The Sistine Secrets (5 page)

Biagio d’Antonio, another proud son of Florence, did not want to be outdone. In his panel, the Parting of the Red Sea, he shows the evil Pharaoh wearing the della Rovere colors and a building looking suspiciously like the chapel itself being flooded by the raging red waters.

The new chapel, still called the Palatine, was consecrated on the Feast of the Holy Assumption, August 15, 1483. The proud pope officiated. He was a happy man, totally unaware of the hidden insults heaped upon him.

Sixtus IV was anything but a great strategist or diplomat. He had made many conflicting and impetuous alliances. He was clearly more concerned with increasing his family’s wealth and power than with strengthening the Church. Luckily, the Muslim invasion of Italy was halted by the unexpected death of Mehmed II, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, in the spring of 1481, but Sixtus took the credit for himself. He died a year later, still blissfully ignorant of how Lorenzo had managed to make a mockery of his attempt to have the chapel serve his egomania.

In retrospect, it is remarkable to see how much the first artists got away with inside the Sistine Chapel. However, the real master of hidden messages would show up a generation later…and with much, much more to say.

Chapter Two

THE LOST LANGUAGE OF ART

…and the understanding of their
prudent men shall be hidden.

—ISAIAH 29:14

W
HAT LORENZO’S ARTISTS were able to carry off in the Sistine Chapel is a powerful example of a practice with many parallels, even in modern times.

During the Second World War, the Allied forces faced a grave threat in the Pacific theater of operations. The Japanese cryptographers were incomparably skilled at breaking every single code that the Air Force, Navy, and Marines could devise. The situation seemed lost, until the Allies hit upon two ingenious solutions.

The first was to bring in a team of Native Americans from the Navaho tribe—the famous “wind talkers”—to translate all radio messages into their native tongue, a language completely unknown to the Japanese. The other took advantage of Japanese ignorance of American cultural trivia. To transmit numerical codes, the instructions began: “Take Jack Benny’s age, and then…” Only someone who had grown up in the United States, listening to the well-known comedian’s popular radio show, would be in on the reference. Jack Benny’s stage persona was known by all to be a tightwad, a horrible violin player, and a vain man—especially about his age. Even though the former vaudevillian was already in his middle years at that time, he would always claim that he was “only thirty-nine.” The Japanese secret services went out of their minds trying to figure out who this Jack Benny was, and then attempting to pin down his actual chronological age, whereas every American soldier knew instantly that no matter what year it was, the answer would forever be “thirty-nine.”

Thankfully, neither of these codes was cracked. An almost unknown language and a bit of Americana “insider info” helped win the war by masking essential information so that only the intended audience could comprehend it.

USING CODES IN ART

Codes proved their value many times over in wartime. Far less obvious, though, is the way hidden messages found a place in another setting with universal significance. Here the intent was not to deceive an enemy but to intensify a sense of mystery, not to achieve military conquest but to produce greater appreciation. It is in art and in some of its most famous expressions that we readily realize an important truth:
artistic geniuses often produced their greatest works when they incorporated concealed meanings in their masterpieces.

Art—at least great art—by its very nature has varying levels, or layers, of meaning. In fact, a masterpiece comes to be considered a masterpiece because we know instinctively, even subconsciously, that there is much more to the work than meets the eye. We don’t love the Mona Lisa because she is beautiful (in fact, in today’s aesthetic, she would be considered plain by many), but because she is
mysterious.
That is the key to the world’s fascination with her for the last five centuries. We know that there is something else there beneath the surface, beneath that smile, and we can’t quite figure it out.

