When the work was finally unveiled in 1541, all Rome came to see the latest marvel of the great maestro. Immediately, the reactions split the city in two; half of the viewers thought that this was one of the most inspirational, deeply religious, and artistic works ever seen; the other half thought that it was pagan and obscene. While the debates raged in front of the painting, one person suddenly started giggling…then another…and another. Soon all of Rome was laughing hysterically because, sure enough, the flabby body and ugly profile of King Minos was an obvious portrait of none other than Biagio da Cesena, the master of ceremonies who was second only to Pope Paul III himself. According to contemporary reports, Biagio had to prostrate himself in tears in front of the pope, begging the pontiff to get him out of the fresco. The pope, who respected Michelangelo (and who was probably also fed up with Biagio’s pretentiousness), replied: “My son, the Almighty has granted me the keys to rule over heaven and earth. If you wish to get out of hell, go talk to Michelangelo.” Obviously, they never made their peace, and now Biagio is stuck in hell forever.
Chapter Sixteen
LATER SECRETS
Many believe—and I believe—that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up;
I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.
—MICHELANGELO
PERHAPS MICHELANGELO had covered his angry messages too well. Immediately after finishing The Last Judgment, the artist was commanded by a very proud Paul III to fresco an entire chapel, the brand-new Cappella Paolina, commissioned by Pope Paul III Farnese and named for himself. Buonarroti unhappily consented, but on the condition that he would be allowed to sculpt as well. He wanted to finish the often-postponed, on-again-off-again funeral monument to Pope Julius II. Michelangelo longed to get this unfinished commitment off his conscience—and Julius’s surviving relatives off his back. Pope Paul did some hard negotiations on behalf of the artist, with the result that the tomb contract was reduced even more, down to a requirement of only three statues from the hands of Michelangelo himself. This was quite a comedown from the original forty-plus statues and the monumental pyramid that Julius had decreed almost four decades earlier. Yet it was clearly still a considerable labor for a sculptor in his late sixties.
Buonarroti immediately started planning the final tomb designs, while also designing his fresco cycle to cover every inch of a completely new chapel. Just as when he got out from under the burden of painting the ceiling, Michelangelo now exploded in a burst of sculpting energy. Strangely enough, he easily had enough finished figures to satisfy the terms of the contract. He could have followed the original design and flanked Moses with two of his prisoner or slave pieces. Instead, he petitioned the pope for permission to do two new figures that he felt would better suit this more modest tomb. According to contemporary reports, he carved the two new full-size statues in just one year. Also, as before, he eagerly returned to images from the Jewish Bible. This time, he picked two matriarchs from the Torah: Leah and Rachel.
In the book of Genesis, they are the sisters who both marry Jacob, the third Hebrew patriarch. The two sisters, along with their two maidservants, become the mothers of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Here, in his fifth and final design for Julius’s tomb, Michelangelo put them on either side of the monument. In a letter to Pope Paul III, Buonarroti, in what for him was an uncharacteristic move, explained some of the symbolism of his design. The secretive artist for once was constrained to give an explanation, since he was petitioning the pontiff to order the della Rovere family to allow this one last change in the tomb design. In this private letter, Michelangelo quoted from Dante’s Purgatory, in which the poet encounters Leah. Leah, whose Hebrew name means “weak eyes,” complains to Dante that she must constantly check her looks in her mirror and weave garlands of flowers to make herself attractive, while her younger sister Rachel does not have to do anything, being naturally graced with beauty. For this reason, Leah symbolizes Active Faith—a faith that requires human initiative in order to make oneself more attractive before God. Leah stands in contrast to Rachel, graced with beauty bestowed without any effort on her part. Rachel is the paradigm of Contemplative Faith, a faith that requires no further action. In the finished pieces, we clearly see Leah holding her garland and pensively glancing at her mirror, while the beautiful Rachel simply looks up to heaven to receive her blessing. In this, too, Michelangelo is again illustrating a powerful mystical idea of the duality of the universe: Mercy versus Strength, and active versus receptive meditation. In the middle, in the place of cosmic balance, he placed his statue of Moses, carved almost thirty years earlier. One side of Moses—his right, next to Rachel (Contemplative)—is seated, while the other side, next to Leah (Active), is in motion, in the act of turning to stand up.
