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Title: The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican
ISBN: 0061469041
Author:
Benjamin Blech
Roy Doliner
Publicate Date: 2008-05-01
Publish: 2008-05-01
List Price: $26.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $15.60
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $9.85
Amazon Merchant Price: $17.79
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Disappointing
This work got lots of press -- that it doesn't deserve. The best feature is the innovative fold out book jacket that turns into the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Other than that, it is written for biblical scholars, not those interested in the ontology of the painting. Very few pictures, generally very poor quality. Not casual reading.
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2: 5 stars for scholarship and readability
The authors have produced an important work of art historical scholarship that is also a delightful book to read. They take their readers on a tour of the intellectual and social world in which Michelangelo's attitudes were formed. They explain that he had "a very special education" that gave him great sympathy with freethinking, even heretical, writers. They also reveal his knowledge of the Midrash, the Talmud, and Kabbalah.
Michelangelo and other Renaissance artists embedded coded messages into nearly all their works. It delighted European elites who gained enormous social cache from their ability to interpret complex images. It also served as a way to express "censored" ideas.
In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo took the opportunity to fill the space with "hidden messages of his passionate loves and his righteous rages, along with mystic symbols of divine justice and divine mercy" (306). His motives remain difficult to discern. But there can be no doubt that he intended his work to be read--not hidden from posterity.
The authors help us to "read" Michelangelo's images by providing the tools used by sixteenth-century humanists. They walk us through the chapel as if they were tour guides, pointing out some very extraordinary features, for example, the depiction of two putti "giving the fig" to Pope Julius's portrait (136). They also show us details that recently came to light after the Sistine ceiling was cleaned, a process that started in 1980. Most notable is the figure of Aminadab (a distant ancestor of Jesus Christ) wearing the yellow badge of shame required by the Fourth Lateran Council. He makes the "devil's horns" with his fingers and points towards the ceremonial canopy over Julius's papal throne (154).
Wow.
This book is so much fun to read.
PS-I recommend the hardcover version because the dust cover opens up into a mini-poster of the Sistine ceiling.
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3: Even with flaws, read this one!
This is an important book. Don't miss it. Despite its flaws, I give it five stars and thumbs up!
However, it is a pity that the authors did not take a more dignified, quasi-scholarly approach. There was no need to hammer each point home; a subtle touch would have been more effective.
The discussion of Michelangelo's education in the de' Medici household is fascinating. The authors claim that the Corpus Hermeticus is the work of an ancient Egyptian master. However, recent scholarship dates the work to the early centuries CE. It is stated that Picco della Mirandola, one of Michelangelo's tutors and famed in his own right, was heavily influenced by Jewish mysticism and had the largest library of Judaic and Kabbalistic writings. There is no reference for this claim, which is so important for the book's thesis.
The claim is made that few Christians in Michelangelo's time, or in this time, would suspect that the Tree of Knowledge was a fig tree, rather than an apple tree. I think that now, many people recognize that it was a fig tree. It would have been better for the authors to more carefully support their claim that in Michelangelo's time few had this understanding. Their treatment of the two angels of our nature in this panel is fascinating.
I hope that this book provokes discussion and further study. The tale is generally told well and provides stimulating food for thought. Sadly, one can imagine how a thoughtful Christian, and especially a genius such as Michelangelo, would have felt when faced with the corrupt and quite unchristian behavior of the popes and cardinals. The point is pursuasive that the secrets had to be well-hidden. Thanks goodness the ceiling was so high and inaccessible or we might not have this masterpiece with us today.
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4: Sistine Secrets
The book turned out as it promised. It was an interesting read and did in fact portray many of the mesages that were left in the paintings.
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5: Seurat Must Be Spinning in His Grave!!!
