The Sistine Secrets (27 page)

This is where the ceiling’s first
par’shah,
or weekly cyclical reading portion of the Torah, leaves off. The next
par’shah
continues the story at the time of ten generations after the sin of Adam and Eve. At this point in history, humanity had begun to cover the globe but, unfortunately, was misusing its free will to follow almost exclusively the Yetzer ha-Ra, or evil inclination. That is the theme of the last triptych section of the ceiling, which Michelangelo began to paint in 1508. Let us see now how he chose to depict the story of Noah.

THE SACRIFICE OF NOAH

As we explained earlier, the three
Noah
panels are not in strict chronological order. This scene actually occurs after the floodwaters receded and Noah, his family, and the animals had disembarked onto dry land. To thank the Almighty for their salvation, Noah built the first altar in history. According to the Midrash, Noah—being a prophet—knew exactly which animals would later be permitted for sacrifice in the Holy Temple. In numerous paintings and frescoes of this scene, other Christian artists have shown Noah sacrificing all sorts of improbable, nonkosher animals: lions, camels, donkeys, and so forth. Michelangelo follows the Midrash faithfully, depicting only the biblically allowed animals that Noah would have used.

Noah himself is pointing up toward heaven with one finger, to show that this first sacrificial altar is being dedicated not for pagan idolatry but to the One God. You will also notice that two figures on the left seem to be in shadow—one of Noah’s three sons and a mysterious female wearing a pagan Greco-Roman crown of laurel leaves, the symbol of Nike, goddess of victory. These two people are not in shadow. What happened was that the constant problems with mold and mildew in these early panels took their toll here. About a generation after the completion of the ceiling, this one section of plaster detached and crumbled to bits on the floor below. In 1568, a fresco painter named Domenico Carnevali had to climb up on a tiny scaffold and replace the fallen section. Obviously, the chemicals in his paint or plaster did not match the quality of Michelangelo and his assistants’ formula, and the repair darkened irreparably over time. This is probably for the good, as it allows us to distinguish easily between the original work and what was added later. We have no idea what Carnevali had in mind with the female figure, but it is doubtful that Nike appeared in Michelangelo’s original version.

THE FLOOD

In the main scene for the last trio of the
Noah
panels, a piece of the fresco is missing, just above the stranded people under a makeshift tent on the right of the panel. This damage occurred in 1795, when ammunition stored in the papal armory in Castel Sant’Angelo accidentally exploded. The huge blast shook the entire neighborhood, and we are lucky that only this one chunk fell down, instead of the entire ceiling. Almost three hundred years after Michelangelo, nobody dared go up there and paint where the Maestro had; so out of respect, the patch was left blank.

Once again a bit of Talmudic knowledge will help us better understand an aspect of this panel. There is a specific Hebrew word for “ark” in the original Torah text—
teivah.
The word
teivah,
however, does not mean a boat or sailing vessel. It really means “box.” In just about every depiction you will ever see, artists have shown Noah’s ark to be a gigantic seaworthy boat with a curved hull. According to Talmud and Midrash, however, it was a giant boxlike structure that could not possibly have floated on the floodwaters’ surface, were it not for the Divine Breath or Heavenly Wind that held it up on the waves. Here, on the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo painted the ark as a huge box, once more following Jewish tradition to the letter.

Of course, Michelangelo and his merry band of Florentines could not resist yet another jab at Rome. On the left edge of the panel, we see the head of a donkey. At the exact same height, on the right edge of the scene, are two tiny figures that have just climbed out of the waters to find refuge on the rocks behind the makeshift tent. Little do they know that they will soon drown anyway for their sins, since the only humans destined to survive the Flood are those on the divinely ordained ark. These two sinners in the background look like two water rats; they are on their hands and knees, and wearing the unmistakable red and golden yellow colors of the city of Rome. Just in case someone didn’t believe there was an insulting message here, the colors of the woman’s dress that forms a backdrop for the ass’s head are the very same Roman colors.

THE DRUNKENNESS OF NOAH

In the Bible, after Noah saves life on earth and builds the first altar, he plants a vineyard (shown in the background on the left) and invents wine. Shortly thereafter, he becomes his own best client, as we can see from his bloated body and reddened features in the later scene in the foreground. He falls asleep naked and is discovered this way by his son Ham, who rather than covering up his father’s nakedness, runs to tell his brothers Shem and Japhet instead. They respectfully enter the place where their father is sleeping, carrying a garment and turning away their heads so as not to see him in his moment of disgrace. In Genesis 9:24, the Torah recounts: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him.” The sages of the Talmud wondered how Noah could have known upon awakening what Ham had “done to him,” if it was just lewd mockery and disrespect while he was passed out. Rabbi Samuel (in the Talmudic Tractate Sanhedrin, 70a) found a textual link with a later episode in Genesis in which Shechem, a pagan prince, accidentally catches a glimpse of the body of Dinah, the only daughter of the patriarch Jacob. After seeing her exposed, Shechem cannot control himself and rapes Dinah (Genesis 34:2). Rabbi Samuel concluded that Ham had followed his animal impulse and similarly sexually molested his own father. This does indeed make more sense of Noah’s statement upon awakening. It also makes far more comprehensible the harshness of his response as he curses his son Ham for his actions.

