The Sistine Secrets

by Benjamin Blech

  According to Vasari, even the stars and planets had marked Michelangelo for a unique destiny. Vasari’s opening of Michelangelo’s biography sounds almost like the Gospel of John describing the birth of Jesus. Vasari depicts the Holy One gazing down from heaven upon all the world’s artists, poets, and architects laboring in error, and mercifully deciding to send down a spirit of truth, talent, and wisdom to show them the way. No wonder that in the sixteenth century, people talked and wrote about the “divine Michelangelo.” The biographer points out that Michelangelo was born under the sign of Jupiter (i.e., a Pisces), with Mercury and Venus ascendant. There is also a Jewish oral tradition about the influence of the stars and planets. According to the Aggadah, the legends of the sages, one born on the second day of the week (Monday, when Michelangelo was born) will have a bad temper, since it was on the second day of creation that the waters were divided and division is a sign of disputation and animosity. It goes on to say that one born under Jupiter (named Tzedek, or “righteousness,” in Hebrew) will be a tzadkan, a righteous seeker of justice, while Venus’s influence imparts wealth and sensuality, and Mercury brings perception and wisdom. This is an accurate prediction of Michelangelo’s life and career: he had a hot temper, would often stand up for the underdog, became wealthy and famous from his sensual portrayals of the nude (most often male) body, and showed a deep understanding of esoteric spiritual truths.

  Two other vital traits help us understand the inner Michelangelo. He had both an extraordinary visual memory (today we would call it photographic recall) and a rock-solid emotional tenacity. This last characteristic made him a loyal friend, a passionate artist, and a long-suffering romantic. In Talmudic and Kabbalistic thinking, almost everything has a positive and a negative aspect. The ancient sages would often say, “On the one hand…on the other hand…” In Michelangelo’s case, on the one hand, his unbreakable ties to cherished ideas, people, and images would make him an unparalleled artist and a lifelong seeker of Truth. On the other hand, the same unbreakable ties would make him a lonely, melancholy, obsessive neurotic.

  At only thirteen years of age, Michelangelo was already in a war of wills with his father. Ludovico wanted him to learn grammar and accounting so that he could become a member and official of the Florence wool and silk guilds—not a high ambition in life, but something respectable that the family could rely on. But Michelangelo’s love of the visual had already led to a fixation on the stonecutter’s craft, and he spent his time in the classroom sketching instead of doing his grammar and math exercises. Ludovico often punished and beat the boy but to no avail—little Michelagnolo could think of nothing other than becoming an artist. His disgusted father gave up and took him to Florence, to have him accepted as a fledgling apprentice in the bottega, or artists’ workshop, of Domenico Ghirlandaio, who had already been part of the team that had frescoed the new Sistine Chapel for Pope Sixtus IV. Ludovico’s only consolation was that his son would get twenty-four gold coins (florins) over his three-year apprenticeship, and that he himself received a small payment on the day he delivered his son to the bottega. It was a sort of paid servitude, but at least this boy who refused to learn a “useful profession” would bring a little bit of income into the family.

  At thirteen, at an age when Jewish boys take on the religious responsibilities of an adult, the young Catholic Michelagnolo Buonarroti’s childhood ended. For the next several years, he was contracted to grind colors, mix plaster and paints, fix brushes, haul ladders, and do whatever else his masters required of him. His family had cast him out for a few coins. However, to his great good fortune he was now in Florence. In fifteenth-century Europe, he had arrived in the exact center of the world of culture, art, and ideas. He was entering into the heart of the Renaissance. On the one hand, his journey had just begun. On the other hand, he was home.

  Chapter Four

  A VERY SPECIAL EDUCATION

  I am still learning.

  —MICHELANGELO

  TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO, the ancient Romans came across a low-lying area north of Rome that was cradled between two rivers. The flowing streams blessed the surrounding land with such lush vegetation that they named the place Florentia, or “flowering.” Long before Michelangelo’s arrival there, the name had evolved into Firenze—what we today know in English as the city of Florence.