It is hard for us in the twenty-first century to appreciate how much it was taken for granted in the Renaissance and Baroque periods that artists
always
incorporated multiple layers of meaning in their work. We have to realize art’s function at a time when people lacked the myriad sensory stimuli we encounter every day, all day. In a world without cable channels and satellite television, videos and DVDs, movies and the Internet, an artist’s creation was the one ever-present object that had to serve as a source of pleasure and inspiration over and over again, year after year, without becoming stale. If an artist of the caliber of Leonardo or Michelangelo was paid a hefty commission for a new private piece of art, that artwork had to be a constant delight and stimulus for the rest of the patron’s life, and then usually go on to become a family heirloom. If an artwork was commissioned by the government, it had to serve as a permanent expression of that society’s ethos and values. And, as we saw in the preceding chapter, a major motivation for someone like Pope Sixtus IV to commission the expensive original decorations of the Sistine was the fact that serving as patron for the creation of fine art was at that time also the greatest demonstration of power and wealth.

The biggest patron of the arts throughout this time was of course the Catholic Church. But for the clergy, art served yet another function. Church art was meant not only to glorify a place of worship or to inspire the faithful; it was also designed to teach the masses, who were almost entirely illiterate. Thus, captivating, textless illustrations of important stories from the Gospels and the lives of the saints were needed to “enlighten the benighted,” to instruct the next generation in the ways and the history of Christendom. This explains why so many medieval and Renaissance churches have incredibly colorful and intricate fresco cycles, sometimes narrating an entire biblical book. (Ironically enough, this tradition is considered by many to be the origin of today’s comic book and graphic novel.)

For people at that time, just as today in many corners of the world, going to mass, aside from fulfilling one’s religious obligations, was the only vehicle for socializing and entertainment. Even in the freethinking Florence of Michelangelo’s youth, people would flock to the churches to mingle, to hear a sermon from a talented popular orator, and to enjoy the latest artwork. Religious ceremonies of the era were anything but brief. A mass, especially a papal one, could last for hours. How to maintain the proper mood and not bore the congregation to sleep? Art was the answer. But not just pretty pictures that required only a short glance. It had to be art that would serve as an ever-unfolding, mesmerizing element of the religious ambience. That is another reason that the art in Michelangelo’s day was so complex—it had to bear hundreds of repeated viewings of long duration. The audience had to believe that it was always possible to discover in it new meanings and insights.

Thus, generation by generation, art—both private and public—became more and more complex and multilayered. Just as Shakespeare filled his works with straightforward storylines, sex, violence, and bawdy jokes for the “groundlings” (the uneducated peasants who stood or sat on the ground) while at the same time creating gorgeous poetry with profound levels of meaning for the wealthy and cultured patrons in the upper seats, artists in Michelangelo’s era were creating amazing pieces that would speak to every level of intelligence. The common folk would see pretty pictures and statues and listen to a cleric’s narration of their meaning. For those of sufficient background, however, there were far more treasures to be gleaned from delving into each work.

Every single element of Renaissance art has an inner significance: the choice of subject and protagonists, the faces selected for different characters in the work, the colors used, the species of flowers or trees shown, the kinds of animals portrayed, the positions, stances, gestures, and juxtapositions of the characters in the scene, even the location and landscape itself—all have hidden meanings. For endlessly creative geniuses like Leonardo and Michelangelo, this made each new work an extremely exhilarating—and exhausting—journey deep into the piece and thus deep into their own souls.

The greatest challenge arose, however, when the artist felt he had to hide his real message out of fear, knowing that his ideas were unacceptable to the establishment or perhaps even prohibited. In times of intolerance and religious persecution, art very often did not dare openly declare what the artist so urgently wanted to communicate. Codes, hidden allusions, symbols, and veiled references comprehensible to only a very limited circle of peers were the only recourse available to those who broke with the traditional dogmas of their age—especially if the artist knew his ideas would be anathema to his patron or to the authorities.

This, as we will see, is what makes Michelangelo and his work in the Sistine Chapel so fascinating. Michelangelo may well be the paradigm of the great artist whose work reflects a passion for both aesthetic perfection and intellectual persuasion. More than anything, he wanted to create works of art that would endure not only because of their beauty but also for their daring—and at the time subversive—statements to people both inside and outside the Church. Although Michelangelo knew that a majority of his contemporaries would not see beneath the superficial, he had faith that somehow his “coded” allusions would surely be exposed by diligent scholars. Michelangelo was certain that history would take the trouble to decipher his true meaning—because hiding dangerous thoughts in works of art was common practice to a great many of his colleagues, a practice with an ancient pedigree.

