The Sistine Secrets

by Benjamin Blech

  PREFACE

  Every year more than four million visitors from all over the world throng to the Vatican Museums, the most-visited museum complex on earth. They come for one overriding reason—to see the Sistine Chapel, the holiest chapel in the Christian world. Viewers—Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, art lovers, and the merely curious—not only marvel at its aesthetic beauty but are moved by its history and its spiritual teachings. The major attraction, without a doubt, is the incomparable vista of frescoes on its ceiling and its altar wall, the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti, universally acknowledged as one of humanity’s greatest artists.

  But very few of the millions of awestruck spectators who enter the Sistine know that the pope’s own chapel, built in the heart of the Vatican, is a full-size copy of the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s ancient Temple in Jerusalem.

  They would also surely be amazed to discover that Michelangelo himself embedded secret messages inside the chapel. Even more shocking, these messages espoused ideas that struck at the heart of the papacy.

  Unknown to most viewers is the dramatic truth that these frescoes contain a lost mystical message of universal love, dangerously contrary to Church doctrine in Michelangelo’s day, but true to the original teachings of the Bible as well as to much of contemporary liberal Christian thought.

  Driven by the truths he had come to recognize during his years of study in private nontraditional schooling in Florence, truths rooted in his involvement with Judaic texts as well as Kabbalistic training that conflicted with approved Christian doctrine, Michelangelo needed to find a way to let viewers discern what he truly believed. He could not allow the Church to forever silence his soul. And what the Church would not permit him to communicate openly, he ingeniously found a way to convey to those diligent enough to learn his secret language.

  Unfortunately these messages were lost and went unheeded for five centuries. The man famous for defining genius as “eternal patience” must have found solace for his inability to voice his disagreement with the Vatican in the hope that eventually there would be those who would “crack his code” and grasp what he was really saying. Only now, thanks to diligent scholarship as well as the new clarity afforded by the chapel’s extensive cleaning, have they been rediscovered and deciphered. Michelangelo spoke truth to power, and his insights, ingeniously concealed in his work, can at last be heard.

  All this is not speculative fiction, but, as we will convincingly prove, completely, incredibly, true.

  This is the startling and provocative thesis that The Sistine Secrets will for the first time reveal—and forcefully demonstrate. It will show how Michelangelo incorporated into his religious masterpiece a stunning number of hidden messages to the Church of his time, messages that resonate to this day with their daring appeal for reconciliation between reason and faith, between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and among all those who share a sincere quest for true faith and service of God.

  Prepare to unlearn everything that you thought you knew about the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s masterpieces. Just as the recent cleaning of the frescoes removed layer after layer of tarnish and darkness accumulated over the centuries, this book will endeavor to remove centuries of prejudice, censorship, and ignorance from one of the world’s most famous and beloved art treasures.

  We invite you to join us on an incredible journey of discovery.

  —The Authors

  BOOK ONE

  In the Beginning

  Chapter One

  WHAT IS THE SISTINE CHAPEL?

  And let them build for Me a Sanctuary,

  that I may dwell in their midst.

  —exodus 25:8

  ON FEBRUARY 18, 1564, the Renaissance died in Rome. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known to all simply as Michelangelo, passed away at age eighty-nine in his frugal home in what is today Piazza Venezia. His body was prepared to be entombed inside the nearby Basilica of the Holy Apostles. Today, this church, Santissimi Apostoli, is an amalgam of many times and styles: its top floor is from the nineteenth century, the middle floor is seventeenth-century Baroque, and the ground floor is pure Renaissance from the second half of the fifteenth century. But what is most interesting about Michelangelo’s intended burial place is that the original part of the church—the only part that existed in 1564—was designed by none other than Baccio Pontelli, the same man who planned the structure of the Sistine Chapel. The church where Michelangelo was supposed to be entombed is important for other reasons as well.

  In a crypt beneath the ground-floor level of the church are the tombs of Saints James and Philip, two of the apostles going back to the life of Jesus. Deeper still, if we were allowed to dig beneath the crypt, we would soon come upon remains of ancient Imperial Rome, beneath that, Republican Rome, and finally, perhaps some of Bronze Age Rome.

