Sistine Heresy

by Justine Saracen

  All eyes turned, trying to identify the unexpected visitor.

  “It’s Mateo, one of Michelangelo’s apprentices,” Raphaela said anxiously. In a moment he was in front of them. “Is everything all right with your master?”

  “Yes, Lady. More than all right. He sends me to announce that the first half of the ceiling is finished and he invites you to see it. Today, before His Holiness arrives.”

  “I’m sorry, Mateo,” Raphaela said. “Please tell him that we have urgent business that requires us to—”

  “We’d be delighted,” Adriana interrupted. “Come in and let Maria give you some breakfast, and then you can return ahead of us to tell him we’re coming.”

  Raphaela was aghast. “You want ride into the mouth of the wolf? The Vatican is the very place we’re running away from.”

  “I know, but your father said Cardinal Carafa would not have his audience with Julius until this evening. He won’t be able to marshal his ‘guardians’ until tomorrow. Surely we can take an hour to see the frescoes and be far beyond Rome when the order is finally given. You know how important the chapel ceiling is to Michelangelo, to you too. Aren’t you curious to see your own work now?”

  Raphaela looked uncertain. “Yes, of course. But what if we’ve miscalculated and the Pope arrives early? God help us then.”

  “We don’t believe in their god, remember?” Adriana whispered.

  XXXIX

  The two horses drew up before the Papal Palace at midday, and Adriana and Raphaela descended onto the bright light of the piazza. They entered the palace at a good pace, seeing no one, passing only the brightly costumed Swiss guard standing in front of each chamber.

  Torn between the desire to see the half-finished ceiling and the urgent need to escape Rome, they hurried up the staircase that opened to the Sala Regia. Mateo met them and led them to the chapel.

  Michelangelo appeared before the chapel doorway in clean clothing, unstained by plaster or pigment. And yet he looked exhausted, like a man who had not slept for days. The dark circles around his eyes and the scar on his broken nose stood out against the pale, light-starved skin of his face.

  “You are the first, you know.” The thumb of his right hand rubbed nervously against his fingertips, as if he constantly rubbed off paint. “Not even the Holy Father has been here. The official half-mark viewing is tomorrow.”

  “We’re honored, Maestro,” Raphaela said. “I’m only sorry I couldn’t continue to assist you. We’ve worried about you for months.”

  “I’ve been busy,” he mumbled, stating the obvious, and swung the double doors wide open to the newly painted chapel.

  The effect was startling. The scaffolding had been dismantled and partly reconstructed at the far end of the chapel, reversing the pattern of the past year. Together with the adjoining walls, the dark wood of the scaffold provided a sort of framework for the newly finished work. Contained within the outline, the explosion of color and activity drew the eye immediately upward. Brightly painted figures seemed to writhe and turn in all directions over the observer’s head. It was dazzling.

  “It will need some explaining,” Michelangelo began. “That’s the reason I—”

  “Maestro Buonarroti! Signore.” Mateo burst in.

  “What is it?” He was obviously annoyed.

  “The Holy Father is downstairs. He wants to see the ceiling.”

  “Christ’s nails!” Michelangelo pounded his fist on the doorpost. For a moment they stood paralyzed within the entry, sensing the lupine footfall on the stairway, the ominous silken steps of the papal slipper.

  “You can’t let him see us,” Adriana said, awakening to the danger. She took hold of his arm. “Look, Cardinal Carafa is about to meet with him to convince him to have me seized for heresy. It’s a long story, but we’re on our way to Venice. We thought we’d have time to see everything. But we don’t. We’ve got to leave now.”

  “No, you must see it. I’ll stop him.” His face grew hard. “I’ll tell him there’s damage. I’ll hold him off a day.” Without waiting for their agreement, Michelangelo pushed them back into the chapel and pulled the double doors firmly shut behind him.

  They looked at one another for a moment, uncertain. Then Raphaela shrugged. “We can escape through the service door, if necessary. In the meantime, let me at least show you quickly what the two of us did together.”

  Adriana glanced nervously toward the chapel portal. “As long as he can keep Julius away.”

