Michelangelo felt a deep affinity to Moses. After all, they were kindred spirits, men of the mountains who carved their messages in stone. Aware of this midrash, Michelangelo wanted to show Moses as he appeared with this gift of prophecy, looking all the way into the distant future of humanity. That is why he returned to the technique he had used so well in carving the David. He made the eyes slightly too far apart, extra deep, and not focused on the viewer. As you stare at the Moses statue today, no matter where you stand, you realize that he is not looking at you. That’s because his gaze is fixed firmly on the future.
In the original plan for Julius’s huge tomb, Moses would have been high above the floor, in the center of the pyramidal structure. Michelangelo planned to take advantage of the light streaming in from the windows of the dome over the funeral monument. He buffed the face of Moses to make it glow with the reflected rays of the sun that would descend to perfectly illuminate it. He even carved two points sticking out of the statue’s head that would also reflect the sun’s rays, making Moses seem as if the divine light were truly shining from his head. This is another secret of the statue—it never had horns. The artist had planned Moses as a masterpiece not only of sculpture, but also of special optical effects worthy of any Hollywood movie. For this reason, the piece had to be elevated and facing straight forward, looking in the direction of the front door of the basilica. The two protrusions on the head would have been invisible to the viewer looking up from the floor below—the only thing that would have been seen was the light reflected off of them. This is another example of how far ahead of his time Buonarroti was—he had created the Moses as a magnificent site-specific artwork, a concept that became quite the rage in the late twentieth century. This is indeed how Michelangelo sculpted and finished the statue after he completed the Sistine ceiling—sitting straight, its legs side by side, and its face looking directly forward…and this is how it remained while sitting more or less in limbo for more than two decades while the giant tomb’s future was being debated and changed with the transitory vicissitudes of power within the Vatican.
Buonarroti had put his heart and soul into the statue of Moses—so much so that, it is said, when he finished the colossal work, he held the carving by the shoulders and shouted, “Speak, damn it, speak.” Now there was nothing to keep him in Rome any longer. Julius was dead, the ceiling was finished, and the plans for his monument had been canceled by the new pope, Leo X. Leo was none other than Giovanni de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of Giuliano, the brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent. When Giuliano was assassinated, Lorenzo took in Giovanni and raised him as one of his own sons. Giovanni and Michelangelo had grown up together in the Palazzo de’ Medici and had probably even slept in the same bed as boys. Now, after the death of their nemesis Julius II della Rovere, the de’ Medici clan had figured out the perfect solution to defend themselves against the persistent attacks from the Vatican—they bribed enough cardinals to have one of their own elected as the new pontiff. They defeated the Vatican by simply taking it over. It is reported that while Leo/Giovanni was going up to take possession of the papal apartments, he chuckled to his brother Giuliano, “God has granted us the papacy—now let us enjoy it.”
If Michelangelo had harbored any dreams of a de’ Medici pope reforming the Church and turning Rome into a new Athens of art and philosophy, he must have been sorely disappointed by Leo’s rule. Leo X was no Lorenzo the Magnificent. His papacy was even more corrupt than that of his predecessors. Rome under Leo became an endless series of banquets and orgies, while the de’ Medicis drained the Vatican’s coffers for their own family affairs and military adventurism. Michelangelo carved the aforementioned pieces, even though he probably realized that Julius’s tomb would never be built inside the new St. Peter’s, just to get his sculpting eye and hand back in shape after the years of painting on the Sistine ceiling. The other reason was that the surviving relatives of Julius were still paying him a retainer of two hundred scudi per month, a kingly income.
When Leo released the artist from his contract for the della Rovere tomb, he commissioned him to create a façade for the unfinished family church of San Lorenzo in Florence. Michelangelo was more than happy to leave Rome and return to his beloved Tuscany.
We wish to avoid the temptation to detour into a long biography and artistic history of Michelangelo in these years, and stay as focused as possible on the secrets that he hid in the Vatican in Rome. However, it was during these years, 1513–1534, that both Michelangelo and the world around him went through great upheavals. Because these events left their mark on the artist, we must understand that part of his life if we are to appreciate the later secrets he would conceal when he was brought back to fresco again in the Sistine in 1534. Suffice it to say that in the twenty-one intervening years he created two permanent artistic legacies for the city of Florence—the Biblioteca Laurenziana, the library in memory of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the Sagrestia Nuova, the new sacristy in the Church of San Lorenzo. Michelangelo designed the room, the candelabra, and the tombs and carved almost all the statues himself—an amazing achievement, considering that by the time he finished the sacristy—also called the de’ Medici Chapel—he was almost sixty years old. Buonarroti’s passions had not dimmed, however—he still hid secret symbols in these architectural wonders. For example, the magnificent staircase leading up to the library has exactly fifteen steps—a reminder of the curved stairway of the Levites in the Holy Temple of Jerusalem. Each step was symbolically a step upward toward repentance and spiritual enlightenment—in fact, in the book of Psalms, there are fifteen “psalms of ascent” (120–134), one for each stair. There are two side stairways, each consisting of nine steps. In the Jewish mystical tradition, nine is the symbol of Truth. The two side stairways added together make eighteen, the Jewish symbol for Life. Here, Michelangelo was paying a final enduring tribute to his great patron Lorenzo’s love of life, his pursuit of truth, and his quest for spiritual harmony in a turbulent world.
