The Sistine Secrets

by Benjamin Blech

  I am more precious to myself than ever before,

  Now, with you in my heart, I am worth much more,

  Like sculpted lines added to a bare marble block

  Bring so much more value to the original rock….

  Against water, against fire, I can endure;

  With the sign of your love shining bright I can give the blind sight,

  And with my spit each venom I can cure.

  Michelangelo would need all this newly rekindled energy very soon. Not only was his life’s road leading him back to Rome, it would soon lead him into the Sistine Chapel again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  SECRETS OF THE LAST JUDGMENT

  What spirit is so empty and blind,

  that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot

  is more noble than the shoe,

  and skin more beautiful than the garment with

  which it is clothed?

  —MICHELANGELO

  BACK IN ROME, Michelangelo was immediately given another herculean task. Pope Clement VII, Buonarroti’s own childhood “brother” Giulio de’ Medici, summoned him to the Apostolic Palace and gave him a daunting commission. Clement wanted to make sure that his family had their original Michelangelo monuments in Rome as well as in Florence. He craved something in Rome that would rival the great masterpiece ensuring the memory of the hated Pope Julius. So, he commanded the astonished artist to redo the entire front wall of the Sistine Chapel.

  This wall above the altar was already covered in precious masterpieces of fresco, including panels from Michelangelo’s own ceiling project from twenty-two years earlier. In the middle, between two large windows, was an irreplaceable fresco of the Virgin Mary ascending into heaven, with Pope Sixtus IV, the founder of the Sistine, kneeling at her side. This scene, painted by Pinturicchio, was the key to the entire original concept of the chapel in the fifteenth century, since it was dedicated to Mary and used by the papal court every Ascension Day (August 15, nowadays more of an Italian national cultural holiday when everyone heads out of town). Above the Virgin and Sixtus were some of the original popes painted by Botticelli’s Florentine team in the fifteenth century, along with their two first panels in the Moses and Jesus cycles, also one-of-a-kind artworks in their own right.

  Clement did not want the sly, subversive artist to do another Jewish-themed painting in the Church’s most important chapel. After all, this pope was a de’ Medici; he knew how Michelangelo had been taught in Florence and was onto his Neoplatonic tricks—or so he thought. Clement decreed that the front wall be a monumental version of the Giudizio Universale, the Last Judgment. In the Christian tradition, this is when Jesus returns to earth to discern between right and wrong, good and evil, and to judge all souls accordingly. The souls judged righteous will ascend to heaven, while the evil ones will be damned to eternal punishment in hell. For once, Michelangelo agreed to a theme without even putting up an argument. He was tired of fighting for the soul of the Church. He was disgusted by the hedonistic heirs of the intellectual, cultured Lorenzo the Magnificent. He was more than happy with the idea of Christ coming back to judge both the Vatican and the de’ Medicis.

  Michelangelo agreed to undertake the task, but on one condition. He told Clement that, to do justice to the important cosmic theme of the painting, he would need to block up the front windows and remodel the entire front wall first. Clement eagerly agreed. In this way, his commissioned artwork would be all the more impressive, since it would take up one huge, uninterrupted mass of wall. Shortly after the contract was signed, Clement went off to his own final judgment, dying at fifty-six years of age. He was succeeded by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who took the papal name Paul III.

  The Farnese family was still another clan of wealthy nobles whose behavior was anything but noble. Paul III had been ordained a cardinal only because his gorgeous sister Julia had been the favorite concubine of Pope Alexander VI, the “poisoner pope” from the decadent Borgia family. Now that Paul was pope, it was the Farnese family’s turn to enjoy the papacy and the Vatican’s coffers of gold. His enormous palace, under construction while he was still a cardinal, would now be finished off with new designs for the façade, upper courtyard, and garden by Michelangelo himself.*

  Pope Paul told Michelangelo also to go right ahead with The Last Judgment fresco on the Sistine’s altar wall. Now, he thought, instead of a lasting tribute to the de’ Medicis, it would glorify the Farnese family forever. However, without a suspicious Florentine like Clement to keep an eye on him, Michelangelo once again succeeded in permeating his fresco with many levels of hidden messages. Today, most visitors to the Sistine have no idea who Clement VII or Paul III were, but they come from all over the world because of Michelangelo Buonarroti. The Last Judgment has become a permanent testament to the artist’s talent and philosophy.

  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 tr
aditional 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.