The Sistine Secrets (36 page)

Faced with the enormous insult of his burial in Rome, the citizens of Florence finally realized their cultural and spiritual debt to Buonarroti. They hurriedly collected public donations to hire the services of Florence’s best
burglars.
The two thieves rode to Rome in an oxcart. After sundown, they broke into the church, stole the famous artist’s body, rolled it up with cords, and disguised it as a bale of rags. They put it in the back of the cart and rode like blazes back to Florence, arriving at dawn. The joyous Florentines immediately entombed their Michelangelo inside the Basilica of Santa Croce, where his tomb can still be seen today.

As an ironic footnote, in the 1850s, almost three hundred years after Michelangelo’s burial there, the church finally got its well-known façade. It was designed by a Jewish architect, Nicolò Matas. Since Matas was told that his name would not appear on the church, he insisted that a large Star of David be placed over the front door. Today, the church that houses the tomb of the most famous secret supporter of Talmud and Kabbalah bears a giant Jewish star.

The defeat and disappearance of the Spirituali and other freethinkers effectively ended any hope for passing down the meaning of Michelangelo’s secret symbols. Soon, they were forgotten. Generation after generation, dust, dirt, sweat, and candle soot slowly covered and darkened the bright Sistine frescoes and further extinguished the illuminated messages embedded within. With the onset of the industrial age, air pollution added another layer of dark filth on the Sistine frescoes. A final blow to the revelation of any of the artist’s true intentions came when the Vatican’s official guidebooks to the Sistine were published early in the twentieth century. It was not simply that the Vatican itself was unaware of what the Sistine frescoes really meant; it was just that an official publication effectively curtailed any further independent analysis or non-Catholic interpretation for a long time to come.

Light began to filter into the Church with the papacy of John XXIII, a jovial, loving man whom the Italians to this day call
Il Papa Buono,
the Good Pope. During the Holocaust, as a cardinal, he saved tens of thousands of Jews by illegally counterfeiting and distributing certificates of baptism to anyone he could find. When he became pope (by a fluke) in 1958, he started a major “housecleaning” of the Church. He convened the Second Vatican Council—commonly called Vatican II—in which the Church’s institutionalized teachings against the Jews and Judaism were brought to an end. Thanks to Pope John, Catholics no longer refer to Jews as “perfidious” but as “our elder brothers and sisters.” He started the reconciliation and tolerance that Michelangelo had been preaching in his artworks four centuries earlier. Today,
Il Papa Buono
has another name—
Saint
John XXIII.

The next major step in the liberalization of the Church was the surprising election in 1978 of the first Polish pope—John Paul II. He became the first pope to enter a synagogue, and in the Catholic Jubilee Year 2000, the first pope to travel to Israel. This was only fitting, since the word
jubilee
comes directly from the Hebrew word
yovel,
the Holy Jubilee celebrated every fifty years in ancient Israel. To set the stage for this important year, Pope John Paul had decreed the definitive cleaning and restoration of the Sistine Chapel in 1980. There had been some previous—and bizarre—attempts to restore the ceiling to its original beauty. So-called experts over the centuries had climbed rickety ladders to wipe parts of the ceiling with bread, milk, and even Greek wine—all in vain. The twentieth-century project took two decades, ending just in time for the new millennium. After many attempts to construct a modern, state-of-the-art scaffolding to enable work on the ceiling, the world’s top engineers came to the conclusion that the only solution was to re-create a metal version of Michelangelo’s original “flying arch” bridge. They even uncovered and reused the holes the maestro had made in the side walls in the early sixteenth century.

As the restoration was nearing completion, Pope John Paul II announced a public “rehabilitation” of Michelangelo and his Sistine frescoes, in a mass held in the chapel itself:

It seems that Michelangelo, in his own way, allowed himself to be guided by the evocative words of the Book of Genesis which, as regards the creation of the human being, male and female, reveals: “The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame” (Genesis 2:25). The Sistine Chapel is precisely—if one may say so—the sanctuary of the theology of the human body. In witnessing to the beauty of man created by God as male and female, it also expresses in a certain way, the hope of a world transfigured….

If we are dazzled as we contemplate
The Last Judgment
by its splendor and its terror, admiring on the one hand the glorified bodies and on the other those condemned to eternal damnation, we understand too that the whole composition is deeply penetrated by a unique light and by a single artistic logic: the light and the logic of faith that the Church proclaims, confessing: “We believe in one God…maker of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen.” On the basis of this logic in the context of the light that comes from God, the human body also keeps its splendor and its dignity.
(April 8, 1994)

Thankfully, some of Michelangelo’s visionary views had found acceptance by a modern head of the Church. Today, the Vatican is catching up with the seeds of thought that Buonarroti planted in its walls five centuries ago. The corrupt and fanatical popes of the past are long gone, but the artist’s vision in the Sistine Chapel of a far more universal and loving faith seems to be growing brighter, clearer, and stronger than ever.

Conclusion

SO, WHAT
IS
THE SISTINE CHAPEL?

Lord, grant that I may always desire more
than I can accomplish.

—MICHELANGELO

Look beneath the surface; do not let the multiple qualities
of a thing nor its value escape you.

—MARCUS AURELIUS,
Meditations

S
UCCESS, IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID, means different things to different people.

Measured by the throngs of visitors who are moved to make personal pilgrimages to Rome and the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel is a success beyond compare—a place that some have suggested should be listed as one of the wonders of the world.

