The Other Sistine Chapel (Part I)

 

On Ischia Island - a Corner Wrapped in Terra-cotta
Relief Sculpture

The Other Sistine Chapel (Part I)

It may be an unconventional way to begin my story but it’s how a recent day began. It was 7 a.m. in the bruised low light of what appeared to be the beginning of a cloudy day. I was in bed. Maria Elena lay beside me, rhythmically breathing — baritone rumbles on the intake, wheezes with each exhale. When I’d opened my eyes, though only one worked for the other was still sunk in my pillow, I was taken by the lamp on my bedside table cornered by angled walls. Its muted classically shaped shade extended from a tall support rod into a hazily lit corner. The 

First Light Lamp

shade had a tapered elongated grace, especially from my one-eyed view angled upward from my pillow. Its base had somewhat of a squared bell shape that rose to a reduced version of itself supported by stiffening wire ribs sheathed in the shade’s fabric. In the dim shards of light cast by windows across the room, this linen-like jacket appeared white, yet my glimpse into its exposed underside, revealed a darkened dirty-white interior. Streaks of dawn rendered an artful scene of quiet shadows from the gradations in the dappled wash of what little light there was. Still early, the corner lacked light’s shimmer reserved for later in the day. For the moment, it had created the sensation of a dirty shadow when nothing was sullied at all. Instead, its glimmer fashioned eerie shadows that gently blurred. Depending on the light, even our sometimes butterscotch sometimes sepia-colored walls seemed to shift colors. As the daylight grew, infinite variations would unfold, but not yet. It seemed a perfect way to exit the languid dreamscape of slumber into the sharpness of everyday reality. As hard as it is to describe, for a moment just imagine an old master, adept with the depiction of light, capturing something like I was experiencing. The ability to depict such imagery is the DNA of sheer artistic genius.

One such master, who preferred stone over pigment, was M. Simoni. We know him simply as Michelangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni). Search his name online and he is

Michelangelo di Lodovico
Buonarroti Simoni

described as a sculptor which he certainly was until forced to paint. It’s safe to say he is best known for sculpting a youthful David (called Il Gigante) and the Vatican’s Pieta, possibly followed by his renderings of Moses, who also carved his message in stone, and a drunken, sensual pagan deity, Bacchus.

To an extent, he mimicked that infamous Dominican Friar Girolamo Savonarola, who in his sermons (Michelangelo attended some) had challenged a corrupt Pope and through his Bonfire of the Vanities harnessed the people of Florence, whether through coercive fear or not, into action. Instead, Michelangelo would work to silently present his message of spiritual harmony, unwilling to risk being similarly hung, then burned, in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria or barring that, being beheaded by the Pope. To this day, few realize that Michelangelo visually preached through his art. Lacking a Last Supper or a Mona Lisa, his greatest artistic depiction in the medium of paint, the Sistine Chapel, provided him exactly that opportunity.

The Vatican’s Sistine Chapel was originally designed to duplicate the Temple of Jerusalem that had been leveled in 70 A.D. It would serve as the 

Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484)

“New Temple,” a symbol that the Roman Catholic Church had replaced Judaism. There were two versions of this chapel: an earlier one designed to the actual specifications of the Temple of Jerusalem, and years later, its renovation by Michelangelo on orders of Pope Julius II. Initially, its walls had been adorned with frescoes when Pope Sixtus IV (born Francesco della Rovere) commissioned the original chapel in 1473. Although I’m not sure how, it is from “Sixtus” that we acquired the name “Sistine.” The chapel, originally adorned with a series of frescos depicting the life of Christ and that of Moses, offset by papal portraits linking this vain pope to Christ, was intended as a monument to the della Rovere family. If I were to attempt to be diplomatic in describing his term in office, I would politely say that Pope Sixtus IV subordinated his duties as the church’s spiritual head to instead enrich his family as well as the Papal States. Absent diplomatic credentials, I’d posit him far more the Tony Soprano, hedge fund manager, commander in chief, sexual liberator Hugh Hefner type, and real estate developer all rolled into one than the sort of popes we are accustomed to these days.

The Latin and Italian word nepote has a range of meanings. It casts a broad net to include grandson, nephew, granddaughter, grandchild, even niece. Drawing from this word, the system of

Pope Julius II (1503-1513)
The Warrior Pope

absolute power and corruption became known as nepotismo. From it, we’ve derived today’s English word for favoritism based on kinship, “nepotism.” In the art of nepotism, Sixtus IV was a consummate master.¹ He advanced family members in Church officialdom and enriched other family members through lucrative appointments wherever he could exert influence which was practically everywhere. It was his nepote, a nephew (Giuliano della Rovere), whom he had groomed with favor from priest to egotistical cardinal by age 28, who through bribery and vote-rigging had himself elected Pope Julius II.² It was Pope Julius, who commanded that Michelangelo come to Rome to renovate the Sistine Chapel, by then over twenty years old.

