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    The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican
    The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican
    The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican
    Audiobook11 hours

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

    Written by Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner

    Narrated by James Cameron Stewart

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 8, 2017
    ISBN9781541481060

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    Reviews for The Sistine Secrets

    4/5

    44 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Wow. This was utterly fascinating. Amazing research and a real page-turner. You want to know what the author will unearth next. If you are fascinated by the Vatican and its Jewish connection, you will be dazzled by the information presented in the book. It is revealed in a thoroughly entertaining manner that really keeps you flipping pages to find out what happens next. If you are planning to visit the Vatican, postpone the visit until you have read this book.
    • 3/5
      Interesting read. Take what you will from it. Coincidence is not eliminated in any of the explanations. Fact and conjecture become entwined. If your visiting the Sistine then have a read before you go. There is so much to see in such a short time that this book may help you identify the frescos that are of most interest to you.
    • 5/5
      Last year I visited the Vatican. It was so crowded and hot that I could not wait to get out. It was enough for me to see Moses in a different place and David (in Florence). After reading this book now, I promised myself to go again and look at all his work. According to this book, Michelangelo's message was universal about love and friendship between the different cultures that influenced Christianity. He was not interested in exalting the Church or the popes. with his work, poked at the corruption and injustice around him. The influence of the Jewish writing on him is very revealing. So many of his painting were from the Old Testament. How sad that people with his ideas lived hundreds of years ago yet the practices of religious persecution continued until very recently. I too wished that there would have been more photos of his work. The references to the Kabbalah are emphasized in this book and one has to learn more about it in order to better understand it.
    • 4/5
      This is one of those books that I wish I had known about and read before I had the opportunity to visit the Sistine Chapel this past summer. Whether you have been to the Sistine Chapel or are planning a visit there in the future, be sure to track down this book and read it. You will never see the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel the same way again. Although this book is illustrated, the book begs to be issued in a deluxe version with more and better illustrations of what the authors are talking about. On one critical not, the authors return to some of the same themes (how much Michelangelo hated to paint) one time to many. All in all, a great experience is to be had by reading this book. I plan on reading it again.
    • 4/5
      For someone who vowed I would never read anything on art appreciation or art history if only God would help me pass my humanities class, I must say I found this book extremely interesting and fun to read (of course, since i long since gave up God, I suppose he'll forgive me for breaking my promise, since I did indeed pass humanities). A hypothesis about the hidden messages Michaelangelo painted into the Sistine Chapel, in essence, some suggest, thumbing his nose at the Catholic hierarchy. This author suggests that the messages can be unraveled by looking into the Jewish Kabbalah, and explains exactly how he woudl interpret the various pictures in the chapel. Darn, now I have to find a book on the Kabbalah, and my list is just so long already! I highly recommend this book, though I do have some reservations about accepting his thesis without more research.
    • 5/5
      An absolutely fascinating, if controversial, analysis of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes. Blech and Doliner argue that Michelangelo held universalistic views not only embracing antiquity and humanistic approach, but also religious views that were in direct conflict with the views of the Catholic church of the time, and were based on Neo-Platonism, hermeneutics and Jewish Kabbalah. Michelangelo was a thoroughly Italian Renaissance figure with his primary love focused on the Antiquity and classical Greek and Roman art and deep religious convictions. But, he was also thoroughly fed up with the immorality, militarism and nepotism of the popes and the church, and everything points to the possiblity that he did not even remain Catholic, but became Protestant by the end of his life. Hence the Sistine ceiling paintings are full of anti-papal messages and devoid of even single New Testament reference or figure, and awash in Old Testament lore instead, very much with a Jewish Bible slant. Being a universalist, Michelangelo wanted to meld the pagan Greek and Roman heritage with the origins of the Christian religion and the New Testament. Some of these elements were well entrenched when he was doing his art, but the Jews were shunned. They were labelled the murderers of Christ for many centuries, denounced by the Church, and it was only in the twentieth century, and by the end of it, that the Church has somewhat let up on that stance. According to Blech, Michelangelo brought it upon himself to rehabilitate the Jews, especially that he saw what was happening in Rome at that time as an aberration of the original religious teachings, and preached Jewish Bible stories and interpretations as warnings. He couldn't do it openly- death would surely follow pretty quickly- so he secretly embedded it in his work. It seems that he got a lot of his knowledge from Neoplatonists of his time, some of whom were his teachers (e.g., Pico della Mirandola) when he was growing up at the Medici court in Florence.The book shows great scholarship of its author and his vast religious knowledge. I learned more about Michelangelo, papacy, Old Testament and Jewish Kabbalah from it than I probably would from separate sources on them.