  The flowing together of two rivers is described by a special word in English: confluence. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, confluence has two principal meanings:

  1: a coming or flowing together, meeting, or gathering at one point [a happy confluence of weather and scenery]

  2 a: the flowing together of two or more streams b: the place of meeting of two streams c: the combined stream formed by conjunction

  Both of these explanations aptly describe the uniqueness of medieval Florence. True, to be precise, the two rivers, the Mugnone and the much more famous Arno, do not quite meet inside Florence. However, in this one city, at one time, there flowed together so many great minds and talents that the combined streams of inspiration brought about the rebirth of Western civilization—the Renaissance.

  Florence’s historic center is so small that you can still stroll across its entire length—from Santa Maria Novella to Santa Croce—in about twenty minutes. Yet, the fortuitous coming together of so many extraordinary personalities and events in this tiny area brought forth a flowering of the arts, sciences, and philosophy that still influences our world to this day.

  The totally unpredictable confluence of events that set the stage for this remarkable moment in history is a fascinating story. Strangely enough, a significant part of it had its roots in Rome.

  THE EXILE OF THE PAPACY AND THE RETURN TO ROME

  In 1304 Pope Benedict IV, according to reliable reports of the day, was poisoned by a platter of figs served to him by a beautiful young boy dressed as a girl. If true, the figs were probably sent by Charles II, the king of France, who had been trying for some time to take over the Catholic Church and thereby obtain unchallenged rule over all Christendom. What we know for certain is that the very next pope, Clement V, immediately moved the papal court to France. He set up his new palace in Avignon, where the papacy would have its headquarters for the next seventy-three years. This period is referred to by the Italians as the Vatican’s “Babylonian exile.”

  The poet Dante Alighieri, furious at this perceived betrayal of Italy, placed Clement and other pro-French popes in hell in his epic poem Inferno. There he describes Clement as “un pastor sanza legge”—an illegitimate pastor—and his supporters as always ready to “puttaneggiar coi regi”—to prostitute themselves to earthly kings. In fact, Dante likens Pope Clement to Jason, the illegitimate ruler of Israel, crowned by the pagan Seleucid enemies of the Jews, as described in the book of the Maccabees.

  This period of the Avignon popes was one of the lowest points in the history of the Church, tarnished by horrendous scandals, violence, intrigues, and assassinations. Finally, in 1377 Pope Gregory XI brought the papacy back to Rome. Still, the French royalty tried to force the Church back to Avignon, continuing their political intrigues and poisonings and elections of French popes (called the antipopes by Rome) until the middle of the next century. In addition to these problems, plagues, and scandals, the growth of the Turkish Muslim Empire seriously threatened the future of the Vatican.

  Renewed hope came with the papacy of Pope Sixtus IV della Rovere (1414–1484), the uncle of the future Pope Julius II, who started the rebuilding of Rome. Even though Sixtus’s motives were to glorify himself and his family—and to make all his clan obscenely wealthy along the way—he was the first to begin a serious urban renewal of Rome since the fall of the empire about a thousand years before. From Sixtus onward, Rome would be considered the undisputed capital of the Catholic world.

  It was during this period of frenetic construction that many treasures of ancient pagan Rome were accidentally rediscovered. Just from the excavations for new foundations in one area of Rome,
two priceless statues were found: the Belvedere Torso and the Belvedere Apollo, both of which were destined to have an enormous impact on the young Michelangelo. By bringing lost works like these back to light, the rebuilding of Rome also brought back the Classical arts to the Western world. Soon, among the wealthy and powerful, there was a mania for anything of ancient Greco-Roman design. The next logical step was finding talents who could approximate the beauty of the original artworks, but within the rigorous confines of acceptable Christian thought.

