As the sun begins to set on the Day of Atonement, the Jewish prayer book offers the image of the closing of the heavenly gates. The prayers change from the request to “write us down for a good year” to “seal us for a good year.” And it is just before the gates close that Jewish tradition requires the recitation of one specific Scripture. It is the four chapters of Jonah, read in every synagogue around the world as the concluding message of the day. The prophet the Jews chose to close the prayers of their holiest day is the very same prophet Michelangelo selected as his farewell spokesman for the Sistine.
To understand the reasons for the choice of Jonah by Jewish tradition is to grasp what must have motivated Michelangelo as well.
The Talmudic rabbis felt that the story of Jonah is the quintessential message for the day on which Jews are most concerned to make their peace with God. It is a story that reminds us that God judges the whole world—not only Jews but the people of Nineveh and all the other nations as well. It emphasizes the truth that those who follow God have an obligation to help the wicked turn from their evil ways. No one can flee from this obligation without suffering the consequence of divine wrath. No one can hide from God no matter where he or she goes, even hidden in the belly of a whale at the bottom of the sea. We may never give up hope that the wicked, no matter how far gone, can be moved to change their ways. Repentance is always possible. And, most important, repentance is always accepted by God, even at the very last moment before imminent destruction. God doesn’t desire the destruction of evildoers as much as he wants them to change their ways—and then to offer them his forgiveness.
Imagine how much these ideas must have meant to Michelangelo. Jonah was the one biblical prophet sent to preach to the gentiles. That, Michelangelo understood, became his mission as well. Try as he might, he, too, just like Jonah, could not flee his appointed task. Michelangelo was deeply troubled by the corruption of the Church and its leaders. He could not bear to see how the lust for luxury and wealth dominated papal policy, and felt that the Church was in need of serious repentance and change. For many in Michelangelo’s era, this was considered an impossible dream. Martin Luther and other like thinkers finally gave up entirely on reforming the Church and started their own forms of Christianity instead. After all, they thought, how could one realistically hope that a system so deeply sunk in sin would ever alter its course? Yet, the Bible tells us it happened once. Nineveh, a huge wicked city, repented at the very moment before its destruction. Jonah learned the all-important lesson: we dare not give up on sinners—it’s never too late to save them.
And so Michelangelo closed his sermon on the Sistine ceiling with the prophet who discovered that, in spite of his doubts and forebodings, his message was taken to heart by those who heard him—and he thereby saved an entire people. Perhaps, Michelangelo prayed, the Church—just like the people of Nineveh—might listen to him as well.
UNDERSTANDING THE HIDDEN MESSAGES
We now know why Michelangelo chose Jonah to be his final messenger—but what exactly is his message? Look carefully at the accompanying reproduction and follow as we spot the clues so brilliantly hidden within.
Notice that over Jonah’s left shoulder are two little angels, or putti, one above the other. Nowhere do they appear in the scriptural text. So what are they doing in this painting? The upper angel is holding up his outspread fingers, showing us the number five. The lower angel is looking directly at Jonah’s bare legs, as if to say “Look for the five down below.”
It is important to note that this is the only Hebrew prophet on the ceiling with bare legs, and the only figure on the ceiling with outspread, exposed lower limbs to have his crotch covered up with a loincloth. As we have seen, Michelangelo had no problem with male nudity; in fact, he reveled in it all over the Sistine—much to the dismay of the Church. Thus, modesty is not the reason here for covering Jonah’s crotch. However, if we look at the shape of the legs as they seem to stick out from the flat surface, they form a Hebrew letter—the letter that stands for the number five, the letter he’. This is what the Hebrew letter looks like: .
Michelangelo needed to put in the unusual loincloth in order to make the gap found in the middle of the Hebrew character. The angels are guiding our path, telling us to look at the he’ and that it means “five.”
