The Sistine Secrets

by Benjamin Blech

  LORENZO “THE MAGNIFICENT”

  After Cosimo de’ Medici died, his son Piero the Gouty did very little except host great banquets of rich foods. Fortunately for the family’s future, Piero died only five years after Cosimo—of gout, naturally. He left behind the family’s international network of banks and other businesses, all in a state of disorder. The family also had an array of deadly enemies, such as the ancient and wealthy noble Florentine clans of the Strozzi and the Pazzi, who had already attempted in vain to assassinate Cosimo years before. The weight of all these problems and responsibilities fell on the shoulders of Lorenzo, the older of Piero’s two sons.

  Lorenzo was only about twenty years old at the time and would have much preferred to party and write poetry, but he immediately threw himself into the dual roles of family patriarch and unofficial godfather of Florence. He made sure that his door was always open to the common people, granting favors to all who came in friendship. This was a political and security investment that would pay off in the future. He continued in his grandfather Cosimo’s tradition of surrounding himself with great art and artists. Lorenzo had also recently married Clarice Orsini, from an ancient line of Roman nobility, thus raising the House of Medici several rungs on the social ladder and gaining political, commercial, and even military support from the upper class. The wedding, a sumptuous affair fit for a Roman emperor, reinforced the public perception of the de’ Medicis as the “royal family” of Florence. The attractive, cultured, fashionable, and extremely charismatic young couple surrounded themselves with their modern, vivacious, sophisticated family and their “imperial court” of the best and brightest artists, thinkers, and writers in Europe. They gave Florence the feeling of a new golden age, comparable in many ways to the popular spirit in the United States five centuries later when the Kennedy family brought the feeling of “Camelot” to Washington.

  Two groups in Florence, however, were not happy with the rise of the House of Medici. One was its old rivals, the Pazzi clan. The other was the fanatical Dominican monks who ran the Church of San Marco, only a few steps from the liberal, secular, fun-loving palace of the de’ Medicis right in the center of town. Both groups were destined to cast a dark shadow on the lives of Lorenzo and his circle of family and friends.

  In 1471 Lorenzo went on behalf of his family and Florence to pay tribute to the newly elected pope, none other than Sixtus IV, the founder of the Sistine Chapel. There, in the Apostolic Palace, Lorenzo was inspired not by the religious rituals but by the pope’s outstanding collection of ancient pagan Roman sculpture pieces. The pontiff, seeking to impress the rich young “lord of Florence” even more, gave him two Roman statues, both broken but still incomparably beautiful.

  When Lorenzo got home, following Ficino’s suggestions, he founded an artists’ bottega (workshop and studio) in the Garden of San Marco, right under the noses of the indignant Dominicans in the church and monastery next door. At its helm he placed an elderly sculptor-painter named Bertoldo di Giovanni, one of the last students of the great Donatello, from the time of Lorenzo’s grandfather. In this garden, along with his own growing collection of ancient pieces, Lorenzo placed the two Roman statues given to him by Pope Sixtus. A few years later, these statues would help inspire an adolescent apprentice named Michelagnolo Buonarroti.

  This sculpture bottega, otherwise known as the Garden of San Marco, soon became part of the popular image of Lorenzo, whom the Florentines called Il Magnifico, the Magnificent. This honorific had nothing to do with divinity or political power, but rather was a Tuscan variant on “munificent,” denoting one who knew how to spend his money well, a great philanthropist or great patron of the arts. Soon, the bottega became a vital destination for artists, philosophers, poets, and scientists—in short, a hotbed of liberal, intellectual activity. The greatest minds were known to frequent the garden, often giving lectures there—and almost none of it having to do with sculpture. Today, there is a heated debate among many Renaissance historians about the nature of the sculpture Garden of San Marco: was it just a workshop for teaching stone carving—or was it a secret, subversive school for studying works that were being devalued or suppressed by Rome, such as Plato (as opposed to the Church-approved Aristotle) and Judaic wisdom and mysticism? In a recent book, Ross King refers to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s garden bottega as one in which he trained his handpicked artists in “both sculpture and the liberal arts.”3 The fact that they were learning anything liberal under the nose of the Inquisition is proof enough that the true nature of the school had to remain a secret. As the French minister of culture Jack Lang has written, the de’ Medici influence on Florence was indeed a “cultural revolution.”4