  THE FALL OF BYZANTIUM

  The last vestige of the vast Roman Empire in the Middle Ages was Constantinople (today Istanbul, Turkey), founded by the emperor Constantine. Constantine had proclaimed Christianity a state-sponsored religion in the year 313, when he reunited the empire and became the one unchallenged emperor. In spite of church legends, according to most Christian historians, Constantine himself never became completely Christian, remaining part pagan until being baptized against his wishes on his deathbed in 337 CE. Ironically, he chose to make the empire reflect his somewhat schizophrenic religious life. He permanently split it into the Christian West, ruled spiritually by Rome and the pope, and the pagan Orient (East), ruled politically and militarily from his new Christian capital city Constantinopolis (Constantinople), named for himself. Less than a century later, the barbarian hordes overran Rome in the horrific sack of 410. Rome never recovered from this trauma, but staggered along until its absolute end in September 476, when a young emperor was forced by a barbarian king to abdicate the throne. Through an ironic twist of fate, this very last emperor was called Romulus, after the founder of Rome. Thus the history of Rome came full circle after thirteen centuries.

  Thankfully, in the Orient, Constantinople survived and kept the flame of Western civilization going, in spite of much infighting and political intrigue. The Eastern empire took the name Byzantium. In a reflection of its torturous history, when we today want to refer to deep corruption mixed with double-and triple-crossing political schemes, we use the adjective byzantine. (Not surprisingly, this word is also often used to describe the Vatican court during the time of Michelangelo.)

  Strangely enough, it was the Church itself that dealt one of the worst blows to Christian Constantinople. The Western knights of the Fourth Crusade, under the direction of the autocratic Pope Innocent III, sacked the city and ripped it to shreds in the early thirteenth century, as part of the pope’s plan for absolute world domination by the Vatican. Weakened by Rome, rotted on the inside by corruption, Byzantine Constantinople limped onward until the Turkish Muslim conquest of 1453. Again, history was playing tricks with the protagonists’ names. The Muslim conqueror of Byzantium was Mohammed II, and its last Christian emperor was another Constantine.

  The Turks’ sacking of the doomed city lasted many days. The raping and butchering of the Christians so horrified the West that it is still a burning memory for many, even serving as a battle call in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in parts of Eastern Europe. Every intellectual, scientist, and artist who could flee to the West did so, bringing with them many precious relics and artifacts and, most important, priceless texts and key ancient documents that represented the very best of Classical thought.

  Two of these texts, thanks to many risks and even more bribes, made it out of the new Ottoman Islamic Empire and had a huge effect on the Renaissance and its art, including what we see today in the Sistine Chapel. One of these salvaged texts was the Corpus Hermeticus, the writings of the Egyptian mystic Hermes Trismegistus. The other was a collection of writings of the great Greek philosopher Plato. The man who paid a fortune for these texts and had them smuggled into Italy was one of the richest men in Europe, Cosimo de’ Medici. His rise and the achievements of his family are the next thread in this historic tapestry of Florence in the time of Michelangelo.

  ENTER THE DE’ MEDICIS

  On the one hand, it would seem that the de’ Medici family had much in common with Michelangelo’s family, the Buonarrotis. They were both very old Florentine clans, and although they had no real roots in nobility, both families liked to believe they did and actively pined for social acceptance on that exalted level. On the other hand, that is where the similarities end. Whereas the Buonarrotis were for the most part inept at business and finance, the de’ Medicis quickly rose from wool dealers to moneylenders to the top bankers of their day—indeed, according to many, they were the richest family in all Europe. The founder of the family fortune was Cosimo the Elder. He also set the family on its path of unofficially ruling the city of Florence and of collecting and commissioning great works of art. Michelangelo’s family never learned how to navigate in high society, and—except for the artist himself—regarded the arts as a frivolous waste of time and money. It was Cosimo the Elder who discovered the great artists Donatello and Botticelli, sponsored the brilliant but eccentric architect Brunelleschi and his amazing dome for the cathedral (still an engineering wonder after six centuries), and also paid for the two aforementioned ancient texts to reach Florence.

  Cosimo took the young scholar Marsilio Ficino under his wing, entrusting him with translating both Hermes Trismegistus and Plato into Latin. Ficino not only did this under Cosimo’s patronage, he also became a philosopher in his own right, founding in Florence his own version of the ancient Platonic Academy, otherwise known as the School of Athens—all of this under the patronage of the de’ Medicis.

