The Sistine Secrets (32 page)

The first step was indeed remodeling the wall. The windows were sealed up, the original frescoes were destroyed, and then the della Rovere crest under
Jonah
was removed, subtly reshaping the wall. Only then were several layers of new surface added to the whole wall. Michelangelo did this to prevent the cracking and mildew that had afflicted the ceiling, but he also had another, subtler reason. He actually made the immense wall
tilt inward
an entire foot. Only if you are inside the Sistine and look at the upper corners of the wall can you see that the fresco is leaning in over your head by a good twelve inches. The familiar explanation is that the fussy artist did not want dust to gather on the surface of his fresco, so he leaned it inward. This theory does not make sense, though. The fact is that this tilt made the fresco all the more susceptible to soot from the countless candles in church processions, plus dirt and dust wafted up with humidity and human sweat. Before the massive cleaning in the late twentieth century, the front wall was as dirty as the ceiling. The real reason is that Michelangelo wanted to subtly—in fact,
subliminally
—make the viewer realize what he felt was the
true
arbiter between right and wrong. When you are standing in front of the altar gazing up at
The Last Judgment,
it is the
shape
of the wall tilting in, looming over you, that tells you what the artist believed should judge human behavior. Without a doubt the silhouette corresponds to what in Hebrew are called the
luchot,
the Tablets of the Law, but are more commonly known to us as the Ten Commandments.

Once the wall had been reshaped and prepared, Michelangelo set up a standard scaffolding and found a trustworthy pair of assistants to prepare the cartoons, the plaster, and the paints. This time, even the color scheme would be different from that of his previous effort. On the ceiling, as we discussed earlier, he had used almost no blue paint. The blue of choice for frescoing was extremely expensive, since it was made of hand-ground lapis lazuli, a semiprecious stone imported from Persia (today Iran). Julius II had made the artist pay for the materials out of his own funds, so costly blue and gold had been out of the question when Michelangelo painted the ceiling. Now, for the front wall, the wealthy Farnese family (and the Church) were covering the costs, so money was no object. The heavenly blue background for the hundreds of figures in the giant work makes this Last Judgment one of the most expensive paint jobs in history.

Michelangelo began at the top of the wall and slowly worked his way down for more than seven years, painting exclusively by himself, with only one or two assistants. He was trudging up and down ladders while he was in his sixties, an age at which most people in the sixteenth century were either retired or buried. When he finished, it would be the largest Last Judgment depiction in the world—in fact, it is the largest fresco ever done by one painter—and at the same time the most precedent-breaking, mysterious, and symbolic. Buonarroti, now world-famous, rich, in love but still the angry rebel, broke every tradition with this work.

At the top, in the two curves of the tablet-shaped painting, he started with the angels holding the instruments of Christ’s martyrdom: the cross, the crown of thorns, the column on which he was flagellated, and the stick tipped with a vinegar-soaked sponge. Oddly enough, neither the traditional nails nor the whip appears. The angels, typical of Michelangelo but very odd for any other painter, have neither wings nor haloes nor baby faces. They are all handsome, muscular youths with delicate faces. Almost all of them were originally quite nude, even displaying their very human-looking genitalia. It is not clear whether they are taking the signs of the Passion up to heaven or bringing them down for us to view. The range of movements, gestures, and expressions is astounding—each one is different.

Just below the level of these angels are the Righteous Souls, forming a circle over the head of Jesus. These are not the famous saints or popes or royal patrons that one would normally find in a painting of this kind. Instead, these are the true holy souls, mostly unknown in life and rewarded in the afterlife, mingling with the angels around Christ. One fascinating detail is something that flies in the face of Church teaching for many centuries. Directly over Jesus’s head is a handsome golden-haired angel robed in red, pointing at two men in this inner circle of the righteous. They are obviously Jews.

