Ficino preached this concept to his circle as “Platonic love,” a love that is not only body-to-body but also soul-to-soul. It was only later in history that “platonic” love came to mean a deep relationship devoid of sexual content. Since Ficino’s Neoplatonism emphasized the centrality of Man and appreciation of his beauty, it was only natural that his academy was very popular with men who loved other men. Back then, there was no concept of homosexuality, just the Church’s emphasis on procreation and its condemnation of what it called “sodomy,” the performance of anal sex, especially (but not exclusively) between two males. The categories of heterosexual and homosexual were only established—in fact, the words were coined—in Germany in the late nineteenth century.
Still, Rome was horrified by all this. The Vatican had “Christianized” the teachings of Aristotle, and not Plato. It preached that redemption could come only through the One Church. These Florentine ideas about the individual, about Art and Science, about universality, and about Greek and Jewish love were anathema and blasphemy…but they all resonated deeply in the mind of Michelangelo. At last he had found a philosophy that would validate his feelings about beauty, about art—and about the sacredness of sex and the perfection of the human body, especially of the men whose physical form so appealed to him.
The Church, however, soon found itself far more concerned with the views of Michelangelo’s other teacher. Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was as much a child prodigy as Michelangelo. In addition to being blessed with great genius, a gift for languages, and an insatiable curiosity, Pico was the scion of a wealthy family of princes; in other words, he was what we would today call a trust-fund baby. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, he was already studying canon law in Bologna, then moving on to the other great learning centers in Ferrara, Padua, and Pavia. In 1484, at only twenty-one years of age, he ended up in Florence to join the circle already led by Poliziano, Ficino, and Lorenzo de’ Medici himself.
At that time, Ficino was promoting the study of his beloved Plato by trying to discredit the philosophies of Aristotle and Averroes. Pico, building on Ficino’s concept of universalizing faith, tried to harmonize them instead. Pico also wanted to include and emphasize in the mix his own favorite stream of thought—Judaic wisdom and mysticism. With his family’s money, he spent his short life paying for the best Jewish minds in Italy to tutor him in Hebrew and Aramaic and to help him navigate the sea of Jewish wisdom in the Torah, the Talmud, the Midrash, and the Kabbalah. His Jewish teachers and intimate friends included great thinkers and writers like Elijah del Medigo, Jochanan Alemanno, and the mysterious Rabbi Abraham, among others. Pico, unlike Poliziano or Ficino, became quite fluent in these languages and deeply knowledgeable in Judaism. His writings and teachings are permeated with Jewish thought. One example is his Heptalus, in which he narrates the biblical story of creation by way of a full Kabbalistic interpretation.
Young Michelangelo, with a mind thirsting for new knowledge and eyes eager to behold all the beauty to be found, was completely immersed in this exciting, dizzying world of liberal thought and high-flying discussions. It was all the more thrilling for other reasons. He had come from a cold, unaffectionate family with no use for artistic or intellectual pursuits, and here he was being embraced by the most sophisticated court in Europe. He was also just starting to get in touch with his romantic and physical attraction to other men. Whether this resulted from his having a distant father and a mother who died young, or whether it was simply his innate nature, we will never know. What we do know is that he was in the city and the social circles where one man’s love for another was common and accepted by almost everyone—except the Church. In fact, male-to-male love and sex were so common there that they were referred to in the rest of Italy as “that Florentine tendency.” We also know that many of the men associated with Lorenzo’s Platonic Academy and Garden of San Marco were lovers of men. Poliziano, Ficino, and Pico all fit into this category. In 1494 Poliziano and Pico died within weeks of each other from a mysterious illness. Judging from their symptoms, it is quite likely that they were two of the first victims when the first wave of syphilis struck Florence in that year. We do know for certain that Pico della Mirandola was buried in a double grave, as married couples were, with his longtime companion, the poet Girolamo Benivieni. Their tomb is inside the Church of San Marco, where no doubt the fanatical Dominican monks of the time are busy spinning in their graves.
