The Sistine Chapel and the Kabbalah

The new Da Vinci Code: Secrets of the Sistine Chapel

...Experts are now convinced that Michelangelo painted subversive messages into his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Is there any truth in their claims — or are their imaginations running away with them?

Cristina Ruiz | The Sunday Times (UK) | June 15, 2008

...it is not just crackpots who believe in a Michelangelo Code. The latest scholarly proponents are Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an associate professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, and Roy Doliner, a writer based in Rome who gives tours of the city and the Vatican to visiting Jewish VIPs. In their forthcoming book, The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo’s Defiant Masterpiece, published by JR Books, they argue that the entire Sistine Chapel should be read as a radically subversive decorative cycle that insults the pope who commissioned it, diverges from Catholic doctrine of the time, and proposes a “lost mystical message of universal love”, which Michelangelo intended as “a bridge” between the church and the Jewish faith. They say the key to this reading is found by unravelling the secret messages placed in the paintings by the artist “in the hope that eventually there would be those who would crack his code”.

Where Gonzalez saw hidden portraits, Blech and Doliner have found Hebrew letters. They say the figure of David in the painting showing his battle with Goliath is in the shape of the Hebrew letter gimel, which in the mystical Jewish tradition known as Kabbalah symbolises g’vurah, or strength. On the opposite wall, the scene showing Judith and her handmaiden carrying the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes is in the shape of the Hebrew letter chet, which represents chesed, or the characteristics of “loving kindness”. The figures of David and Judith were intended by the artist to be seen as the two sides of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, say Blech and Doliner.

Their theory goes like this: as a teenager Michelangelo spent two years under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, mixing with the leading thinkers of the day. Lorenzo’s court was a liberal hotbed of ideas, some of which were later branded heretical by the church. And there was strong interest in Jewish culture and esoteric Hebrew texts that came to Florence when Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo, allowed the Jews into the city, where some of them prospered for a time. At the Medici court, Michelangelo was exposed to the humanist philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, a proponent of Neoplatonism, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who incorporated a wide variety of texts into his teachings, including the Kabbalah. Michelangelo absorbed these syncretic philosophies, and some 20 years later he used the Sistine Chapel to illustrate them.

The problem with this argument is that it is highly speculative. Michelangelo did absorb classical and humanist philosophies in Florence, and there is evidence of this in his paintings, but the authors stretch the idea to breaking point, invalidating any legitimate arguments. The figures of Judith and David may seem to be the same shape as Hebrew letters, but there is no proof that Michelangelo intended this. The conjecture continues throughout the book, where the interpretation of almost every painting is wildly skewed to give a Jewish reading. In a bizarre example, the authors say the figure of St Lawrence beneath Christ in The Last Judgement is not holding the instrument of his execution, as tradition would have it (Lawrence is said to have been burnt alive on a gridiron by the Romans in the 3rd century): he is holding a ladder. “Jacob’s Ladder, to be exact,” they write. “This is the link between heaven and earth, humanity and angels, the material and spiritual worlds. The Kabbalah teaches that the entire creation revolves around this ladder.” And so they discover it at the centre of The Last Judgement.

Blech is an adviser to the Pave the Way Foundation, an organisation that describes itself as “dedicated to achieving peace by bridging the gap in tolerance and understanding between religions”. In January 2005 the foundation organised a visit of Jewish delegates to Rome to meet Pope John Paul II. Blech led the mission “to express thanks to the pope for all he had done for the Jewish people. He was the first pope to visit the [Wailing] Wall in Jerusalem, where he inserted a prayer asking God and the Jews for forgiveness”. In 2006, Blech also accompanied the current pope, Benedict XVI, to Auschwitz. Much of the rabbi’s life has been devoted to inter-faith dialogue, and his book would have us believe that Michelangelo was an early proponent of the same ideals and that he placed hidden messages illustrating these throughout the Sistine Chapel. This argument has two elements in common with all the other Michelangelo Code theories. The authors believe they are the first to have interpreted the paintings as the artist would have wished. Doliner likens the experience of writing the book to “finding a letter on the pavement and delivering it 500 years later."

Here’s what we do know: in 1505, Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo to Rome to create a funerary monument on a grand scale. The artist was considered the pre-eminent sculptor of his day, a reputation sealed a year earlier when he unveiled his statue of David showing him at the moment he has decided to battle Goliath. The work, hailed as a masterpiece, was placed in front of Florence’s town hall in Piazza della Signoria as a symbol of the city’s freedom. Once in Rome, Michelangelo began work on the pope’s tomb, but this stopped when Julius II decided to focus on the rebuilding of St Peter’s. After a dispute over money, Michelangelo fled Rome and returned to Florence.In 1508 the artist, then 33, was back. He had begrudgingly accepted the pope’s commission to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine with frescoes (Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor, not a painter).

It took him four years, working with a team of assistants, and he decorated 12,000 sq ft, most of this being taken up by nine scenes from the Book of Genesis at the top and the figures of seven prophets and five pagan sibyls, who were believed to have predicted the arrival of Christ, around the base of the ceiling. Julius II had originally wanted Michelangelo to paint the ceiling with the figures of the 12 apostles and a vast geometric pattern. The artist argued against this. The pope “gave me a new commission to do what I liked”, he later wrote, a claim viewed with suspicion by most scholars, who generally believe that Michelangelo would have been guided by the pope’s theologians and advisers. This was, after all, an age when religious imagery was strictly controlled. But no information about this survives. Twenty-two years later he returned to paint The Last Judgement on the entire wall of the chapel behind the altar, following a commission from Pope Clement VII, filling it with the figures of the resurrected awaiting Christ’s verdict on their fate.

...So where does the truth lie? Which of the Michelangelo Code theories is most plausible? In the end...these theories are “impossible to refute. But they are also impossible to prove”. One thing is certain: the Sistine Chapel is a complex decorative cycle containing over 300 figures...The Sistine Chapel is the most important church in the Catholic world. It has to be. It’s the pope’s private chapel. Not only does the conclave that selects the popes actually take place in here, but the chapel is also where the popes went for their private services, where they greeted important visitors and mounted special prayers. So the crucial question that anyone trying to understand the real meaning of the Sistine Chapel has to ask themselves is: would any pope have allowed any artist to do as they pleased inside the Sistine Chapel? Is it really likely, or possible, that Michelangelo would have filled the most important church in the Christian world with heresy and Judaism?...

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