The final location for the monument was not to be the Vatican, however. The della Rovere clan had been out of power and out of favor for a long time. Moreover, Julius had not been forgiven for destroying so many tombs of previous popes when he ordered the demolition of the first Basilica of St. Peter. Thus, his body and his monument ended up in a much more modest place—his family church of San Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains), tucked away on a hilltop overlooking the Colosseum area.
This new setting, of course, gave the artist a fresh problem. His original Moses was meant to interact with its setting, perched high up in the center of St. Peter’s, directly beneath the light that would enter from the windows of the dome above. As we discussed, Buonarroti had made two nodes on the top of the statue’s head and buffed the face to a reflective finish, in order to make it seem that the divine light was emanating from the head and face of the great prophet. Now that the Moses would be sitting at floor level, in a niche off to the right side of the altar, this brilliant special effect would no longer work.
Once more, Michelangelo broke the rules. He actually recarved his favorite statue that he had finished three decades earlier. He moved Moses’s left foot and lower leg back a pace and lowered the left thigh (on the viewer’s right), to make the statue seem about to stand up and walk out the door to bring the luchot to humanity—the same two Tablets of the Law that he had just completed on The Last Judgment fresco. In this way, he conceptually linked this side of Moses to the Active/G’vurah symbol of Leah. Even more incredible than this, however, is what he achieved with Moses’s head. Michelangelo made the statue’s head turn ninety degrees to its left by carving a brand-new head within the already-completed head. This is the reason that the head of Moses seems a bit misshapen and the so-called horns twisted. He was adapting the old statue to interact with its new environment, in order to salvage his cherished special effect. After making the statue change its bodily position, Buonarroti cut a rectangular hole in the ceiling of the church to funnel the sunlight onto the new face and the reconfigured nodes on the head that he twisted around to better reflect the descending rays of light.
Once the monument was set in place, reports from the time describe how the Jewish families of Rome would come on Sabbath afternoons to gaze at Moses and recount to their children the stories of the great prophet and the righteous matriarchs Leah and Rachel. We do not know if it was because of too much attention from the Jews, or if it was because the Catholic visitors were ignoring Saint Peter’s chains in the main altar and just admiring the Jewish-themed statues on the side—but for whatever reason, the Church authorities decreed that Michelangelo’s hole in the ceiling be sealed up forever. Now, just as with his David, the Moses statue no longer performs its special optical effect. For centuries, people thought that Michelangelo was actually anti-Jewish, or had misunderstood a faulty translation of the Torah, and purposely gave a pair of horns to poor Moses. They could not have been more wrong.
There is one more secret that was only recently discovered about the tomb. The reclining statue of Julius II above Moses has at last been decisively attributed to Michelangelo himself, and not one of his assistants. After the sculpture
was cleaned and restored, it became evident that only the great maestro could have carved it. There is one more proof—the face on the statue is not that of the late pope, but a self-portrait of Michelangelo, gazing proudly down on his gnarled sculptor’s hands and on his favorite statue. In the end, the artist got the better of the pontiff.
Back in the Vatican, he painted two big frescoes in the new Cappella Paolina—the Conversion of Saint Paul, facing the Martyrdom of Saint Peter across the room. Since this chapel is off-limits to the public, we will not go into the various secret messages that Michelangelo embedded in these two works. Suffice it to say, they made Pope Paul and his court so uncomfortable that they canceled the rest of Buonarroti’s contract and never asked him to paint in the Vatican again. There is no record that this turn of events upset the artist at all.
After this, Michelangelo was entrusted only with architectural projects for the Vatican. The Church hierarchy must have reasoned that there was no way to hide an insulting or subversive messages in buildings. Of course, they were mistaken.
