The Sistine Secrets (10 page)

The first of these master tutors, Marsilio Ficino, was the son of Cosimo de’ Medici’s doctor. After Cosimo came into possession of the ancient writings of Plato and Hermes Trismegistus, he learned that the twenty-year-old Marsilio showed brilliant promise at translation. Since he already had the scholar’s father on retainer as his private physician, it was not difficult to put the son on the family payroll as well. Marsilio’s Greek and Latin studies were subsidized by Cosimo, who also paid for the foundation of a Platonic Academy, under Ficino’s direction. Cosimo, ever sensitive about his nonpatrician roots, wanted to be perceived as the new Solon, leading Florence into a world-famous golden age.

Ficino set up his “School of Athens” in the de’ Medici palace, in the family’s country villa, and in the Garden of San Marco. Thanks to his growing reputation as the leading expert on Plato—plus the de’ Medici name and patronage—he was quickly able to attract a circle of intellectuals, artists, philosophers, teachers, and freethinkers. Soon he was engaged in a flood of intellectual correspondence with great minds all over Europe. Cosimo was happy, as this brought him more fame worldwide than any possible business transaction could do.

After Sixtus IV’s ascent to the papal throne, Ficino became a priest. It is said that he took the vows as a result of recovering from a severe illness. More likely, it was at the de’ Medici family’s suggestion, as he could then be a useful link to any maneuvers going on in the papal court. At the same time, Marsilio was developing his own system of philosophy, based on Platonism, Neoplatonism, and humanism.

While it is clearly impossible in these pages to do justice to this school of thought, we can at the very least highlight some of its key points, especially as they will help in understanding Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes. In essence, Ficino’s philosophy elevated the liberal arts, pure scientific research, and the centrality of the individual and his or her immortal soul’s redemption through beauty and love. It taught that there are absolute concepts that exist outside of human variations and distortions, among them the concepts of Absolute Good, Absolute Love, and Absolute Beauty.

This is almost certainly what Michelangelo had in mind when in later life he explained, “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and in action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”
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For Michelangelo, imbued with this Platonic mind-set, art was not creating as much as it was uncovering hidden preexistent absolute beauty. “I saw the angel in the marble,” he said, “and I carved until I set him free.”
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Neoplatonists also believed that the vast variety of human thought, if traced back to the One Source—what Leonardo da Vinci called the Prime Mover—would lead to spiritual enlightenment and ultimately to God. This and the mystical texts that Ficino was translating led him to attempt a fusion of all mystical beliefs, from Greek gnosticism to Egyptian hermeneutics to Christian cosmology—and to Jewish Kabbalah.

One of Ficino’s influences was a well-known work called
Fons Vitae
(Fountain of life), one of the first European Neoplatonic texts, by an eleventh-century philosopher from Spain named Avicebron. Little did Ficino know that this was a translation of the Arabic translation of an original Hebrew text written by the great Jewish poet-philosopher Solomon Ibn Gavirol (died c. 1058). The idea of harmonizing monotheism with Platonic thought gripped Ficino and led him to attempt the construction of a universal faith, by which all humanity could achieve individual redemption. Of course, now that Jews had just been permitted to settle in Florence, he longed to work Judaic thought into his master plan of the universe. Ficino did study Hebrew with Jews like Elijah del Medigo and Jochanan ben Yitzchak Alemanno, but it seems his talent for Greek and Latin did not help him in this case. In his writings, he is limited to some (sometimes faulty) quotes from the Hebrew Scriptures and great commentators such as Rashi, Maimonides, Gersonides, and Sa’adia Ha-Gaon.