  Raphaela stepped forward and opened both arms, encompassing the entire work. “There is a sort of framework with three layers: the actual architecture, the painted one, and then the stories. It takes a bit of staring to figure it out.”

  Adriana tried to focus her attention. “It doesn’t take long to figure those out, though, all those nude men.” She swept her finger in a wide circle, indicating the dozen or so nude figures in twisted poses.

  Raphaela chuckled. “He calls them angels, but they look pretty earthly to me. Like real people.”

  “That one is real. I recognize him.” Adriana pointed at the figure, which slouched over the northern pendentive. He turned in a graceful curve, supporting his upper body on his left arm while his right arm dangled between his open thighs. The head, haloed by reddish curls, was turned flirtatiously toward the right, and the twist of his body both exposed and delineated the fine musculature of his neck and chest.

  “You’re right,” Raphaela agreed. “It’s the halberdier who stood guard at the chapel when we were painting. He certainly looks different without his pretty pants.”

  “I know that one too.” Adriana pointed. “The jailor’s son—from the prison at Sant’Angelo. And that one on the right is sitting just as he was in the prison guardroom the night we saved Domenico.” She glanced around at the others.

  “That sly dog. He’s painted a whole troop of naked guards.”

  Adriana ventured a few paces along the wall of the chapel and peered up at the ring of men and women seated on the periphery of the ceiling. “And these?”

  “Prophets and sibyls.”

  “The sibyls look like men. Wait. I recognize them. They’re from the Carnevale parade.”

  “He’s even copied their dresses and their books.” Raphaela chuckled. “I helped him paint them.”

  “A nice tribute to Silvio Piccolomini.”

  Raphaela stepped toward the southeast corner of the chapel and stared intently at the figure. Resting on his right elbow, a beardless gray-haired man peered down at a scroll outstretched between his two hands. His high forehead, hairless and smooth, gave his face a pedagogical air. The red cloak draped over his shoulders and lying across his lap was unmistakable.

  “It’s your father,” Adriana murmured. “Incredible. Donato Bramante as the prophet Joel and sitting the same way as he did at my supper. And the scroll he’s reading from is Michelangelo’s note to him.”

  “I wonder who the others are,” Raphaela said. “It’s like a puzzle, isn’t it?” They crossed diagonally to the second bay and studied its prophet.

  The twisted posture gave it away finally, the posing of a man inclined toward drama and display. Holding his place in the great book he had been reading, he seemed about to reply to some annoying question, disdain and condescension on his face.

  “It’s Silvio,” Adriana exclaimed. “He’s put Silvio on the ceiling, clutching his Ficino translation the moment he reproached Michelangelo for not knowing Plato.” She laughed out loud. “He was even wearing that exact rose tunic with the yellow sleeves. Colors no one else would wear. We teased him for it.” She laughed again. “In exile, but still insulting the Pope. If we see him in Venice we’ll have to tell him.”

  Raphaela glanced nervously toward the door. “I wish he’d hurry back so that we can get to Venice. Let’s try to figure it out without him. It’ll save time.” They crossed again to the south wall. “The prophet Ezekiel,” Raphaela read. “Anybody you know?”

  A massive male body, h
is head, small by comparison, was dignified by a short white beard. A pale blue shawl covered his head and was thrown across his wide shoulders. He leaned toward the right, opening his hand as if offering a compelling new argument. The power contained in the turning of his huge shoulders suggested that the artist respected him and his argument as well.

  “I can’t believe he would dare to do it. It’s Baldassare Salomano, the Jewish doctor who saved my life. He sat that way exactly, next to my bed, arguing with Michelangelo about God.”

  “Cardinal Carafa won’t like that. He hounded the man from Rome.”

  “I imagine Julius wouldn’t care for it either, if he knew.”

  “I’m sure Michelangelo will not tell him that his sibyls and his Hebrews are laughing at him.”

  Adriana shook her head. “In Spain he would burn for this!”

  *

  “Then he should be thankful that he does not live in Spain,” Michelangelo said from the doorway.

  Adriana was relieved. “Did you get rid of him?”

  “Only for an hour. So come along, there’s a lot to see.”

