The central Torah strip ends here. Before we leave the Sistine Temple tour, though, we will have to look at some powerful final secrets that Michelangelo concealed in the ceiling frescoes before he laid down his brush. It seems he had been saving up the strongest messages for last.
Chapter Thirteen
PARTING SHOTS
God is in the details.
—LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE
AS THE HELLISH four and a half years of Michelangelo’s enslavement to the Sistine ceiling drew to a close, the rebellious artist decided to make maximum use of the remaining frescoes for the hidden messages he wanted so desperately to leave as his legacy. That is why he hid an entire cluster of secrets in the section depicting the Jewish prophet Jeremiah.
SOMEONE ABOVE THE POPE
We need to pay especially close attention to the portrait of the gloomy seer, shown to us from his left side, the area referred to as the “sinister face,” which represents the darker side of a person. In Kabbalah it is also the side of G’vurah and Din, power and judgment, the strict aspect of the Tree of Life that is concerned with judging sins and conferring punishment.
We see the prophet staring sadly and angrily down over the spot where the pope would sit on his sumptuous throne, under the regal canopy. As you will recall, Jeremiah was the godly messenger who warned the corrupt priests of the Holy Temple that their bronze and gold would be taken away and their Temple destroyed unless they cleaned up the corruption within. He is covering his mouth in the signum harpocraticum, a gesture signifying that a profound esoteric knowledge occupies his thoughts. (Michelangelo employs the same gesture in other works, including his funerary monument to Lorenzo de’ Medici, a duke named after Lorenzo the Magnificent.)
The entire panel is filled with foreboding. The two small figures in the background of Jeremiah are not the cute cherubic putti seen elsewhere. Instead, we have a mournful youth and a sad woman of indeterminate age, both starting to turn away from the chapel. The young man’s golden hair and the woman’s red hood whisper a coded message to us: “Look at the colors the prophet is wearing.” Sure enough, Jeremiah is garbed in the very same red and gold. Why? They are the giallorosso, the traditional colors that symbolize Rome, the home of the Vatican. We have seen this before, hidden in tiny figures in the Flood panel, when the Florentine artist wanted to make fun of Rome. To this very day, centuries later, red and gold are the city’s colors, found on taxicabs, official documents, and even the uniforms of Rome’s soccer team. This is how Michelangelo wants to make it clear that he is addressing Rome and not ancient Jerusalem. The woman is wearing a hooded traveling cloak and is bearing a bundle; she seems to be leaving her home. The youth is gazing sadly down at his own foot, where, if we squint our eyes from far below, we find something quite intriguing. The boy’s foot is holding in place a faint trompe l’oeuil parchment scroll unrolling high above the regal papal platform.
Most Vatican guides never talk about the barely visible scroll. Many are not even aware of its existence; almost all the ones who do know of it will say that Michelangelo wrote the Greek letters alpha and omega (signifying the beginning and the end) on it, both in reference to Jesus and to the completion of the giant fresco. None of this is true. He was not yet finished; he still had another strip of ceiling to fresco. Also, the scroll contains no Greek letters.
It says, indisputably and in Michelangelo’s own hand, ALEF, the name of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, written in Roman script. This is a reference that would be clear to someone who had studied the Scriptures from a Jewish perspective. Jeremiah is not only the author of his eponymous book of prophecies; he is also accepted in Jewish tradition as the author of the book of Lamentations. This plaintive book, which describes in gruesome detail the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, is read every year on the somber holy day of the ninth of the month Av (Tisha b’Av), as Jews worldwide fast and mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple. In Michelangelo’s day, if any lay Christian read this book, it would have been in Latin. Only Jews or Christians who had studied Hebrew and Judaism (such as Michelangelo’s private teachers Marsilio Ficino and, especially, Pico della Mirandola) would know that the book of Lamentations is an acrostic, written verse by verse in the order of the Hebrew alphabet, beginning with the alef. The reason for this is based on a deep Kabbalistic concept: just as the Almighty One created the entire universe with the twenty-two letters of the holy Hebrew alphabet, starting with alef, so God can destroy it as well.
