The Sistine Secrets (13 page)

With the death of Lorenzo, the future of the Jews of Florence looked grim. Savonarola and his followers disapproved of how much the Florentine Christians fraternized and studied with the Jews, and the families who had originally opposed their entry into Florence were now taking back control of the city. Michelangelo wanted to remind people of intelligence, culture, and learning that
the Jesus worshiped by the Church was a Jew, come forth from the Jewish people and the Jewish religion
—the very same people and faith that the Church was then persecuting. That very year, the Inquisition expelled all the Jews from Spain. The death march across Spain, in which thousands of Jews died on their way to the deportation boats, horrified all people of good conscience in Europe at that time. Michelangelo was one of them. He was not a public orator, not a writer or a teacher or a politician—he was an artist. His response was to leave a permanent protest embedded in his work. At only seventeen or eighteen years of age, Michelangelo had started down the path of subversive, hidden art with a message—a path he would follow all the way into the Sistine Chapel.

BOLOGNA

With the inept Piero in charge of the de’ Medici family fortunes, the brewing backlash of the other powerful clans in town after decades of living under the control of the de’ Medicis (whom many had never forgiven for bringing the Jews into Florence), and religious fanaticism on the march, Michelangelo saw the writing on the wall. Two of his most cherished tutors, Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, died within weeks of each other. A military alliance was formed between France and Milan, which was launching a successful invasion into the heart of Italy, shattering the generation of peace in which Michelangelo had grown up. With the premonition of a series of awful nightmares, he suddenly packed his bag and fled. Like Adam in the Sistine ceiling, he was forced out of his Paradise. (His instincts and nightmares had served him well, however: within a year, the rival clans, supported by Savonarola’s mob, literally chased Piero and the entire de’ Medici court out of Florence. The Jews quickly left with them.)

First, the nineteen-year-old fled to the popular refuge for many on the run in Italian history—the lagoon of Venice. After a short, unproductive stay there, he went back southward to Bologna and in no time at all was in trouble with the authorities there, because he didn’t have money to pay the fee at the tollgate. Only the last-minute appearance of Gianfrancesco Aldrovandi, a relative of the ruling family of Bologna and a longtime ally of the de’ Medici clan, saved Michelangelo from a stay in prison. Aldrovandi sheltered him under his roof for a year. During that time, he noticed that the teen had missed out on basic
formazione
in the writings of Dante, Plutarch, and Ovid. The Bolognese nobleman made him read these classics every night, and especially loved to hear the young Florentine recite Dante in his authentic Tuscan accent. This was when Michelangelo acquired his lifelong passion for Dante. He would quote him and imitate his writing style from then on. His knowledge of Ovid and Virgil would later guide him in determining which sibyls to include—and to exclude—in the Sistine ceiling frescoes. Aldrovandi even got the young sculptor his first paying commissions: a few minor statues to finish off the tomb of Saint Dominic. Michelangelo also created for his new patron a beautiful young Apollo with his quiver of arrows, which could bring either intellect and inspiration or plague and death. Apollo was also known for his physical beauty and his beautiful lovers, both male and female. This statue, also long considered lost, was finally definitely recognized in 1996, located in the French embassy in New York City. It is fascinating to note that this pagan Apollo has exactly the same lithe nude body as the Jesus on the cross in Santo Spirito that the young artist had made two or three years before.

Michelangelo never learned to like Bologna, and in the winter of 1495–96 he went back to Florence. His boyhood Camelot was no more. Savonarola and his fanatical minions had taken over the city, keeping it in a continuous grip of terror. Women would be assaulted in the street for wearing makeup or jewelry. Men were beaten or killed for sodomy. Savonarola had instituted a new public event called the Bonfire of the Vanities, which frightened and repentant Florentines attended to toss their luxurious clothing, jewels, art, and non-Christian books into the flames. Botticelli, either out of fear or religious brainwashing, personally threw some of his own precious paintings into the blaze. Michelangelo needed to find a way out. His art was the key.

To keep his hands busy, and to amuse his few remaining friends, he carved a copy of an ancient Roman statue of a sleeping Cupid that he recalled from the Garden of San Marco or from the Palazzo de’ Medici. His friends said that it was so convincing, it could easily be taken for an authentic artifact from Classical Rome. For a lark, they artificially aged the piece and sent it off to Rome with an antiquities dealer of questionable ethics. Sure enough, he was soon able to sell it to Cardinal Riario, a wealthy nephew of the late Pope Sixtus. Michelangelo must have loved the idea of conning money out of a member of the same corrupt family that had tried to assassinate Lorenzo. He was happy, that is, until he learned that he had received only thirty ducats out of the two hundred that the cardinal had paid to the middleman. Outraged that someone else should profit so much from his hard work and talent, and probably also as an excuse to get out of Florence and see the wonders of Rome, Michelangelo packed his bag and headed for the Eternal City.