Where to begin? Let's begin with this book's end chapter where the authors wonder why the Sistine Ceiling has no unifying name. In this absence, the authors sense conspiracy, Michelangelo's last laugh at the Vatican. Well - the reason "The Last Judgement" has a title, as other frescoes used by way of comparison, is because it deals with a specific moment. The ceiling, on the other hand, has no unifying title, dealing as it does with so very many episodes from the Old Testament - but each individual fresco does! ('Creation of Adam', etc.) No forbidden message here! Let me scattershot, because the book is a hodge-podge of supposed revelations of "Forbidden Messages" with not a single, solitary footnote to aid in our astonishment. Shoddy scholarship - especially given the authors' prestigious credentials. But...maybe the lack of footnotes contains, in itself, some secret, coded, Kabbalistic message???? Did you know that Michelangelo invented pointillism, while most poor slobs think it was Seurat! The authors base this absurd claim on the restored face of Mary in "The Last Judgement" - simply because it - out of hundreds of faces in the giant fresco - is painted in a pixelated fashion by the Maestro. Well, who knows - maybe the restorers botched the clean up? Maybe Time wrought its defects on this one face! But to say that Michelangelo - whom I consider the greatest artist to have ever lived - invented pointillism is simply absurd. Just as is the authors' claim that Michelangelo purposefully left several of the statues for Pope Julius' tomb unfinished as he perfected his "non finito" style - and thus presaged (consciously, mind you) the Impressionists and Picasso and Rodin all by his lonesome - when, in fact, the plain truth is that he did not finish the works because there were only so many hours in a day and so many years in a life! If he was, indeed, at this time perfecting his "not-finished' new, revolutionary style...why then did he polish and perfect the contemporaneous Moses? Oh, and did you know that the Moses has NO horns? How do we know this - because the authors say so...again with no footnote to back up the claim. They say the alleged horns are actually a special effect - like something out of Hollywood - that Michelangelo purposefully created them to catch the light and make the horns look like beams of light shooting out of Moses' head. The trouble is, once the statue was not to be placed in an elevated position - and once the window that Michelangelo purposefully cut in the San Pietro Church was walled up by the ominous Church powers-that-be (trying to diminish Michelangelo's hidden Moses-message)....why then didn't he chisel off the horns-which-aren't-horns? And despite daylight beaming off the projections out of Moses' head - what were people to think of the "horns" on cloudy days or at night when viewing the statue? We are told he re-sculpted the entire face once he realized the statue would be placed ground-level (something I never heard of before in all my studies of Michelangelo!).....so why not chisel off the horns? Because, Truth be told, they ARE horns and they come from a mistranslation of the Vulgate which Michelangelo was acquainted with. In the Vulgate, it says "Moses had horns." But to acknowledge that Michlenagelo succumbed to Latin Vulgate mistranslation would unravel the basic premise of this book: and that is that Michelangelo was deeply initiated into Kabbalistic mysteries and Talmudic messages. Maybe he was maybe he wasn't. Maybe he took some advice from a variety of Biblical and Talmudic scholars. The fact is - no one knows for certain who decided on the final theme of the ceiling's frescoes in the first place (see Ross King's excellent book about the ceiling, etc.) I could go on. The authors tell us that 'The Last Judgement' was painted on a restructured wall that Michelangelo purposefully and secretively structured to look like the traditional shape of the tablets of the Ten Commandments! Yet you will see these same arches in an illustration of the Chapel's interior prior to even the ceiling's being painted! Plus...if these are the traditional shapes of the tablets and Michelangelo was knowledgeable about this hidden, coded message - why then are the tablets in the Moses sculpture traditionally squared off? The authors go on to point out that Mary in this same fresco is looking at a woman who is the portrait of the famed Vittoria Colonna herself! How do we know this? The authors say it is so, simply that. Just as Michelangelo's great love is also portrayed in the fresco - Tommaso dei Cavalieri is (no doubt about it!) the only person in the painting in eye-to-eye contact with Christ who is actually the Belvedere Apollo! The bottom line is this: the authors assume too great an entry into the mind of Michelangelo. They turn their assumptions into facts, like ancient alchemists trying to transmute base metals into gold. Much of what they are doing when revealing to us the secrets of the Sistine frescoes is nothing other than....seeing images in clouds. Did you know that God in the Creation of Adam scene is floating on a dissected brain? How do we know this is a fact, unalterable and inviable? Because the authors tell us so! This book also wastes plenty of space (that could have been devoted to footnotes!) to reproducting the same pictures in the text and in the insert, needlessly. And a picture we would have liked to see - the self-portrait of Michelangelo set above the Moses - we only see in a blurred, distant shot. So - this book is slipshod, didactic in the extreme and....it doth protest too much! It tries TOO hard to push its agenda. The book's subtitle is sure to make the book fly off the shelves - yet there is really nothing outstanding here, except for alot of speculation. We all know that Michelangelo was well-versed in the Old and the New Testaments and drew his inspiration from many, many sources. But the authors hammer their Kabbalistic points home on virtually every page of this book that, as a reader, I felt like a block of marble being pounded and chiselled by Michelangelo himself. One other point: the authors make much of Michelangelo's flying bridge construction that allowed him to paint on the ceiling for four and a half years - yet provide no illustration showing what such a structure may have looked like. And yet by the book's end, the Bridge theme becomes central. By-the-way, did you know that the Mona Lisa has been positively identified? I didn't! I do now, though.....because the authors told me so!!!!!! Only there is no footnote further elucidating how her identity has been finally revealed. The Devil...is in the details, friends.
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