The Sistine Secrets (12 page)

About a year later, instead of drawing inspiration from a Christian Renaissance sculpture, he based his work on an ancient pagan Roman sarcophagus. This time, his theme was clearly mythological: the battle of the centaurs, the legendary creatures with a human upper form and the lower body of a horse. Even though limited to a small, thin piece of marble, Michelangelo managed to create an amazingly intricate mass of struggling bodies that seem to fade back into infinity.

In this work, we can find even more hints of what he would eventually do inside the Sistine. First and foremost, there is his love for the male body, very muscular and always nude, in a variety of positions. In fact, he is so enamored of his nude male studies that he depicts only one token part of a horse at the bottom to suggest the idea of centaurs, and then carves the rest consisting entirely of naked men. There is only one female form in this large tangle of flesh. She is Hippodameia, the pagan princess kidnapped by the drunken, bestial centaurs, and, in the legend, the cause of all this bloodshed. Since Michelangelo had no female models, and also showed no great interest in the female body, he portrays the princess only from the back; unless you are purposefully looking for her in the sculpture, you would assume that this piece was composed exclusively of male nudes. It is strange but true—this consummate artist would never master depicting the female body, as we will see later in the Sistine frescoes.

Most important in the
Battle of the Centaurs
is its underlying theme, which will resonate more powerfully in Michelangelo’s later work—and especially in the Sistine. It captures the essence of a mystical Jewish concept: the struggle of the animalistic, amoral soul against the human, spiritual soul. In Kabbalah, this is highlighted as the ultimate test of humanity in “the battle between the Two Inclinations”: the
yetzer ha-tov
(the Good Inclination) versus the
yetzer ha-ra
(the Evil Inclination). Michelangelo wrote often about this struggle within himself (without using the formal Hebrew terminology) in his letters, and especially in his poetry. Even in his sixties, he worked it into a madrigal he apparently wrote for a friend who was suffering from an unrequited passion for a beautiful woman. Since Buonarroti did not feel this same passion for women, he indulged in more spiritual terms instead when writing the lyric on his friend’s behalf.

He writes of “half of me that is of Heaven,/ And that turns back towards there with great desire” while the desire for “a sole woman of Beauty…keeps me torn between two contrary halves,/ So that each one takes from the other / The Goodness I should have, were I not so divided.”

This challenge of the Two Inclinations will appear later in the panel of the
Original Sin
in the Sistine ceiling frescoes.

THE SCOURGE FROM FERRARA

In 1491 darkness started creeping into Michelangelo’s Florence. His teacher Pico della Mirandola, rescued by Lorenzo from exile and threat of death for writings that the Vatican deemed heresies, had an inexplicable and bizarre idea. He urged Lorenzo to bring the fanatical Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola back into Florence.

Who was this Savonarola? He came from Ferrara, in the region of Emilia-Romagna, from a normal family. As a young man, he showed a great aptitude for philosophy and studied the ancient Greek thinkers, with a definite preference for what existed at that time of the writings of Plato. In fact, he completed a commentary on Plato—before suddenly feeling that Christ had called him as his special messenger on earth. He destroyed his thesis on Plato and devoted his energies to the Church-approved Aristotle. He became a Dominican monk and began preaching around central Italy, with very little success. Savonarola next came to Florence to preach against the liberal, hedonistic society there. When he started condemning the de’ Medici family from the pulpit, Lorenzo had him thrown out of town. Why, then, did a great humanist thinker like Pico advise Lorenzo to bring him back to Florence and install him as the regular preacher in the family church of San Lorenzo? Historians are perplexed to this day. Perhaps, all things considered, it was for a laugh—after all, the Florentines previously had made fun of the heavy Emilian accent of this monk from Ferrara. Savonarola was also exceptionally ugly, a skeletal figure with a huge nose and slobbering lips. It is possible that Pico thought his presence would actually undermine the Church’s influence in Florence, by presenting the masses with such an unappetizing image from the pulpit. Perhaps, too, Pico had been worn down by years of fighting and fleeing the Vatican’s power, and now wanted to make peace with the Church. We do know that in the year before he died, Pico convinced Savonarola to make him a Dominican as well. Was it a case of more intrigue or true repentance? We will probably never know.