  This makes the church a metaphor for the entire Eternal City: a place of layer upon layer of history, of accumulations of countless cultures, of confrontations between the sacred and the profane, the holy and the pagan—and of multiple hidden secrets.

  To understand Rome is to recognize that it is a city swarming with secrets—more than three millennia of mysteries. And nowhere in Rome are there more secrets than in the Vatican.

  THE VATICAN

  The very name Vatican comes from a surprising source. It is neither Latin nor Greek, nor is it of biblical origin. In fact, the word we associate with the Church has a pagan origin. More than twenty-eight centuries ago, even before the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, there was a people called the Etruscans. Much of what we think of as Roman culture and civilization actually comes from the Etruscans. Even though we are still trying to master their very difficult language, we already know a great deal about them. We know that, like the Hebrews and the Romans, the Etruscans did not bury their dead inside the walls of their cities. For that reason, on a hillside slope outside the confines of their ancient city in the area that was destined to become Rome, the Etruscans established a very large cemetery. The name of the pagan Etruscan goddess who guarded this necropolis, or city of the dead, was Vatika.

  Vatika has several other related meanings in ancient Etruscan. It was the name of a bitter grape that grew wild on the slope, which the peasants made into what became infamous as one of the worst, cheapest wines in the ancient world. The name of this wine, which also referred to the slope where it was produced, was Vatika. It was also the name of a strange weed that grew on the graveyard slope. When chewed, it produced wild hallucinations, much like the effect of peyote mushrooms; thus, vatika represented what we would call today a cheap high. In this way, the word passed into Latin as a synonym for “prophetic vision.”

  Much later, the slope became the circus, or stadium, of the mad emperor Nero. It was here, according to Church tradition, that Saint Peter was executed, crucified upside down, and then buried nearby. This became the destination of so many pilgrims that the emperor Constantine, upon becoming half-Christian, founded a shrine on the spot, which the Romans continued to call the Vatican Slope. A century after Constantine, the popes started building the papal palace there.

  What does “the Vatican” mean today? Because of its history, the name has a number of different connotations. It can refer to the Basilica of St. Peter; to the Apostolic Palace of the popes with more than fourteen hundred rooms; to the Vatican Museums complex with more than two thousand rooms; to the political/social/religious hierarchy that is considered the spiritual leadership of about one-fifth of the human race; or to the world’s smallest official country of Città del Vaticano (Vatican City). It is indeed strange to consider that this tiniest country on earth, which could fit eight times over inside Central Park in New York City, contains within it the world’s largest and costliest church, the world’s largest and most luxurious palace, and one of the world’s largest museums.

  REPLACING THE TEMPLE

  Most fascinating of all, though, may well be a place within the ancient fortress walls
of Vatican City whose symbolic meaning is unknown to almost all its visitors. Its theological significance can best be realized by noting that this Catholic effort was something explicitly forbidden to Jews. In the Talmud, the ancient holy commentaries of the greatest Jewish sages spanning more than five centuries, it is clearly legislated that no one may construct a functioning full-sized copy of the Holy Temple of Jerusalem in any location other than the Temple Mount itself (Tractate Megillah, 10a). This was decreed in order to avoid any possible bloody religious schisms, such as later happened in Christianity (Roman Catholicism; Eastern and Greek Orthodoxy; Protestantism—and their centuries of internecine warfare) and Islam (Sunni and Shi’ite, who are sadly still killing each other around the globe).

  Six centuries ago, however, a Catholic architect who was not constrained by Talmudic laws did exactly that. He designed and built an incredible, full-sized copy of the inner sanctum, or the Holy of Holies, of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem—right in the middle of Renaissance Rome. To get the measurements and proportions exactly correct, the architect studied the writings of the prophet Samuel in the Hebrew Bible, where Samuel describes the First Holy Temple, cubit by cubit (1 Kings 6:2). This massive reproduction of the heichal, or rear section of the First Temple, still exists today. It is called la Cappella Sistina—the Sistine Chapel. And this is where more than four million visitors a year come to view the incredible frescoes of Michelangelo and pay homage to a site sacred to Christianity.

