The Sistine Secrets (2 page)

All of this the authors convincingly show us find powerful echoes in the Sistine. Only with this background can we fully understand Michelangelo’s meaning and messages. This becomes all the more evident after the perfect cleaning of the stupendous frescoes of Michelangelo, which had been obscured by centuries of thick smoke, dust, and misguided attempts at preservation. Only today can we fully savor the beauty and the true meaning of the Sistine Chapel.

The “cleaning”—and not the “restoration,” as has been erroneously written—not only brought the Chapel back to its original splendor, but also put an end to many ill-informed disputes that dated back to the beginning of the work. I was invited numerous times to climb up on the scaffolding to observe the cleaning labors, and I was able to personally share in the joy of actually seeing the frescoes from only twenty centimeters (about seven and a half inches) away. Above all, I could bear witness in my books to the accuracy of the work of these specialized technicians, carried out with talent and love. Just think, a team of twelve experts was hard at work for twelve years in order to finish the job!

After the cleaning, we were able to verify that the dirt had covered up not only the colors, but had also hidden the numerous messages that had already been purposely “veiled,” left inside the paintings by the great Florentine. Now we can say with assurance that the original plan for the Sistine Chapel by its patron, Pope Julius II, was purposely thwarted. Julius had wanted the Sistine to be the eternal reminder of the extravagant success of the papal family and to feature Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the twelve apostles, and almost certainly John the Baptist.

For the first time in the history of the Sistine, Blech and Doliner make us understand just how Michelangelo was able to subvert the entire project in order to secretly promote his own ideals, especially those linked to humanism, Neo-Platonism, and universal tolerance.

Clearly they explain how this Florentine genius was able to paint the largest fresco in the Catholic world without even a single Christian figure in it and, other than the sibyls, managed to portray only figures from the Hebrew Bible. Even more amazingly, they tell us how he evaded papal censorship of his opinionated work with his private agenda.

It is also significant that the Sistine frescoes are not only faithful to the Hebrew Bible, but even more so to the Kabbalah, the Jewish doctrine of mystical and esoteric character. In this book we find comprehensive replies to most of the questions that for centuries have tormented experts in theology and art history, as well as the average researchers and aficionados.

For example, in the fresco of the
Original Sin
:

• Why does the serpent have arms?
  
• Why is the forbidden Tree of Knowledge not an apple tree, but a fig tree?
  
• In the previous panel, why does Eve seem to be emerging from a “side” of Adam, and not from his rib?
  

The answers are all given by the Kabbalah and described brilliantly in this book.

Another valuable insight demonstrated by the authors is the closeness, if not the admiration, that Michelangelo felt for the Jews. I found particularly fascinating their explanation of a detail that was entirely unknown until now, after the recent cleaning of the frescoes, with the subsequent reappearance of the original colors that had been darkened and covered by soot and dust. Not to give away too much, it involves a yellow circle on the cloak (to be exact, on the left arm) of Aminadab, one of the ancestors of Christ, similar to the yellow badge of shame the Fourth Lateran Council ordered the Jews, in 1215, to sew on their clothing. The incredible and unprecedented photo can be seen in chapter 9. To make this even more relevant, this portrait of Aminadab is positioned right above the place of the papal throne of Julius II.

Almost certainly, some of the instructors in the school of the de’ Medicis were rabbis and had explained to Michelangelo about the Hebrew alphabet and the esoteric significance of each letter. This is amply demonstrated by the Hebrew letters that are hidden in the gestures and the stances of many figures in the paintings.

Even in
The Last Judgment,
the influence of Jewish culture is quite evident. The enormous fresco is clearly in the shape of the Tablets of the Law of Moses. This is due not only to the form of the chapel, but also to the fact that Michelangelo, before painting the
Judgment,
had covered over the two windows that were a large part of the wall over the altar, and had a new wall built on top of the original one.

One exquisite final touch: Few if any people have noticed that Michelangelo placed two Jews in Paradise, very close to the powerful figure of Jesus. If you look carefully, over the shoulder of the youthful blond Christ and painted above St. Peter, two Jews are quite clearly displayed—you can see them in the photo at the beginning of chapter 15. They are easily recognizable not only for their characteristic facial traits, but also because the first man is wearing the typical double-pointed hat that Jewish males were forced to put on, in order to reinforce the medieval prejudice that these people, being the offspring of the devil, had horns. The second man has on the yellow cap that the Jews were forced to wear in public.

At the end of this fascinating reading experience, the readers will realize that Rabbi Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner have guided us to see in a brand-new light not only the Sistine Chapel but also most of Michelangelo’s artwork, including the monument to Julius II, the famous
Moses,
and the various statues of the pietà, scattered about in Italy.

We will come to appreciate, as the authors point out, that the real message of his masterpiece is that Michelangelo created a true bridge between the two faiths of Judaism and Christianity, between humanity and God, and, perhaps most difficult of all, between each person and his or her spiritual self.

Just as the work of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel changed forever the world of art, so will this book change forever the way to view and, above all, to understand the work of Michelangelo!

Enrico Bruschini.
Professor Bruschini is one of the most esteemed art experts in all of Rome and in the Vatican Museums. He is an international lecturer, consultant, and the author of numerous books on Italian art history, including
In the Footsteps of Popes, Vatican Masterpieces,
and
Rome and the Vatican
—the last two titles published by the Vatican itself. In 1984, he was named Official Art Historian of the United States Embassy in Rome, a lifelong title, and was subsequently appointed Fine Art Curator. In 1989 he was named the Official Guide of Rome and guided Presidents Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush during their official visits to Rome and Vatican City. To learn more about him, please visit his site at: www.profenrico.com, or write him at enricobruschini@ libero.it.