  Camelots never last long, however, and Lorenzo’s bright dream of an Athens-on-the-Arno took a dark turn in 1476 when Pope Sixtus, seeking to destroy the de’ Medici family, took away its contract with the Vatican for alum (a huge income, since in that era alum was a key ingredient in paper production, leather tanning, and fabric dyeing). The pope then gave the lucrative contract to the de’ Medicis’ deadly rivals, the Pazzi clan. In 1478 the aforementioned assassination plot by Sixtus (commonly and misleadingly called the Pazzi Conspiracy) resulted in Lorenzo’s beloved younger brother, Giuliano, being slain before his eyes. Ten years after that, Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice, died, leaving him to care for their adolescent and teenaged children. Lorenzo threw himself into repairing the family’s finances, international network, and morale. He invested more than ever in great art, both collecting ancient masterpieces and providing for the creation of new ones.

  In 1489 he discovered a young apprentice who was working under Ghirlandaio. It seemed that this mere boy from the mountains could carve stone better than any adult. Realizing that there was a potential prodigy to be molded and instructed, Lorenzo took the rebellious lad off of Ghirlandaio’s hands. There is a story that the first piece that Michelangelo sculpted for Lorenzo was the head of an aged, grinning faun, a mythological forest spirit. Lorenzo was astonished at the mature mastery of the work but happened to mention in passing that the faun, being so old, would probably not have all his teeth. As soon as Lorenzo had left, Michelangelo immediately chiseled out a tooth and even drilled a hole in the marble gum of the faun, making the bust seem even more perfectly real. When Lorenzo saw what he had done, Il Magnifico laughed and proudly showed the grinning faun to his family and friends. He took a great personal liking to the boy and instead of having him lodge in crowded students’ rooms, he informally adopted the uncouth lad and brought him to live in the grand de’ Medici palace. Thus, Michelangelo, at the age of about thirteen or fourteen, suddenly found himself being raised with the richest offspring in Europe, taking all his meals with them and studying with the best private tutors in Italy. This would always be the happiest time in his very long life—and change his way of viewing God, religion, and art forever. It would also have a profound effect on the messages Michelangelo would eventually impart in his masterwork on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  THE FORMAZIONE OF MICHELANGELO

  In Italian, the word for education is formazione, in the sense of “shaping, molding, forming” a young mind. It is a perfect word to describe the training of the young genius in the care of Lorenzo. Michelangelo’s experiences in Florence in his early teens would indeed shape his talent and mold his thinking for the rest of his long life and career. Through his artistic apprenticeships, his privileged private tutoring in the palace, his encounters with the greatest geniuses of his day, and his extraordinary daily life as part of the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he underwent an incredibly broad formazione that was not only unique for the fifteenth century but would be so even in our own time. It would be this wide range of cultural sources and references that he drew on when painting the Sistine Chapel. Its amazingly all-encompassing scope may well be one of the reasons that it has taken us all of five centuries to figure out what he was really saying in his magnificent frescoes.

  Ghirlandaio was Michelangelo’
s first maestro, or master teacher. Even though Michelangelo would say years later that the great painter had taught him nothing, we can easily assume that at least he taught the boy the basics of making and mixing paints, of color and composition, and of the great development of fifteenth-century Florentine artwork—perspective. It is interesting to note, however, that we cannot find any “Michelangelesque” contributions in the frescoes that Ghirlandaio painted at that time. Once Michelangelo was transferred to the Garden of San Marco, Bertoldo did instruct him in some of the basics of the art of sculpture, but the prodigy surpassed his master in no time at all. Young Buonarroti really took his lessons from the great masters of the past, whose works could be seen and studied all over Florence: the frescoes of Fra Angelico and Masaccio, the sculptures of Donatello, the architecture of Brunelleschi and Alberti. Above all, he fell in love with pagan Greco-Roman art and design. He loved it for its simplicity, its kinetic quality, and its celebration of the muscular male nude. Between the sculptures in the garden and in the Palazzo de’ Medici, and the masterpieces all over town, Michelangelo’s voracious curiosity and photographic memory were exercised to their peak, and would serve him well to the end of his days.

