The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican
by Benjamin Blech, Roy Doliner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Benjamin Blech, Roy DolinerEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-05-01
ISBN: 0061469041
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: HarperOne
Book Reviews of The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican
Book Review: Seurat Must Be Spinning in His Grave!!!
Summary: 2 Stars
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.
Summary of The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican
Five hundred years ago Michelangelo began work on a painting that became one of the most famous pieces of art in the world—the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Every year millions of people come to see Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, which is the largest fresco painting on earth in the holiest of Christianity's chapels; yet there is not one single Christian image in this vast, magnificent artwork.
The Sistine Secrets tells the fascinating story of how Michelangelo embedded messages of brotherhood, tolerance, and freethinking in his painting to encourage "fellow travelers" to challenge the repressive Roman Catholic Church of his time.
"Driven by the truths he had come to recognize during his years of study in private nontraditional schooling in Florence, truths rooted in his involvement with Judaic texts as well as Kabbalistic training that conflicted with approved Christian doctrine, Michelangelo needed to find a way to let viewers discern what he truly believed. He could not allow the Church to forever silence his soul. And what the Church would not permit him to communicate openly, he ingeniously found a way to convey to those diligent enough to learn his secret language."—from the Preface
Blech and Doliner reveal what Michelangelo meant in the angelic representations that brilliantly mocked his papal patron, how he managed to sneak unorthodox heresies into his ostensibly pious portrayals, and how he was able to fulfill his lifelong ambition to bridge the wisdom of science with the strictures of faith. The Sistine Secrets unearths secrets that have remained hidden in plain sight for centuries.
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