  Before the creation of this replica of the Jewish Temple, there had been a chapel on the same spot during the Middle Ages. It was called la Cappella Palatina, or the Palatial Chapel. Since every European ruler had his or her own regal chapel for praying privately with the royal court, it was deemed necessary for the pope also to have one in his own palace. This was to show the power of the Church, which had to be viewed as greater than that of any secular sovereign. It is no coincidence that the word palatina comes from the Palatine Hill, the home of the most powerful human beings known to Western history at that point—the pagan emperors of ancient Rome. According to Roman tradition, the Palatine Hill was where Romulus had founded the city on April 21, 753 BCE. Since that time, every ruler of Rome had lived on the Palatine, constructing one spectacular palace after another. The Church was determined to prove that it was the new ruling power in Europe and hoped to spread Christendom, that is, the empire of Christianity, across the globe. This chapel was meant to be a harbinger of this coming triumph and glory, and so the pope wanted its opulence to overshadow that of any other royal chapel on earth.

  Aside from the magnificent Palatina, there was also the Niccolina, a private chapel ordained by Pope Nicholas V in 1450 and decorated by the great Renaissance painter Fra Angelico. This was a tiny room in one of the older parts of the papal palace, capable of hosting the pope and a few personal aides. This is why the Palatina also had the nickname of Cappella Maggiore, the Larger Chapel, since it could hold all the papal court and its VIP guests.

  The story of the Sistine Chapel, however, begins with a pontiff who wanted the chapel to be even larger and more palatial than la Cappella Palatina.

  THE GRAND PLAN OF POPE SIXTUS

  Sixtus was born Francesco della Rovere into a humble family in northwestern Italy not far from Genoa. He was a young man with an intellectual bent but no money, so it was only natural that he ended up in the priesthood. He became a Franciscan monk and slowly worked his way up the rungs of the educational and administrative ladder of the Church, finally becoming a cardinal in Rome in 1467. He was elected without much ado by a conclave of only eighteen cardinals and took the name Sixtus IV, the first pope with that name in more than a thousand years. His first acts had nothing to do with the various crises facing the Vatican, but with supplying his family with titles, estates, and privileges. He made his various and sundry nephews obscenely rich by either ordaining them as cardinals (one at only sixteen years of age) or by marrying them off into wealthy, noble families. This was nothing unusual, though. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and right up to the end of the eighteenth century, it was common practice for a corrupt pope to pick his most decadent nephews to do the dirty work necessary to upgrade their entire family’s material status from “well-off” to “astronomically wealthy.” The word for “nephew” in Medieval Italian is nepote, and this system of absolute power and absolute corruption became known as nepotismo—and in modern English today as nepotism. One of Sixtus’s nephews was Giuliano, who later became Pope Julius II—the man who forced Michelangelo to paint the Sistine ceiling.

  When Pope Sixtus IV began his reign in 1471, the Palatine Chapel was falling apart. It was a heavy building resting perilously on the soft soil of the former Etruscan graveyard slope of the Vatican. This was a perfect symbol for the crisis of the Church itself when Sixtus took over. It was rife with plots, scandals, and schisms. Foreign rulers, such as Louis XI of France, were warring with the Vatican over the right to select and assign cardinals and bishops. Whole sections of Italy rejected papal jurisdiction. Worst of all, the Ottoman Turks were on the march. Only eighteen years earlier, Constantinople had fallen to the Muslims, marking the death of the Christian Byzantine Empire. Shock waves reverberated throughout Christian Europe. In 1480 the Ottomans invaded the Italian peninsula itself, seizing the city of Otranto on the southeastern coast, slaughtering the archbishop and many priests in the cathedral, forcibly converting the townspeople, beheading eight hundred who refused to convert, and sawing the bishop in half. After that, they attacked several other coastal cities. Many feared that Rome itself would meet the same doom as Constantinople.