Another reason that this intellectual confluence must have been so exciting to the teenaged Michelangelo was its “sinful” aspect. The Holy Inquisition was actively trying to eradicate Jewish knowledge like the Talmud and the Kabbalistic book of the Zohar, the very books his teachers were imparting to him. Also, Rome was actively trying to separate Jews and Christians while Florence was trying to unite them. In 1487, only a year or so before Michelangelo arrived in Lorenzo’s court, Pico della Mirandola amassed more than nine hundred theses that he had composed to prove that Egyptian mysticism, Platonic philosophy, and Judaism all led to the same deity worshiped by the Catholic Church. He offered to sponsor out of his own pocket an international conference to be held at the Vatican to discuss and celebrate this new universality and harmony between the faiths. The Vatican, upon reading his writings, immediately declared them blasphemous and ordered him arrested for heresy. Pico was forced to recant his ideas, but soon after denied his retraction and had to flee to France. The long arm of the Vatican had him arrested there, and it was only through Lorenzo’s deep pockets and international connections that Pico was released and spirited back to Florence, where he gratefully remained inside the protection of the de’ Medici palace for the rest of his brief life.
This heady whirl of art, love, and forbidden fruit made an indelible impact on young Michelangelo, who would remain passionately influenced by these teachings for the rest of his life and career. We will see how much it permeates almost all his artwork—and reaches its peak in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
WHAT EXACTLY DID MICHELANGELO LEARN?
Normally, a young Florentine’s formazione would start with Italian grammar, Latin, sometimes Greek, and the poetry of Virgil and Dante. There would be Greco-Roman mythology, some of it based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, some of it transmitted orally. Also in the oral tradition would be the stories of the Christian saints and the teachings of the Church. The Jewish stories from what the Church called the Old Testament would be recounted, but only as a proof of the validity of the New Testament. For young men from the upper classes, especially the nobility, there would be instruction in swordsmanship, equestrian skills, music, elocution, and dance—in short, all the proper grooming for war, high society, and future leadership.
Also extremely popular in this preparation was the ethical instruction of the ancient Greek text of Pseudo-Phocylides. This primer in morality is an epic poem of about 250 verses and aphorisms, which most scholars today define as the outreach teachings of a Jew in the Hellenistic period. The anonymous Jewish poet, pretending to be a well-respected Greek philosopher, uses thinly disguised quotes from the Hebrew prophets and the Torah to woo the pagan gentiles away from their way of life, and to observe the Seven Basic Commandments of Noah—the universal covenant of law preceding the giving of the Torah to the Jews on Mount Sinai. To avoid revealing his identity as a Jew, he does not blatantly condemn idol worship per se, only the behavior and society around it. By the time of Pico and Michelangelo, this cunning forgery had long been accepted and passed along as an authentic ancient Greek work, and was woven into another, similar forgery, the so-called Sibyllines, supposed to be the twelve books of the mysterious female seers of the Classical world. In this way, the impressionable young apprentice was taught that ethical behavior came from yet another confluence, the teachings of the Jewish prophets and the pagan sibyls, all mixed together. This would show up years later—on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Making Michelangelo’s education unique were the lessons he was taught by Ficino and Pico. Darin
g, innovative, philo-Semitic, often branded heretical, they would explain why, when allowed to design an artwork of his own choosing, Michelangelo would often select a Jewish theme rather than the standard Christian and mythological images of the day. It also explains why, when commissioned by the pope to create works of art as homage to Jesus and the Church—including the Sistine Chapel—Michelangelo would brilliantly hide inside these works antipapal messages more in keeping with his true universalistic feelings.
THE JEWISH INFLUENCES: MIDRASH, TALMUD, AND KABBALAH
Because Ficino and, more particularly, Pico were powerfully inspired by Jewish thought and transmitted it to their prize student, we need to clarify the areas of that thought that most affected Michelangelo and much of his later artwork.