But there is another way to determine whether a human effort has achieved its goal. It is important to take note of what its creators sought to accomplish. We need to know not only what the Sistine Chapel is today, but also what it was meant to be by its founders. Would
they
feel their chapel is a success today? As we have seen, the chapel has been altered, expanded, decorated, and yes, even partially defaced down through the ages. It has undergone not only structural alterations but also philosophic and theological modifications. Unlike Saint Paul, the Sistine never became “all things to all men,” but it has spoken with many voices and preached many different messages. Its strongest messages undoubtedly come from Michelangelo, the man most responsible for the Sistine’s enduring fame. However, his messages—“things seen and unseen”—have been obscured, misinterpreted, censored, overlooked, and forgotten over the centuries, only to come back to light in our time. Buonarroti once prayed, “Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.” We have to ask: would
he
feel that he accomplished his goal with his frescoes? For Michelangelo, could the Sistine be considered a success?

Jonah, the prophet who appears over the Sistine’s altar, was asked by the sailors: “What is your occupation? From where do you come? What is your land? And to which people do you belong?” To assess the success of the Sistine, we must think in terms of its history, its prime architects, and its contemporary relevance. What was it first meant to be? What were its functions over the course of time—practically, spiritually, and conceptually? Perhaps most meaningful of all, we need to ask: what did Michelangelo want the Sistine to teach humanity? What was
his
vision for it—not only for his time but for posterity? Did he succeed?

Let’s start with Michelangelo’s predecessors. What did they want the chapel to say, and what relevance, if any, do these ideas still have today?

THE PALATINA: THE PRE-MICHELANGELO CHAPEL

Pope Sixtus IV, the original founder of the Sistine Chapel in the fifteenth century, ostensibly wanted it above all to proclaim the miracle of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Of course, with the egotism that also marked so many of his predecessors and immediate followers, he was very concerned that at the same time it would assert the triumph of his family’s taking over the papacy. To accomplish both messages, he had a fresco of the Virgin’s ascent into heaven placed at the very front of the chapel with himself beside her. Knowing his vanity and family pride, we can assume he probably would have entitled the Sistine “The Chapel of the Holy Assumption, Shedding Perpetual Glory on the House of della Rovere.”

Today, both of Sixtus’s messages have met an inglorious fate. The Sistine is not at all the paean of praise that he commissioned to glorify himself and his family, the della Roveres, and their messianic pretensions. The only trace that remains of him, aside from the chapel’s name (“Sistine” for Sixtus IV), is the family symbol of the oak tree and the acorns scattered around the room. Instead of an everlasting testimony to his greatness, there still linger the various insults to the papal family from the Florentine artists. The sabotage job so brilliantly executed by the original fresco team sent by Lorenzo de’ Medici ensured that the Sistine would never fulfill Sixtus’s dream of a positive public relations image for the della Rovere clan.

The other original theme of the chapel, depicting the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, is also no more. Since the 1530s, when Michelangelo destroyed Pinturicchio’s original fresco of Mary’s ascent on the front altar wall, there has not been a trace of that subject matter left in any of the room’s imagery.

So, with the passage of time, the first two major rationales (or “occupations,” in the Jonah questions) for the Sistine became irrelevant. To replace them, another concept was stressed to validate the chapel’s uniqueness. Vatican theologians turned the Sistine into “The New Holy Temple of the New Jerusalem.” Its role, they explained, was to replace with a Christian counterpart the original Temple in Jerusalem demolished by the Romans in 70 CE. What was lost to the Jews would be shown to have been transferred to the Church. That is why, as we previously indicated, the Sistine has exactly the measurements and proportions of the Holy Temple of Solomon as described by the prophet Samuel in the Bible.

Interestingly enough, this correspondence between the Jewish Temple and the Sistine Chapel was later purposely diminished by the Church itself. The rabidly anti-Semitic Pope Paul IV (the same Cardinal Carafa who spied on and persecuted the Spirituali) decided that the Sistine was
too Jewish,
and therefore decreed that the marble partition grill had to be moved several feet east. That partition originally had marked exactly where the Veil hung in the Holy Temple. The Veil served as the separation curtain between the regular sanctuary and the
Kodesh Kodoshim,
the Holy of Holies, a spot so sacred that only the High Priest was allowed to enter on but one day of the year. As visitors enter the Sistine today, they will find a small ramp in the middle of the hall between the area of the Holy of Holies and the slightly lower regular half of the room. That is where the marble partition stood for almost a century, until the hateful Paul IV. This pope was loathed by Catholics and Jews alike. He brought the tortures of the Inquisition into Rome itself, created the Index of Forbidden Books, set a heavy tax on Christians to pay for colossal statues of himself worthy of any pagan emperor, set up a debtors’ prison for those who could not pay, and walled up the Jews of Rome in a hellish ghetto. Thankfully, he never lived to realize his other desired changes in the chapel—the censoring of the ceiling and the complete destruction of Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment.
The angel of death took Paul IV before he could fulfill this wish.
*

With the destruction of the original demarcation of the Holy of Holies and the permission granted today for streams of visiting tourists to flow freely through these premises, this concept of the Sistine as a replacement for the Temple of Solomon has also been rendered almost totally obsolete.

THE SISTINE AND “THE CONCLAVE”

There is another very important rite that is identified with the Sistine Chapel. It is where the Conclave, the election of a new pope, is held. The word
conclave
comes from the Latin
con clave,
“with a key,” meaning that the College of Cardinals is actually locked inside the Apostolic Palace until a new pope has been chosen. Before the Sistine, the voting was held secretly in many venues, often outside Rome to avoid rumormongering and political pressures. Once, in the ducal palace of the city of Viterbo, the cardinals wrangled for so many months that the exasperated Duke of Viterbo locked them in the palace, fed them only bread and water, and even had the palace’s
roof
removed to force them to choose a new pope. Since the Papal Conclave was moved centuries ago to the Sistine, there has been no threat that anyone would remove
that
famous ceiling.