Ficino did, however, pick up the Judaic idea of the sacredness of human love and its capacity to lead to greater closeness to the Divine. The Hebrew Bible, speaking of the first sexual encounter between Adam and Eve, says that “Adam
knew
” his mate. Remarkably, the Hebrew word
l-da’at,
“to know,” means also to love or to make love. Sex, on the deepest level, transcends the physical and connotes spiritual union. A seemingly carnal act is invested with dignity and sanctity. The ideal of lovemaking is true intimacy—not merely of intertwining bodies but of mutually understanding souls. To be intimate on this level is to “know” the other person’s essence—his or her divine image—which is but another way of gaining greater kinship with God. Viewed in this light, lovemaking is meant not just for the single objective of procreation, as the Church then taught, but also to foster this ultimate sense of knowing. As the Kabbalah daringly puts it, when a couple “know” each other in a complete sexual-romantic-spiritual act, they actually unite heaven as well.

Ficino preached this concept to his circle as “Platonic love,” a love that is not only body-to-body but also soul-to-soul. It was only later in history that “platonic” love came to mean a deep relationship devoid of sexual content. Since Ficino’s Neoplatonism emphasized the centrality of Man and appreciation of his beauty, it was only natural that his academy was very popular with men who loved other men. Back then, there was no concept of homosexuality, just the Church’s emphasis on procreation and its condemnation of what it called “sodomy,” the performance of anal sex, especially (but not exclusively) between two males. The categories of heterosexual and homosexual were only established—in fact, the words were coined—in Germany in the late nineteenth century.

Still, Rome was horrified by all this. The Vatican had “Christianized” the teachings of Aristotle, and not Plato. It preached that redemption could come only through the One Church. These Florentine ideas about the individual, about Art and Science, about universality, and about Greek and Jewish love were anathema and blasphemy…but they all resonated deeply in the mind of Michelangelo. At last he had found a philosophy that would validate his feelings about beauty, about art—and about the sacredness of sex and the perfection of the human body, especially of the men whose physical form so appealed to him.

The Church, however, soon found itself far more concerned with the views of Michelangelo’s other teacher. Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was as much a child prodigy as Michelangelo. In addition to being blessed with great genius, a gift for languages, and an insatiable curiosity, Pico was the scion of a wealthy family of princes; in other words, he was what we would today call a trust-fund baby. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, he was already studying canon law in Bologna, then moving on to the other great learning centers in Ferrara, Padua, and Pavia. In 1484, at only twenty-one years of age, he ended up in Florence to join the circle already led by Poliziano, Ficino, and Lorenzo de’ Medici himself.

At that time, Ficino was promoting the study of his beloved Plato by trying to discredit the philosophies of Aristotle and Averroes. Pico, building on Ficino’s concept of universalizing faith, tried to harmonize them instead. Pico also wanted to include and emphasize in the mix his own favorite stream of thought—Judaic wisdom and mysticism. With his family’s money, he spent his short life paying for the best Jewish minds in Italy to tutor him in Hebrew and Aramaic and to help him navigate the sea of Jewish wisdom in the Torah, the Talmud, the Midrash, and the Kabbalah. His Jewish teachers and intimate friends included great thinkers and writers like Elijah del Medigo, Jochanan Alemanno, and the mysterious Rabbi Abraham, among others. Pico, unlike Poliziano or Ficino, became quite fluent in these languages and deeply knowledgeable in Judaism. His writings and teachings are permeated with Jewish thought. One example is his
Heptalus,
in which he narrates the biblical story of creation by way of a full Kabbalistic interpretation.

Young Michelangelo, with a mind thirsting for new knowledge and eyes eager to behold all the beauty to be found, was completely immersed in this exciting, dizzying world of liberal thought and high-flying discussions. It was all the more thrilling for other reasons. He had come from a cold, unaffectionate family with no use for artistic or intellectual pursuits, and here he was being embraced by the most sophisticated court in Europe. He was also just starting to get in touch with his romantic and physical attraction to other men. Whether this resulted from his having a distant father and a mother who died young, or whether it was simply his innate nature, we will never know. What we do know is that he was in the city and the social circles where one man’s love for another was common and accepted by almost everyone—except the Church. In fact, male-to-male love and sex were so common there that they were referred to in the rest of Italy as “that Florentine tendency.” We also know that many of the men associated with Lorenzo’s Platonic Academy and Garden of San Marco were lovers of men. Poliziano, Ficino, and Pico all fit into this category. In 1494 Poliziano and Pico died within weeks of each other from a mysterious illness. Judging from their symptoms, it is quite likely that they were two of the first victims when the first wave of syphilis struck Florence in that year. We do know for certain that Pico della Mirandola was buried in a double grave, as married couples were, with his longtime companion, the poet Girolamo Benivieni. Their tomb is inside the Church of San Marco, where no doubt the fanatical Dominican monks of the time are busy spinning in their graves.