First, we should mention the Midrash. Not the name of one book, it rather refers to many collections of stories, legends, and biblical commentaries from the hands of different scholars at about the beginning of the common era (i.e., after the year one in the common calendar). According to Jewish tradition, these are part of an oral tradition of transmitted knowledge going back many centuries, some even from the time of Moses. Unlike the Talmud, Midrash is more interested in theology than law, in concepts rather than commandments. It has been well said that the Talmud speaks to humanity’s mind but the Midrash is directed to its soul.
We know that Michelangelo studied Midrash with his masters because so many of its insights appear in his depictions of biblical scenes. An excellent example is the panel in the Sistine ceiling known as The Garden of Eden. There we find Adam and Eve standing before the Tree of Knowledge. Throughout the Middle Ages, in every cultural tradition but one, the fruit of that tree was thought to be an apple. Indeed, the Latin word for apple reflected its infamous past—male, which means evil. (In modern Italian the vowels have been reversed, and we now call it mela.) In the fourth century CE, the word malum appeared in the Latin Vulgate translation of Genesis in the phrase “the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” formally codifying the association between the apple and the forbidden fruit. There was only one exception to this commonly held belief: the Jewish tradition. According to a mystical principle, God never presents us with a problem unless he has already created its solution within the problem itself. When Adam and Eve sin by eating the forbidden fruit, they are stricken with shame from their new awareness of their nudity. The Bible tells us that their immediate solution was to cover themselves with fig leaves. According to the Midrash, the Tree of Knowledge was a fig tree, since a compassionate God had provided a cure for the consequence of their sin within the self-same object that caused it. It is hard to imagine any Christian being aware of this, either in Michelangelo’s era or even today. Only someone who had studied the Midrash could have known such a thing. Yet, sure enough, there in the panel of Original Sin, Michelangelo’s forbidden Tree of Knowledge is a fig tree.
When we tour the Sistine in the upcoming chapters, only a strong familiarity with this body of Jewish knowledge will permit us to grasp the countless Midrashic allusions that Michelangelo worked into his frescoes—something unfortunately almost completely unknown and ignored by contemporary scholars.
Pico, as indicated by his library, also greatly admired the Talmud, a vast compendium of Jewish law and commentary composed over a five-hundred-year period beginning roughly at the time of Jesus. What sets this work apart from almost all other books of the time is its unique system of thought, what is even today referred to as “Talmudic logic.” It conditions us to see the universe and to think in a multilayered way, as opposed to the Church’s uncritical, linear, and unanalytical approach. Its predominant theme is to question. It links reason to faith. It values logic as a prime good and allows for the legitimacy of conflicting opinions. It also places great stress on the ability to harmonize seeming opposites. These were hardly ideals for the Church, which therefore sought to suppress it. But Michelangelo, while not able to study the Talmud in depth, learned from his teachers to incorporate at least some of its values into his outlook and its multiple levels of meaning into his artwork.
The Judaic study that had the greatest impact on Michelangelo was the one for which Pico is perhaps best remembered. Pico had the largest Judaic library of any gentile in Europe, and—more striking still—holds the record for the biggest private library of Kabbalistic materials gathered in one place anywhere. Kabbalah was Pico’s passion. In fact, his dedication to this branch of Jewish knowledge may well explain his very positive feelings toward Jews and Judaism.
Kabbalah, comprising the esoteric and mystical tradition of Judaism, is supposed to have its origin in the secrets the angels dared to transmit to Adam. Kabbalah is a Hebrew word that literally means “received.” Because its teachings are extremely complex and deal with subjects not everyone is capable of handling, it is ideally taught only to those mature enough to “receive” its hidden knowledge, by way of a master to a select chosen disciple. But the Zohar, which first appeared in Spain in the thirteenth century published by a Jewish writer named Moses de Leon—ostensibly as a manuscript he found dating back to the Talmudic era—and other Kabbalistic works were available for study, and Pico took full advantage.