The headstrong young man was taking a huge risk. He was a mere artist, with no family or protector in Rome, a former member of the exiled House of Medici, and a Florentine—from a city that was detested by Rome and the Vatican. Still, taking courage from his anger, Michelangelo met with the cardinal and confessed the deception. The cardinal, seeing that he could now have the artist and not just the one artwork, forgave him. He commissioned him to sculpt a drunken Bacchus. This was Michelangelo’s introduction to Rome—a supposedly holy clergyman, vowed to a life of both poverty and chastity, paying a hefty amount of money for him to create an erotic statue of the pagan deity of drunken orgies. However, the new pope on the throne at this time was none other than Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, possibly the most scandalous, corrupt, and disgraceful pope of the entire Renaissance—and that is saying a great deal. While Florence was being scourged by Savonarola for art, jewelry, and cosmetics, the Vatican itself had become one big bacchanalia. The drunken Bacchus was the perfect symbol of this hypocrisy.

Michelangelo gave Cardinal Riario exactly what he wanted. The
Bacchus
could easily pass for an authentic ancient pagan masterpiece. The young deity’s hair is made up of clusters of juicy grapes, and his sensual pose accentuates both his nudity and a stomach slightly bloated from alcohol. The viewer, encountering this Bacchus head-on, receives a toast from the tipsy god. Then, upon circling the statue, one finds a young faun hidden behind Bacchus, holding and eating a grape cluster in a suggestive, sexual manner.

Two asides about this sculpture bear mention. The faun has symbolic goat horns that appear very authentic and naturalistic. This is the only time that Michelangelo put horns on a figure; the universal misconception that the protrusions on the head of his
Moses
are horns can be easily disproved just by simple visual comparison with this statue, as we shall see later. The other point of interest is that seventy-five years later, this Bacchus was purchased and brought to Florence by none other than the de’ Medici family.

THE PIETÀ

Fate was now about to give the young artist a giant push in the direction of the Sistine. Cardinal Riario, although very pleased with his new Bacchus, was more than a bit embarrassed by the statue’s frank sexuality. He quickly gave it to a close friend, Jacopo Galli, to become the centerpiece of Galli’s garden of antique Roman statuary, where undoubtedly it was explained to visitors as a pagan artifact. Galli must have, however, told the truth to his friend Cardinal Bilhères de Lagraulas, the French king’s ambassador to the Holy See. In no time at all, the cardinal was commissioning Michelangelo to create a private work—this time something with a decidedly Christian theme, a pietà. The pietà was already a common iconographic scene in Christian art. The word
pietà
does not translate into English, but oddly enough it corresponds perfectly to the Hebrew word
rachmanut,
which denotes a combination of compassion, loving-kindness, pity, consolation, grief, sorrow, and care. It is the precise moment in the Passion of Jesus when his dead body is taken down from the cross and laid on the lap of his grieving mother, Mary. It was a huge challenge for any artist, since the scene was quite awkward to portray: the limp body of a fully grown dead man stretched over his middle-aged mother’s lap. Previous pietà works had seemed ungainly and unbalanced.

Galli, who acted as the middleman, promised the French cardinal that he would receive the most beautiful sculpture in marble in all of Rome, something that no other living artist could create. Although it might have seemed like no more than southern Italian hyperbole at the time, Galli’s promise turned out to be prophetic.

Michelangelo had the wealthy cardinal order an extremely expensive block of the highest-quality Carrara marble. He knew that this one commission was to be his big calling card to Rome, a work that could either make or break his career. He took an entire year carving the statue, even spending several months just buffing it over and over by hand until the body of Jesus seemed to glow from within. By the time he finished the piece in 1499, he was twenty-four years old.

As already mentioned, no artist was allowed to sign works for the hierarchy in the Church. The purpose ostensibly was to keep the artists in their place and to “protect” them from the sin of pride—this despite the fact that popes and cardinals had no problem putting their names, faces, and family crests all over the buildings and artworks of the day. Michelangelo, after more than a year of putting his heart, energy, talent, and soul into this pietà, could not sign it.

