The Sistine Secrets (33 page)

After Valdés died in 1541, his small circle of
alumbrados
(illuminated ones) scattered. The core of the group migrated north to Cardinal Pole’s residence in Viterbo, today about an hour’s drive north of Rome. The new leader of the group was not Pole—that would have been too obvious. The group had already been spied upon for some time, especially by a certain Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa, a fanatical promoter of the Inquisition and its reign of terror. The true leader was a woman and a nun—Vittoria Colonna—who ran everything from her convent in Viterbo. Through her powerful family connections and influence, she set up an underground network that soon covered all of Italy and most of Europe. Freethinking priests, politicians, diplomats, and intellectuals were secretly involved everywhere in one quest—to become a hidden “fifth column” inside the Vatican, to reform it from the inside, and ultimately, to harmonize Catholic and Protestant belief. This cabal of dreamers took on a new name:
Gli Spirituali,
the Spiritual Ones. Their ultimate goal: to reunite the two Christian faiths before the schism became too great, and to bring about one Church, cleansed and reborn.

Years before, while still living in Rome, Vittoria had become friendly with Michelangelo, and their bond would become ever stronger until her untimely death. They wrote lengthy personal letters to each other, composed poems in each other’s honor, and often exchanged gifts and favors. Many historians who sought to deny Buonarroti’s love of men tried to use his poems to Vittoria as proof of his heterosexuality. Their love, however, was the epitome of what we today would label “platonic.” They loved each other’s
minds.
Michelangelo was thrilled to find an intellectual peer and fellow spiritual traveler in Vittoria. Just as he had thrown himself so passionately into new ideas and movements in the past, he now became heart and soul one of the Spirituali.

In
The Last Judgment,
just as Mary is turning away from the severe judgment of Jesus, there is a deeper meaning: Michelangelo is symbolically turning away from the Church as well. This had to be kept secret, of course, since only Catholic artists were allowed to work inside the Vatican, and especially in the pope’s chapel. If it had been discovered that Buonarroti had denied the Church and veered into Valdesian Protestantism, he would not only have lost his career, but also his freedom—and possibly his life. Only a few years earlier, the Vatican had put a price on his head for supporting Florence’s independence movement. Still, the rebel in him could not be silent, and he continued to fill the giant fresco with more and more hidden messages.

If we look carefully at Mary, we see that she is looking downward at only one figure, a woman who is peering over the shoulder of Saint Lawrence and his grill. In fact, Mary’s foot is resting on the top of the grill. The woman’s face is mostly obscured by the grill—and for good reason.
She is the secret leader of the underground movement—Vittoria Colonna herself.

Jesus also is gazing down at only one figure—an unnamed man peering over the shoulder of Saint Bartholomew, who like Saint Lawrence, is seated in a place of honor at Jesus’s feet. From the handsome profile and the large eyes, the same that we saw on the statues that Buonarroti carved in Florence after 1532, we can recognize the other great love of Michelangelo’s life at this time—Tommaso dei Cavalieri. Here, in the fresco, he appears to be too old, with gray hair and a receding hairline—even though his face is young and almost completely unlined. This was probably done on purpose, either by Michelangelo or by his friend Daniele da Volterra, who did some retouching when he was ordered to censor the painting in 1564. In Naples, there is one copy of the original
Last Judgment,
the way it looked before the censoring. The copy, an oil painting, was done by Michelangelo’s trusted friend Marcello Venusti in 1549, under the direction of Buonarroti himself. In Venusti’s copy of the fresco, we can find the same young man, but with a full head of dark hair, looking very much the handsome thirty-eight-year-old Tommaso was at the time Michelangelo was helping Venusti create this painting.

Why did Michelangelo choose these two particular saints to guard his two great loves? Saint Lawrence’s name in Italian is Lorenzo, just like the artist’s first patron and protector, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Also, Saint Lawrence, the treasurer of the early Christian Church in Rome, said that the true wealth of the Church was not its gold but its common folk of faith. This is part of Michelangelo’s message to the papal court of his day, going all the way back to his work on the Sistine ceiling.
*

Saint Bartholomew, besides being the patron saint of taxidermists and leather tanners, is also the protector of plasterers. After Michelangelo’s traumatic problems with the plastering of the ceiling, he wanted all the help he could get with this enormous fresco work and had good reason to include this saintly protector.

Saint Bartholomew was not martyred in Rome but skinned alive in Armenia. According to tradition, his skin is inside the altar of his church on the Tiber Island, between the areas that were the two main Jewish neighborhoods of Rome in the Renaissance. Dressed up as Saint Bartholomew is a friend of Buonarroti, a man who got in trouble for portraying too much skin in his prints that accompanied his lewd poems—Pietro Aretino, pornographer and fellow Spirituali conspirator. Buonarroti is not making fun of Saint Bartholomew but showing his belief that a man like Aretino, in trouble with the hypocritical Church, was closer to God than many so-called religious authorities of his day.

Saints are almost always shown with the signs of their martyrdom for the faith. (The main exception is Peter, who is shown with the keys he received from Jesus, instead of being portrayed crucified upside down.) Bartholomew is always shown holding his entire intact skin and the knife with which he was flayed. The skin here holds another intriguing mystery: whereas the figure of Bartholomew/Aretino is completely bald with a long gray beard, the face on the skin is clean-shaven with a full head of dark unruly hair. They do not match. This is because the face on the skin is none other than Michelangelo himself. As we discussed in the story of the
Pietà,
artists were forbidden to sign works commissioned by the Vatican. Here, instead of his name, Buonarroti secretly signed the fresco
with his own face.
It is also one more protest from the sculptor who hated to paint. He seems to be saying that being commanded to return to paint in the Sistine again was a fate as awful as being skinned alive.