  Combined with his artistic development, Michelangelo’s liberal arts education moved ahead at a prodigious pace. In the Florentine Republic in the fifteenth century, a well-rounded education was considered vital for every young man. A generation before Michelangelo, the ultimate example of the Florentine “Renaissance man” was the architect-painter-writer-athlete-musician-lawyer Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472). Alberti wrote: “The artist in this social context must not be a simple artisan, but rather an intellectual prepared in all disciplines and all fields.” Lorenzo firmly believed in this, and wanted his young sculpture prodigy to have the very best formazione that money could buy. Lorenzo’s children had been tutored from an early age by the great humanist poet and classicist Angelo Ambrogini of Montepulciano, better known as Poliziano. Poliziano had been orphaned at a tender age and brought to Florence, where he was taken in and cared for by the de’ Medici family. He remained deeply attached to the entire family and stayed with them most of his life. However, his most passionate devotion was to Lorenzo, as evidenced in Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, in which Lorenzo’s entire court views the manger scene. Poliziano is virtually draped over Lorenzo, in what most art books describe as a sign of “great friendship.”

  Poliziano was famous in his time as an elegant poet in Latin, but also as the supreme expert in Ancient Greek. He claimed to be as fluent in the language as Aristotle and Socrates, and contemporary reports seem to prove that this was no empty boast. These talents made the young scholar a perfect choice to teach the de’ Medici offspring the classics, an indispensable part of the education of any gentleman or lady of the period. Some art historians think that Poliziano must have been Michelangelo’s main tutor as well; however, by the time the teenaged Buonarroti moved into the palace, Lorenzo’s children were also teenagers and had been studying privately with Poliziano since 1475. When Michelangelo arrived in 1489, they were ready to move on to other teachers in other disciplines. Even though Poliziano would suggest some reading and artistic sources to him, Michelangelo showed little or no interest in Greek or Latin linguistic studies, while being greatly drawn to philosophy and spiritual subjects taught by others. This would explain why Michelangelo’s Latin was never up to par, and why he wrote his poems only in Tuscan Italian. In fact, he studied Dante only while in hiding many years later.

  MICHELANGELO’S TWO MASTER TUTORS

  Far more influential in Michelangelo’s formazione than Poliziano were two remarkable scholars commonly acknowledged as the greatest masters of philosophy in Florence: Marsilio Ficino and the childhood prodigy Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The combined influence of these two teachers is clearly evident in much of Michelangelo’s life work.

  Ficino’s translations, his teachings on Plato and Neoplatonism, and his Platonic Academy were already well known and esteemed throughout Europe by the time Michelangelo became his student. From Ficino, Michelangelo absorbed the daring ideas of this philosophic school of thought. But, as we will see, it was young Pico della Mirandola who played the most significant role in Michelangelo’s development. Pico was the charismatic architect of an intellectual and theological bridge between ancient mysticism, Greek philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. He inspired freethinkers everywhere, enraged the Vatican, and deeply affected the passionate, impressionable Michelangelo. In fact, two decades later, Michelangelo would secretly turn the ceiling of the Sistine into a permanent testimony to Pico’s unique—and heretical—teachings.

  The first of these master tutors, Marsilio Ficino, was the son of Cosimo de’ Medici’s doctor. After Cosimo came into possession of the ancient writings of Plato and Hermes Trismegistus, he learned that the twenty-year-old Marsilio showed brilliant promise at translation. Since he already had the scholar’s father on retainer as his private physician, it was not difficult to put the son on the family payroll as well. Marsilio’s Greek and Latin studies were subsidized by Cosimo, who also paid for the foundation of a Platonic Academy, under Ficino’s direction. Cosimo, ever sensitive about his nonpatrician roots, wanted to be perceived as the new Solon, leading Florence into a world-famous golden age.