And what is so special about the number five? Five is an extremely important number in terms of the Bible. In English, it gives us the word Pentateuch—penta, of course, is five—for the Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. In Hebrew these books are called the Chumash—root of the Hebrew word for five. The Church of Michelangelo’s time tried to negate the importance of the Five Books of Moses; they were nothing more than the “Old Testament,” a vestigial remnant whose old laws had been invalidated by the “New Testament” replacement. Michelangelo is sending a message to the Vatican that a Church that ignores its roots in the Torah and the primacy of the Hebrew Scriptures will be lost.
As we have learned, Michelangelo was an enthusiastic disciple of Neoplatonist philosophy, which sought to harmonize the faiths. For him Christianity was not meant to be an evolutionary, higher form of religion supplanting all others. It was meant to coexist with its mother religion, sensitive to its source. The Five Books would always remain the original key to understanding our link to the Creator. The Old Testament must be respected, if the New Testament is to have any validity.
See how Michelangelo reinforces this concept as you look at the unusual positioning of Jonah’s fingers. Anyone familiar with Hebrew letters, as Michelangelo was, cannot fail to notice that the blank space defined by Jonah’s strangely crossed and twisted right and left hands clearly forms the shape of this letter: —the Hebrew letter bet.
As every reader of the Bible in the original knows, bet is the opening letter of the Torah, the letter that begins the Five Books of Moses and is—in order to convey its significance—written large (i.e., double the size of all the letters that follow) in every handwritten scroll of the Bible that is read in every synagogue.
So let us summarize: Michelangelo has one angel holding up five fingers and the other angel guiding our gaze downward to Jonah’s legs, which are spread out in such a way that they correspond to the Hebrew letter for five. This is the number that symbolizes the Torah, which the artist regarded as the common root of Judaism and Christianity. Jonah’s fingers then contort themselves into the shape of the very first letter of the Five Books of Moses.
Kabbalists go on to explain why the letter bet deserves the honor of being first in the book authored by God. According to tradition, bet is not only a letter, it is also a word on its own. Bet means “house.” In its holiest and most profound sense, it refers to the house of God, the Bet Ha-Mikdash, the Temple that would eventually be built in Jerusalem. The Torah starts its prescription for human connection with the Creator by hinting that our primary obligation is to allow God to find a home in our midst.
This concept is very significant in the context of where Michelangelo placed it. Let us not forget that the Sistine Chapel was built with one purpose in mind: to serve as a replica of the Temple, erected according to its biblical specifications. Michelangelo is completing the beautification of the bet—the house of God that was alluded to mystically in the first letter of the original Bible. Do not forget that book, says Michelangelo, in his final fresco, even as you build a Temple in Rome in place of the one in Jerusalem.
Michelangelo loved the Midrash, the ancient Jewish explanations of biblical texts. That’s why he ignored the far more famous Christian commentary that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. After all, the text in the Hebrew simply said dag gadol—“a great fish.” The rabbis say that it was probably Leviathan, the gigantic sea beast that the righteous souls will eat to celebrate their redemption when the Messiah comes. So that’s what we see alongside Jonah on the right.
Then, hovering over the prophet’s left shoulder is a leafy bough obviously meant to suggest the kikayon
tree that grew overnight over Jonah’s head to shade him from the Babylonian sun, near the end of his story (Jonah 4). Here we have yet another example of Michelangelo showing us his background in Talmud and using it to convey a daring but coded message. According to all other interpretations of the story of Jonah, the kikayon is a “gourd tree” however, there is not one gourd on the tree he painted over the pope’s altar. According to the Talmudic sages, it is a tree related to the ricinus tree, and is the source of an oil considered ritually unfit for lighting the Menorah in the Holy Temple. Once again, the Florentine is making his own private statement to the corrupt Roman Church of his time: not everything that seems to be holy is suitable for divine service. Over the head of the prophet—and over the heads of the papal court below—rests the reminder that the profane has no place in the house of God.
And finally, Michelangelo’s genius found a way to express one more biblical idea with a brilliant stratagem. Here is how God summarizes the sin of the people of Nineveh that almost spelled their ruin: “But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left” (Jonah 4:11). Imagine being so confused that one cannot tell right from left—or, for that matter, good from evil, right from wrong. That is the way the Almighty depicted moral confusion.