  “An hour?” Adriana was all but wringing her hands. “It has to be quick, then. Listen, we’ve already recognized your angels and sibyls, and know that your prophets are Bramante and Salomano and Silvio. Very amusing, but we have to go.”

  “Amusement is not what I intended,” he muttered, drawing them back to the chapel entryway. “Here is where it starts.” He pointed directly overhead to the first panel, of an old man lying on the ground, with three younger ones slouching over him. It was not at all amusing. “Noah shamed by his sons,” Michelangelo said.

  “Very powerful, and I know where you got it, too,” Adriana said. “It’s the drunken King who collapsed on the Via del Corso at Carnevale. Those two are Farnese boys. You remembered the whole scene, in spite of the darkness.”

  They were under the next panel and Raphaela tilted her head back. “I will always think of that as ‘our’ Deluge, Maestro. Some of it’s still under my nails.”

  “How many of your friends or enemies are in the flood?” Adriana interjected.

  He looked up at the chaotic scene. “Too many to tell.”

  Adriana was already studying the third panel, of four men preparing a burnt offering. “Noah’s Sacrifice,” Michelangelo announced. “In case it’s not evident.”

  Four young men were crowded into a small space struggling with animals. One of them, in a red cape, knelt over a slaughtered ram and handed some of its flesh up to another man, obviously for a burnt offering. The index finger of his left hand appeared truncated at the first joint.

  “The young one, the pretty one in the cape. That’s the butcher boy in the Piazza Navona, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, he was arrested by Carafa’s guardians and brutally flogged.” Michelangelo grew solemn. “This was all I could do for him.”

  Raphaela had hurried ahead of them, but stopped. “What…is that?”

  Adriana joined her and also halted abruptly, incredulous. It was all too familiar. The rocks, the small forked tree, the leafy branch under Adam’s hands. She had found the portrait that he promised her, in the Garden of Eden. “You bastard,” she whispered.

  A red-haired Adam, who seemed a younger, more muscular version of Michelangelo himself, grasped a tree branch, as if in shock. The disobedient Eve, bulky and nude, knelt before him with her face mere centimeters from his penis. And Eve, her head turned away, had the face of Adriana Borgia.

  “You bastard,” she repeated out loud. “It’s your revenge, isn’t it, for my refusing you that night at the Villa Borgia. You painted the exact moment when I heard Raphaela call me. Is that what you were thinking of? Us doing that?” She snorted and stared up at the panel again. “And why is the snake a woman? Oh, I see.”

  It took only a moment to recognize the face and to grasp the accusation. For it was an accusation, that what had turned her head from the righteous appeal of the man, tempting her with forbidden knowledge, was Raphaela. The amber-colored hair, the intelligent face, the full lips parted were unmistakable. So also was the posture in which he had painted her. He had combined their nighttime confrontation in the garden with that of the orchard the next morning, so that while Adam grasped the branch in shock, the blond temptress reached out her arm through the forked tree to drop something into the hand of Eve.

  It was as if he intuited what was going on among the three of them long before she understood it herself. Her rejection of him had obviously shaken him so much that he made it the model for the world’s first sin.

  She stared, speechless, trying to make sense of the wide double scene, disobedience on the one side and the expulsion on the other. But God’s expelling angel revolved around the same axis and had the same sensual face and outstretched arm as the snake. Thus, Adriana’s Eve turned away from the man’s sex toward the Raphaela-snake and then was led away from innocence by the Raphaela-angel.

  “Why have you done this?” Adriana was losing patience. She was about to run for her life, and the last thing she needed to do was see insulting pictures of herself.

  Michelangelo shrugged. “You asked for a portrait.”

  “Not that kind of portrait. It’s filthy. And why have you made Raphaela the face of both evil and good?”

  “I’m surprised you’re thrown by my little ironies,” he said calmly. Have you forgotten the amulet I gave you?”

  “The seductress-and-saint medallion. No, I haven’t forgotten it. But why Raphaela?”

  “Because she was those things. And I created her. Which takes us to the center panel.”

  The same dreamy-eyed profile, the same full lips of the snake-woman and the angel, were now on the imploring face of Eve at the moment of her creation. Supported on one leg, the other one bent and caught behind her, Eve looked toward her maker. Raphaela recognized herself immediately.