And turbulent it was, indeed. While Michelangelo was working on these Florentine projects, one of his Roman prophecies came horribly true. As previously discussed, his Jeremiah fresco was a warning to the Vatican to cleanse itself spiritually and ethically so as not to suffer the fate of the original Holy Temple in Jerusalem. There, God had punished a corrupt priesthood with an attack by a ruthless enemy who carried away all its bronze and gold. Five years after Buonarroti finished the Sistine ceiling, an exasperated German cleric named Martin Luther nailed his protests against the papacy to a church door. Within only ten years, his religious movement became a tidal wave that swept over Europe, breaking into many groups and schisms, all of which, however, shared one hatred in common—the Vatican. One army of Lutheran soldiers under a coalition of German barons called the Lanzichenecchi took the city of Rome and sacked it mercilessly in 1527. More than twenty thousand unarmed civilians were slaughtered. The Vatican was seized and desecrated, and all its bronze and gold carted away, just as Michelangelo had foretold. This event traumatized the entire Catholic world but stimulated the hopes of reformists everywhere that perhaps, finally, the Vatican would repent and change its corrupt ways. Michelangelo and others who shared this hope were all to be deeply disappointed. Inside the Apostolic Palace, business went on as usual.
Ten days after the sack of Rome, young freethinkers who wanted to restore Florence to her glory days rose up and threw out the corrupt descendants of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Michelangelo, disgusted by the decadence of the new generation of de’ Medicis, eagerly took part in the popular revolt. Perhaps also contributing to his commitment to their cause was the fact that the ringleaders of the uprising were mostly handsome youths whose company Michelangelo constantly sought out. He threw himself passionately into the role of revolutionary, working tirelessly elbow to elbow with these young men, designing new ramparts and defenses, rallying the troops, planning strategies, nursing his companions who were felled by the plague. Three years later, in 1530, through a series
of unholy alliances, the de’ Medicis and the Vatican were able to retake Florence and punish the rebels without pity. Michelangelo was publicly declared an enemy of the restored regime and of the Church, and a price was set on his head. He disappeared into thin air, only to reappear a month and a half later, when old mutual friends were able to convince the de’ Medici pope Clement VII to pardon him so that he could finish the de’ Medici Chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo. Thus, Buonarroti’s talent was credited with saving his life. Only recently have we found that this was doubly true.
In 1975 the Italian art historian Paolo Dal Poggetto discovered how Michelangelo had disappeared in 1530, while papal and imperial killers were turning Florence inside out searching for him. The artist had managed to get back in time to his own work-in-progress, the de’ Medici Chapel. Under his new sacristy was a secret bunker. We do not know whether Buonarroti had actually built it or just knew of its existence, but he convinced the prior of the church to let him hide there and to smuggle food and sketching charcoals to him for as long as he needed to stay there. Five centuries later, his sketches made while a fugitive still cover the walls of his hiding place. His chapel project did indeed save his life in more ways than one; however, after this episode, Michelangelo decided he had had enough both of the de’ Medici clan and of Florence itself. He finished the chapel by 1534, and did not even stay in town to oversee the installation of the statues or attend the inauguration. He went back to Rome the year that the de’ Medici pope Clement died, and he never set foot again in Florence. The incredibly ambitious design for the façade of San Lorenzo—the original reason Pope Leo X de’ Medici had allowed him to return to Florence—was a total fiasco, and left undone. To this day, the clan’s family church has no façade, just raw stone—the revenge of history or of Michelangelo?
We should mention one other major event in the artist’s life during this period. He fell in love. Oh, he had been in love many times before, with beautiful youths, models, singers, and apprentices. He was strongly attracted to much younger men, both for their muscular beauty and for their passion and enthusiasm for life. It seems that in some cases this love was physical and reciprocated, in other cases not. His preferences were certainly common knowledge in certain circles back then, but Michelangelo was still very cautious, especially after seeing how men who loved men had been punished under the fanatical reign of Savonarola and the Inquisition. Even the great Leonardo da Vinci had been forced to flee Florence the second time he was accused of being a “sodomite.” Still, Buonarroti had written love poems to his favorite youths, and his contemporaries recorded that he produced great art, sketches, and poems when his love was requited and went into unproductive rages and depressions when he felt rejected.
In the spring of 1532, the great artist was in the thrall of one of the worst depressive periods of his life. The project for the San Lorenzo façade had fallen to pieces (literally, the huge central marble columns had smashed to bits in transport), he had been betrayed by his adopted family, he was by now a social outcast in his hometown, his dreams of a new golden age of Florence had been dashed, and the plan for the giant della Rovere tomb inside St. Peter’s—a project that Michelangelo had come to consider more his own monument than that of Julius II—had been canceled. He was being sued by the surviving relatives of Julius to finish the late pope’s tomb, even though it would not be allowed inside the Vatican. His birth family was continually draining his money—to set up his incompetent brothers in businesses and then to bail them out when they failed, to settle their legal affairs, to restore lost family properties, to pay for their weddings, and on and on. His family never showed gratitude but only resented him for his success while demanding more and more money. In 1528 his brother Buonarroto died, followed three years later by Michelangelo’s father, Ludovico (at the age of eighty-seven, remarkable for that era), leaving the artist with many unresolved emotions and the feeling of being ever more isolated.