What fascinated Pico so? And what was it in Kabbalah that captivated Michelangelo to the extent that almost every part of the Sistine ceiling bears traces of its teachings? We can only hint at some of the answers.
Surely part of the answer lies in the major premise of Kabbalah that beneath the surface of every object are hidden “emanations” of God. Things are far more than they seem to the naked eye. What a provocative concept for an artist—especially one whose credo was “Every block of stone has a statue inside of it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” These emanations of the Divine, known as the Ten S’firot (ten communications), represent the “series of intermediate stages” that make the creation of the finite world possible—almost like the steps necessary for an artist to bring his ideas to life. Moreover, these Ten S’firot, representing all of God’s attributes, have a direct correspondence with the physical body of a person. God is imminent in the corporeal; the body has sparks of the Divine. And that of course makes even the nudes that preoccupied Michelangelo holy.
Kabbalah allowed its students, as we’ve already noted, to think positively about sex. It also provided for a totally different way of viewing male/female distinctions. Both are equal parts of divinity because God himself/herself is a perfect blending of both characteristics—God is man and woman.
Harmonizing these two seemingly disparate aspects is a Kabbalistic concept that finds expression not only in God’s sexuality but in almost every other aspect of life. What we today call the positive and negative forces of atoms was a secret long known by Kabbalists, although they used different language. Harmonizing opposites, balancing extremes, grasping the power of the hidden inner essence of objects certainly could have strong appeal not only to the religious mind of old but to the artistic—and even the scientific—minds of all times.
Not to be ignored in this list is Kabbalah’s fascination with numbers and the Hebrew alphabet. The Hebrew letters have both a numerical and a spiritual value. According to Kabbalah, God created the universe with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Numbers are also connected to specific ideas. Just as we have seen the number seven conveying a host of interconnected concepts, every other number has its message and its link to a mental category. Understanding this will allow us to recognize why Michelangelo used exactly the number of prophets he chose for the ceiling, as well as other significant objects—and why he even hid Hebrew letters up there.
Perhaps most powerful of all, Michelangelo’s immersion in Kabbalistic study gave him the key to how he could accept the pope’s mandate to beautify the Sistine Chapel although he strongly disagreed with much of the Church’s thinking at that time: truths, Michelangelo realized, could be conveyed by way of the covert approach of Kabbalah, making the hidden message underneath more important than the
images on the surface.
Still, the young artist had much more formazione to shape him on his life’s journey before the Prime Mover would lead him to his destiny inside the Sistine…
Chapter Five
OUT OF THE GARDEN AND INTO THE WORLD
It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.
—MICHELANGELO
BEYOND HIS FORMAL STUDIES, Michelangelo could not avoid that other formazione: harsh experiences and encounters with the real world, commonly referred to as the school of hard knocks. Indeed, a very early lesson he learned was a literal hard knock that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
When he arrived in the Garden of San Marco to study under Bertoldo, Michelangelo found another student already there, also selected to pursue a career in sculpture. The other youth was Pietro Torrigiano. Pietro was everything that Michelangelo was not: from a true noble family, well-off financially, and extremely handsome. Michelangelo, however, had the superior talent. Both boys had hot artistic temperaments and egos; in other words, a dispute was just waiting to happen.
The fateful fight occurred a short time after the arrival of Michelangelo. Both students were in the chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine, sketching the artwork there, when apparently Michelangelo made fun of Pietro’s drawings. The infuriated Torrigiano hauled off and gave Michelangelo a punch so intense that it crushed the bone and cartilage of his nose. For the rest of his life, while creating so much beauty, Michelangelo himself would look like a retired boxer with a flattened nose. Lorenzo de’ Medici was so distraught about the ruination of his young favorite’s face that he immediately exiled Torrigiano from Florence.
The Sistine Secrets Page 8