One is wearing the two-pointed cap that the Church forced Jewish males to wear to reinforce the medieval prejudice that Jews, being spawn of the Devil, had horns. While speaking to the other, older Jew, he makes the very same gesture we find Noah making on the Sistine ceiling: pointing one finger upward, to indicate the Oneness of God. The other Jew is wearing a yellow cap of shame, the kind that the Church ordered Jewish men to wear in public in 1215. In front of them is a woman with her hair modestly covered, who is whispering in the ear of a nude youth before her. The youth resembles Michelangelo’s young tutor Pico della Mirandola, who taught the young artist so many secrets of Jewish mysticism. According to traditional Church teaching, as clearly expressed in the first chapters of Dante’s
Inferno,
this depiction of those granted divine favor borders on blasphemy. Jews could never hope to have a heavenly reward. Even their greatest heroes, such as Moses, Miriam, Abraham, and Sarah, could only look forward to limbo at best. Yet here they are, Jews in the center of Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment,
hovering over the head of Jesus. Even today, in the twenty-first century, the question of whether or not there is room in heaven for Jews remains a hot topic of debate among many Christians. Imagine how daring it was for Michelangelo to take a stand on this issue in the sixteenth century in a way that clearly contravened official Church doctrine of his day. We need not wonder, in this light, why Michelangelo chose to make his Jewish heavenly residents so very small and hard to notice.

Turning our attention next to the left side, under the cross, we see the Righteous Women, or the Female Elect. If it were not for the somewhat feminine faces and the not-very-credible breasts, this would look more like a male bodybuilders’ convention. Michelangelo is doing again what he did with the sibyls, using muscular male models and then sticking women’s hair, faces, and breasts on them. In a church in the sixteenth century, and in an era in which many theologians were still debating whether women had souls, Michelangelo shows us a vast array of striking women worthy of heavenly immortality, each with her own look and personality—and a vast amount of female nudity as well.

On the right side, under the column, are the Righteous Men, or the Male Elect. In previous depictions of the reward of the elect in heaven, other artists had shown a very reserved behavior among the blessed souls: they usually greeted each other in Paradise with a chaste handshake or at most by clasping each other’s wrists in ancient Roman style. Here, the happy males who have been accepted into heaven are much more demonstrative, to say the least.

In the middle of the group, at the top, are two handsome young men in a naked, impassioned embrace, kissing. Just behind them is a shadowy figure who looks like Dante, gloomy and disapproving as ever. Next to them a strong nude man is hauling another nude male up to his cloud to join him. Next to him, we clearly see another pair of naked blond boys kissing, and then on the right, a youth gazing deeply into an older man’s eyes while kissing his beard in reverence. Today, most visitors do not even notice this loving male section of the fresco or know it exists, but if it is pointed out to them, many become upset. We can only imagine how shocking and offensive it must have been in the sixteenth century.

Also in this section of the painting, just below the kissing couples, are many women interspersed next to and behind the men, almost hidden in this male-dominated zone. They are the wives and mothers, as if to show that these men did not achieve their blessed state alone, but only with the help of strong, pious women behind them.

In the middle, we find Christ, returning to bring human history to an end. Saint Peter is on his left (our right), returning the papal keys of rulership over heaven and earth, with the other patron saint of Rome, Saint Paul, at his side. On Jesus’s right side (our left) is his mother, Mary. This Jesus is a complete break with all traditional depictions: beardless, extremely muscular, sensual and severe at the same time. He seems very un-Christian, more like a pagan Greek statue—and for good reason. In fact, he is a composite of two Greek statues, both famous and both on display in the Vatican Museums collection.

The head of Jesus is none other than that of Apollo, the golden-haired god of the sun. Originally, the Vatican statue—the
Belvedere Apollo,
as it is called—had pure gold–plated hair, until the gold was stripped off after the fall of the Roman Empire. The overpumped torso of Christ is that of the
Belvedere Torso,
which back in the time of Michelangelo was called the Belvedere Hercules. The artist loved this torso so much that even in his last days, almost totally blind, he would be led by the arm through the maze of hallways in the Apostolic Palace to visit the ancient statue, to study and admire it one more time with his fingertips instead of with his eyes. Because of his passion for this muscular piece, it also came to be called Michelangelo’s Torso. Once more, Michelangelo is satisfying his love of sculpture by including his favorite pieces in the painting.

According to Saint Matthew, Christ should be seated on his throne of glory at the Resurrection. According to Michelangelo, Christ is not risen—he is
rising.
He is in the act of standing up, about to execute his awesome, severe final judgment on humanity. Mary, his mother, is looking away; it seems as if she does not want to witness the punishments on the other side of the fresco. Her face holds another secret, unknown until the recent cleaning and restoration. Although all the other figures are painted in brushstrokes that imitate the sculpting strokes of Michelangelo’s chisel, Mary’s face is a mass of tiny, colored dots, almost like pixels in a digital image. Here, the artist is pioneering a new art technique, called pointillism, which most people think was invented by Georges Seurat in Paris in the late 1880s. With Mary, Buonarroti took one more leap into the future. In fact, it is here with Mary that Michelangelo’s personal spiritual path—and that of the fresco—took a surprising, secret turn in the late 1530s.