Even his physical health was at an all-time low. He was laboring on the de’ Medici Chapel, a project to glorify the very family that had betrayed him and had sought to have him killed. To finish the sacristy and move on to more agreeable commissions and patrons, he was yet again pushing himself beyond all human limits. This habit of working around the clock alone without eating or sleeping sufficiently might have worked for him when he was in his twenties and thirties, but now that he was in his fifties, it was taking its toll. Word traveled all the way to the Vatican that he had become skin and bones and was having vision problems, dizzy spells, and migraine headaches. The pope was so concerned for Michelangelo’s life that he ordered him to stop working on the sacristy and come to Rome at once to resolve once and for all the nagging question of Pope Julius’s tomb. The stubborn genius begrudgingly took a break from his labors, went to Rome, and there cleaned himself up to present himself at the papal court. This was in the spring of 1532. It would also be the spring of Michelangelo’s life.
In the social whirl of the Apostolic Palace under Clement VII de’ Medici, one figure instantly stood out to the artist’s keen eye for male beauty, a young nobleman from an ancient Roman patrician family whose name was on everyone’s lips that season: Tommaso dei Cavalieri. Strikingly handsome with the physique of an athlete, Tommaso was the epitome of the cultured gentleman. He was also passionately fascinated by art and architecture, dabbling in both fields when he could. He liked to dress in nostalgic outfits, including doublets made of shot silk and a golden belt with ancient coins on it. To Michelangelo, this twenty-three-year-old courtier seemed to have stepped out of his most romantic dreams. For the lonely fifty-seven-year-old artist, it was not simply love at first sight, but a lightning bolt from heaven. To find a young man who was his ideal of masculine charm and who also shared his creative passions was a revelation. For the young Tommaso, to receive so much attention from the world’s most famous artist and architect also seemed like a dream come true. Soon, the great maestro was behaving like a love-sick schoolboy: writing love notes and romantic sonnets, making sketches and drawings as gifts for his beloved.
Historians and other scholars have produced reams of speculation about whether Michelangelo and Tommaso ever physically consummated their mutual feelings. Most doubt it, but quite frankly, it does not matter nor is it even our business. What is important is that, while in the depths of his despair, Michelangelo found love, passion, and renewed inspiration. In fact, he was finally truly understanding his old tutor Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonic theory of love, whereby the total, unselfish love for another soul—in this case, another male—would transport him ever closer to God. In one of his torrent of love poems to Cavalieri, Buonarroti wrote:
I see, through your beautiful eyes, a sweet Light that I
Can’t see through mine, with sight so poor….
Though without feathers, with your wings I fly
And with your mind I am borne to Heaven more and more.
Almost all of his poems to Tommaso reflect these deep feelings of sexual and spiritual awakening. Buonarroti went right back to Florence and not only finished up the huge de’ Medici Chapel project, but also carved another masterpiece, his Victory. It does not seem to have related to any of his commissions, so the artist must have carved it for his own pleasure.
According to many experts, the enigmatic Victory statue is a hidden romantic double portrait. The handsome youth is taken to be the young Tommaso, who, armed with nothing but his beauty, has taken prisoner the older man beneath him—none other than the great maestro himself, finally mastered not by Power, not by Art, but by Love. Buonarroti himself supports this interpretation, with a double meaning hidden in a love poem written at this time:
If conquered and suppressed is the way I must be bless’d,
It is no marvel that, nude and alone
With a well-armed cavalier, as his captive, do I rest.
The cavaliere, or noble knight, who has captured Michelangelo is, of course, the young Cavalieri. Throughout these lines,
we find the following paired letters in the original Italian, at either the beginning or the end of the phrases: t-o, m-a, and s-o—for Tommaso.
What is interesting to note is that in the new sacristy, at the very same time, Michelangelo was finishing up the memorial statue to Giuliano de’ Medici. Historians all agree that the face on the statue bears no resemblance to Giuliano’s. What they do not mention is that it is almost identical to the face of Victory. Obviously, the love-struck artist could not stop thinking of Tommaso.
In 1534, as soon as he had finished his obligations in Florence, Michelangelo packed his belongings and moved to a city that he hated—Rome—to be near the man he loved. He wrote in letters and poems at this time that he felt like the phoenix. According to legend, this mythical bird, upon growing very ancient, burns up in a fire and is reborn young and anew from the ashes. Thanks to his flames of passion for Tommaso, he felt young and powerful again, ready to take on both Rome and the Vatican and even figuratively spit in their face, if need be. Right at this time, he wrote to his beloved:
The Sistine Secrets Page 23