  Ficino set up his “School of Athens” in the de’ Medici palace, in the family’s country villa, and in the Garden of San Marco. Thanks to his growing reputation as the leading expert on Plato—plus the de’ Medici name and patronage—he was quickly able to attract a circle of intellectuals, artists, philosophers, teachers, and freethinkers. Soon he was engaged in a flood of intellectual correspondence with great minds all over Europe. Cosimo was happy, as this brought him more fame worldwide than any possible business transaction could do.

  After Sixtus IV’s ascent to the papal throne, Ficino became a priest. It is said that he took the vows as a result of recovering from a severe illness. More likely, it was at the de’ Medici family’s suggestion, as he could then be a useful link to any maneuvers going on in the papal court. At the same time, Marsilio was developing his own system of philosophy, based on Platonism, Neoplatonism, and humanism.

  While it is clearly impossible in these pages to do justice to this school of thought, we can at the very least highlight some of its key points, especially as they will help in understanding Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes. In essence, Ficino’s philosophy elevated the liberal arts, pure scientific research, and the centrality of the individual and his or her immortal soul’s redemption through beauty and love. It taught that there are absolute concepts that exist outside of human variations and distortions, among them the concepts of Absolute Good, Absolute Love, and Absolute Beauty.

  This is almost certainly what Michelangelo had in mind when in later life he explained, “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and in action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”5 For Michelangelo, imbued with this Platonic mind-set, art was not creating as much as it was uncovering hidden preexistent absolute beauty. “I saw the angel in the marble,” he said, “and I carved until I set him free.”6

  Neoplatonists also believed that the vast variety of human thought, if traced back to the One Source—what Leonardo da Vinci called the Prime Mover—would lead to spiritual enlightenment and ultimately to God. This and the mystical texts that Ficino was translating led him to attempt a fusion of all mystical beliefs, from Greek gnosticism to Egyptian hermeneutics to Christian cosmology—and to Jewish Kabbalah.

  One of Ficino’s influences was a well-known work called Fons Vitae (Fountain of life), one of the first European Neoplatonic texts, by an eleventh-century philosopher from Spain named Avicebron. Little did Ficino know that this was a translation of the Arabic translation of an original Hebrew text written by the great Jewish poet-philosopher S
olomon Ibn Gavirol (died c. 1058). The idea of harmonizing monotheism with Platonic thought gripped Ficino and led him to attempt the construction of a universal faith, by which all humanity could achieve individual redemption. Of course, now that Jews had just been permitted to settle in Florence, he longed to work Judaic thought into his master plan of the universe. Ficino did study Hebrew with Jews like Elijah del Medigo and Jochanan ben Yitzchak Alemanno, but it seems his talent for Greek and Latin did not help him in this case. In his writings, he is limited to some (sometimes faulty) quotes from the Hebrew Scriptures and great commentators such as Rashi, Maimonides, Gersonides, and Sa’adia Ha-Gaon.

  Ficino did, however, pick up the Judaic idea of the sacredness of human love and its capacity to lead to greater closeness to the Divine. The Hebrew Bible, speaking of the first sexual encounter between Adam and Eve, says that “Adam knew” his mate. Remarkably, the Hebrew word l-da’at, “to know,” means also to love or to make love. Sex, on the deepest level, transcends the physical and connotes spiritual union. A seemingly carnal act is invested with dignity and sanctity. The ideal of lovemaking is true intimacy—not merely of intertwining bodies but of mutually understanding souls. To be intimate on this level is to “know” the other person’s essence—his or her divine image—which is but another way of gaining greater kinship with God. Viewed in this light, lovemaking is meant not just for the single objective of procreation, as the Church then taught, but also to foster this ultimate sense of knowing. As the Kabbalah daringly puts it, when a couple “know” each other in a complete sexual-romantic-spiritual act, they actually unite heaven as well.