The Sistine Secrets (30 page)

Michelangelo could also exploit this technique to hide even more ambiguous messages in his later works. Strangely enough, he never used the
non finito
style in his painted works. It seems that the artist was never able or willing to connect certain aspects of his sculptural genius to his two-dimensional works.

It was at this point in his life that Michelangelo decided to pour his heart and soul into what was almost certainly his own favorite sculpture—his depiction of Moses, the greatest of all the Jewish prophets.

From the very beginning of the tomb design, Michelangelo had planned a giant statue of Moses for the place of honor, which would be the center of the middle level of the pyramidal structure. According to the original plans, the Hebrew prophet would have been sitting on high in the heart of the new Basilica of St. Peter, directly under the giant dome—where the main altar is today. This would have certainly suited the artist’s dream of permanently linking the two faiths in a highly visual and unforgettable manner.

To prepare for this task, the Florentine went back to the mountains of his childhood, to Carrara. It was very much akin to a pilgrimage—perhaps even a way to cleanse his body and soul after the horrors and tensions of painting the Sistine. He spent several months in the marble quarries, searching for the perfect piece from which to carve his
Moses.
This was to be his crowning achievement in stone, his great comeback to the world of sculpture. Whereas all the other elements of the tomb were being left in his not-finished style, the
Moses
was the exact opposite—carved and lovingly buffed by hand for months, until it was perfectly finished and gleamed even brighter than the
Pietà.

What almost nobody knows is that the
Moses
we see today is not the Moses that Michelangelo carved in 1513–15. The subversive artist was up to his old tricks of hiding mystical Jewish wisdom in artworks commissioned by the pope. In the Torah, in Exodus 34:29, we read: “And it came to pass—when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of Testimony in Moses’s hand—that as he came down from the mount, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone since God had spoken with him.” In fact, this divine light was so intense that Moses subsequently had to put on a mask so as not to blind his fellow Israelites when he met with them. What was the source of this supernatural light? The Midrash and Kabbalah have an explanation. When Moses was up on the mount, pleading with the Almighty for forgiveness for his people after their sin of worshiping the golden calf (Exodus 32), nobody was able to accompany the prophet to the summit. The divine light of God was too intense. No mortal aside from Moses could survive it. Moses stayed on Mount Sinai forty days and forty nights, neither eating, drinking, nor sleeping, in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment—not just for himself but for all his people. It took supreme, superhuman effort to achieve atonement for the children of Israel’s terrible sin of idolatry, a sin compounded by coming so soon after their miraculous redemption from Egypt. The word
atonement
can also be read at-
one
-ment—the spiritual goal of feeling at one with God and the universe. It is this level that Moses reached on the mountaintop. According to the Kabbalah, he broke through to the highest sphere ever reached on the Tree of Life by any living human being—the level of Binah, the most insightful and profound degree of comprehension and understanding. After Moses smashed the first tablets in response to finding the Israelites worshiping the golden calf, he was commanded to carve a second set to replace the pair carved by God. According to tradition, God then taught Moses the entire Torah, the Talmud, and all the mystical secrets of the Kabbalah. That is what caused his face to be imbued with light; he had been enlightened directly by God and now shared in the glow of divinity. The Midrash adds that God also wanted to reveal to Moses the future history of the Jewish people and the world, up until the coming of the Messiah. To grant him this special vision, God bestowed on him a drop of the divine light—not ordinary light, but the primordial light with which God created the entire universe and the
s’firot
on the Tree of Life.

Michelangelo felt a deep affinity to Moses. After all, they were kindred spirits, men of the mountains who carved their messages in stone. Aware of this midrash, Michelangelo wanted to show Moses as he appeared with this gift of prophecy, looking all the way into the distant future of humanity. That is why he returned to the technique he had used so well in carving the
David.
He made the eyes slightly too far apart, extra deep, and not focused on the viewer. As you stare at the
Moses
statue today, no matter where you stand, you realize that he is not looking at you. That’s because his gaze is fixed firmly on the future.