PREFACE

Every year more than four million visitors from all over the world throng to the Vatican Museums, the most-visited museum complex on earth. They come for one overriding reason—to see the Sistine Chapel, the holiest chapel in the Christian world. Viewers—Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, art lovers, and the merely curious—not only marvel at its aesthetic beauty but are moved by its history and its spiritual teachings. The major attraction, without a doubt, is the incomparable vista of frescoes on its ceiling and its altar wall, the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti, universally acknowledged as one of humanity’s greatest artists.

But very few of the millions of awestruck spectators who enter the Sistine know that the pope’s own chapel, built in the heart of the Vatican, is a full-size copy of the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s ancient Temple in Jerusalem.

They would also surely be amazed to discover that Michelangelo himself embedded secret messages inside the chapel. Even more shocking, these messages espoused ideas that struck at the heart of the papacy.

Unknown to most viewers is the dramatic truth that these frescoes contain a lost mystical message of universal love, dangerously contrary to Church doctrine in Michelangelo’s day, but true to the original teachings of the Bible as well as to much of contemporary liberal Christian thought.

Driven by the truths he had come to recognize during his years of study in private nontraditional schooling in Florence, truths rooted in his involvement with Judaic texts as well as Kabbalistic training that conflicted with approved Christian doctrine, Michelangelo needed to find a way to let viewers discern what he truly believed. He could not allow the Church to forever silence his soul. And what the Church would not permit him to communicate openly, he ingeniously found a way to convey to those diligent enough to learn his secret language.

Unfortunately these messages were lost and went unheeded for five centuries. The man famous for defining genius as “eternal patience” must have found solace for his inability to voice his disagreement with the Vatican in the hope that eventually there would be those who would “crack his code” and grasp what he was really saying. Only now, thanks to diligent scholarship as well as the new clarity afforded by the chapel’s extensive cleaning, have they been rediscovered and deciphered. Michelangelo spoke truth to power, and his insights, ingeniously concealed in his work, can at last be heard.

All this is not speculative fiction, but, as we will convincingly prove, completely, incredibly,
true.

This is the startling and provocative thesis that
The Sistine Secrets
will for the first time reveal—and forcefully demonstrate. It will show how Michelangelo incorporated into his religious masterpiece a stunning number of hidden messages to the Church of his time, messages that resonate to this day with their daring appeal for reconciliation between reason and faith, between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and among all those who share a sincere quest for true faith and service of God.

Prepare to unlearn everything that you thought you knew about the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s masterpieces. Just as the recent cleaning of the frescoes removed layer after layer of tarnish and darkness accumulated over the centuries, this book will endeavor to remove centuries of prejudice, censorship, and ignorance from one of the world’s most famous and beloved art treasures.

We invite you to join us on an incredible journey of discovery.

—The Authors

BOOK ONE

In the Beginning

Chapter One

WHAT IS THE SISTINE CHAPEL?

And let them build for Me a Sanctuary,
that I may dwell in their midst.

—exodus 25:8

O
N FEBRUARY 18, 1564, the Renaissance died in Rome. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known to all simply as Michelangelo, passed away at age eighty-nine in his frugal home in what is today Piazza Venezia. His body was prepared to be entombed inside the nearby Basilica of the Holy Apostles. Today, this church, Santissimi Apostoli, is an amalgam of many times and styles: its top floor is from the nineteenth century, the middle floor is seventeenth-century Baroque, and the ground floor is pure Renaissance from the second half of the fifteenth century. But what is most interesting about Michelangelo’s intended burial place is that the original part of the church—the only part that existed in 1564—was designed by none other than Baccio Pontelli, the same man who planned the structure of the Sistine Chapel. The church where Michelangelo was supposed to be entombed is important for other reasons as well.

In a crypt beneath the ground-floor level of the church are the tombs of Saints James and Philip, two of the apostles going back to the life of Jesus. Deeper still, if we were allowed to dig beneath the crypt, we would soon come upon remains of ancient Imperial Rome, beneath that, Republican Rome, and finally, perhaps some of Bronze Age Rome.

This makes the church a metaphor for the entire Eternal City: a place of layer upon layer of history, of accumulations of countless cultures, of confrontations between the sacred and the profane, the holy and the pagan—and of multiple hidden secrets.

To understand Rome is to recognize that it is a city swarming with secrets—more than three millennia of mysteries. And nowhere in Rome are there more secrets than in the Vatican.

THE VATICAN

The very name
Vatican
comes from a surprising source. It is neither Latin nor Greek, nor is it of biblical origin. In fact, the word we associate with the Church has a pagan origin. More than twenty-eight centuries ago, even before the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, there was a people called the Etruscans. Much of what we think of as Roman culture and civilization actually comes from the Etruscans. Even though we are still trying to master their very difficult language, we already know a great deal about them. We know that, like the Hebrews and the Romans, the Etruscans did not bury their dead inside the walls of their cities. For that reason, on a hillside slope outside the confines of their ancient city in the area that was destined to become Rome, the Etruscans established a very large cemetery. The name of the pagan Etruscan goddess who guarded this
necropolis,
or city of the dead, was Vatika.

Vatika
has several other related meanings in ancient Etruscan. It was the name of a bitter grape that grew wild on the slope, which the peasants made into what became infamous as one of the worst, cheapest wines in the ancient world. The name of this wine, which also referred to the slope where it was produced, was Vatika. It was also the name of a strange weed that grew on the graveyard slope. When chewed, it produced wild hallucinations, much like the effect of peyote mushrooms; thus,
vatika
represented what we would call today a cheap high. In this way, the word passed into Latin as a synonym for “prophetic vision.”