The Sistine Secrets
Page 20
There is still more. Since we know that Michelangelo studied Kabbalah, he was surely aware of the concept of Mochah Stima’ah, the hidden brain. This is a mysterious facet of God, concealed behind and between the s’firot on the Tree of Life. It represents the Almighty’s purpose and reasoning behind seemingly meaningless occurrences and commandments. When people of faith say “The ways of the Lord are mysterious,” they are implying a belief in this Mochah Stima’ah, God’s camouflaged rationale, or divine plan, behind everything that transcends the understanding of our finite mortal minds. Even the word mysterious has its root in the Hebrew word nistar, which means “that which is hidden.” The Mochah Stima’ah is also the unknown purpose behind the will to create. This “hidden brain” (also known as “concealed wisdom”) inspires in human beings the will to create, to build, to design, and yes—to sculpt and paint. It is the source of our drive to imitate the Creator and to infuse the world with meaning and purpose. It is transfused into us, according to the Kabbalah, by both sets of emotions emanating from the Tree of Life. The upper emotions—those that are spiritual, transcendent, and self-controlled—are called Yisrael Saba, or the Israel the Elder.* The lower emotions—those that are material, ego-centered, and impulsive—are called Yisrael Zuta, or the Israel the Little One. In a highly passionate creative genius like Michelangelo, driven by the ceaseless will to create, both of these emotions—the upper and lower—definitely came into play. Small wonder, then, that he painted Wisdom/Chochmah in the female guise of Sofia, flanked by the now-classic figure of the white-bearded God representing Yisrael Saba, and the infant representing Yisrael Zuta, all enclosed inside the right hemisphere of the human brain, blessing the Man’s left hand with the talent and the will to create. Seen in this light, hidden inside this world-famous scene is nothing less than a forbidden anatomy lesson, a journey into the depths of Kabbalah, and a secret self-portrait of Michelangelo as Adam—not by way of the artist’s physical appearance but rather of his very soul.
THE CREATION OF EVE
Even in the smaller, simpler panel of the creation of woman, we can find a deep, hidden Judaic message. According to Christian translation and tradition, the Almighty created Eve, the mother of us all, from Adam’s rib. However, the biblical Hebrew does not say that; the word used there is ha-tzelah, the side of Adam. The rabbinic sages explained that she was not made from Adam’s head, which could have made her feel conceited and above her mate, and not from his foot, which could have made her feel downtrodden and want to run away, but from his side, to be his equal partner in life. For that very reason, in the next verse after Eve is created and named, we read: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). In almost every non-Jewish depiction of the birth of Eve, she is shown as rising out of one rib of Adam. Here, on the Sistine ceiling, however, she is shown following Judaic tradition, stepping out of the entire side of Adam.
THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT
The Forbidden Fruit section of the ceiling also holds secrets. It is a diptych, a painting made of two equal parts. On the left, we see Adam and Eve, still innocent, about to eat the forbidden fruit. The crafty serpent is in the middle, wrapped about the tree, tempting them into sin. On the right, we see them being exiled from the Garden of Eden, ashamed and already showing signs of the natural aging process, since part of their punishment was to lose their immortality and their eternal youthfulness. At first glance, this seems like a typical rendition of the story of what the Church calls the Original Sin, or the Fall from Paradise. However, looking deeper, we find many surprising and subversive elements, even in the format chosen for this panel.
First of all, let’s look at the forbidden fruit itself. As we have previously pointed out, according to most traditions, it was an apple. In fact, in medieval Latin, the word for apple is malum, which in other cases becomes male and mala, synonymous with evil, as in the words malicious and maleficent. In modern Italian, the vowels have been reversed, making mela the word for apple. If you look at almost any other painting or fresco in Western art that depicts the forbidden fruit, you will find the standard image of the apple.
There was only one exception to this commonly held belief: the Jewish tradition. The Talmud (in Tractate Brachot, 40a) discusses the views of the rabbis and offers a strikingly different belief. The sages base their conclusion on a mystical principle that God never presents us with a difficulty unless he has already created its solution within the very problem itself. Therefore, they propose that the Tree of Knowledge was a fig tree. After all, when the immediate result of Adam and Eve’s transgression was shame, occasioned by their new awareness of their nudity, the Bible tells us that their recourse was to cover themselves with fig leaves. A compassionate God provided the cure for the consequence of the sin from the selfsame object that caused it.
It is hard to imagine many Christians being aware of this in Michelangelo’s era, or even today. Only someone who had studied Talmud would have known such a thing. Yet, sure enough, there in the panel of the Original Sin, Michelangelo’s Forbidden Tree of Knowledge is a fig tree. If you look closely, you will see that the fruits dangling from the serpent’s hand, which Adam and Eve are about to pick, are all juicy green figs. Remarkably, Michelangelo chose a rabbinical interpretation of the biblical story over the one accepted by his Christian contemporaries.
Michelangelo also chose a unique way to show their innocence before eating the fruit. If you look at Adam’s stance as he reaches into the tree for a fig, it is difficult not to notice that his sexual organ is positioned almost in Eve’s face. If she were to turn her head even slightly in his direction, we would have an X-rated ceiling. The Church was not unaware of this, and so prohibited any reproductions of this one panel all the way up to the late nineteenth century.