Whatever the reason, Lorenzo and his court soon stopped laughing. Savonarola and his bizarre outbursts were gaining a loyal audience, much as certain television evangelists have done in our own times. In response, Lorenzo sponsored a more moderate mainstream preacher to counterbalance Savonarola, but the damage was already done—the mobs were firmly on the side of the ugly Dominican and his apocalyptic visions of fire and brimstone. From an insecure, unexciting backwoods cleric, Savonarola had become a fiery public orator who could whip the crowds into a frenzy with his delirious visions of Florence as the Whore of Babylon, doomed to eternal damnation for its lust for Beauty and the senses. His main target of hate was the House of Medici, their court, and all that they represented.

Michelangelo attended some of Savonarola’s hysterical sermons against his happy oasis of Art, Beauty, freethinking, and love between men. Even in his old age, the artist would confide that he could never get the sound of Savonarola’s voice out of his head. In fact, more than forty years later, Michelangelo would depict him in his
Last Judgment
in the Sistine. The fanatical preacher is shown in all his ugliness, at the very bottom of the painting, either emerging from the ground to go to a heavenly reward, or sinking into hell. It is striking that there are no other souls or angels to help him, as there are for almost all the other worthy dead in the giant fresco.

Within a year, it seemed that the wild-eyed preacher’s ominous prophecies were coming true. A freak lightning storm broke over the city in April 1492 and shattered the lantern turret atop the famous dome of the cathedral. The charred pieces fell down on the side facing the Palazzo de’ Medici. Three days later, Lorenzo was stricken with a mysterious ailment. Instead of allowing himself to be treated by the Jewish physicians, Lorenzo called in some superstitious quacks, who tried to save him by dosing him with a potion made of mashed pearls and precious stones. This only increased his agony, and in extremis, Lorenzo actually sent for his nemesis Savonarola to give him a final absolution and blessing for his soul. There is no written record of the actual words that transpired at the bedside, but it seems that Savonarola, ever intransigent, cursed Lorenzo to damnation instead and stalked out. The Magnificent died in agony shortly thereafter.

This pushed the frightened Florentines over the brink. Crowds flooded Savonarola’s sermons and begged for forgiveness. Soon, he set up squads of fanatical youths and hooligans to harass and beat up anyone on the streets of Florence for wearing jewelry, makeup, luxurious clothing, or for just having too much of a good time—much like in Iran after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in 1979.

The House of Medici was in deep trouble. Lorenzo’s older son, Piero, a young man of twenty, took over. However, whereas Lorenzo at twenty had been shaped and toughened to be the dynamic head of the clan, Piero was soft, weak, and spoiled. He merely wanted to party and ignore the fact that Camelot-on-the-Arno was collapsing around him. Piero did not even know how suitably to use his artists’ talents. Under his governance, Michelangelo was not prodded to produce a single enduring artwork for his patron family. The only thing that comes down to us from these two empty years is the story of a record snowfall in Florence in the winter after Lorenzo’s death. Piero ordered Michelangelo to make a giant statue of Hercules—out of
snow.
The Florentines flocked to see this marvel for a few days before it finally melted—an unintended but nonetheless powerful symbol of the ephemeral state to which the de’ Medici family had declined.

TAKING UP THE CROSS—A HIDDEN HEBREW MESSAGE

Michelangelo’s eager hands could not stand to be idle. He struck up a friendship with the prior in charge of the Church of Santo Spirito. Why a priest, especially one in a smaller church? The reason was that this cleric had access, through the hospital adjoining the church, to the corpses of the poor, of criminals, and of the anonymous dead. In the ancient world, not only doctors but also artists would dissect the bodies of executed criminals in order to gain deeper knowledge of the inner human body. In this way, the Classical master artists learned to portray it more perfectly in Greco-Roman sculpture. The discovery of more and more of these ancient masterpieces, unearthed in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, inspired the renaissance of art. The great masters such as Pollaiuolo, Leonardo, and many others all yearned to be able to match the level of these ancient works. There was a major obstacle, however. As we have already seen, the Vatican had forbidden anyone to dissect the human body for any reason. The only place that was exempted was the University of Bologna, where the medical school had special permission to dissect the cadavers of executed criminals, for teaching purposes only.