In the original plan for Julius’s huge tomb,
Moses
would have been high above the floor, in the center of the pyramidal structure. Michelangelo planned to take advantage of the light streaming in from the windows of the dome over the funeral monument. He buffed the face of Moses to make it glow with the reflected rays of the sun that would descend to perfectly illuminate it. He even carved two points sticking out of the statue’s head that would also reflect the sun’s rays, making Moses seem as if the divine light were truly shining from his head. This is another secret of the statue—it never had horns. The artist had planned
Moses
as a masterpiece not only of sculpture, but also of special optical effects worthy of any Hollywood movie. For this reason, the piece had to be elevated and facing straight forward, looking in the direction of the front door of the basilica. The two protrusions on the head would have been invisible to the viewer looking up from the floor below—the only thing that would have been seen was the light reflected off of them. This is another example of how far ahead of his time Buonarroti was—he had created the
Moses
as a magnificent
site-specific
artwork, a concept that became quite the rage in the late twentieth century. This is indeed how Michelangelo sculpted and finished the statue after he completed the Sistine ceiling—sitting straight, its legs side by side, and its face looking directly forward…and this is how it remained while sitting more or less in limbo for more than two decades while the giant tomb’s future was being debated and changed with the transitory vicissitudes of power within the Vatican.

Buonarroti had put his heart and soul into the statue of Moses—so much so that, it is said, when he finished the colossal work, he held the carving by the shoulders and shouted, “Speak, damn it, speak.” Now there was nothing to keep him in Rome any longer. Julius was dead, the ceiling was finished, and the plans for his monument had been canceled by the new pope, Leo X. Leo was none other than Giovanni de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of Giuliano, the brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent. When Giuliano was assassinated, Lorenzo took in Giovanni and raised him as one of his own sons. Giovanni and Michelangelo had grown up together in the Palazzo de’ Medici and had probably even slept in the same bed as boys. Now, after the death of their nemesis Julius II della Rovere, the de’ Medici clan had figured out the perfect solution to defend themselves against the persistent attacks from the Vatican—they bribed enough cardinals to have one of their own elected as the new pontiff. They defeated the Vatican by simply taking it over. It is reported that while Leo/Giovanni was going up to take possession of the papal apartments, he chuckled to his brother Giuliano, “God has granted us the papacy—now let us
enjoy
it.”

If Michelangelo had harbored any dreams of a de’ Medici pope reforming the Church and turning Rome into a new Athens of art and philosophy, he must have been sorely disappointed by Leo’s rule. Leo X was no Lorenzo the Magnificent. His papacy was even more corrupt than that of his predecessors. Rome under Leo became an endless series of banquets and orgies, while the de’ Medicis drained the Vatican’s coffers for their own family affairs and military adventurism. Michelangelo carved the aforementioned pieces, even though he probably realized that Julius’s tomb would never be built inside the new St. Peter’s, just to get his sculpting eye and hand back in shape after the years of painting on the Sistine ceiling. The other reason was that the surviving relatives of Julius were still paying him a retainer of two hundred scudi per month, a kingly income.

When Leo released the artist from his contract for the della Rovere tomb, he commissioned him to create a façade for the unfinished family church of San Lorenzo in Florence. Michelangelo was more than happy to leave Rome and return to his beloved Tuscany.

We wish to avoid the temptation to detour into a long biography and artistic history of Michelangelo in these years, and stay as focused as possible on the secrets that he hid in the Vatican in Rome. However, it was during these years, 1513–1534, that both Michelangelo and the world around him went through great upheavals. Because these events left their mark on the artist, we must understand that part of his life if we are to appreciate the later secrets he would conceal when he was brought back to fresco again in the Sistine in 1534. Suffice it to say that in the twenty-one intervening years he created two permanent artistic legacies for the city of Florence—the Biblioteca Laurenziana, the library in memory of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the Sagrestia Nuova, the new sacristy in the Church of San Lorenzo. Michelangelo designed the room, the candelabra, and the tombs and carved almost all the statues himself—an amazing achievement, considering that by the time he finished the sacristy—also called the de’ Medici Chapel—he was almost sixty years old. Buonarroti’s passions had not dimmed, however—he still hid secret symbols in these architectural wonders. For example, the magnificent staircase leading up to the library has exactly fifteen steps—a reminder of the curved stairway of the Levites in the Holy Temple of Jerusalem. Each step was symbolically a step upward toward repentance and spiritual enlightenment—in fact, in the book of Psalms, there are fifteen “psalms of ascent” (120–134), one for each stair. There are two side stairways, each consisting of nine steps. In the Jewish mystical tradition, nine is the symbol of Truth. The two side stairways added together make eighteen, the Jewish symbol for Life. Here, Michelangelo was paying a final enduring tribute to his great patron Lorenzo’s love of life, his pursuit of truth, and his quest for spiritual harmony in a turbulent world.