Lacking autokinetic abilities to reach his ceiling “canvas” of damp plaster, Michelangelo needed some sort of scaffolding. At first, papal architect Donato Bramante was charged with the design. He initially proposed a system of ropes suspended through holes in the ceiling. Michelangelo vehemently objected to this approach because the numerous holes would interfere with his planned frescos. Bramante’s second attempt took a different tact and approached the problem from the opposite direction. It featured support legs extending from the floor. There were many of these legs,

Sketch by Michelangelo 
of Him Standing While
Painting God on the Ceiling
 

so many that the Chapel would be unusable during its anticipated years of restoration. Fortunately, even before this substitute high rise platform could be used, it collapsed. At this point, Michelangelo took over. Rather than build the structure from the floor up, he constructed a “flying bridge” based on the Roman bowed arch. With his design, the scaffold’s weight was distributed through small support holes in the sidewalls. It could also be moved. As he completed a fresco, the scaffold could be repositioned beneath the chapel ceiling to paint the next section. One misconception, likely invented history from Hollywood movies, is that Michelangelo painted the damp plaster while lying on his back atop this scaffold. In fact, Michelangelo customarily stood. His head tilted upward, his neck strained, his body contorted in vertical effort throughout the annual extremes of heat and numbing cold, his eyes continually violated by particles of oozing plaster and droplets of paint, … all took their toll over the years. Driven to complete the project, he also ate little and barely slept in the hovel he called his home. The injuries he sustained to complete the task resulted in impaired eyesight for the rest of his life along with his overall physical deterioration that at times approached emaciation.

Throughout this ordeal, while committed to creating a biblical panorama across a Vatican ceiling, he was furious for being forced to put down his chisel for a paintbrush and for being removed from the sight of Florence’s Duomo for Rome, a city he detested. The dominance of the Church and a tyrannical Pontiff forestalled any chance of refusal. There was nowhere he could go to escape the pontiff’s reach.

 Ceiling Design Layout of the Sistine Chapel

Fearing repercussions if he refused the Pope, even Florence’s ruling council, Il Signoria, demanded that he comply. Realizing he had no choice, that his career would essentially be on hold to paint frescoes, he eventually acquiesced to the Pope’s demands. Twenty-two years later, he’d encore with an enormous depiction of the Last Judgement on the wall behind the chapel’s altar. All along, his only desire was to probe blocks of marble to liberate the forms he sensed were trapped inside the encasing stone, craving release. His was no ordinary love for his art totally occupied him, not to the extent that he was fanatical but clearly driven. If he were to describe it, he would have likely uttered words of affection only someone deeply in love could voice, “I love … marble.” While his contemporaries may have considered sculpting a 9-to-5 job, he relentlessly immersed himself in thoughts of sculpting. He never stopped. As he saw it, while a painter uses perspective to adjust two-dimensional images for distance, a sculptor could build life-size in three dimensions and let its size adjust naturally to a viewer’s position. Accurate presentation from every angle, not simply front-on as in a portrait, was essential. No wall would prevent an observer from orbiting his artwork. This difference meant everything to Michelangelo. He would live a monastic existence, alone with his blocks of marble, surrounded by the chipped crystalline debris of his vision. While that rival genius Leonardo da Vinci would argue that sculpting was an inferior artform, Michelangelo vehemently countered. He professed that sculpture was the closest in true form to God’s creations. As God had created man in three dimensions from dirt, a sculptor worked to fashion man in 3D from marble. God, after all, in creating man and woman, had been the very first sculptor.