VITTORIA COLONNA AND THE FIFTH COLUMN

As we have already seen, Michelangelo was not alone in his disillusionment with the Vatican. Since Martin Luther’s first protest against the Church in 1517, a large part of Europe had become Protestant. In Naples in the 1530s, a small but highly influential secret group formed, under the leadership and spiritual inspiration of Juan de Valdés. Valdés came from a Castilian family of
conversos,
Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism by the Spanish Inquisition.
*
His parents and at least one of his uncles were later arrested and tortured by the Inquisition for either secretly maintaining or returning to their Judaism. Juan had been sent to Catholic universities, where he excelled in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, literature, and theology. He is considered one of the greatest Spanish writers of the sixteenth century. He was another Renaissance genius, sought after by emperors, popes, and the intellectuals of his day. To escape the dangers of the Inquisition in Spain, Valdés went to Italy, ending up in Spanish-ruled Naples in 1536. He was a handsome, extremely charismatic speaker, drawing crowds of eager listeners. His home became an early forerunner of the artistic-intellectual salons of a later age, such as the one hosted by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in twentieth-century Paris. It was a magnet for the greatest artists, writers, and thinkers of the day—much as Lorenzo the Magnificent’s home had been in Florence decades earlier. Some of the frequent attendees at these gatherings were Cardinal Reginald Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, who had had to flee England when he opposed Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon; Pietro Aretino, a bawdy intellectual poet, critic, and pornographer; Pietro Carnesecchi, one of the greatest diplomats, political advisers, and debaters of his day; Bernardino Ochino, a Capuchin monk and highly popular preacher; Giulia Gonzaga, the dazzling widow of the rich Roman nobleman Vespasiano Colonna; and her sister-in-law Vittoria Colonna. Vittoria was another Italian Renaissance genius, one of the few published female poets, who had a devoted following as great as that of any male poet of the age. After her husband’s death in battle, she threw herself into her poetry and the intellectual whirl of the day. In this private circle of the intelligentsia of Naples, under the guise of seemingly harmless artistic dinner parties, the seeds were planted for a new underground movement with one goal—to reform the Vatican and the Catholic Church. In spite of the vastly differing backgrounds of these plotters, many of them had something in common: they were either acquaintances or friends of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the pope’s chosen artist and architect.

Valdés spoke out convincingly against the abuses of power and the hypocrisy of the Vatican. He wanted the Scriptures to be open and available to the average Christian, not used as an instrument of manipulation by the Church. He proposed an intellectual, questioning, analytical approach to the New Testament, in the same way that Jews interacted with their Scriptures by way of Talmudic reasoning and Midrashic insights. He believed that every Christian, free to delve into the Bible at his or her own level, would be illuminated spiritually by the holy text. In fact, this is what he called his philosophy:
alumbradismo,
or illuminism. Valdés regularly illustrated his teachings with Midrash and with metaphors from Moses Maimonides. Maimonides, according to Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike, was the greatest mind in all of Spain in the twelfth century. Also called RaMBaM (an acronym from his full name, Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon), he was a rabbi, teacher, Bible and Talmud commentator, philosopher, poet, and translator—and all the while working full-time as a much-sought-after anatomist and physician. Valdés was fond of citing Maimonides’s description of the Divine Illumination as a huge royal palace. Some visitors would shyly stand at the front door, others would wander through the gardens, others would enter the foyer, others would stand off at a distance, others—those blessed with a profound encounter with illumination—would make themselves at home in the heart of the palace. However, he preached that
all
souls were blessed with divine grace, according to their level. Thus, it was impossible to condemn those souls who had not yet reached the level of entering into the core of the holy palace. He wrote: “They are not strangers, those who are still gazing at the divine palace from the outside.” In this way, he both negated heresy and the existence of purgatory, which the Vatican was using mainly as a moneymaking gimmick, through the sale of the infamous indulgences. He taught that salvation did not come through baptism at birth and through unquestioning obedience to the Church, as the Vatican taught, but through the grace bestowed on all people by a loving God, through baptism as an adult when one could understand and appreciate the act, through studying and delving into Scripture to the best of one’s ability, and through humbly imitating Christ in one’s daily life. Only with an understanding of the influence of Valdés’s
illuminismo
on Michelangelo can we comprehend why the saved souls in the Last Judgment are ascending at so many different levels and in so many varied ways.