And turbulent it was, indeed. While Michelangelo was working on these Florentine projects, one of his Roman prophecies came horribly true. As previously discussed, his
Jeremiah
fresco was a warning to the Vatican to cleanse itself spiritually and ethically so as not to suffer the fate of the original Holy Temple in Jerusalem. There, God had punished a corrupt priesthood with an attack by a ruthless enemy who carried away all its bronze and gold. Five years after Buonarroti finished the Sistine ceiling, an exasperated German cleric named Martin Luther nailed his protests against the papacy to a church door. Within only ten years, his religious movement became a tidal wave that swept over Europe, breaking into many groups and schisms, all of which, however, shared one hatred in common—the Vatican. One army of Lutheran soldiers under a coalition of German barons called the Lanzichenecchi took the city of Rome and sacked it mercilessly in 1527. More than twenty thousand unarmed civilians were slaughtered. The Vatican was seized and desecrated, and all its bronze and gold carted away, just as Michelangelo had foretold. This event traumatized the entire Catholic world but stimulated the hopes of reformists everywhere that perhaps, finally, the Vatican would repent and change its corrupt ways. Michelangelo and others who shared this hope were all to be deeply disappointed. Inside the Apostolic Palace, business went on as usual.

Ten days after the sack of Rome, young freethinkers who wanted to restore Florence to her glory days rose up and threw out the corrupt descendants of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Michelangelo, disgusted by the decadence of the new generation of de’ Medicis, eagerly took part in the popular revolt. Perhaps also contributing to his commitment to their cause was the fact that the ringleaders of the uprising were mostly handsome youths whose company Michelangelo constantly sought out. He threw himself passionately into the role of revolutionary, working tirelessly elbow to elbow with these young men, designing new ramparts and defenses, rallying the troops, planning strategies, nursing his companions who were felled by the plague. Three years later, in 1530, through a series of unholy alliances, the de’ Medicis and the Vatican were able to retake Florence and punish the rebels without pity. Michelangelo was publicly declared an enemy of the restored regime and of the Church, and a price was set on his head. He disappeared into thin air, only to reappear a month and a half later, when old mutual friends were able to convince the de’ Medici pope Clement VII to pardon him so that he could finish the de’ Medici Chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo. Thus, Buonarroti’s talent was credited with saving his life. Only recently have we found that this was doubly true.

In 1975 the Italian art historian Paolo Dal Poggetto discovered how Michelangelo had disappeared in 1530, while papal and imperial killers were turning Florence inside out searching for him. The artist had managed to get back in time to his own work-in-progress, the de’ Medici Chapel. Under his new sacristy was a secret bunker. We do not know whether Buonarroti had actually built it or just knew of its existence, but he convinced the prior of the church to let him hide there and to smuggle food and sketching charcoals to him for as long as he needed to stay there. Five centuries later, his sketches made while a fugitive still cover the walls of his hiding place. His chapel project did indeed save his life in more ways than one; however, after this episode, Michelangelo decided he had had enough both of the de’ Medici clan and of Florence itself. He finished the chapel by 1534, and did not even stay in town to oversee the installation of the statues or attend the inauguration. He went back to Rome the year that the de’ Medici pope Clement died, and he never set foot again in Florence. The incredibly ambitious design for the façade of San Lorenzo—the original reason Pope Leo X de’ Medici had allowed him to return to Florence—was a total fiasco, and left undone. To this day, the clan’s family church has no façade, just raw stone—the revenge of history or of Michelangelo?