Another reason that this intellectual confluence must have been so exciting to the teenaged Michelangelo was its “sinful” aspect. The Holy Inquisition was actively trying to eradicate Jewish knowledge like the Talmud and the Kabbalistic book of the Zohar, the very books his teachers were imparting to him. Also, Rome was actively trying to separate Jews and Christians while Florence was trying to unite them. In 1487, only a year or so before Michelangelo arrived in Lorenzo’s court, Pico della Mirandola amassed more than nine hundred theses that he had composed to prove that Egyptian mysticism, Platonic philosophy, and Judaism all led to the same deity worshiped by the Catholic Church. He offered to sponsor out of his own pocket an international conference to be held at the Vatican to discuss and celebrate this new universality and harmony between the faiths. The Vatican, upon reading his writings, immediately declared them blasphemous and ordered him arrested for heresy. Pico was forced to recant his ideas, but soon after denied his retraction and had to flee to France. The long arm of the Vatican had him arrested there, and it was only through Lorenzo’s deep pockets and international connections that Pico was released and spirited back to Florence, where he gratefully remained inside the protection of the de’ Medici palace for the rest of his brief life.

This heady whirl of art, love, and forbidden fruit made an indelible impact on young Michelangelo, who would remain passionately influenced by these teachings for the rest of his life and career. We will see how much it permeates almost all his artwork—and reaches its peak in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

WHAT EXACTLY DID MICHELANGELO LEARN?

Normally, a young Florentine’s
formazione
would start with Italian grammar, Latin, sometimes Greek, and the poetry of Virgil and Dante. There would be Greco-Roman mythology, some of it based on Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
some of it transmitted orally. Also in the oral tradition would be the stories of the Christian saints and the teachings of the Church. The Jewish stories from what the Church called the Old Testament would be recounted, but only as a proof of the validity of the New Testament. For young men from the upper classes, especially the nobility, there would be instruction in swordsmanship, equestrian skills, music, elocution, and dance—in short, all the proper grooming for war, high society, and future leadership.

Also extremely popular in this preparation was the ethical instruction of the ancient Greek text of Pseudo-Phocylides. This primer in morality is an epic poem of about 250 verses and aphorisms, which most scholars today define as the outreach teachings of a Jew in the Hellenistic period. The anonymous Jewish poet, pretending to be a well-respected Greek philosopher, uses thinly disguised quotes from the Hebrew prophets and the Torah to woo the pagan gentiles away from their way of life, and to observe the Seven Basic Commandments of Noah—the universal covenant of law preceding the giving of the Torah to the Jews on Mount Sinai. To avoid revealing his identity as a Jew, he does not blatantly condemn idol worship per se, only the behavior and society around it. By the time of Pico and Michelangelo, this cunning forgery had long been accepted and passed along as an authentic ancient Greek work, and was woven into another, similar forgery, the so-called
Sibyllines,
supposed to be the twelve books of the mysterious female seers of the Classical world. In this way, the impressionable young apprentice was taught that ethical behavior came from yet another confluence, the teachings of the Jewish prophets and the pagan sibyls, all mixed together. This would show up years later—on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Making Michelangelo’s education unique were the lessons he was taught by Ficino and Pico. Daring, innovative, philo-Semitic, often branded heretical, they would explain why, when allowed to design an artwork of his own choosing, Michelangelo would often select a Jewish theme rather than the standard Christian and mythological images of the day. It also explains why, when commissioned by the pope to create works of art as homage to Jesus and the Church—including the Sistine Chapel—Michelangelo would brilliantly hide inside these works antipapal messages more in keeping with his true universalistic feelings.