Right next to the word ALEF, Michelangelo painted —the Hebrew character for another letter, the ayin. Why? These two letters are not commonly written together. Only someone very conversant with Judaic tradition can tell you the answer. The Talmud teaches that if a high priest cannot distinguish in his pronunciation between these two letters—alef and ayin—which are sounded almost identically, that priest is not fit to serve in the Holy Temple. Why is this so? First of all, the High Priest must be a trustworthy conveyor of God’s Word to the world. The change from an alef to an ayin in a word—or vice versa—may significantly alter its meaning. The High Priest’s improper diction can cause great harm to traditional teaching. The other, more profound reason is concerned with the fundamental concepts that these two letters spiritually represent. The letter alef (sometimes written as “aleph” in English—hence the word alphabet from the first two Hebrew letters, alef and bet) is not only the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet; it is also the first letter of the Ten Commandments, whose message is monotheism. According to the mystic system of gematria (Hebrew numerology), the value of alef is one. That is why it is often used to represent God, whose defining characteristic is that he is One. The value for the other letter on the scroll, ayin, is seventy. In biblical Hebrew, the number seventy is used to imply a great amount or diversity, such as “seventy languages in the world” and “seventy nations.” Both the Talmud (Tractate Succah, 55b) and the Midrash (B’resheet Rabbah, 66:4) discuss the seventy-one descendants of the three sons of Noah. Seventy of them go on to found the seventy pagan nations of the earth, while only one goes on to found the Jewish people—at that time, the one and only monotheistic, non-pagan people in the world. It is therefore imperative for a high priest to be able to differentiate clearly between the Alef and the Ayin, between the “One” and the “seventy,” between those who commit themselves to the purity of monotheistic faith and those who succumb to the immorality of paganistic practice. This message of one versus seventy serves as a strong warning not just to the Jewish high priests but to the custodians of any monotheistic faith, popes included, to maintain the purity of belief and of people in the face of challenges from materialistic and pagan cultures. In Jewish tradition, we find the cautionary adage “Be in the world, but not of the world.” In the Gospels, Jesus says: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s” (Matthew 22:21). Michelangelo was deeply troubled by a Church that was trying to imitate the grandeur of the Caesars while ignoring the humility and poverty of Christ. He recognized that the Vatican had become a place of unbridled corruption, greed, nepotism, and military adventurism. No longer was spiritual leadership concerned with delineating the differences between the “One” and the “seventy.” And so Michelangelo dared to express his anger by way of the angry prophet Jeremiah, who predicted doom for precisely those who failed to heed this very message. Of course, it was an extremely dangerous and seditious statement.
How much more perilous to inscribe that message right over the pope’s gilded throne in his own royal chapel. No wonder Michelangelo blurred the text and made the scroll itself almost invisible. But he left enough there to allow us to grasp his meaning. The rest of the scroll is still hard to decipher. Its harsh criticism of the Church, though, is confirmed by the fact that even now, in the twenty-first century, the Vatican has made sure that this panel does not appear clearly featured in any authorized reproduction, nor is it ever pointed out or discussed in any official guidebook.
Ironically, Pope Ju
lius II would sit below Jeremiah and his condemnation amid all his symbols of power and wealth, from the ground up: a marble platform, his royal court, his gilded throne, his precious rings, his velvet robes, his golden pastoral staff, his triple crown covered with jewels, and above his head, the baldacchino, the regal canopy of the papacy. That is why Michelangelo decided to set a series of his own symbols right over the canopy, to ensure that his message would always remain above the pope himself. As we will see, in addition to Jeremiah’s face, the two figures behind him, his gesture, and the alef-ayin scroll, there is even more to discover.
As we described in chapter 9, almost all the Jewish ancestors are portrayed as members of content, tranquil families; these are positive portraits of biblical Jews. There are only two exceptions, two very strange figures. One we have already discussed: the angry young Aminadab, wearing the yellow badge of shame forced on the Jews and making the devil’s horns pointing down toward the papal throne area. The second is the Salmon-Booz-Obeth lunette, which features a rage-filled old man yelling at a carved head atop the wooden staff he holds in his hand. The wooden head seems to be a portrait of the old man himself, pointy beard and all, mirroring his expression and seeming to yell right back in his face.