Here, in Michelangelo’s version, he has painted the other two sons, Shem and Japhet, coming into Noah’s room to cover him with their heads turned away from their father’s nudity. Ham has reentered behind them, gesturing toward Noah and not turning his head away. Ham is even grasping his brother (probably Japhet) from behind as if to try to dissuade him from covering up their father. The artist has given a definite homoerotic slant to Ham’s embrace of his younger brother, making it seem as if now Ham would like to sexually molest Japhet as well.

The official explanations for this panel range from a foreshadowing of the Incarnation of Jesus (the planting of a new vine), to an allusion to the Passion (because of the blood-red color of wine) or the chance for redemption through Christ (the covering up of one’s past sins). However, a clear, fresh look at this scene makes it seem more likely that Michelangelo was once again following Talmudic teachings and his own sexual tendencies as well.

There is one more reason that the central strip seems to end on this relatively minor, downbeat note. As we saw in the diptych (two-part panel) of
The Garden of Eden,
Michelangelo knew very well the concept of the two sides of the human soul—the Yetzer ha-Tov and the Yetzer ha-Ra—the transcendent spiritual tendency versus the materialistic animal tendency. In that panel, he paired the serpent and the angel, mirroring each other, to represent this ongoing struggle between good and evil in the human soul. Here, in the
Noah
triptych, he put the Flood in the middle, framed by the transcendent, spiritual side of Noah (the sacrifice scene) before it and the sinful, hedonistic side of Noah (the drunkenness scene) after it.

The artist is not leaving us with a negative note, but—when we view the
Noah
triptych as a whole, the way he first designed it to be perceived—we can see that he is presenting us with a deep spiritual question as we leave the Sistine. Michelangelo is asking us which tendency we are following: our Yetzer ha-Tov or our Yetzer ha-Ra? Has his work inspired us to take a step closer to God or a step away from God?

The central Torah strip ends here. Before we leave the Sistine Temple tour, though, we will have to look at some powerful final secrets that Michelangelo concealed in the ceiling frescoes before he laid down his brush. It seems he had been saving up the strongest messages for last.

Chapter Thirteen

PARTING SHOTS

God is in the details.

—LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE

A
S THE HELLISH four and a half years of Michelangelo’s enslavement to the Sistine ceiling drew to a close, the rebellious artist decided to make maximum use of the remaining frescoes for the hidden messages he wanted so desperately to leave as his legacy. That is why he hid an entire cluster of secrets in the section depicting the Jewish prophet Jeremiah.

SOMEONE ABOVE THE POPE

We need to pay especially close attention to the portrait of the gloomy seer, shown to us from his left side, the area referred to as the “sinister face,” which represents the darker side of a person. In Kabbalah it is also the side of G’vurah and Din, power and judgment, the strict aspect of the Tree of Life that is concerned with judging sins and conferring punishment.

We see the prophet staring sadly and angrily down over the spot where the pope would sit on his sumptuous throne, under the regal canopy. As you will recall, Jeremiah was the godly messenger who warned the corrupt priests of the Holy Temple that their bronze and gold would be taken away and their Temple destroyed unless they cleaned up the corruption within. He is covering his mouth in the
signum harpocraticum,
a gesture signifying that a profound esoteric knowledge occupies his thoughts. (Michelangelo employs the same gesture in other works, including his funerary monument to Lorenzo de’ Medici, a duke named after Lorenzo the Magnificent.)

