The Sistine Secrets (11 page)

THE JEWISH INFLUENCES: MIDRASH, TALMUD, AND KABBALAH

Because Ficino and, more particularly, Pico were powerfully inspired by Jewish thought and transmitted it to their prize student, we need to clarify the areas of that thought that most affected Michelangelo and much of his later artwork.

First, we should mention the Midrash. Not the name of one book, it rather refers to many collections of stories, legends, and biblical commentaries from the hands of different scholars at about the beginning of the common era (i.e., after the year one in the common calendar). According to Jewish tradition, these are part of an oral tradition of transmitted knowledge going back many centuries, some even from the time of Moses. Unlike the Talmud, Midrash is more interested in theology than law, in concepts rather than commandments. It has been well said that the Talmud speaks to humanity’s mind but the Midrash is directed to its soul.

We know that Michelangelo studied Midrash with his masters because so many of its insights appear in his depictions of biblical scenes. An excellent example is the panel in the Sistine ceiling known as
The Garden of Eden.
There we find Adam and Eve standing before the Tree of Knowledge. Throughout the Middle Ages, in every cultural tradition but one, the fruit of that tree was thought to be an apple. Indeed, the Latin word for apple reflected its infamous past—
male,
which means evil. (In modern Italian the vowels have been reversed, and we now call it
mela.
) In the fourth century CE, the word
malum
appeared in the Latin Vulgate translation of Genesis in the phrase “the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” formally codifying the association between the apple and the forbidden fruit. There was only one exception to this commonly held belief: the Jewish tradition. According to a mystical principle, God never presents us with a problem unless he has already created its solution within the problem itself. When Adam and Eve sin by eating the forbidden fruit, they are stricken with shame from their new awareness of their nudity. The Bible tells us that their immediate solution was to cover themselves with fig leaves. According to the Midrash, the Tree of Knowledge was a fig tree, since a compassionate God had provided a cure for the consequence of their sin within the self-same object that caused it. It is hard to imagine any Christian being aware of this, either in Michelangelo’s era or even today. Only someone who had studied the Midrash could have known such a thing. Yet, sure enough, there in the panel of
Original Sin,
Michelangelo’s forbidden Tree of Knowledge is
a fig tree.

When we tour the Sistine in the upcoming chapters, only a strong familiarity with this body of Jewish knowledge will permit us to grasp the countless Midrashic allusions that Michelangelo worked into his frescoes—something unfortunately almost completely unknown and ignored by contemporary scholars.

Pico, as indicated by his library, also greatly admired the Talmud, a vast compendium of Jewish law and commentary composed over a five-hundred-year period beginning roughly at the time of Jesus. What sets this work apart from almost all other books of the time is its unique system of thought, what is even today referred to as “Talmudic logic.” It conditions us to see the universe and to think in a multilayered way, as opposed to the Church’s uncritical, linear, and unanalytical approach. Its predominant theme is to question. It links reason to faith. It values logic as a prime good and allows for the legitimacy of conflicting opinions. It also places great stress on the ability to harmonize seeming opposites. These were hardly ideals for the Church, which therefore sought to suppress it. But Michelangelo, while not able to study the Talmud in depth, learned from his teachers to incorporate at least some of its values into his outlook and its multiple levels of meaning into his artwork.

The Judaic study that had the greatest impact on Michelangelo was the one for which Pico is perhaps best remembered. Pico had the largest Judaic library of any gentile in Europe, and—more striking still—holds the record for the biggest private library of Kabbalistic materials gathered in one place anywhere. Kabbalah was Pico’s passion. In fact, his dedication to this branch of Jewish knowledge may well explain his very positive feelings toward Jews and Judaism.