The most famous names of the Renaissance broke the law. They hired grave robbers (in England, called body snatchers) to steal the bodies of freshly executed criminals and deliver them to secret laboratories in the middle of the night. There, the artists would dissect the cadavers by the light of a dim candle, sketch down everything as accurately and as fast as possible, and then rid themselves of the evidence before dawn.

The subversive prior of Santo Spirito, out of either friendship or love, abetted Michelangelo in breaking this law. He gave him access to corpses from the hospital awaiting burial. The gruesome work of midnight dissections nauseated the young sculptor, but his passion to perfect his art overcame his queasy stomach. In this way, Michelangelo learned the inner secrets of the human body better than almost any other artist or even physician of his time. This amazing level of knowledge and the forbidden way in which he obtained it would both figure prominently in the Sistine frescoes, including stunning hidden images that have only been discovered in our era.

To thank his secret benefactor, Michelangelo made the one artwork that has come down to us from this part of his life—a painted wooden crucifix. Long thought lost forever, it was only recently found in a hallway of the church and definitively attributed to Buonarroti just a short time ago.

Legend has it that the impassioned artist actually crucified a fresh corpse to see exactly how the muscles in the hands and the rest of the body would react. What we now know for sure is that anatomically it is an astoundingly accurate crucifix for the late fifteenth century.

There are three facts about this piece that have escaped almost all viewers, perhaps because they are only noticeable very close up. One is that Michelangelo, so enamored of the male body,
actually painted fine hairs on the chest and even in the armpits of this Jesus.
This had the effect of making him much more human than the normal completely hairless representations to which we are accustomed. The second is that Michelangelo even made the backside of the body perfectly accurate and fully fleshed, even though the piece would be hung high on a wall in the church. The third truth, however, is by far the most shocking. On the
titulus,
which in the Gospels is the mocking sign that the pagan Roman soldiers nailed on the cross over Jesus’s head, Michelangelo did not inscribe the standard four letters I.N.R.I. (
Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudeorum
—Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews). Instead, he wrote out the full phrase three times, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. What is most striking, though, is that Michelangelo wrote the Hebrew in the top position in the perfect right-to-left order of the Hebrew language, with excellent calligraphy, and then below that the Greek and the Latin
backward,
as if in a mirror, in order to follow the Hebrew. The almost certain explanation rests on the fact that, in that same year, a relic had been discovered hidden in a wall of the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome. It was a piece of an ancient wooden inscription that seemed to be the original
titulus
of the Crucifixion (but proved by carbon dating in the year 2002 to be wood from the eleventh century, not the first). The broken, worn segment contains only the words “Jesus the Nazarene”—with the additional “King of the Jews” reference broken off near the beginning of the phrase—in all three languages, with the Greek and Latin backward and under the Hebrew. Word of this discovery must have reached Michelangelo, who was trying to make his crucifix as authentic as possible. More than that, this trilingual inscription would have been especially appealing to someone who was part of the inner circle of Neoplatonists. Indeed, Ficino and Pico had made this concept a central tenet of their teaching, that it was possible to harmonize the three worlds of thought: Hebrew mysticism, Greek philosophy, and the Roman Church. Buonarroti, always seeking to build bridges between Judaism, Christianity, and the Classical world, was clearly delighted to reflect this discovery in his new work.

Michelangelo could not resist the temptation to leave yet another hidden message in this crucifix. Although his Latin and Greek inscriptions are flawed, his Hebrew is fine—with but one exception that seems to have been done on purpose. The phrase “King of the Jews,” described in the Gospels and appearing in so many Crucifixion scenes, is not on the relic discovered in Rome—it is broken off. In Hebrew it would normally read
Melech ha-Yehudim.
But Michelangelo wrote
Melech me-Yehudim.
By changing just one letter from the accepted phrase, he was saying “a king
from
the Jews.” And that makes quite a difference.