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The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican [Hardcover]

Benjamin Blech (Author), Roy Doliner (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)

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Book Description

April 29, 2008

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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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Fascinating.... Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner appear to have few equals when it comes to the history and detail of the fresco.... a readable and informative piece of work.” (Manchester Evening News (U.K.) )

“The journey of analysis of the complex images rewards the reader with many profound insights about the artwork and the complex nature of Michelangelo’s ideas....fascinating and engaging!” (The Jewish Press )

“…(a) fascinating study of the Sistine Chapel. […] Like the best art historians, the authors give us a fresh context for the times, never hesitating to make contemporary parallels. […]This is a stimulating exploration that makes familiar masterpieces seem strange and new.” (Los Angeles Times )

“This book of astounding revelations is built on careful scholarship, lucid exposition, and it is, above all, compelling reading.” (Jonathan Harr, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Lost Painting and A Civil Action )

“Just as the work of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel changed forever the world of art, so will this book change forever the way to view and, above all, to understand the work of Michelangelo!” (Enrico Bruschini, Official Art Historian for the U.S. Embassy in Rome )

About the Author

Rabbi Benjamin Blech is an internationally recognized educator, religious leader, author, and lecturer. A recipient of the American Educator of the Year Award, he has been a professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University since 1966. He is the author of eleven books and has written for the New York Times, Newsweek, and Newsday. He lives in New York City.


Product Details

  • Hardcover: 336 pages
  • Publisher: HarperOne; 1ST edition (April 29, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0061469041
  • ISBN-13: 978-0061469046
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #143,297 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
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58 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Michelangelo's Jewish agenda? Reference, please . . ., November 18, 2008
This review is from: The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican (Hardcover)
This book describes many of Michelangelo's high Renaissance artworks in the Vatican City, Florence and elsewhere and claims Michelangelo was directly influenced by Jewish religious teachings of the Talmud, Midrash and Kabbalah in his subject matter as well as deeper symbolic messages of Christian religious art, particularly in the Sistine Chapel.

The authors note that Michelangelo was virtually adopted by Lorenzo de Medici and educated in an intellectual environment of the de Medici court that included Renaissance scholars and philosophers who were proponents of ideals of unity of religious and philosophical thought. Among other sources, the authors claim these studies included Jewish teachings and philosophical works based on Jewish teachings. The authors argue that the Jewish component of those intellectual discussions at the "School of Athens" in the de Medici family palace must have been picked up and internalized by the young Michelangelo as a lifetime intellectual influence and a sympathy to Jewish religious and mystical thought. This tenuous speculation about his early education is the basis of the central claim.

In order to accept the theme, one has to accept the central speculation about Michelangelo's alleged fascination with the Jewish teachings.

Several detailed observations, subjective interpretations and speculations about the artworks in the Sistine Chapel and elsewhere are then provided in the book to validate these claims. These interpretations of the artworks are the strength of the entire argument. The authors provide skimpy evidence of this alleged fascination in Michelangelo's letters and poetry, his known associates, or in any accounts of his contemporaries.

More conventional Christian scholarship could have provided the Old Testament subject matter and many of the subtleties revealed in the authors' observations.

The authors' theme that Jewish teaching was as central and profound as they propose, and claims of Michelangelo being directly influenced by the Jewish teaching are not well established.

Some of the observations and speculations of the book are interesting. The book has provided me with previously unfamiliar insights in the history and symbols in the Sistine Chapel. Some of the speculations the authors provide seem plausible, others are open to various interpretation, while others strain credibility or contradict my own observations.

I cannot validate or invalidate the authors claims, however, because I have been frustrated by a lack of reference in dozens of places in the text when I had a question regarding an extraordinary or even an uncontroversial statement of fact, history, observation, theory or speculation. There are other places where the authors disagree with other writings I have read on the subjects.

The book is woefully lacking in annotation and reference. I cannot assess how common or how unique the themes and subtleties of Michelangelo were in the context of wider Renaissance religious art or how common or unprecedented are the observations and speculations the authors provide.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence that the authors do not provide. What we get instead are speculations, subjective interpretations and conspiracy theory.

The result is a book that is neither fish nor fowl; neither scholarly treatise nor popular guide accessible to a larger naive audience.

I can suggest this book to readers with a particular interest in the Sistine Chapel or Michelangelo's life for its unconventional viewpoint, but I would caution the reader to read it with a critical mind.
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27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but fatally heavy on the speculation, February 6, 2009
By 
Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican (Hardcover)
We all love a good yarn about Vatican secrets. What are those wacky prelates up to now? But what a great tale it would be if one the Vatican's own treasures -- Michelangelo's bravura painting of the Sistine chapel ceiling and front wall -- was laden with anti-Catholic messages and secret insults against popes?

That's the idea behind Sistine Secrets. The book sets the stage by discussing little-known tales of artists embedding secret messages in their art. How many know, for instance, that sculptor Daniel French's Lincoln Memorial statue show Abe's forming the initials "A" and "L" in sign language? And what are the strange openings in the leafy canopy to either side of the head of the central figure in Botticelli's "Primavera"? Could the artist, in an age in which human dissection was taboo, have surreptitiously revealed his participation in this illicit practice by embedding the outline of human heart and lungs into his painting? I'm not sure what art historians make of this this theory, but it certainly got my attention.