That is not all that this symbolic skin is saying, though. The figure of Tommaso—the only person in direct eye-to-eye contact with Jesus in the whole gigantic painting—has his fingers pressed together in supplication. (It was not until the recent cleaning that one could clearly see where Jesus’s and Tommaso’s eyes were focused.) Michelangelo, feeling himself a sinner unworthy of heaven, believed that his one hope of salvation was his true, unselfish love of Tommaso. Here, he placed Tommaso as his intercessor, pleading his case before Christ the Judge. Just to make sure we understand that he felt that a man’s love—even for another man—could lead to redemption, he placed next to his skinned body yet another male couple passionately kissing in Paradise. The identity of Tommaso here is not mere conjecture. For once, we have a surviving clue, written in Buonarroti’s own hand. In 1535, just when he was plotting out his designs for the fresco, he wrote another love poem to Tommaso. In this sonnet, Michelangelo likens himself to a lowly silkworm, whose protective covering becomes the clothing for another being:

To enfold my noble lord, I would wish the same fate;

To clothe my lord’s living skin with mine that is dead;

As the snake passes through rocks in order to shed,

Thus would I pass through Death to better my state.

THE SAVED AND THE DAMNED

At the bottom of the left-hand side of the fresco, below Mary and the Blessed Women, is the Resurrection of the Good Souls. They are climbing out of the ground as their flesh slowly returns to their bodies. The demons of the underworld are trying desperately to haul some of them back, but the angels seem to be prevailing. In the corner we see a priest blessing these adult souls—possibly a sign of Michelangelo’s new illuminist faith, in which baptism was for adults. Another symbol of this early form of Italian Protestantism is the rosaries that are being used in this corner of the fresco, to save and lift up to salvation several of the souls. Valdés and his followers believed that divine grace was the key to salvation, as opposed to blind obedience to the Church; in fact, we get the expression “saving grace” from this concept. The rosary is an act of humble, daily faith in which the Ave Maria prayer is recited. It begins: “Hail, Mary, full of
grace….
” This was another break with traditional representations of the Last Judgment, in which the saved souls showed the
acts
that had earned their redemption, such as sponsoring the construction of a church or chapel, proselytizing to bring more followers into the Church, or conquering a city for the pope.

At the bottom middle, beneath the trumpeting angels, and on the right-hand side, beneath the Blessed Males and the Martyr Saints, we see visions of hell: fire and brimstone, dark caverns, Charon ferrying the damned across the River Styx, and demons dragging the evil souls down to their eternal doom. One of the most famous images of all is a soul finally realizing the enormity of his sins while being bitten by a demonic creature. Michelangelo is making a pun in Italian here—to be bitten is
morso.
This poor damned soul is the picture of remorse—in Italian,
rimorso.

To the right of this image, a battle is going on. Furious angels are literally beating down some of the worst souls, some of them symbolizing sins or vices. One of these is commonly identified as the image of Greed, since there is a heavy money bag dangling down at his side.

Another sin rampant at the time, but now long extinct in the Church, was the sin of simony, described and punished at length in Dante’s
Inferno,
one of Michelangelo’s favorite texts. Simony was the practice of selling priestly positions in the Church hierarchy. In the Renaissance, it was the usual modus operandi for popes to raise money by selling to the highest bidders the titles of cardinal, archbishop, and so on. This only added to the mess of corruption and confusion in the Church of Michelangelo’s era. As expressed in Michelangelo’s poem of 1512, in which he described the Vatican as selling Christ’s blood for money, this was something that particularly enraged the artist. We see the proof here: the cursed figure is upside down, a sad parody of the martyrdom of Saint Peter; the money purse is gold in color, tied with red cords—the exact same
giallorosso
colors that Michelangelo had used before to insult Rome and the Vatican. The pair of lead keys hanging by the cursed figure’s side are also a sardonic parody of the twin keys of Vatican City and the papacy. Buonarroti painted the angriest, strongest angel of them all to batter this corrupt soul’s buttocks down to hell.

On the far right is another naked figure, but with a face that is more like a caricature than a real person. He is the symbol of Lust, sex without love. In this case, the artist let the punishment fit the sin; if we look carefully, we can see that Lust is being dragged down to perdition by his testicles. Small wonder that he is biting his knuckles to keep from screaming in agony.

THE KABBALAH OF THE JUDGMENT

Of course, Michelangelo did not leave out his cherished Kabbalah in
The Last Judgment.
This fresco contains the same balance of the universe that he concealed in the ceiling. On Mary’s side of the twin tablet-shaped fresco, we find the symbols of Chessed, the female, merciful side of the Tree of Life. On Jesus’s side, to his left or
sinister
side, are the signs of G’vurah and Din, the male aspects of strength and judgment, found on the opposite side of the Tree of Life. On the Chessed side, we find: souls being saved through grace, the Merciful Virgin, the Blessed Female Souls, and the Cross of Salvation at the top. On the G’vurah/Din side, we find souls being damned and punished, Christ the Judge, the Blessed Male Souls, and the Column of Flagellation at the top. On the Judgment side, even the Martyred Saints seem angry, pointedly showing the instruments of their torture and death to the very comfortable Vatican hierarchy that would gather there beneath their gaze, as if to say: “This is what
we
did for the faith—how about you?”

This time, instead of hiding Hebrew letters in the work to signify the balance of female and male, mercy and power, Michelangelo hid other ancient mystical symbols of femininity and masculinity at the top of the fresco…in plain view. The cross and the circular crown of thorns at the top of the female tablet of Chessed is from this symbol:
. It is the cross of the love goddess Venus, very popular in his day as a symbol in astrology as well as in alchemy.