Kabbalah, comprising the esoteric and mystical tradition of Judaism, is supposed to have its origin in the secrets the angels dared to transmit to Adam.
Kabbalah
is a Hebrew word that literally means “received.” Because its teachings are extremely complex and deal with subjects not everyone is capable of handling, it is ideally taught only to those mature enough to “receive” its hidden knowledge, by way of a master to a select chosen disciple. But the Zohar, which first appeared in Spain in the thirteenth century published by a Jewish writer named Moses de Leon—ostensibly as a manuscript he found dating back to the Talmudic era—and other Kabbalistic works were available for study, and Pico took full advantage.

What fascinated Pico so? And what was it in Kabbalah that captivated Michelangelo to the extent that almost every part of the Sistine ceiling bears traces of its teachings? We can only hint at some of the answers.

Surely part of the answer lies in the major premise of Kabbalah that beneath the surface of every object are hidden “emanations” of God. Things are far more than they seem to the naked eye. What a provocative concept for an artist—especially one whose credo was “Every block of stone has a statue inside of it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” These emanations of the Divine, known as the Ten S’firot (ten communications), represent the “series of intermediate stages” that make the creation of the finite world possible—almost like the steps necessary for an artist to bring his ideas to life. Moreover, these Ten S’firot, representing all of God’s attributes, have a direct correspondence with the physical body of a person. God is imminent in the corporeal; the body has sparks of the Divine. And that of course makes even the nudes that preoccupied Michelangelo holy.

Kabbalah allowed its students, as we’ve already noted, to think positively about sex. It also provided for a totally different way of viewing male/female distinctions. Both are equal parts of divinity because
God himself/herself is a perfect blending of both characteristics—God is man and woman.

Harmonizing these two seemingly disparate aspects is a Kabbalistic concept that finds expression not only in God’s sexuality but in almost every other aspect of life. What we today call the positive and negative forces of atoms was a secret long known by Kabbalists, although they used different language. Harmonizing opposites, balancing extremes, grasping the power of the hidden inner essence of objects certainly could have strong appeal not only to the religious mind of old but to the artistic—and even the scientific—minds of all times.

Not to be ignored in this list is Kabbalah’s fascination with numbers and the Hebrew alphabet. The Hebrew letters have both a numerical and a spiritual value. According to Kabbalah, God created the universe with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Numbers are also connected to specific ideas. Just as we have seen the number seven conveying a host of interconnected concepts, every other number has its message and its link to a mental category. Understanding this will allow us to recognize why Michelangelo used exactly the number of prophets he chose for the ceiling, as well as other significant objects—and why he even hid Hebrew letters up there.

Perhaps most powerful of all, Michelangelo’s immersion in Kabbalistic study gave him the key to how he could accept the pope’s mandate to beautify the Sistine Chapel although he strongly disagreed with much of the Church’s thinking at that time: truths, Michelangelo realized, could be conveyed by way of the covert approach of Kabbalah, making the hidden message underneath more important than the images on the surface.

Still, the young artist had much more
formazione
to shape him on his life’s journey before the Prime Mover would lead him to his destiny inside the Sistine…

Chapter Five

OUT OF THE GARDEN AND INTO THE WORLD

It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.

—MICHELANGELO

B
EYOND HIS FORMAL STUDIES, Michelangelo could not avoid that other
formazione:
harsh experiences and encounters with the real world, commonly referred to as the school of hard knocks. Indeed, a very early lesson he learned was a literal hard knock that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

When he arrived in the Garden of San Marco to study under Bertoldo, Michelangelo found another student already there, also selected to pursue a career in sculpture. The other youth was Pietro Torrigiano. Pietro was everything that Michelangelo was not: from a true noble family, well-off financially, and extremely handsome. Michelangelo, however, had the superior talent. Both boys had hot artistic temperaments and egos; in other words, a dispute was just waiting to happen.

The fateful fight occurred a short time after the arrival of Michelangelo. Both students were in the chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine, sketching the artwork there, when apparently Michelangelo made fun of Pietro’s drawings. The infuriated Torrigiano hauled off and gave Michelangelo a punch so intense that it crushed the bone and cartilage of his nose. For the rest of his life, while creating so much beauty, Michelangelo himself would look like a retired boxer with a flattened nose. Lorenzo de’ Medici was so distraught about the ruination of his young favorite’s face that he immediately exiled Torrigiano from Florence.