  In spite of all these existential threats to Christendom, Sixtus spent vast amounts of the Vatican’s gold on reviving the splendors of Rome, rebuilding churches, bridges, streets, founding the Vatican Library, and starting an art collection that would become the Capitoline Museum, the oldest operating museum in the world today. His most famous project, however, was the rebuilding of the Palatine Chapel.

  There is so much about the history of the Sistine that seems predestined. According to the more reliable sources, work began on renovating the chapel in 1475. In the very same year, in the Tuscan town of Caprese, Michelangelo Buonarroti was born. Their fates would weave ever more tightly together in the years to come.

  THE NEW CHAPEL

  Pope Sixtus decided not just to rebuild the decaying papal chapel but to enlarge and enrich it. He brought in a young Florentine architect named Bartolomeo (“Baccio”) Pontelli. Pontelli’s specialty was the construction and reinforcement of fortresses, such as the ones still standing in fine condition in Ostia and Senigallia. This was especially important to Sixtus, since he feared both the Turkish Muslims and the Catholic mobs of Rome. The designs were drawn up for a huge chapel, larger than most churches, with a fortress lookout bastion on top to defend the Vatican.

  We may never know for certain whose idea it was to build the Sistine Chapel as a copy of the Jewish Holy Temple. Sixtus was learned in scripture, so he would have been aware of the exact measurements found in the writings of Samuel the Prophet in 2 Kings. With this in mind, he might have been anxious to give concrete expression to the theological concept of successionism, an idea that had already found an important place in Christian thought. Successionism means that one faith can replace a previous one that has ceased to function. In religious terms, it is comparable to what Darwin would later postulate in the theory of evolution: the dinosaurs were replaced by the Neanderthals who were in turn replaced by fully developed Homo sapiens. As taught by successionism, the belief is that the Greco-Roman pagan philosophies were replaced by Judaism, which in turn was superseded by the Church Triumphant, the True Faith that rendered all others invalid. The Vatican preached that because the Jews had killed Jesus and rejected his teachings they were punished with the loss of their Holy Temple and the city of Jerusalem, as well as their homeland. In addition, they were damned to wander the earth forever as a divine warning to anyone who might ref
use to obey the Church. (It is important to note that this teaching was categorically rejected and forbidden by the Second Vatican Council in 1962.)

  Baccio Pontelli, on the other hand, was not a great religious scholar. However, he was a Florentine. Florence was one of the most liberal, open-minded cities in Italy—and indeed, in Europe—at that time. The Jewish community of Florence, though numbering only several hundred, was well accepted and influential in the city’s bustling intellectual and cultural activity. Pontelli would have known many artists and architects who were accustomed to incorporating Jewish themes in their work.

  Whoever’s idea it was, the new Palatine Chapel was designed to replace the ancient Jewish Temple as the New Holy Temple of the New World Order in the New Jerusalem, which would from this time forward be the city of Rome, the capital of Christendom. Its measurements are 134.28 feet long by 43.99 feet wide by 67.91 feet high—exactly those of the heichal, the long, rectangular back section of the First Holy Temple completed by King Solomon and his architect King Hiram of Tyre (Lebanon) in 930 BCE.

  More remarkable still, and a fact that most visitors do not realize, is that in keeping with the intent to simulate the sacred site that existed in ancient Jerusalem, the sanctuary was built on two levels. The western half, containing the altar and the private area for the pope and his court, is about six inches higher than the eastern half, originally meant for the common onlookers. This elevated section corresponds to the farthest recess of the original Holy Temple—the Kodesh Kodoshim, the Holy of Holies—where only the High Priest could enter and then only once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The High Priest would symbolically pass through the parochet curtain, referred to in the Gospels as the veil, to perform the all-important prayer of forgiveness and redemption for the people. To show exactly where this veil would have been in the Temple of Jerusalem, a huge white marble partition grill was commissioned, with seven marble “flames” on top, to correspond to the Holy Menorah (seven-branched candelabrum) that glorified the Jewish sanctuary in biblical times.