The Sistine Secrets (17 page)

Michelangelo’s earlier studies of Kabbalah, Talmud, and Midrash afforded him considerable material to incorporate into his plans. Yet we still have to wonder, did Michelangelo come up with every one of his Jewish symbols and mystical references all by himself? We will never know for sure, but it seems likely that two kindred spirits inside the Vatican walls played a role and shared some of their learning with him. One was Tommaso Inghirami, a Christian Neoplatonist who knew a bit of Kabbalah. He was the adviser to young Raphael in planning the many layers of meaning in his famous fresco
The School of Athens
for Pope Julius II’s office. The other possible “suspect” would be Schmuel Sarfati, the Jewish physician to the pope. It is a little-known fact that, even through the centuries of Church persecutions when Jews were not allowed to treat Christian patients, almost every pope had a Jewish doctor. Sarfati, besides being a trusted physician and anatomist, was also an extremely cultured man. In addition to being a poet and a scholar of Torah and Talmud, he was well versed in Kabbalah and in Jewish literature. His Latin was of such high quality that he was chosen to formally address the pope in Latin on behalf of the Jewish community of Rome—even though, like Michelangelo, Sarfati was from Florence. Although we have no written documentation of any meeting between him and Buonarroti, it would be quite odd if these two Florentine Renaissance geniuses, both working inside the papal palace, had
not
struck up an acquaintance, given all the things that they had in common.

According to local accounts, in 1511, while Michelangelo was deep in the process of painting the ceiling, the pope fell gravely ill, probably from his years of being infected with syphilis. When he could no longer eat or even speak, it looked as if this was the end of the “
papa terribile
.” If the pope died while the fresco project was unfinished, there was a good chance that his successor might cancel or destroy the entire work-in-progress. While the rest of the papal attendants and medical consultants are said to have been busy looting the papal private bedroom as Julius lay inert in bed, his head doctor boiled some peaches and made him suck on their softened pulp. As the story goes, the doctor was able, bit by bit, to nurse the pope back to health, and in no time at all, Julius was back on his feet, terrorizing the palace and being as
terribile
as ever. This doctor would most likely have been his Jewish physician Schmuel Sarfati. And if all of this is true, it would mean that Julius’s Jewish doctor helped save the Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo.

But no matter if someone advised him or not, it was Michelangelo who risked inserting all his secret messages in the frescoes, and it was his talent alone that guaranteed their survival for five centuries.

We need not dwell here on the long, arduous, argumentative process of painting the ceiling, told and retold in books and films. It is true that Michelangelo painted the bulk of it alone, with only assistants for preparing the plaster and paints. It is true that he often argued with Julius, who once even struck him with his pastoral staff in public. It is true that he was so obsessed with getting this job done and returning to his beloved sculpting that he often would go for days without washing or changing his clothes. It is not true that he painted flat on his back the whole time. We have a self-caricature sketched onto a private letter, next to a sadly comic poem about his sufferings up on the scaffolding. This sketch and the sonnet it accompanies testify that it was much worse for poor Michelangelo, up there for four and a half dreadful years of contorting his body.

In the poem, addressed to a close humanist friend of his, Michelangelo sardonically describes how his body is being distorted beyond recognition during this torturous process: swollen up with retained fluids, head forced back unnaturally…

…and my brush, always above and dribbling o’er,

Turns my face into a fancy floor.

My loins have gone up into my gut,

While my butt is scrunched up like a horse’s rump as a counterweight…

He ends the poem on a very despondent note, which tells us just how much he hated this job:

My dead painting and my honor, Giovanni, by now only you can defend—

Since I’m not in a nice spot, nor even a painter in the end.

Michelangelo was so frantic to escape from this “not so nice spot” that as he neared the end of the ceiling, he used fewer and fewer preparatory cartoons and outlines to guide his brush in the wet plaster, and started doing something that no other artist had dared to do:
he was frescoing freehand.
In fact, whereas many of the early panels were the products of month after month of intensive labor, the
Creation
panel above the altar wall was painted completely freehand in only one day.

It was not only a case of rushing to get back to sculpting. He knew that his physical health was in jeopardy if he stayed at this job much longer. As it was, by the time he finished, he had scoliosis, incipient rheumatism, respiratory problems, more water retention and possible kidney stones, and vision complaints. For a year afterward, until his eyes finally refocused, he could read a letter or look at a drawing only by holding it high over his head, as if he were still painting the ceiling.

When he finished in the fall of 1512, the first thing that Michelangelo did was destroy his incomparable flying arch bridge and then burn all of his notebooks and private sketches for the ceiling. What those sheets of expensive paper, covered with his true intentions for the frescoes, might have told us—we will never know. However, the very fact that he felt compelled to destroy the evidence gives us an idea that the papal censors would not have approved.

Before the great unveiling, Pope Julius came for a private preview. He gave his gruff acceptance of the work, but with one complaint. He informed Michelangelo that the job was not done, that he would have to reassemble both his crew and the scaffolding. Julius wanted to see more of the della Rovere family colors up on the ceiling—royal blue and gold. These were the two costliest colors for any fresco painter, since gold meant real gold leaf and royal blue was made from pure, imported lapis lazuli, a semiprecious gem. Since the pope had made the artist pay for the materials out of his own earnings, there was precious little of either color on the ceiling. Buonarroti wearily but stubbornly replied that the project was finished and impossible to start up again, and that the colors were as they should be. The haughty pontiff sarcastically threw the artist’s original complaint back in his face: “Well, then it shall be a very ‘poor thing.’” Michelangelo got the last word: “The holy people we see up there—they were very poor, too.”