Even before it was unveiled, the statue changed ownership. Cardinal Bilhères de Lagraulas died before the work was finished, either from natural causes or perhaps with a bit of assistance from the Borgias’ endless supply of poisons. The
Pietà
was appropriated by Pope Alexander VI Borgia himself. One theory is that the theme of the statue touched him greatly because his son, the Duke of Gandia (one of the countless children that he had sired as a supposedly chaste man of the cloth, and one of the very few that he acknowledged as his), had been recently assassinated.

According to the story, on the day the statue was unveiled Michelangelo hid himself behind a column in St. Peter’s Basilica, awaiting the applause of the crowd and the praise of his name by the critics. Instead, he overheard people saying that this marvelous new work had to be from a great talent from Rome or from Lombardy—anywhere but from Florence.

Enraged, Michelangelo risked his life that night by breaking into the cathedral, climbing up on his masterpiece, and rapidly carving on the sash across Mary’s chest: “Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this.” He escaped before the Swiss Guardsmen, who most likely would have decapitated any intruder on the spot, could catch him.

Recent laser scans of the surface of the
Pietà
bear out the story. Apparently, one person buffed the whole statue with a constant motion for months; then the inscription on the sash was carved very quickly by someone with a nervous, slightly shaky hand. The writing also bears witness. It is filled with errors, owing to Michelangelo’s quite understandable frightened rush at the time. For example, instead of
Michelangelus,
he first wrote
Michelaglus,
then went back and stuck the
e
inside the
g.
He inserted other forgotten letters as he went along. This was not to save space, since instead of the correct, shorter word
fecit
(the standard Latin inscription for “made this”), he put the incorrect
faciebat,
“was making this.” Obviously, Michelangelo’s Hebrew was better than his Latin—at least in his artwork.

When the inscription was discovered, Michelangelo had to be pardoned by the pope, and most likely had to promise not to sign another work again. We do know that in eighty-nine years, this is the only work that bears his name.

There is another secret of this famous work. When it was first revealed to the public in 1499, the critics and art experts of the era praised it as the finest sculpture in marble since the fall of ancient Rome a thousand years earlier. However, all the critics voiced one important complaint: the face of Mary was wrong—it was far too young for the mother of a thirty-three-year-old son. Most Christian historians place Mary in her fifties at the time of Jesus’s crucifixion. All earlier artworks had shown her at this age in Passion scenes. Some writers thought that Michelangelo had taken one obscure line from Dante’s
Paradiso
that calls Mary the daughter of her own son, or that he had decided to show the new mother Mary cradling Baby Jesus but having a dreadful vision of the end of his life while he is on her lap. Many years later, Michelangelo admitted to his biographer Condivi that there had been much criticism of Mary’s strangely youthful face in the
Pietà.
He gave Condivi the same excuse that he had used in 1499, that a virgin does not show her age. Buonarroti himself must have known how flimsy a rationale this was, since he undoubtedly saw nuns and old maids every day, and they did not age very well in his day, with or without a sex life.

So, why would he do such an odd thing in such an important work? Michelangelo was aware that he was sculpting not only the holy mother of the Christian faith but a Jewish mother as well. A way to emphasize this would be to go back to the original holy Jewish matriarch, Sarah. In the book of Genesis, Sarah is the deeply pious wife of Abraham, who finally gives birth to their son Isaac, the second Hebrew patriarch, at 90 years of age. When she dies from shock 37 years later, believing that Isaac has been sacrificed, she is 127. The Torah does not give her age directly, however. The original Hebrew says: “And the life of Sarah was 100 years and 20 years and 7 years, the years of Sarah’s life.” Rashi, the great Torah commentator from France in the eleventh century, explained this unusual phrasing with a well-known midrash, an expansion of the biblical narrative. According to Rashi, the Torah means that Sarah, at only 7 years old, was as fully developed spiritually and intellectually as a full-grown woman of 20—and at 100, she was still so spiritually pure that she appeared as young as a woman of 20. Indeed, she was known as the most beautiful woman of her era, and in the Bible, she is kidnapped twice by pagan rulers to become part of their sexual harems—once in her sixties and again in her eighties. Since Rashi was eagerly studied and taught by both Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, it is highly likely that Michelangelo had learned this midrash back in Florence. It is also quite probable that he decided to take this touching story of the mother of the Jewish religion and transpose it onto the face of the mother of the Christian religion. If this is indeed the case, it means that the world’s most famous Christian statue has a Jewish secret hidden within it.