Buonarroti was later given the job of designing the huge dome of the new Basilica of St. Peter. It is well known how much he loved the simplicity and perfection of ancient Roman architecture. His favorite building of all was the Pantheon, the central shrine to the Greek and Roman idols, built by Hadrian in the first half of the second century. Michelangelo proposed to the pope that he make a large copy of the Pantheon dome on top of the new St. Peter’s. The horrified pontiff replied that Hadrian’s dome was pagan—the Vatican cathedral had to have a Christian-looking dome, like the one built in Florence a century before by Brunelleschi. The disappointed artist designed the famous egg-shaped dome that the whole world knows today…with one little detail that most of the world does not know.
It is a Catholic tradition that the cupola, or dome, of any city’s cathedral must be both the tallest structure and the widest dome, to show its authority.* When Michelangelo died at age eighty-nine, the massive tamburro, or drum-shaped base, for the dome had already been completed. Of course, construction was halted for several weeks. As any contractor or engineer will tell you, whenever there is a long pause in a building project, it is important to remeasure everything, because of possible shifting, contraction, or expansion of the structure. When they remeasured Michelangelo’s base for the dome, they discovered that he had once more outfoxed the Vatican. The diameter was a good foot and a half narrower than the pagan Pantheon. There was nothing to be done, except finish the dome and hope that nobody would find out. To this day, the Vatican dome is the second-widest dome in Rome.
In his last years, Michelangelo worked on new pietà sculptures—not for any pope, but for his own diversion and probably for his own tomb. His eyesight had never recovered from his torment on the ceiling of the Sistine, and by this point in his life he was almost blind. He was sculpting more by feel than by sight—and yet he persevered, even trying new carving techniques right up until six days before his death. His best-known pietà from this last period is the one now housed in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence. He had put all his remaining energy into the top of the sculpture, and by the time he had worked his way down more than halfway, he found more and more defects, both in the marble and in his own carving. Frustrated that his hands and eyes could no longer match what he envisioned in his mind, he smashed the legs of Jesus in a fit of rage and gave the pieces to his servant. Fortunately for us, the servant saved all the pieces and sold them to a merchant who had the whole thing put back together again.
We can also see why he had put all his energy into the top of the grouping. Holding up Jesus from behind is the hooded figure of Nicodemus. According to Christian tradition, he is the symbol of hiding one’s true faith in order to survive and serve God. Juan de Valdés had instructed his secret followers, the Spirituali, to practice what he called nicodemismo, disguising their underground illuminist faith, in an attempt to infiltrate the Church and reform it from the inside, while avoiding capture and execution by the Inquisition. When we take a good look at the face of Nicodemus, we see the last self-portrait of a man who hid so many of his true beliefs throughout his long life—Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Chapter Seventeen
“A WORLD TRANSFIGURED”
A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as
does failing to hear and see it.
—MICHELANGELO
Within the fall, we find the ascent.
—KABBALISTIC PROVERB
ROME IN WINTER, 1564.
The great maestro Michelangelo Buonarroti, the last survivor of the golden age of Florence, lay dying at the age of eighty-nine. With him were being extinguished the last embers of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo, Raphael, Bramante, Botticelli, Lorenzo de’ Medici—all the other great figures had passed away long before. Now art and science were being stunted and censored, books burned in public, freethinking forced to go deep underground. The Jews of Rome were walled up alive in the prison known as the ghetto, and all their venerable sanctuaries and centers of learning outside the ghetto walls destroyed without a trace. Wars covered the face of Europe. It seemed that the world was sliding back into darkness. How had things fallen to such a depth?
Back in the 1540s, Pope Paul III had started the repressive measures of the Counter-Reformation to crack down on the growth of reformers, Lutherans, and freethinkers in the Catholic world. One impetus for this puritanical backlash was the outrage expressed by fundamentalists in response to the unveiling of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, with its hundreds of stark-naked figures right in the heart of the Vatican. The relentless Cardinal Carafa and his spies started hunting down the Spirituali all over Europe. Those who were not arrested and executed had to run for their lives and died in exile. The lucky ones, such as Giulia Gonzaga and Vittoria Colonna, died of natural illnesses before they could be rounded up and burned in public. The Spirituali’s last hope had been Cardinal Reginald Pole, their man deep inside the Church hierarchy. When the Council of Trent was convened, he led the large contingent of reformist delegates. They had hoped to meet with Martin Luther in person and somehow reach an accord that would have allowed the two faiths, Catholic and Protestant, to merge again into one new Church. The Vatican hardliners, however, were able to stall the proceedings so long that Luther died shortly after the opening session. That was the beginning of the end.