On the other side of the lunette is a beautiful young mother, gently covering her sleeping baby’s ears to block out the angry ranting coming from the old man. Out of all the portraits of the ancestors on the ceiling, this furious elder is the only one who is not realistically depicted. He is more like a caricature—and on purpose. He is a satirical swipe at another bearded old man, the one who would sit directly below, also known for his bad temper—Il Papa Terribile, Julius II. A quick comparison of the pronounced cheekbones in this figure and in Raphael’s much more flattering portrait of Julius will show that they are the same person. If Michelangelo had made the insult to the pope too obvious, it would have been the artist’s head on display instead—on the executioner’s block.
Right between the Boaz-Aminadab double jab at Julius is the name plate of Jeremiah, Hieremias in Latin. The other names of the sibyls and prophets are held up by cute little boys and putti. In this case, though, the name Hieremias is being held up in the manner of a strong man at the circus—by a muscular young woman. She is not very attractive, and her awkwardly exposed breasts are quite obvious—right above the papal throne. Julius, despite his priestly vow of chastity, was known to be a womanizer. In fact, while still a cardinal he had contracted syphilis from one of his trysts, and suffered from its symptoms throughout his papacy. Just like this young woman, Michelangelo is exposing everything here.
The papal throne area is the platform near the front of the Sistine, to the left of the altar area. It is under the fifteenth-century masterpiece fresco Scenes from the Life of Moses, by another gay Florentine artist linked with the de’ Medici family—Sandro Botticelli. One scene in this painting depicts the moment when Moses the shepherd realizes he is near the Divine Presence. The Almighty tells him to remove his shoes, that where he is standing is holy ground (Exodus 3:5). Moses is shown taking off his shoes before he can approach the Presence in the burning bush. All the other Jewish prophets painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling have bare feet, to show that they are in a holy place, the replica of Solomon’s Temple—with one exception. Jeremiah appears to be wearing dirty old boots. Dirty shoes over the head of the pope was an insult, but it also said that his conduct and his papacy, unless changed for the better, would eventually remove the holiness from this sanctuary. The artist was warning that the Divine Presence and its protection were getting ready to abandon the Vatican.
Exactly fifteen years after Michelangelo painted his prophetic warning, the Protestant Franks perpetrated the horrific, infamous sack of Rome in 1527, raping and murdering by the thousands. They seized and pillaged the Vatican, taking away all its bronze and gold that they could carry—just as Jeremiah and Michelangelo had predicted.
LAST TOUCHES
The reaction is almost always the same.
First-time visitors to the Vatican look up to the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Their eyes are drawn to the largest and most imposing figure in all the frescoes. They stare in wonderment. Often they literally gasp. What Michelangelo achieved in the portrait of Jonah that he planned as his final statement, the work he put off until the very end of his long, grueling project, is a masterpiece in purely artistic terms. However, for those who know of his genius for conveying the most profound messages in the seemingly simple strokes of his brush, the Jonah painting is a veritable gold mine. More than just a great painting, it is a powerful summary of Michelangelo’s feelings as he brought to a close the project that he never wanted, for a pope who put him through a personal, physical, and artistic hell for almost a decade.
Knowing this, we have to ask: out of all the prophets and famous heroes in the Bible—why Jonah? Michelangelo saved the most prestigious spot, right above the altar, for him. He allowed Jonah the most space of any figure. And then he literally made him “stand out” in a way that viewers still have difficulty believing is merely two-dimensional.
