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The Sistine Secrets

Page 25

by Benjamin Blech


  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.

  After Valdés died in 1541, his small circle of alumbrados (illuminated ones) scattered. The core of the group migrated north to Cardinal Pole’s residence in Viterbo, today about an hour’s drive north of Rome. The new leader of the group was not Pole—that would have been too obvious. The group had already been spied upon for some time, especially by a certain Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa, a fanatical promoter of the Inquisition and its reign of terror. The true leader was a woman and a nun—Vittoria Colonna—who ran everything from her convent in Viterbo. Through her powerful family connections and influence, she set up an underground network that soon covered all of Italy and most of Europe. Freethinking priests, politicians, diplomats, and intellectuals were secretly involved everywhere in one quest—to become a hidden “fifth column” inside the Vatican, to reform it from the inside, and ultimately, to harmonize Catholic and Protestant belief. This cabal of dreamers took on a new name: Gli Spirituali, the Spiritual Ones. Their ultimate goal: to reunite the two Christian faiths before the schism became too great, and to bring about one Church, cleansed and reborn.

  Years before, while still living in Rome, Vittoria had become friendly with Michelangelo, and their bond would become ever stronger until her untimely death. They wrote lengthy personal letters to each other, composed poems in each other’s honor, and often exchanged gifts and favors. Many historians who sought to deny Buonarroti’s love of men tried to use his poems to Vittoria as proof of his heterosexuality. Their love, however, was the epitome of what we today would label “platonic.” They loved each other’s minds. Michelangelo was thrilled to find an intellectual peer and fellow spiritual traveler in Vittoria. Just as he had thrown himself so passionately into new ideas and movements in the past, he now became heart and soul one of the Spirituali.

  In The Last Judgment, just as Mary is turning away from the severe judgment of Jesus, there is a deeper meaning: Michelangelo is symbolically turning away from the Church as well. This had to be kept secret, of course, since only Catholic artists were allowed to work inside the Vatican, and especially in the pope’s chapel. If it had been discovered that Buonarroti had denied the Church and veered into Valdesian Protestantism, he would not only have lost his career, but also his freedom—and possibly his life. Only a few years earlier, the Vatican had put a price on his head for supporting Florence’s independence movement. Still, the rebel in him could not be silent, and he continued to fill the giant fresco with more and more hidden messages.

  If we look carefully at Mary, we see that she is looking downward at only one figure, a woman who is peering over the shoulder of Saint Lawrence and his grill. In fact, Mary’s foot is resting on the top of the grill. The woman’s face is mostly obscured by the grill—and for good reason. She is the secret leader of the underground movement—Vittoria Colonna herself.

  Jesus also is gazing down at only one figure—an unnamed man peering over the shoulder of Saint Bartholomew, who like Saint Lawrence, is seated in a place of honor at Jesus’s feet. From the handsome profile and the large eyes, the same that we saw on the statues that Buonarroti carved in Florence after 1532, we can recognize the other great love of Michelangelo’s life at this time—Tommaso dei Cavalieri. Here, in the fresco, he appears to be too old, with gray hair and a receding hairline—even though his face is young and almost completely unlined. This was probably done on purpose, either by Michelangelo or by his friend Daniele da Volterra, who did some retouching when he was ordered to censor the painting in 1564. In Naples, there is one copy of the original Last Judgment, the way it looked before the censoring. The copy, an oil painting, was done by Michelangelo’s trusted friend Marcello Venusti in 1549, under the direction of Buonarroti himself. In Venusti’s copy of the fresco, we can find the same young man, but with a full head of dark hair, looking very much the handsome thirty-eight-year-old Tommaso was at the time Michelangelo was helping Venusti create this painting.

  Why did Michelangelo choose these two particular saints to guard his two great loves? Saint Lawrence’s name in Italian is Lorenzo, just like the artist’s first patron and protector, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Also, Saint Lawrence, the treasurer of the early Christian Church in Rome, said that the true wealth of the Church was not its gold but its common folk of faith. This is part of Michelangelo’s message to the papal court of his day, going all the way back to his work on the Sistine ceiling.*

  Saint Bartholomew, besides being the patron saint of taxidermists and leather tanners, is also the protector of plasterers. After Michelangelo’s traumatic problems with the plastering of the ceiling, he wanted all the help he could get with this enormous fresco work and had good reason to include this saintly protector.

  Saint Bartholomew was not martyred in Rome but skinned alive in Armenia. According to tradition, his skin is inside the altar of his church on the Tiber Island, between the areas that were the two main Jewish neighborhoods of Rome in the Renaissance. Dressed up as Saint Bartholomew is a friend of Buonarroti, a man who got in trouble for portraying too much skin in his prints that accompanied his lewd poems—Pietro Aretino, pornographer and fellow Spirituali conspirator. Buonarroti is not making fun of Saint Bartholomew but showing his belief that a man like Aretino, in trouble with the hypocritical Church, was closer to God than many so-called religious authorities of his day.