There is still more Judaic teaching to be found here. Another shocking change from the standard imagery is that Adam himself is plucking the forbidden fruit off the tree, instead of the stereotype of the “evil temptress Woman” handing him the deadly apple and seducing him into eating it. This is to show that Adam shared as much responsibility in the sin as Eve. Why? The Almighty tells him that they are allowed to eat freely from all the trees in the Garden of Eden, except for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:16–17). However, only a few verses later, at the beginning of Genesis 3, when the serpent is tempting Eve, we hear a different story:
Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, Has God said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat of it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die. (Genesis 3:1–3)
This is not what God had commanded Adam. The Almighty specified the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, not the “tree in the midst of the garden.” That is a different tree, the Tree of Life. Furthermore, nothing had been said about not touching the tree. What did the ancient rabbis derive from this? Adam had not faithfully passed on the true words of God. He did not specify the right tree, and he embroidered God’s prohibition with an extra one of his own invention about not even touching the tree. This transgression on Adam’s part made Eve an easy prey to the serpent’s lies. When the Almighty confronted a frightened Adam after the sin, the Man tried to lay all the blame on the Woman. When God confronted Eve, she was far more truthful and simply said: “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Notice that she did not say “tempted me” but actually said “deceived me.” How was she deceived? The sages of over two thousand years ago developed this midrash, which explains everything: As the serpent enticed Eve to approach the forbidden tree, he gave her a shove that made her touch the tree. When no bad consequence ensued, she was easily convinced that God had lied to them. In fact, it was not the tree situated exactly in the middle of the garden—that
was the other mystical tree, the Tree of Life—but because of Adam’s careless transmission of God’s words, Eve did not know the true prohibition. In this way, she was deceived and not merely tempted. So, Michelangelo decided to show Adam sharing equally in the guilt—something not seen in any other Western representation of the Original Sin.
In yet one more way Michelangelo chose to follow Jewish tradition. Only the Midrash described the serpent as originally having both arms and legs. In the mainstream imagery of the Garden, the serpent is usually shown as a huge snake looking much as we know snakes today. Sometimes, the serpent will have a human head, but that is it. Here, on the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo again follows the Judaic teachings, giving his unique serpent arms and legs.
Next to the serpent, on the right side of this two-part panel, we see the angel with the sword banishing Adam and Eve from Paradise forever. Here we discover the last great hidden message of this scene. The righteous angel is an exact twin of the evil serpent. Even their gestures and body positions are mirror images of each other. Their bodies together form a sort of human heart. Michelangelo is returning to the subject of his earlier poem and the Battle of the Centaurs—the struggle of the two inclinations. According to Jewish philosophy, you might recall, each of us has a lifelong internal conflict, a “tug of war,” between the Yetzer ha-Tov (inclination toward doing good) and the Yetzer ha-Ra (inclination toward doing evil). Notice that the twin inclinations—symbolized by the serpent and the angel—are on the two sides of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, since it is at this very spot that humanity learns the difference for the first time. What the artist is illustrating here differs from the standard Church concept of Original Sin—a concept foreign to Judaism. Rather, his rendering stresses the human potential for free choice and free will.
This is where the ceiling’s first par’shah, or weekly cyclical reading portion of the Torah, leaves off. The next par’shah continues the story at the time of ten generations after the sin of Adam and Eve. At this point in history, humanity had begun to cover the globe but, unfortunately, was misusing its free will to follow almost exclusively the Yetzer ha-Ra, or evil inclination. That is the theme of the last triptych section of the ceiling, which Michelangelo began to paint in 1508. Let us see now how he chose to depict the story of Noah.
THE SACRIFICE OF NOAH
As we explained earlier, the three Noah panels are not in strict chronological order. This scene actually occurs after the floodwaters receded and Noah, his family, and the animals had disembarked onto dry land. To thank the Almighty for their salvation, Noah built the first altar in history. According to the Midrash, Noah—being a prophet—knew exactly which animals would later be permitted for sacrifice in the Holy Temple. In numerous paintings and frescoes of this scene, other Christian artists have shown Noah sacrificing all sorts of improbable, nonkosher animals: lions, camels, donkeys, and so forth. Michelangelo follows the Midrash faithfully, depicting only the biblically allowed animals that Noah would have used.
Noah himself is pointing up toward heaven with one finger, to show that this first sacrificial altar is being dedicated not for pagan idolatry but to the One God. You will also notice that two figures on the left seem to be in shadow—one of Noah’s three sons and a mysterious female wearing a pagan Greco-Roman crown of laurel leaves, the symbol of Nike, goddess of victory. These two people are not in shadow. What happened was that the constant problems with mold and mildew in these early panels took their toll here. About a generation after the completion of the ceiling, this one section of plaster detached and crumbled to bits on the floor below. In 1568, a fresco painter named Domenico Carnevali had to climb up on a tiny scaffold and replace the fallen section. Obviously, the chemicals in his paint or plaster did not match the quality of Michelangelo and his assistants’ formula, and the repair darkened irreparably over time. This is probably for the good, as it allows us to distinguish easily between the original work and what was added later. We have no idea what Carnevali had in mind with the female figure, but it is doubtful that Nike appeared in Michelangelo’s original version.