FROM THE BIBLE TO THE RENAISSANCE

The first recorded instance of a hidden message in artwork goes back almost four thousand years, to a story recorded in the biblical book of Genesis. Joseph, the heir and favored son of the last patriarch, Jacob, is sold into Egyptian slavery by his jealous brothers. The conspiring brothers then take Joseph’s fancy cloak of many colors, rip it, dip it in blood, and tell their father, Jacob, that Joseph has been devoured by a savage beast. Joseph, thanks to his God-given talents and ingenuity, grows up to become the Pharaoh’s vizier, the second most powerful man on earth at that time. At the end of the tale, Joseph is reunited with his brothers and he sends the Pharaoh’s highly decorated royal carriages and wagons to Canaan to take precious gifts to his beloved father and to transport the patriarch in style to Egypt, along with the rest of his large family. Jacob, who has been inconsolable through all the long years since Joseph’s “death,” cannot bring himself to hope that Joseph might not only still be alive, but also have risen to the highest echelons of power in mighty Egypt. The text says at this point: “And [the brothers] told him [Jacob], saying, Joseph is yet alive, and he is governor over all the land of Egypt. And Jacob’s heart grew faint, for he believed them not. And they told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said to them; and when he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived; And Israel said, It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive; I will go and see him before I die” (Genesis 45:26–28).

The ancient Jewish commentators point out that it is only when the doubting patriarch sees the wagons that he at last believes that his son Joseph is alive and governing Egypt. Why? Because Jacob understood the coded message Joseph had sent him on the artistic adornments of the wagons. Pharaoh’s carriages of the time were as a matter of course covered with pagan Egyptian art, colorful carvings and paintings depicting the various gods and goddesses of the idolatrous death-worshiping cult that controlled Egypt. According to the Midrash, the Jewish oral lore connected to the biblical text, Joseph painted over and disfigured these pagan images on the royal vehicles. This conveyed two hidden meanings to his father: one, that only someone in the highest ranks of power would dare to deface the king’s carriages; and two, that it must have been a member of his own family, someone who believed in but one God, that was responsible for this covert insult to the pagan symbols that epitomized artwork in ancient Egypt.

From the biblical Joseph’s wagon to the twentieth century’s Jack Benny, we’ve had countless examples of codes relying on cultural references known only to the initiated, the “insiders,” to convey an important message meant for but a select few.

Serious scholars have increasingly become aware that many of the best-known artworks of the Renaissance and Baroque periods (especially from the late 1400s through the mid-1600s) are similarly filled with hidden ideas and covert codes. Some require fairly little work to decipher. It doesn’t take all that much effort, for example, to figure out the great artists’ references to Greco-Roman mythology and medieval legends, to observe their use of the heraldic colors and crests of the powerful families that controlled Italy and the Vatican, and even to identify many of the faces of then-famous individuals in their frescoes.

Somewhat more elusive, though, are the secret symbols ordered by the patron commissioning the work. Renaissance and Baroque art teems with this type of hidden message: portraits of the patron and his family members or inner circle who just happen to be present at the Nativity or the Crucifixion, family crests that appear as decorations in architectural details from ancient Rome, and even puns based on the patron’s name. In 1475, for example, the year of Michelangelo’s birth, Botticelli painted Lorenzo de’ Medici and his Renaissance court present as witnesses at the Adoration of the Magi. Much later, Michelangelo similarly festooned the entire ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel in garlands of oak leaves and acorns, to remind the public of both Pope Sixtus IV who had commissioned the building of the chapel and of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s contentious patron. Both popes, uncle and nephew, were from the della Rovere clan, whose name means “of the oak tree.”