Buonarroti, who even before this had not been especially good-looking, felt terribly ugly from then on. He overcompensated by throwing himself into his work and career, often shying away from romantic possibilities as a defense against heartbreak. He became more and more of a perfectionist and an egotist. Psychologists have a term for this behavior. They call it
grandiosity,
covering up deep feelings of inadequacy with arrogant or overbearing behavior. Unfortunately, for the rest of his life only a few beloved friends and companions would be able to see through this façade of grandiosity to get close to the lonely, sensitive, love-starved dreamer beneath.

FIRST SIGNS OF GENIUS

As we have seen, a great deal is known about Michelangelo’s intellectual growth at this time under the tutelage of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Oddly enough, though, we have very little information about any artistic technique he was learning from Bertoldo. Even Professor Howard Hibbard, one of Michelangelo’s noted biographers, admitted: “We still do not know how he learned to carve marble.”
¹

The first examples that we do have are a Madonna nursing a very muscular baby Jesus, and a battle of the centaurs, both from when Michelangelo was between fifteen and seventeen years old. These clearly demonstrate how the young sculptor, from the very beginning of his career, was caught between the market for Christian art and his personal love for classicism and the male body.

The Madonna, called
Madonna della Scala
(
Madonna of the Stairs
), is loosely but clearly inspired by an earlier work of Donatello that Michelangelo had been studying in Florence. Even this very first work (from 1490) is mysterious and has been the subject of many varying interpretations down through the centuries. Maria (Mary) is nursing the infant Jesus next to a stairway of five steps, upon which three little boys, perhaps angels, are playing. Maria, while in profile in the foreground, seems to be staring almost eye to eye with one angel leaning on the railing in the middle ground. At the top of the stairs, the other two childlike figures are blurred in the background and appear to be either embracing or wrestling; a fourth is almost hidden behind Maria, pulling on a cloth. Amazingly, Michelangelo at fifteen was making solid marble seem like a modern photograph with extremely differentiated depth-of-field focus: the foreground is crystal-clear while the figures in the background are actually blurry.

To explain Michelangelo’s depiction of precisely five steps, some art historians have linked the number to the five letters of the name Maria, since certain arcane medieval and Renaissance theologians called the Virgin “The Stairway,” representing the link between heaven and earth. This seems to be a bit of a stretch, though; considering his unique education, it is quite possible that Michelangelo had something else in mind. Under the influence of his teacher, Michelangelo was aware of a far more profound significance to the number five. Marsilio Ficino often taught about the five levels of the human soul as a central part of his Neoplatonic philosophy. This is based on the Kabbalistic concept of the five levels of the soul:
nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chayah,
and
yechidah.
These are, respectively, the basic material life force, the emotional soul, the human soul, the spiritual or God-seeking soul, and the transcendent unifying soul that is integrated with God and the wholeness of the universe. For a Neoplatonist and Kabbalist like Michelangelo, this set of five would be the most fundamental series in the soul’s quest for union with the Divine—a sort of stairway to God. Wouldn’t this more logically be what Michelangelo was trying to convey? The Talmud teaches that King David’s character and spirituality were infused in him through his mother’s milk. The sculptor himself said that his uncanny skill with marble came to him through his wet nurse’s milk. Is Michelangelo perhaps also suggesting that the Madonna, while yet nursing her baby, foresees that her child’s destiny is to transcend all five stages of the human soul? In this, one of his earliest pieces, is Michelangelo already achieving Neoplatonic harmony—linking Greco-Roman design with Jewish mysticism in a Christian artwork? The only thing that we know for sure is that this talented teenaged artist was already experimenting with groundbreaking sculpting techniques and very sophisticated, ambiguous, and
multilayered
art themes.