THE FLOOD
In the main scene for the last trio of the Noah panels, a piece of the fresco is missing, just above the stranded people under a makeshift tent on the right of the panel. This damage occurred in 1795, when ammunition stored in the papal armory in Castel Sant’Angelo accidentally exploded. The huge blast shook the entire neighborhood, and we are lucky that only this one chunk fell down, instead of the entire ceiling. Almost three hundred years after Michelangelo, nobody dared go up there and paint where the Maestro had; so out of respect, the patch was left blank.
Once again a bit of Talmudic knowledge will help us better understand an aspect of this panel. There is a specific Hebrew word for “ark” in the original Torah text—teivah. The word teivah, however, does not mean a boat or sailing vessel. It really means “box.” In just about every depiction you will ever see, artists have shown Noah’s ark to be a gigantic seaworthy boat with a curved hull. According to Talmud and Midrash, however, it was a giant boxlike structure that could not possibly have floated on the floodwaters’ surface, were it not for the Divine Breath or Heavenly Wind that held it up on the waves. Here, on the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo painted the ark as a huge box, once more following Jewish tradition to the letter.
Of course, Michelangelo and his merry band of Florentines could not resist yet another jab at Rome. On the left edge of the panel, we see the head of a donkey. At the exact same height, on the right edge of the scene, are two tiny figures that have just climbed out of the waters to find refuge on the rocks behind the makeshift tent. Little do they know that they will soon drown anyway for their sins, since the only humans destined to survive the Flood are those on the divinely ordained ark. These two sinners in the background look like two water rats; they are on their hands and knees, and wearing the unmistakable red and golden yellow colors of the city of Rome. Just in case someone didn’t believe there was an insulting message here, the colors of the woman’s dress that forms a backdrop for the ass’s head are the very same Roman colors.
THE DRUNKENNESS OF NOAH
In the Bible, after Noah saves life on earth and builds the first altar, he plants a vineyard (shown in the background on the left) and invents wine. Shortly thereafter, he becomes his own best client, as we can see from his bloated body and reddened features in the later scene in the foreground. He falls asleep naked and is discovered this way by his son Ham, who rather than covering up his father’s nakedness, runs to tell his brothers Shem and Japhet instead. They respectfully enter the place where their father is sleeping, carrying a garment and turning away their heads so as not to see him in his moment of disgrace. In Genesis 9:24, the Torah recounts: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him.” The sages of the Talmud wondered how Noah could have known upon awakening what Ham had “done to him,” if it was just lewd mockery and disrespect while he was passed out. Rabbi Samuel (in the Talmudic Tractate Sanhedrin, 70a) found a textual link with a later episode in Genesis in which Shechem, a pagan prince, accidentally catches a glimpse of the body of Dinah, the only daughter of the patriarch Jacob. After seeing her exposed, Shechem cannot control himself and rapes Dinah (Genesis 34:2). Rabbi Samuel concluded that Ham had followed his animal impulse and similarly sexually molested his own father. This does indeed make more sense of Noah’s statement upon awakening. It also makes far more comprehensible the harshness of his response as he curses his son Ham for his actions.
Here, in Michelangelo’s version, he has painted the other two sons, Shem and Japhet, coming into Noah’s room to cover him with their heads turned away from their father’s nudity. Ham has reentered behind them, gesturing toward Noah and not turning his head away. Ham is even grasping his brother (probably Japhet) from behind as if to try to dissuade him from covering up their father. The artist has given a definite homoerotic slant to Ham’s embrace of his yo
unger brother, making it seem as if now Ham would like to sexually molest Japhet as well.
The official explanations for this panel range from a foreshadowing of the Incarnation of Jesus (the planting of a new vine), to an allusion to the Passion (because of the blood-red color of wine) or the chance for redemption through Christ (the covering up of one’s past sins). However, a clear, fresh look at this scene makes it seem more likely that Michelangelo was once again following Talmudic teachings and his own sexual tendencies as well.
There is one more reason that the central strip seems to end on this relatively minor, downbeat note. As we saw in the diptych (two-part panel) of The Garden of Eden, Michelangelo knew very well the concept of the two sides of the human soul—the Yetzer ha-Tov and the Yetzer ha-Ra—the transcendent spiritual tendency versus the materialistic animal tendency. In that panel, he paired the serpent and the angel, mirroring each other, to represent this ongoing struggle between good and evil in the human soul. Here, in the Noah triptych, he put the Flood in the middle, framed by the transcendent, spiritual side of Noah (the sacrifice scene) before it and the sinful, hedonistic side of Noah (the drunkenness scene) after it.
The artist is not leaving us with a negative note, but—when we view the Noah triptych as a whole, the way he first designed it to be perceived—we can see that he is presenting us with a deep spiritual question as we leave the Sistine. Michelangelo is asking us which tendency we are following: our Yetzer ha-Tov or our Yetzer ha-Ra? Has his work inspired us to take a step closer to God or a step away from God?