Look again at Jonah’s hands. See how strangely positioned and contorted they seem, the right and left hands crossed over each other. What was Michelangelo trying to express? Obviously, the very point of the story. A nation that has gone astray cannot even tell its right from its left. And that, Michelangelo felt, was what had happened to his own Church. Michelangelo could not bear to see the autocratic, syphilitic Julius II head a religion that had lost its way, that was no longer true to the mission of its founders. The Church had become more like Nineveh and less like Nazareth. Yet, to denounce it publicly would have meant to risk the fate of Savonarola, who had been burned at the stake in Florence. No, the way of Michelangelo was to preach through his art. Given the opportunity of expressing himself in the very “Temple” of the Vatican, he made the most of it in the hope that his viewers would understand.
And at last Michelangelo had his revenge on Julius. The chapel was supposed to focus all attention and majesty on the pontiff, yet Jonah towers over him, stealing the scene…and Jonah is looking up toward an even Higher Power, in the opposite direction from the pope below.
Jonah’s gaze is the key to one last secret—and this time a Christian one. Michelangelo surely must have known the other meaning of the prophet’s name in Hebrew. Jonah (pronounced yo-NAH in Hebrew) can mean “God will answer,” as we learned in chapter 11. However, it has another meaning as well—“dove.” In Christian tradition, the dove flying down from heaven is the symbol of the Holy Spirit. It can been seen in most depictions of the baptism of Christ, when, according to Matthew 3:16, Jesus saw the Holy Spirit descend and alight upon him. A classic example is found in the Sistine in the fifteenth-century fresco by Pinturicchio and Perugino to the right of the altar. In fact, that is another standard location for the symbolic dove—on the wall over Christian altars, including the pope’s altar in St. Peter’s Basilica. The idea is that the Holy Spirit has descended onto the altar to illuminate and bless the sanctuary. Why, then, is Jonah looking upward? Michelangelo wanted to say that he felt the Holy Spirit was not present in the Sistine in the time of Julius’s papacy. The artist was still waiting for the Divine Presence to descend on the Church and (to paraphrase Saint Francis of Assisi) to bring light where there were only shadows, to bring humility where there was only arrogance, to bring love where there was only intolerance. Jonah has leaned back and poked his head through the roof of the Sistine just to let some of heaven’s pure light into what was then a very dark time in the Church.
Here we have the epitome of the artist’s message—a Jewish prophet named “dove” sitting over the pope’s altar, substituting for the Christian dove normally seen in that spot, looking up to the One Source of Light, and thus Kabbalistically linking through his position as the s’firah of Mercy (Chessed) the material world with the Divine. In one image, Buonarroti interwove art and religion, Jewish and Christian tradition, anger and mercy, heaven and earth.
In late October of 1512, after four and a half excruciating years, Michelangelo was finally liberated from the Sistine Chapel, elated that he would never have to return to paint anything in that place ever again. If he only knew what fate awaited him twenty-three years later…
BOOK THREE
Beyond the Ceiling
Chapter Fourteen
BACK ON THE SCENE
Love, with his very own hands, is drying my tears.
