besides being a church built by the men whose chapel had made his life so miserable, the edifice itself in the time of Michelangelo was a dark, low-lying structure off the beaten path. It was already an insult to the artist that he was not considered worthy of burial inside the Vatican, or even inside the Pantheon, where Raphael had been entombed. In addition, the decision to keep his body in Rome, a place that everyone knew he hated, instead of sending it home with honors to Florence, was very disrespectful. This low point of his fall from favor actually contained the seeds of Michelangelo’s reascension after death.