  Saints are almost always shown with the signs of their martyrdom for the faith. (The main exception is Peter, who is shown with the keys he received from Jesus, instead of being portrayed crucified upside down.) Bartholomew is always shown holding his entire intact skin and the knife with which he was flayed. The skin here holds another intriguing mys
tery: whereas the figure of Bartholomew/Aretino is completely bald with a long gray beard, the face on the skin is clean-shaven with a full head of dark unruly hair. They do not match. This is because the face on the skin is none other than Michelangelo himself. As we discussed in the story of the Pietà, artists were forbidden to sign works commissioned by the Vatican. Here, instead of his name, Buonarroti secretly signed the fresco with his own face. It is also one more protest from the sculptor who hated to paint. He seems to be saying that being commanded to return to paint in the Sistine again was a fate as awful as being skinned alive.

  That is not all that this symbolic skin is saying, though. The figure of Tommaso—the only person in direct eye-to-eye contact with Jesus in the whole gigantic painting—has his fingers pressed together in supplication. (It was not until the recent cleaning that one could clearly see where Jesus’s and Tommaso’s eyes were focused.) Michelangelo, feeling himself a sinner unworthy of heaven, believed that his one hope of salvation was his true, unselfish love of Tommaso. Here, he placed Tommaso as his intercessor, pleading his case before Christ the Judge. Just to make sure we understand that he felt that a man’s love—even for another man—could lead to redemption, he placed next to his skinned body yet another male couple passionately kissing in Paradise. The identity of Tommaso here is not mere conjecture. For once, we have a surviving clue, written in Buonarroti’s own hand. In 1535, just when he was plotting out his designs for the fresco, he wrote another love poem to Tommaso. In this sonnet, Michelangelo likens himself to a lowly silkworm, whose protective covering becomes the clothing for another being:

  To enfold my noble lord, I would wish the same fate;

  To clothe my lord’s living skin with mine that is dead;

  As the snake passes through rocks in order to shed,

  Thus would I pass through Death to better my state.

  THE SAVED AND THE DAMNED

  At the bottom of the left-hand side of the fresco, below Mary and the Blessed Women, is the Resurrection of the Good Souls. They are climbing out of the ground as their flesh slowly returns to their bodies. The demons of the underworld are trying desperately to haul some of them back, but the angels seem to be prevailing. In the corner we see a priest blessing these adult souls—possibly a sign of Michelangelo’s new illuminist faith, in which baptism was for adults. Another symbol of this early form of Italian Protestantism is the rosaries that are being used in this corner of the fresco, to save and lift up to salvation several of the souls. Valdés and his followers believed that divine grace was the key to salvation, as opposed to blind obedience to the Church; in fact, we get the expression “saving grace” from this concept. The rosary is an act of humble, daily faith in which the Ave Maria prayer is recited. It begins: “Hail, Mary, full of grace….” This was another break with traditional representations of the Last Judgment, in which the saved souls showed the acts that had earned their redemption, such as sponsoring the construction of a church or chapel, proselytizing to bring more followers into the Church, or conquering a city for the pope.

  At the bottom middle, beneath the trumpeting angels, and on the right-hand side, beneath the Blessed Males and the Martyr Saints, we see visions of hell: fire and brimstone, dark caverns, Charon ferrying the damned across the River Styx, and demons dragging the evil souls down to their eternal doom. One of the most famous images of all is a soul finally realizing the enormity of his sins while being bitten by a demonic creature. Michelangelo is making a pun in Italian here—to be bitten is morso. This poor damned soul is the picture of remorse—in Italian, rimorso.

  To the right of this image, a battle is going on. Furious angels are literally beating down some of the worst souls, some of them symbolizing sins or vices. One of these is commonly identified as the image of Greed, since there is a heavy money bag dangling down at his side.

  Another sin rampant at the time, but now long extinct in the Church, was the sin of simony, described and punished at length in Dante’s Inferno, one of Michelangelo’s favorite texts. Simony was the practice of selling priestly positions in the Church hierarchy. In the Renaissance, it was the usual modus operandi for popes to raise money by selling to the highest bidders the titles of cardinal, archbishop, and so on. This only added to the mess of corruption and confusion in the Church of Michelangelo’s era. As expressed in Michelangelo’s poem of 1512, in which he described the Vatican as selling Christ’s blood for money, this was something that particularly enraged the artist. We see the proof here: the cursed figure is upside down, a sad parody of the martyrdom of Saint Peter; the money purse is gold in color, tied with red cords—the exact same giallorosso colors that Michelangelo had used before to insult Rome and the Vatican. The pair of lead keys hanging by the cursed figure’s side are also a sardonic parody of the twin keys of Vatican City and the papacy. Buonarroti painted the angriest, strongest angel of them all to batter this corrupt soul’s buttocks down to hell.