When Pole saw that Vatican rejectionists had taken over the council, he pretended to be ill and fled before he could be arrested. The Council of Trent became the death knell for any reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics. It also destroyed any hopes of tolerance for the Jews of Europe. The Inquisition gained much more power, and soon the dreaded Cardinal Carafa was able to establish the Index of Forbidden Books, as well as torture chambers in the heart of Rome. Artwork was also condemned, and a large amount of the council’s time and energy was spent discussing Michelangelo’s “obscenities and heresies” in his Sistine frescoes. The Holy Inquisition was revitalized and expanded, to terrorize most of Europe, publicly burning copies of the Talmud as well as paintings, together with freethinkers, Jews, artists, and homosexuals.
There had been one last-ditch attempt at reconciliation in 1549. When Pope Paul III Farnese died, the conclave stood poised to elect none other than Cardinal Pole, the secret member of the Spirituali, as the new pope. He had the necessary two-thirds majority of cardinals about to vote him into office when, at the last moment, late-arriving cardinals from France brought about a stalemate. Amid a flurry of bribes, politicking, and at least one possible poisoning, a compromise pope was elected—Julius III del Monte. This new Julius did not care about religious reform or art—or anything intellectual, for that matter. He had fallen in love with a thirteen-year-old boy of the streets four years earlier and forced his wealthy brother to adopt the lad. His first act upon being crowned pope was to ordain the boy, now seventeen, with his adoptive name, as Cardinal Nephew Innocent Ciocchi del Monte. While the Inquisition was persecuting
and burning homosexuals around Europe, the pope and his almost illiterate teenaged lover were holding private parties in their newly constructed pleasure palace of Villa Giulia (today the Etruscan Museum in Rome). During this do-nothing papacy, the fanatical Cardinal Carafa became more and more influential, leading Cardinal Pole, in fear for his life, to return to England in 1554, when the Catholic Queen Mary took the throne. Under Mary’s reign, Pole abandoned the ideals of the Spirituali and wreaked his revenge on the Protestants, whom he blamed for the torture and murder of his family. The man who might have been the great reforming and reconciling pope died instead as a mass murderer in 1558. Pietro Aretino, Michelangelo’s other surviving ally from the underground group, turned against the artist publicly and vociferously condemned him for the very same Last Judgment in which he had been immortalized as Saint Bartholomew, and for which he had earlier praised Buonarroti. Julius III’s papacy was also the first time in fifty years that Michelangelo’s talents in sculpting and painting were ignored by the Vatican. Only his architectural work for the cathedral under Paul III was allowed to continue; other than that, the aged artist was ignominiously shunted aside.
The last ramparts of free art and free thinking fell in 1555. When Julius III died, the next conclave elected Cardinal Marcello Cervini. Cervini was the last great hope of the Renaissance and the reformers. He was a brilliant, modest, open-minded Tuscan, respected by all and poised to clean the Vatican and make peace with the Protestants. A desperate conclave of cardinals immediately and unanimously elected him on the first ballot. To the horror of his supporters, the humble Marcello announced that in spite of his new power he would not change his name as pontiff. For centuries, it had been the custom for a cardinal to assume a new name as pope, since it was considered bad luck to retain one’s original name (past popes who had kept their birth names had all had disastrous papacies). Marcello rejected superstition, and was crowned Pope Marcellus II. Instead of indulging in coronation parties and banquets, he gave all the celebration funds to the poor. Hope sprang up again. At last, here was a pope who seemed capable and determined to redeem the Vatican, bring back the Renaissance of ideas, and create peace between the conflicting faiths. He proclaimed that there would be a new Church, returning to Scripture and spirituality. Twenty-two days later, he was dead—according to official sources, from “exhaustion.” Suffice it to say that Marcellus was the very last pope to refuse to change his name.
The Sistine Secrets Page 26