Having established the fascinating possibility that artist embed "secrets" into their art, the authors move on to their main thesis. Michelangelo's tumultuous family life and apparent homosexuality come in or scrutiny. The story of how he snuck in at night to carved "Michelangelo made this" on the band across the Virgin's chest (in badly-spelled and ungrammatical Latin) was fun and accurate as far as I know.

But from here, things got dodgy. Michelangelo, taken in by the de Medici family, is supposedly instructed in the ways of the Kabala as well as neo-platonic teachings supposedly banned by the Church. I'm no scholar, but Church teaching took Plato quite seriously, seeing in his theory of the ideal forms an echo of divine perfection. Moving to the Sistine chapel painting, the book lands into trouble. While suggesting that the artist incorporated the symbols of papal families into the painting seems innocent enough, the authors claim that Michelangelo incorporated numerous insults to Julius II -- the pope who commissioned the work. Supposedly, portraying the worldly, intemperate Julius as a book-reading prophet Jeremiah was a subtle insult. But this seems too ambiguous to be truly insulting -- at best it seems like an ironic compliment. The authors then point to a putti figure behind Jeremiah who is supposedly showing the "fig" gesture -- the Italian equivalent of a raised middle finger. But the accompanying illustration is dark and obscure, and all I can see is a closed fist.

In another supposedly devastating example of Michelangelo's secret messages, the authors discuss the figures of Judith and her maidservant carrying aloft a basket holding the head of Holofernes. Tracing the figures supposedly shows the figure "T", the Hebrew letter chet, which the authors relate to the Kabalistic female principle. But the figures could just as easily be the figure "pi", suggesting...what? That Michelangelo was hungry? That he loved geometry?

By the time the authors get to the figure of Jonah, things get truly weird. Jonah is said to be the only figure shown barelegged. But his oddly-splayed legs are said to be in the form of the Hebrew character for the number 5. What does this mean? To the author, it means that Michelangelo was expressing the idea that the Hebrew Bible's Pentateuch (literally 5-"five books") must be honored along with the New Testament. But 5 could mean anything -- say, the five senses. And the Church has honored its Jewish roots from he beginning, albeit with long and irredeemable periods of persecution.

The front wall of the Sistine Chapel is supposed to be secretly in the shape of the round-topped tablets of the Ten Commandments. While many depictions show them this way, many show rectangular tablets. And the Bible doesn't say either way. The problem with the supposition is that the chapel's front wall had this shape long before Michelangelo started painting it, as the illustration on page 10 helpfully indicates.

What to make of "Sistine Secrets"? It says something that for all its controversial claims, the book contains just barely over a page of notes. I don't know the Kabala from a Cub Scout or a Medici from a medfly, and I'm not about to take the word of a couple of guys who write about a farfetched idea without a boatload of sources. Reviewers who claim that a book without references is "scholarly" are talking out of their hats. But references or no, the book finally falls apart on its own. The secret messages in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are very few and are ambiguous at best. Even if the artist camouflaged a whole alphabet of Hebrew letters in the writhing forms of his work, what would it mean? And to suggest that Michelangelo pulled the wool over the eyes of the greatest minds of his times -- and those of the last 500 years -- until now, of course, seems hubristic to say the least.

"Sistine Secrets" did make me genuinely curious about the true meaning of Michelangelo's master works. Though I don't buy this book's thesis, I'd love to know more about the weird features of his work. Why *are* Michelangelo's figures posed in such varied poses of motion -- simple variety? What is the point of the main Genesis stories he chose to portray? I would love to read a debunking of the book by an educated scholar -- in the same ay that Bart Ehrman deconstructed "The Da Vinci Code" in his book.

As of today, I'm waiting.
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48 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Surprising and Fun, May 6, 2008
This review is from: The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican (Hardcover)
I love the history of art and I am often fascinated by both the psychology of the artists in renaissance Italy as well as intricate geopolitical backdrop in which this particular work was ensconced. The authors do an incredible job of painstakingly detailing the historical veracity of their claims, which to be honest I was skeptical about before reading the book.

Their discoveries are enlightening, entertaining and not the least bit shocking. I applaud them for tackling such a controversial topic with scholarly aplomb. To the critics who harp on minor points or site comparisons to the Da Vinci Code, I would firstly recommend actually reading the book, and second I would point out that this work sites references for all claims which can, with a bit of time and effort on your part, be easily corroborated. Its easy to throw stones from the peanut gallery, a bit more challenging to open your mind to these new and exciting ideas.

A most thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
warrior pope, one true church, ceiling project, giant fresco, fresco artists
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Sistine Chapel, Pope Julius, The Last Judgment, Very Special Education, Pope Sixtus, Tree of Life, The Middle Path, Holy Temple, Company of Prophets, Vatican Museums, Leonardo da Vinci, Parting Shots, The Lost Language, Garden of San Marco, Virgin Mary, Saint Bartholomew, Pope Paul, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Catholic Church, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Pope Alexander, The House of David, Saint Lawrence, Original Sin, Holy Spirit
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