  On the far right is another naked figure, but with a face that is more like a caricature than a real person. He is the symbol of Lust, sex without love. In this case, the artist let the punishment fit the sin; if we look carefully, we can see that Lust is being dragged down to perdition by his testicles. Small wonder that he is biting his knuckles to keep from screaming in agony.

  THE KABBALAH OF THE JUDGMENT

  Of course, Michelangelo did not leave out his cherished Kabbalah in The Last Judgment. This fresco contains the same balance of the universe that he concealed in the ceiling. On Mary’s side of the twin tablet-shaped fresco, we find the symbols of Chessed, the female, merciful side of the Tree of Life. On Jesus’s side, to his left or sinister side, are the signs of G’vurah and Din, the male aspects of strength and judgment, found on the opposite side of the Tree of Life. On the Chessed side, we find: souls being saved through grace, the Merciful Virgin, the Blessed Female Souls, and the Cross of Salvation at the top. On the G’vurah/Din side, we find souls being damned and punished, Christ the Judge, the Blessed Male Souls, and the Column of Flagellation at the top. On the Judgment side, even the Martyred Saints seem angry, pointedly showing the instruments of their torture and death to the very comfortable Vatican hierarchy that would gather there beneath their gaze, as if to say: “This is what we did for the faith—how about you?”

  This time, instead of hiding Hebrew letters in the work to signify the balance of female and male, mercy and power, Michelangelo hid other ancient mystical symbols of femininity and masculinity at the top of the fresco…in plain view. The cross and the circular crown of thorns at the top of the female tablet of Chessed is from this symbol: . It is the cross of the love goddess Venus, very popular in his day as a symbol in astrology as well as in alchemy.

  The column at the top of the male tablet of G’vurah is decidedly male. On careful inspection, we can see that the artist purposely exaggerated the muscular back of the angel raising the base of the column so that the rounded, divided back looks just like a scrotum, complementing the phallic angle of the column. Viewed as a whole, it is very clearly the male symbol of the war god Mars: .

  To achieve proper balance in the universe, there must be a center as well. According to the Kabbalah, there is indeed a central point to the universe: it is the Ladder of Jacob. In Genesis 28:12, Jacob dreams of a divine ladder, by which the angels descend to earth and ascend to heaven. This is the link between heaven and earth, humanity and angels, the material and the spiritual worlds. The Kabbalah teaches that the entire creation revolves around this ladder. Most people who view The Last Judgment fresco think that Jesus is the center of the painting—but they are mistaken. The true center is just below Jesus, where Saint Lawrence is sitting with his grill. Down through the centuries, critics have complained that the martyr’s grill has no legs and that it resembles a ladder more than a grating. They are right. It is a ladder—Jacob’s Ladder, to be exact. The bottom rung of the ladder is at the exact center of the huge picture, and if you look carefully, you will see that the dynamic
motion of the painting revolves perfectly around the angle of the ladder. Once again, Michelangelo embedded a central teaching of Jewish mysticism in one of the most famous Catholic artworks of all time.

  This time, Michelangelo managed to incorporate a significant number of daring ideas into his work. He found a way, as we have seen, to include his male lover, respect for Jews, contempt for the Vatican’s corruption and immorality, experimental painting techniques, and his underground, subversive neo-Protestant faith. This last is possibly the biggest secret of them all—that while Michelangelo was creating this masterpiece for the Church, he had left the Church and personally subscribed to another faith.

  Amazingly enough, the millions of visitors to the Sistine Chapel each year do not notice any of this. The clever Florentine once again succeeded in overwhelming the visitor with so much color and imagery that only those who are lucky enough to spend a good deal of time inside have a chance to notice any details. One man who did spend much time inspecting the fresco was the pope’s cerimoniere, or master of ceremonies, while Michelangelo was toiling away on it. The cerimoniere is basically the papal chief of staff, running the day-to-day operations of the Vatican for the pontiff. In the time of Paul III, the master of ceremonies was a pompous, self-important cleric by the name of Biagio da Cesena. He reviled Michelangelo publicly, even before the fresco was finished, for filling the holy papal chapel with an “orgy of pagan obscenities and heresies.” The artist replied with the quote at the top of this chapter, and then followed it up with paint. In the bottom right-hand corner of the fresco, just over the exit door (through which the public enters today), is the damned soul in hell, King Minos of Greek mythology. Minos loved gold and despised human beings, thus assuring him eternal damnation. He is depicted here with donkey ears, crushed by a huge serpent that is chewing his genitals forever. The cursed king is the very last figure that Michelangelo painted at the end of his seven years’ toil on the wall fresco.

 

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