  Cosimo accomplished one other important feat, almost entirely unknown today, but extremely controversial in his own time. It would have great significance for Florence, for the vigor of its intellectual climate and content, and eventually for the education of Michelangelo. Cosimo brought the Jews into Florence.

  A CONFLUENCE OF CULTURES

  Up until Cosimo de’ Medici, the Republic of Florence had barred Jews from working or living there. The only exceptions were a handful of physicians and translators. The rich, Catholic money-lending families, such as the Strozzi and the Pazzi, kept the Jewish money changers and lenders out of town, not only because of religious prejudices but also for fear of competition. Since the Church frowned on usury among Roman Catholics, the Tuscan Christian banking families specialized in lending only to foreign royalty and international business concerns. This left the field wide open for Jews to lend to the common people and the poor. The Florentine upper crust had no interest in working with the “little people,” but they did not want anyone else to do business with them, either.

  In 1437 Cosimo took over the city—not by force, but by finance and strength of personality. He went along with the pretext that Florence was still a republic run by wealthy noble families and the great guilds (such as the wool merchants), but in reality he ruled the town as a sort of benign philosopher-king, much as Plato envisioned in his utopian book, entitled ironically enough The Republic.

  By bringing in the Jews, Cosimo won the hearts of the common Florentines. They could now get loans like the “big shots,” giving them the long dreamed of opportunity to pay off crushing debts, buy homes, start up or expand their businesses, or invest in the businesses of others. As for the Jews, from this point on, their fate in Florence would be forever linked to that of the de’ Medici family. When, in two different eras, the de’ Medicis were chased out of town by their enemies (supported by the Vatican), the Jews would leave with them. When the de’ Medicis took back control of the city, the Jews moved right back in with them.

  Besides easy financing for the common people, the Jews brought with them a much more enduring gift—their culture and esoteric wisdom. As much as Cosimo and Ficino and their intellectual circle were excited to be able to study Plato, they were absolutely ecstatic about obtaining access to a body of deep wisdom that long predated him. Not only that, but Jewish spiritual and esoteric knowledge could be learned from living representatives of that culture. This was far more stimulating and inspiring than translating texts from a long-dead society.

  In no time at all, Jews could be found studying Plato and h
armonizing his ideas with Judaism, just as Maimonides had done with Aristotle’s concepts three centuries earlier. Catholic Florentines set about studying Hebrew, Torah, Talmud, Midrash, and—their favorite—the mystical Kabbalah. As Professor Roberto G. Salvadori recounts in his history of the Jews in Florence: “Recent studies have revealed what was hidden or unknown until a short time ago: the vivacity and variety of Jewish cultural manifestations in many Italian cities in the 15th and 16th centuries, which reached their apex in Florence…. The Florentine humanists—and particularly those gathered around the famous Platonic Academy—were strongly attracted to Judaism [and] to the Hebrew language as a vehicle of values that they considered extremely important.”1 Jews were sought after for private tutoring and for public debates, salons, parties, lectures, and intellectual retreats. The Dominicans in Florence and the Vatican in Rome were scandalized, and now had one more reason to want the whole de’ Medici clan dead.

  Jewish wisdom was even sought out by the great Christian painters and sculptors—in spite of the fact that Jews themselves, following the law of the Torah, did not create that kind of art. In a recent prestigious series on art history, Losapevi dell’arte: Simboli e allegorie-prima parte, it is stated in the Introduction: “The symbolic images of the 15th and 16th Centuries were profoundly influenced not only by ancient Greco-Roman myths, but also by the philosophy of Plato and by the hermetic and esoteric traditions derived from the Jewish Kabbalah.”2 This thrilling, fermenting brew of cultures and ideas became a confluence of art, science, spiritual philosophy, and liberated creative impulses that changed the world. Four centuries later, in 1860, the great historian Jacob Burckhardt would name this amazing period “The Renaissance.”