—MICHELANGELO
AT LONG LAST, after his “release” from the Sistine, Michelangelo happily threw away his paintbrush and once again picked up his beloved hammer and chisel. He must have been extremely excited to get back to his true passion, since he immediately started several large marble pieces for the pope’s tomb—all at the same time. He had spent precious years of his energy up on the Sistine ceiling, forcibly removed from his love for sculpting, and was now desperate to make up for what he probably considered lost time. The huge blocks of marble that had been left lying on the ground next to the gigantic construction site for the new Basilica of St. Peter were finally being put to use. He set to carving six large male nudes, plus one colossal Jewish prophet. This explosion of creative energy marked a new period in his technique. Instead of following the classic approach of creating highly finished and polished statues, as he had done when carving the Pietà and the David, Michelangelo perfected his now-famous style of the non finito, the “not-finished” look. Centuries before the impressionistic and cubist movements in art, Buonarroti pioneered the same concepts. He reduced his sculptured works to the bare minimum of their defined forms—to their very essence—in order to express his ideas and feelings, rather than merely to make pretty decorations in stone. Working in this futuristic fashion, and with enough assistants and no further interruptions, he probably would have been able to carve all the forty-plus figures required by the contract for Pope Julius’s tomb.*
Michelangelo could also exploit this technique to hide even more ambiguous messages in his later works. Strangely enough, he never used the non finito style in his painted works. It seems that the artist was never able or willing to connect certain aspects of his sculptural genius to his two-dimensional works.
It was at this point in his life that Michelangelo decided to pour his heart and soul into what was almost certainly his own favorite sculpture—his depiction of Moses, the greatest of all the Jewish prophets.
From the very beginning of the tomb design, Michelangelo had planned a giant statue of Moses for the place of honor, which would be the center of the middle level of the pyramidal structure. According to the original plans, the Hebrew prophet would have been sitting on high in the heart of the new Basilica of St. Peter, directly under the giant dome—where the main altar is today. This would have certainly suited the artist’s dream of permanently linking the two faiths in a highly visual and unforgettable manner.
To prepare for this task, the Florentine went back to the mountains of his childhood, to Carrara. It was very much akin to a pilgrimage—perhaps even a way to cleanse his body and soul after the horrors and tensions of painting the Sistine. He spent several months in the marble quarries, searching for the perfect piece from which to carve his Moses. This was to be his crowning achievement in stone, his great comeback to the world of sculpture. Whereas all the other elements of the tomb were being left in his not-finished style, the Moses was the exact opposite—carved and lovingly buffed by hand for months, until it was perfectly finished and gleamed even brighter than the Pietà.
What almost nobody knows is that the Moses we see today is not the Moses that Michelangelo carved in 1513–15. The subversive artist was up to his old tricks of hiding mystical Jewish wisdom in artworks commissioned by the pope. In the Torah, in Exodus 34:29, we read:
“And it came to pass—when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of Testimony in Moses’s hand—that as he came down from the mount, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone since God had spoken with him.” In fact, this divine light was so intense that Moses subsequently had to put on a mask so as not to blind his fellow Israelites when he met with them. What was the source of this supernatural light? The Midrash and Kabbalah have an explanation. When Moses was up on the mount, pleading with the Almighty for forgiveness for his people after their sin of worshiping the golden calf (Exodus 32), nobody was able to accompany the prophet to the summit. The divine light of God was too intense. No mortal aside from Moses could survive it. Moses stayed on Mount Sinai forty days and forty nights, neither eating, drinking, nor sleeping, in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment—not just for himself but for all his people. It took supreme, superhuman effort to achieve atonement for the children of Israel’s terrible sin of idolatry, a sin compounded by coming so soon after their miraculous redemption from Egypt. The word atonement can also be read at-one-ment—the spiritual goal of feeling at one with God and the universe. It is this level that Moses reached on the mountaintop. According to the Kabbalah, he broke through to the highest sphere ever reached on the Tree of Life by any living human being—the level of Binah, the most insightful and profound degree of comprehension and understanding. After Moses smashed the first tablets in response to finding the Israelites worshiping the golden calf, he was commanded to carve a second set to replace the pair carved by God. According to tradition, God then taught Moses the entire Torah, the Talmud, and all the mystical secrets of the Kabbalah. That is what caused his face to be imbued with light; he had been enlightened directly by God and now shared in the glow of divinity. The Midrash adds that God also wanted to reveal to Moses the future history of the Jewish people and the world, up until the coming of the Messiah. To grant him this special vision, God bestowed on him a drop of the divine light—not ordinary light, but the primordial light with which God created the entire universe and the s’firot on the Tree of Life.
The Sistine Secrets Page 22