The story has it that as Michelangelo was nearing the end of his work on the ceiling, his old rival Bramante (the architect who got him into this mess in the first place) went into the chapel to take a look at the almost-completed fresco. “Va bene, all right, you can paint,” he begrudgingly conceded to Michelangelo, “but a real painter would impress the viewer with trompe l’oeuil figures.” Michelangelo had indeed used trompe l’oeuil throughout the ceiling, in the faux architectural-design elements such as the vaulted ribs and the square white pedestals that seem to be three-dimensional seats for the ignudi; however, he had not yet done this with his human images. Now, after four years of on-the-job practice, he was more than up to the challenge. As an ultimate demonstration of his artistic power—a talent that those who sought to denigrate him claimed Michelangelo was unable to transfer from his true profession as a sculptor—Michelangelo saved for last his most magnificent example of three-dimensional painting. Jonah seems to be actually dangling his legs out of the wall and over the altar, while his shoulders and head seem to be leaning back through the roof of the Sistine into the open sky beyond. It is incomparable technique. It resoundingly refuted Michelangelo’s critics. But again, why did Michelangelo choose Jonah as his paradigm “stand-out” figure?
It was striking enough, and surely disturbing to the pope who commissioned him, that of all the prophets chosen to be spotlighted by Michelangelo, not one of the seven—Zechariah, Joel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jeremiah, and Jonah—was a New Testament hero. But even among Hebrew Scripture personalities, Jonah hardly seems worthy of such illustrious company. His book is short, all of four short chapters totaling forty-eight sentences. In the Christian Bible, the book of Jonah is found in the section called “The Minor Prophets.” In the Jewish version, Jonah isn’t even given the courtesy of a book of his own; he is simply lumped in with eleven others in the work known as Trey Assar, “The Twelve.”
Yet for Michelangelo, Jonah is the final and most eloquent spokesman of the Sistine Temple because Michelangelo saw in Jonah his alter ego—a reluctant prophet forced by divine will into a mission he wanted at all costs to avoid.
Jonah is the very image of the unwilling prophet forced to accept a task against his own wishes. Just as Michelangelo was perfectly content to sculpt his statues under the de’ Medicis of Florence, Jonah was content to live in Israel under the corrupt rule of Jeroboam, who according to the Talmud was the most evil and idolatrous of all the kings of Israel. (To this day in wine shops, one of the largest sizes—and thus the most decadent—of wine bottles is the jeroboam.)
Jonah is called upon by the Almighty to go to the wicked city of Nineveh (located in what is modern Iraq) and to prophesy to its corrupt pagan ruler and inhabitants. Michelangelo was called upon to give up both sculpting and his beloved city of Florence to remain at the Vatican for several years doing something that he disdained—painting.
Jonah tries to escape from his calling by boarding a ship going in another direction, but he is pursued by God and ends up being swallowed by a giant fish for three days. Michelangelo attempted several times to flee from the pope’s onerous commission but ended up being forced to paint the ceiling of the Sistine for more than four years of physical and emotional torture.
Both Jonah and Michelangelo cried and prayed to heaven for their liberation “out of the depths.” Jonah, once he is saved from the belly of the beast, fulfills his obligation by going to Nineveh and preaching to its citizens to repent. Amazingly, after only one day, the entire city—from the king to the lowest pauper—dress in sackcloth and ashes, fast and seek atonement. All of Nineveh forsakes the worship of idols. Jonah, upset that the repentance of Nineveh might discredit the truth of his warning, sulks outside the city. Michelangelo, despondent that he had not met with the same success in his efforts to purify the Church from its hedonistic excesses, sulked in the Sistine, intent on finishing the ceiling project and escaping the chapel as soon as possible.
And still there is more.
Michelangelo had a precedent for putting so much emphasis on Jonah and saving the message of this prophet for the very end of his work. It was a precedent that Michelangelo had almost certainly learned about as he studied the teachings of the Talmudic rabbis in the secret school of the de’ Medicis. Because Michelangelo’s focus on Jonah is what the Jews have been doing for centuries, to this very day, on their holiest day of the year—Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, concludes a ten-day period of penitence that begins with Rosh Hashanah, the “Head of the Year.” The Talmud explains that on the first of these ten days God “writes” his decree for the coming year for every individual—who will live, who will die; who will be blessed, who will be cursed; who will be well, who will suffer. But the decree is not sealed until the conclusion of Yom Kippur. Repentance may still alter a harsh judgment. So these ten days are also known as the Days of Awe, each one bringing closer the moment when there is no longer any escape possible from the heavenly verdict.
The Sistine Secrets Page 21