  “That’s me, on the platform begging to paint real figures,” Raphaela said. “You ‘created’ me and then I disappointed you? Is that how you see it? It’s too bad we have no time for me to tell you I don’t like it.” All nerves, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, in a sort of minute pacing, edging toward the exit.

  Michelangelo shook his head. “It’s not a reproach, but it’s true. I brought you into the picture—my life’s picture—and now all three of us are fallen. In any case, this is how I understand creation, sin, redempt—”

  The chapel doors flew open with a bang and Mateo ran in again. “His Holiness is on the stairs. With Cardinal Carafa.”

  Adriana jumped at the name. “Carafa? They’ve met then.” She took a step away from Michelangelo. “We have to get out of here. Right now.”

  “No, not yet!” Michelangelo sprinted toward the entrance. He threw the double doors closed and barred them.

  “Maestro, it’s His Holiness,” Mateo cried. Michelangelo rushed back to where Adriana and Raphaela were halfway to the service door. He seized Adriana by the arm and pulled her back to the center of the chapel. “One more panel!” He stood behind her, holding her in place by her upper arms. “Look. You must see it before he does. Before he orders it changed.”

  With growing panic, Adriana forced herself to look up, and she staggered. For a moment she forgot her fear. And she forgave him.

  Overhead, the virile muscular body of Adam curved languidly against the green earth. Tilting his head back, he reached out dreamily with his left hand to touch the finger of his creator. And God’s first creature in His image, the father of the world, from whose loins all humankind would spring, had the face of Domenico Raggi. The thick brown hair hung back, as if he had just run his fingers through it, and the full muscle around his lips recalled the smooth skin she had caressed. That Michelangelo, of course, had caressed.

  She lowered her gaze, hearing the angry pounding on the chapel door.

  Michelangelo loosened his grip and stood before her, at once noble and pathetic, his face haggard, his painter’s hands fallen idle to hi
s sides. She understood him now. It was his revenge. He had cast into the images of orthodoxy the drama of his own life and populated the Pope’s chapel with the faces of humanists, skeptics, and sodomites. Raphaela was right. His blasphemy was his inspiration.

  The pounding was more insistent, and she retreated again. “It’s God’s backside, isn’t it?” She could not wait for an answer. “It’s magnificent,” she said with utter sincerity, backing toward the escape door. “Don’t let him make you change anything. Lie to him, tell him whatever you have to. Domenico must stay.” Then Raphaela seized her hand and pulled her into the service corridor.

  They lingered a moment behind the almost-closed door and peered through the crack as Mateo yanked up the bolt and the Pope burst in, Cardinal Carafa a step behind him. She could not see Michelangelo, but she knew he genuflected and she heard him speak.

  “Holiness.”

  They slipped along the narrow corridor quietly and at the end, Raphaela whispered, “It’s heresy, isn’t it? The whole ceiling.”

  “The most splendid heresy in Christendom. I wonder if anyone will ever know it.”

  Postscript

  While the novel clearly stretches historical “facts,” or what pass as facts, to suit a plot and sensibility that is LGBT, the historical context and most of the characters are authentic. Michelangelo did indeed follow a painting schedule that began in May 1508 and halted temporarily after the Creation of Adam panel, in August 1510. He resumed work some time in 1511 and completed the ceiling in 1512. Under Pope Paul III he also painted the grim “Last Judgment” on the altar wall, portraying himself as an empty skin. He completed a much-reduced version of Julius’s tomb in 1545, although in San Pietro in Vincoli rather than in the basilica. As hinted by Giovanni de’ Medici, Michelangelo was finally put in charge of the design of St. Peter’s Basilica (after both Julius’s and Bramante’s death) from 1546 until the end of his life.

  While there is no clear evidence that Michelangelo engaged in sex with men, there is even less evidence that he ever did so with a woman, and he lived to be eighty-eight. In any case, even the weakest “gaydar” can register signs of homoeroticism all over the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In addition, in spite of the Church’s ferocious condemnation, homosexuality appears to have been widespread at the time and is often referred to in contemporaneous written accounts.