Yet anger and bitterness, while strong emotions are short-lived. They usually live and die with a person. To openly seek vengeance for his injuries, both physical and professional, fell into the realm of unachievable fantasy. Anything he might attempt would fall far short of destroying a standing pope, however flawed. Beyond these bitter motivations, it is now believed he expressed his feelings in messages woven into his images, something he hoped would endure beyond his demise, even well past what time might try to erase. He chose to portray a tolerance of all faiths, yearned for the Church’s reform, and a need for revolutionary change in Christianity's relationship to Judaism.³ Scaffolding eventually in place, what he did up there, alone, has only recently been revealed following a decade of cleaning. As a result, it is now believed that Michelangelo concealed a myriad of messages that he dared not openly express due to the harsh ecclesiastic consequences sure to follow if their true nature were revealed. His messages, concealed in the code of Jewish tradition at great risk, were ingeniously embedded within this artistic masterpiece. The 68-foot-high chapel ceiling helped, for its distant, neck-straining location aided to conceal their presence. Here away from probing eyes, the patina of lost centuries aided in their coverup through the addition of dirt, soot, and the stains of pollution. Limited access to the chapel also concealed his progress even the nature of the images he created. Eventually, all those who may have known or suspected their presence were long dead, their implications lost. Now, the obscuring tarps of time have been pulled away. These revelations did not involve “the how” of his technique or some recently found cartoon sketch. Almost five centuries later, what he painted and “the why” of what motivated him are beginning to be understood. Contrary to the norms of his day, he had a statement to make concerning Jewish identity as well as vengeance to take for his years of servitude to complete the chapel ceiling (four and a half years) and later even more to complete The Last Judgement (six years). Fortunately for him, few if any grasped his illusions to Jewish theology. History would record that his justice would not be loud, violent, or swift but graphic and from its presence to this day, enduring. The impetus to undertake this appeal for reform and respect for Judaism began when he was a teenager.

As a young man of fourteen in 1489, Michelangelo’s world changed when he was taken into the household of Lorenzo de’ Medici (il Magnifico), the de facto ruler of Florence. In this nascent Camelot, essentially the ark of the Renaissance, he was treated as one of Lorenzo’s sons. It was here that he found himself surrounded by the best and brightest — poets, freethinkers, businessmen, philosophers, and intellectuals. Through his influential teachers,

Ceiling of the Vatican's
Sistine Chapel

he immersed himself in the study of the classic works of the ancients only then following the demise of the Roman Empire being revived, along with languages, philosophy, as well as spiritual subjects. One of Michelangelo’s teachers was the renowned Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino, a Catholic priest comfortable with Hebrew. Ficino attempted to raise the importance of liberal arts, among them the visual arts. Additionally, he tried to harmonize Platonism with monotheism, which to him meant Judaism as well as Christianity with a touch of Greek paganism. From Marsilio we get, call it “friends without privileges,” platonic love. Also near at hand was a private library of Judaic literature thought to have been the largest gentile-owned collection in existence. We have little appreciation for just how revolutionary a period this was, a time of intellectual ferment, where mankind’s concern significantly grew in importance beyond those of simply a focus on the afterlife or what Irving Stone in his historical novel The Agony and the Ecstasy would describe as: “… little creatures living only for salvation in the next life.” During this turbulent period, his newfound humanism impinged on his Christianity to eventually merge to express a need for ecclesiastic reform, secular justice, and respect for Christianity’s inheritance from Judaism. This resurgence of interest in ancient philosophies had a name, it was known as Neo-Platonism. Mingling within this circle of Medici tutors, Michelangelo learned to appreciate Platonism along with the humanist movement. Over his years in the Medici household, he developed a positive view toward Judaism through an appreciation for the Torah, the sayings of the Talmud, Kabbalist thought, Midrash commentary, and the Judaic roots of Catholicism.⁴ Among these many disciplines, his teachers impressed on him the nature of this Judaic “mother religion,” even then being persecuted by its own offspring, the Catholic Church. He would grow to deplore the Church's failure to acknowledge its debt to its Jewish origins and its shameful treatment of Jews, from among whom Jesus, himself a Jew, was born. He’d remind the Church of this fact and that its roots were grounded in the Torah given by God to the Jewish people. In evidence of this is the fact that everything he painted on the Sistine’s ceiling, contrary to the Pope’s direction, was extracted from the Old Testament, code for the edited Jewish bible. He envisioned a society based on universal tolerance and classical humanism. He also fell in love with Greek and Roman art, then thought pagan and unaccepted beyond the walls of the Medici palace. Taken together, the daring ideas of his formazione (education) provided him with plenty of conceptual material, engendered life-long respect for the Jewish people, shaped him into who he would become, and influenced his life’s work, especially in how he would express these concepts.

Yet too much to tell takes too many words. To this point, I have attempted to describe the motives for Michelangelo’s actions in the Sistine Chapel. In the next installment, I will delve into what his messages were.

To Be Continued …… 

From that Rogue Tourist
Paolo

1. “The Papacy During the Renaissance,”

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pape/hd_pape.htm

2. “Pope Julius II: The Warrior Pope,”

https://historyofyesterday.com/pope-julius-ii-the-warrior-pope-4d9a09c20455

3. Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner, “The Sistine Secret: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican,” Harper One, 2008.

4. “A Jewish Art Paradise at the Vatican,”

https://forward.com/culture/308648/in-the-vatican-a-jewish-paradise/