The entire panel is filled with foreboding. The two small figures in the background of Jeremiah are not the cute cherubic putti seen elsewhere. Instead, we have a mournful youth and a sad woman of indeterminate age, both starting to turn away from the chapel. The young man’s golden hair and the woman’s red hood whisper a coded message to us: “Look at the colors the prophet is wearing.” Sure enough, Jeremiah is garbed in the very same red and gold. Why? They are the
giallorosso,
the traditional colors that symbolize Rome, the home of the Vatican. We have seen this before, hidden in tiny figures in the
Flood
panel, when the Florentine artist wanted to make fun of Rome. To this very day, centuries later, red and gold are the city’s colors, found on taxicabs, official documents, and even the uniforms of Rome’s soccer team. This is how Michelangelo wants to make it clear that he is addressing Rome and not ancient Jerusalem. The woman is wearing a hooded traveling cloak and is bearing a bundle; she seems to be leaving her home. The youth is gazing sadly down at his own foot, where, if we squint our eyes from far below, we find something quite intriguing. The boy’s foot is holding in place a faint trompe l’oeuil parchment scroll unrolling high above the regal papal platform.

Most Vatican guides never talk about the barely visible scroll. Many are not even aware of its existence; almost all the ones who do know of it will say that Michelangelo wrote the Greek letters alpha and omega (signifying the beginning and the end) on it, both in reference to Jesus and to the completion of the giant fresco. None of this is true. He was not yet finished; he still had another strip of ceiling to fresco. Also, the scroll contains no Greek letters.

It says, indisputably and in Michelangelo’s own hand, ALEF, the name of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, written in Roman script. This is a reference that would be clear to someone who had studied the Scriptures from a Jewish perspective. Jeremiah is not only the author of his eponymous book of prophecies; he is also accepted in Jewish tradition as the author of the book of Lamentations. This plaintive book, which describes in gruesome detail the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, is read every year on the somber holy day of the ninth of the month Av (Tisha b’Av), as Jews worldwide fast and mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple. In Michelangelo’s day, if any lay Christian read this book, it would have been in Latin. Only Jews or Christians who had studied Hebrew and Judaism (such as Michelangelo’s private teachers Marsilio Ficino and, especially, Pico della Mirandola) would know that the book of Lamentations is an acrostic, written verse by verse in the order of the Hebrew alphabet, beginning with the alef. The reason for this is based on a deep Kabbalistic concept: just as the Almighty One created the entire universe with the twenty-two letters of the holy Hebrew alphabet, starting with alef, so God can destroy it as well.

Right next to the word
ALEF
, Michelangelo painted
—the Hebrew character for another letter, the ayin. Why? These two letters are not commonly written together. Only someone very conversant with Judaic tradition can tell you the answer. The Talmud teaches that if a high priest cannot distinguish in his pronunciation between these two letters—alef and ayin—which are sounded almost identically, that priest is not fit to serve in the Holy Temple. Why is this so? First of all, the High Priest must be a trustworthy conveyor of God’s Word to the world. The change from an alef to an ayin in a word—or vice versa—may significantly alter its meaning. The High Priest’s improper diction can cause great harm to traditional teaching. The other, more profound reason is concerned with the fundamental concepts that these two letters spiritually represent. The letter alef (sometimes written as “aleph” in English—hence the word
alphabet
from the first two Hebrew letters, alef and bet) is not only the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet; it is also the first letter of the Ten Commandments, whose message is monotheism. According to the mystic system of
gematria
(Hebrew numerology), the value of alef is one. That is why it is often used to represent God, whose defining characteristic is that he is One. The value for the other letter on the scroll, ayin, is seventy. In biblical Hebrew, the number seventy is used to imply a great amount or diversity, such as “seventy languages in the world” and “seventy nations.” Both the Talmud (Tractate Succah, 55b) and the Midrash (B’resheet Rabbah, 66:4) discuss the seventy-one descendants of the three sons of Noah. Seventy of them go on to found the seventy pagan nations of the earth, while only one goes on to found the Jewish people—at that time, the one and only monotheistic,
non
-pagan people in the world. It is therefore imperative for a high priest to be able to differentiate clearly between the Alef and the Ayin, between the “One” and the “seventy,” between those who commit themselves to the purity of monotheistic faith and those who succumb to the immorality of paganistic practice. This message of one versus seventy serves as a strong warning not just to the Jewish high priests but to the custodians of any monotheistic faith, popes included, to maintain the purity of belief and of people in the face of challenges from materialistic and pagan cultures. In Jewish tradition, we find the cautionary adage “Be
in
the world, but not
of
the world.” In the Gospels, Jesus says: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s” (Matthew 22:21). Michelangelo was deeply troubled by a Church that was trying to imitate the grandeur of the Caesars while ignoring the humility and poverty of Christ. He recognized that the Vatican had become a place of unbridled corruption, greed, nepotism, and military adventurism. No longer was spiritual leadership concerned with delineating the differences between the “One” and the “seventy.” And so Michelangelo dared to express his anger by way of the angry prophet Jeremiah, who predicted doom for precisely those who failed to heed this very message. Of course, it was an extremely dangerous and seditious statement.