The lavish celebration occurred on the anniversary of the pope’s coronation—October 31, 1512. On that day, Western painting changed forever. Michelangelo, the sculptor, had painted over three hundred figures that seemed to be sculpted on the two-dimensional ceiling. Artists and art lovers flocked from all over the world to gawk in astonishment and sheer admiration at this superhuman feat. Five centuries later, they still do. Michelangelo, in spite of a sea of challenges, obstacles, and doubts, had triumphed.

Less than four months later, the Warrior Pope died peacefully in bed. Michelangelo, the sculptor, turned his talents back to the project that had brought him to Rome, carving Julius II’s giant tomb.

THE OFFICIAL STORY

There are many books, theses, and articles dedicated to various interpretations of the Sistine ceiling frescoes, but the most widely accepted view over the centuries has naturally been that of the Vatican. How, then, does the Church officially explain Michelangelo’s untraditional and often confusing design?

In the Vatican Museums’ official publication
The Sistine Chapel,
Fabrizio Mancinelli writes that the
Genesis
panels in the middle are “intended to illustrate the origins of man, his fall, his first reconciliation with God and the promise of future redemption.”
²
The problem with this oft-repeated interpretation is that the strip ends with Noah getting drunk and exposing himself, while his son Ham laughs at him and his other sons try to cover him up. Is this really a promise of future redemption? If so, it is a very muddled one. Of the unusual mix of prophets and sibyls, the book says that they “in a more or less clear manner foretold the coming of the Redeemer of Humanity.” It does not bring up the mix of prophets and sibyls that most young men of the time would have studied in Pseudo-Phocylides, as discussed in the chapter on Michelangelo’s
formazione.
The rest of this official explanation of the ceiling is rife with phrases such as “not completely clear from the thematic point of view,” “no real structural connection,” and so on.

Basically, the Church explains the huge fresco as simply “the promise of Redemption through Christ and his Church.” In other words, the creation of the universe, the Original Sin, the Flood, Noah’s sin of drunkenness, the pagan sibyls, the Hebrew prophets, the Jewish ancestors all lead up to the coming of the Savior and his One True Church under the divinely inspired guidance of His Holiness Pope Julius II della Rovere. Even the vastly popular Wikipedia, the online interactive encyclopedia, says:

The subject matter of the ceiling is the doctrine of humanity’s need for Salvation as offered by God through Jesus.

In other words, the ceiling illustrates that God made the World as a perfect creation and put humanity into it, humanity fell into disgrace and was punished by death, and by separation from God. God sent Prophets and Sibyls to tell humanity that the Saviour or Christ, Jesus, would bring them redemption. God prepared a lineage of people, all the way from Adam, through various characters written of in the Old Testament, such as King David, to the Virgin Mary through whom the Saviour of humanity, Jesus, would come. The various components of the ceiling are linked to this doctrine.
³

Clear and simple…except—if this is such a deeply religious work, why does Michelangelo hide at least three vulgar gestures aimed at the pope? If this is such a deeply Catholic work, why in more than three hundred figures is there not even a single Christian one? As we will see, other than a series of barely noticeable names that bounce around the room, going from Abraham to Joseph, the Jewish father of Jesus, there is nothing Christian at all up there, and definitely no Christian symbols or figures. With twelve thousand square feet to cover, it is doubtful that Michelangelo ran out of room. And where are Jesus and Mary? They are nowhere to be found in the whole work. About 5 percent of this famous ceiling is composed of pagan symbolism and the rest—about 95 percent of it—is all Jewish themes, heroes, and heroines. Many guides and commentators claim, as does the Wikipedia article above, that Michelangelo’s concept for the work culminates in the final redemption of Jesus—that is,
The Last Judgment
on the front wall. The problem with this common explanation is that Buonarroti left the chapel in 1512, hoping never to have to paint another brushstroke in there again. He was forced by another pope
twenty-two years later
to create that front-wall fresco. Hardly an organically thought-out design.

Extremely strained explanations have been put forth by the Vatican down through the years. Several have claimed that Michelangelo must have been following long, arcane preachings on the history of Jesus’s salvation—either from Egidio da Viterbo, in a long-winded homily on the history of the world that he gave in Rome in
1502
(while Buonarroti was still living in Florence), or by other more obscure theologians that the artist would never have met or read, or even a series of sermons by none other than the fanatical Savonarola. Buonarroti had been so traumatized by the monk’s rantings that the artist claimed even in old age that he could still hear the Dominican’s voice in his head. Some art historians think that this is a testament to Michelangelo’s deep-rooted Catholicism and love for the Church…and even for Savonarola.

Let us give the artist himself the final say here. Right after completing the debilitating task of frescoing the ceiling, he wrote another angry poem to his friend, describing the Vatican in 1512:

Here they make helmets and swords from chalices

And by the handful sell the blood of Christ;

His cross and thorns are made into lances and shields;

Yet even so Christ’s patience still rains down.

But let him come no more into these parts;

His blood would rise up as far as the stars;

Since now in Rome his flesh is being sold;