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The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican | 
| Authors: Benjamin Blech, Roy Doliner
Publisher: HarperOne
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 4841
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0061469041
Dewey Decimal Number: 759.5
EAN: 9780061469046
ASIN: 0061469041
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
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Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 Very Interesting July 23, 2008
This book is very interesting because it goes into the culture and background of why Michelangelo spurned the pope with his art. I recommend it.
 Sistine Sympathies July 17, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The book is a "Michelangelo Code" of sorts, but like Dan Brown's novel, it offers no documentary evidence and nary a footnote to back up its claims.
As someone who has led many a tour in the Sistine Chapel, the first thing that struck me about the book was how the claims of Blech and Doliner revolve around the most frequently asked questions by visitors to the chapel.
Why is there so much Old Testament imagery in a Christian chapel, many query as they see the cycle of Moses on the walls and Genesis, painted by Michelangelo across the ceiling.
The authors declare that Michelangelo changed his original commission from the Twelve Apostles requested by Pope Julius II to the Genesis cycle out of a secret sympathy for Jews. But Pope Sixtus IV, the uncle of Julius, had already hired the finest painters in Florence 25 years earlier to decorate the lower panels with the stories of Moses paralleling the life of Christ.
As art historians and theologians know, the point of these images was to represent the seamless flow from the Old Testament to the New Testament, the fulfillment of God's covenant with man through the coming of Christ. As a consecrated chapel where the Pope would celebrate the Eucharist some 40 times a year, the theme of God's plan for man's salvation starting from the origins of our need to be saved was an apt choice for the ceiling.
But for Michelangelo, the subject of Genesis offered the possibility of accomplishing a feat never done before: Painting a narrative 60 feet off the ground and making it readable from the floor through his unique sculptural painting.
Doliner and Blech insist that Michelangelo learned about Kabala, a form of Jewish Gnosticism, in the garden of Lorenzo de Medici in Florence, when at 15 the young artist went to study sculpture there.
They hypothesize that Pico della Mirandola was the origin of Michelangelo's interest in Kabala.
Pico, a philosopher and humanist, had formed a syncretistic theory of all ancient thought from Plato to the Arab writings of Averroes to Kabala and the Bible. Like Thomas Aquinas' "Sententiae," Pico dreamed of defending his thesis before an international congress of scholars, but many of his theses were condemned as heretical and ultimately Pico retired to Florence.
Pico, at the time Michelangelo met him, was closely tied to Giacomo Savonarola, the famed Florentine Dominican preacher. By then Pico had already recanted his heterodox theories.
The authors overlook that Michelangelo was a third order Franciscan, like his hero Dante, as well as the fact that while Michelangelo never mentioned Pico, he often recalled the sermons of Savonarola throughout his life.
But what they conspicuously neglect is that Michelangelo was taking a hammer and chisel into his hands for the very first time and embarking on the greatest love affair of his life, with the art of sculpture. Michelangelo's messages would not be interesting to us if his art were not so powerful, and that richness of his works comes from the ceaseless practice of his art. We honor him today for his extraordinary talent, which he knew was God-given.
So how do Doliner and Blech turn him into a propagandist with crypto-Jewish sentiments and an anti-papal agenda?
Drawing on Dr. Frank Meshberger's 1990 article in the Journal of American Medicine, where he proposed that the cape of God in the creation of Man was shaped like a cross-section of the human brain, the authors seize on the idea, speculating that it is the right side of the brain, which according to Kabala contains secret God-given knowledge.
Even if Meshberger's theory were correct, one would only have to look at the Gospel of John 1:1, "In the beginning there was the Word," a source with which Michelangelo was certainly more familiar, to find the idea of God as Logos.
Many tourists over the years have wondered why God, in the creation of the sun and moon, is so prominently featured from the back.
In the hands of these authors, the tired old tour guide joke that this was the origin of the term "mooning," becomes the basis of their anti-papal theory. They claim that Michelangelo made God "moon" the Pope, because he was so angry about having to paint the chapel instead of work on the sculptural commission he had been promised.
From here they extrapolate that Michelangelo was disgusted with the corruption of the papal court, as well as the Church's treatment of the Jews and added figures making other obscene gestures at the Pope. Besides the fact that these other gestures are nowhere to be seen, it is ironic that two writers purporting to be familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures missed the most obvious scriptural reference to God's "back parts," when Moses in Exodus 33 asks to see God's glory and is denied because no one can see God's face and live.
God, to show his favor of Moses, allows him to look upon His "back parts." The Christian understanding of this event is that in the Old Testament man cannot see God, but with the Word made flesh, everyone could finally look upon God's face.
This theological point, which justifies Christian art, explains why Christians have a visual culture and why Michelangelo could dare to paint God.
The reason why Doliner and Blech have a chapel to study is because the people who gathered in that space and the man who painted it believed that God descended among men as Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, and in that space during the Mass, we could relive the encounter with the living God.
Ultimately, the authors claim that Michelangelo, gainfully employed and greatly respected within the Vatican walls, was betraying the trust placed in by the Pope and theologians of the court, to advertise his own interests on the walls of the Sistine Chapel.
It is perhaps not surprising that this idea occurred to co-author Roy Doliner, who despite a lack of any formal education in art history or theology has been able to earn a living giving tours at the Vatican Museums. He hangs his own agenda on isolated images from the chapel without any consideration of the chapel's meaning and function as a whole.
The book is redolent with anti-papal sentiment, despite lip service paid elsewhere by Blech to Pope John Paul II and the "good Pope John XXIII."
According to these authors, the Pope, his court and the endless stream of theologians, historians, saints and philosophers who have meditated on the chapel, were blind to this "code"; only the wisdom of Doliner and Blech could see to the mind and heart of Michelangelo. Gnosticism at its best.
In the end, Doliner and Blech's interpretation of the chapel mirrors others that see the chapel as a sort of Protestant manifesto, and is only slightly more plausible than another recent theory that the chapel contains encrypted messages from aliens.
Gender studies, psychologists, gay activists and thousands of others have seen themselves reflected in the ceiling and have co-opted Michelangelo for their own agendas over the years.
Bottom line: If everyone can find him or herself reflected in the ceiling of the chapel, it makes Michelangelo pretty universal. And isn't that the definition of Catholic?
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a Rabbi wrote this book?????????? July 13, 2008
0 out of 9 found this review helpful
I would like to tell Rabbi Bleich and Mr. Doliner that the naked men
on the cover are inappropriate.I don't care if it's "art". There is no excuse for such a lack of tzniut (modesty). How do I bring such a book into my home? I have to glue a piece of cardboard over the cover???
 Much more than a great art discovery July 4, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (and the Last Judgment fresco on the wall at the alter end), this book is wonderful at many levels.
First, it will help people understand a lot about one of the great philo-Semitic periods of history. Together with Britain in Victorian times, surely wonderful to see the Italian Renaissance and the period of Lorenzo di Medici (The Magnificent) was a time of great interest in Jewish learning on the part of non-Jews and a sense of Jewish-chic.
Second, a great deal of Kabbala theory will be found here. The first author being a professor of Talmud at Yeshiva U., he also presents quite a drosh on Talmudic and Midrashic issues as they touch on the images in Michelangelo's work.
Third, an enormous amount of "insider" history of the period esp, about the papacy and Italy is presented. To call this "juicy" would hardly do it justice! Vast amount of historical fact (all right, call it "gossip").
Finally, this is a book about great, if familiar art. It will help you enjoy Michelangelo's entire work (not just the Vatican masterpieces). There are many hidden messages within Michelangelo's work and many of these are based on his grasp of Jewish sources. If not all the observations seem convincing to all, a great many surely do.
Highly recommended for people who love the real stories within history. By the way, the writing is as good as the best New Yorker articles.
 Disappointing July 2, 2008
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
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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