The Sistine Secrets Quotes

“Carafa, as Pope Paul IV, established the Index of Forbidden Books, banned all women from entering the Vatican, burnt volumes of Talmud and Kabbalah, threw the Jews of Rome into the ghetto, drained the Church’s savings while overtaxing the faithful in order to enrich his nephews and mistress, tortured and burned homosexuals in public, ordained two nephews (ages fourteen and sixteen) as cardinals, and banned the potato—recently brought to Europe from the New World by Sir Francis Drake—as a fruit of lust sent by Satan.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Back in the 1540s, Pope Paul III had started the repressive measures of the Counter-Reformation to crack down on the growth of reformers, Lutherans, and freethinkers in the Catholic world.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Michelangelo, who had already spent much time studying Roman architecture in the ruins, proposed a revolutionary “flying bow bridge” scaffold. It was based on the principles of the Roman arch, whose weight presses out against the sides it is spanning. This ingenious structure could be inserted in just a few small holes made in the side walls, since all its pressure would flow there, and none down to the floor. It would also allow Michelangelo to fresco the ceiling a whole strip at a time, moving to the next strip as soon as one was finished, and thus progressing across the length of the chapel. He got approval to construct it, and it was an instant success, allowing the papal court to have its regular processions under it without any obstruction.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Somewhat similar is another effect called anamorphosis. This is an amazing technique that makes an image literally “morph” into another shape or image when the viewer looks at it from a different angle. Only highly skilled artists who had also mastered”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Yet another strategy for encoding in Renaissance works involved environmental “special effects.” Messages were ingeniously inserted so that they could be viewed only when one was in situ, in the very spot where the artist intended for the viewer to receive his true intent. Often this would be determined by how light coming from an actual window at the site would stream into the painting, thus literally and figuratively illuminating the piece. Leonardo did this with the light in his Last Supper fresco,”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Leonardo da Vinci, was brought to the Vatican in 1513 by the new pope, Leo X, and given a list of commissions to create for the greater glory of the pope and his family. After three years of living in the papal palace and exploring Rome, the great Leonardo had produced almost nothing. The furious Pope Leo decided to have a surprise showdown with the capricious artist and intimidate him into completing some of his commissions. In the middle of the night, surrounded by several imposing Swiss Guardsmen, the pope burst through the door to Leonardo’s private palace chambers, thinking to shake him out of a sound sleep. Instead, he was horrified to find Leonardo wide awake, with a pair of grave robbers, in the midst of dissecting a freshly stolen corpse—right under the pope’s own roof. Pope Leo let out a nonregal scream and had the Swiss soldiers immediately pack up Leonardo’s belongings and throw them and the divine Leonardo himself outside the fortress wall of the Vatican, never to return again. Shortly afterward, Leonardo decided it was probably healthier to get out of Italy and move to France, where he spent the rest of his days. This, by the way, is why the great Italian genius’s most famous oil paintings, including the Mona Lisa, are all in Paris, in the Louvre museum.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Vatika has several other related meanings in ancient Etruscan. It was the name of a bitter grape that grew wild on the slope, which the peasants made into what became infamous as one of the worst, cheapest wines in the ancient world. The name of this wine, which also referred to the slope where it was produced, was Vatika. It was also the name of a strange weed that grew on the graveyard slope. When chewed, it produced wild hallucinations, much like the effect of peyote mushrooms; thus, vatika represented what we would call today a cheap high. In this way, the word passed into Latin as a synonym for “prophetic vision.” Much later, the slope became the circus, or stadium, of the mad emperor Nero. It was here, according to Church tradition, that Saint Peter was executed, crucified upside down, and then buried nearby. This became the destination of so many pilgrims that the emperor Constantine, upon becoming half-Christian, founded a shrine on the spot, which the Romans continued to call the Vatican Slope. A century after Constantine, the popes started building the papal palace there.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Vatika has several other related meanings in ancient Etruscan. It was the name of a bitter grape that grew wild on the slope, which the peasants made into what became infamous as one of the worst, cheapest wines in the ancient world. The name of this wine, which also referred to the slope where it was produced, was Vatika. It was also the name of a strange weed that grew on the graveyard slope. When chewed, it produced wild hallucinations, much like the effect of peyote mushrooms; thus, vatika represented what we would call today a cheap high. In this way, the word passed into Latin as a synonym for “prophetic vision.” Much later,”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Divine. In one image, Buonarroti interwove art and religion, Jewish and Christian tradition, anger and mercy, heaven and earth.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Here they make helmets and swords from chalices And by the handful sell the blood of Christ; His cross and thorns are made into lances and shields; Yet even so Christ’s patience still rains down. But let him come no more into these parts; His blood would rise up as far as the stars; Since now in Rome his flesh is being sold; And every road to virtue here is closed.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“The pope had planned his own multilayered symbolic design for the chapel. It was meant to illustrate successionism to the world, proving that the Church was the one true inheritor of monotheism by replacing Judaism.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“The name of the pagan Etruscan goddess who guarded this necropolis, or city of the dead, was Vatika.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“The man famous for defining genius as “eternal patience” must have found solace for his inability to voice his disagreement with the Vatican in the hope that eventually there would be those who would “crack his code” and grasp what he was really saying.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Within the fall, we find the ascent. —KABBALISTIC PROVERB”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“What this lone artist wanted to do was construct a giant bridge of the spirit, spanning different faiths, cultures, eras, and sexualities.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Almost exactly five hundred years ago, a tormented soul named Michelangelo built a very narrow bridge in the middle of the air in the middle of a chapel in the middle of Rome. This resulted in a masterwork that would change the world of art forever.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Thus, Michelangelo filled the chapel with hidden messages of his passionate loves and his righteous rages, along with mystic symbols of divine justice and divine mercy. For him, the Sistine was indeed the Sanctuary, the neck of the world, but more than that, it was “The Bridge”—the bridge meant to unite people with God, with their fellow humans, and, perhaps most difficult of all, with their own spiritual selves.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Michelangelo knew that for the Church to fulfill the will of God, it had to become a paradigm of true brotherhood. There had to be a bridge between rich and poor, between privileged and downtrodden, between those who ostensibly spoke for God and those who desperately needed divine assistance.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“He infused his ceiling fresco with Kabbalistic images that reflected the Kabbalistic pavement design below. He linked the Jewish ancestral tree to Jesus. He connected pagan philosophy and design with Judaism and Christianity. He joined his love of male beauty to his love of God. He narrated the entire story of the universe, beginning with creation, in a way that makes us realize humanity’s common ancestry.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“With his genius, Michelangelo built many bridges of the spirit.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“When Michelangelo came along a generation after the original fresco masters, he took on the almost-impossible task of linking the whole Sistine Chapel together. To accomplish this, he had to engineer an amazing “flying arch” bridge scaffolding from which to create his works. No one else was able to figure out how this could be done. No one after him could replicate his amazing feat. Michelangelo’s bridge is regarded as an engineering miracle to this day. How appropriate for the very same Michelangelo to have accomplished a similar miracle in creating the bridge between faiths that is perhaps the major message of his masterpiece.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Michelangelo was aiming with his frescoes, we modestly suggest that if he had dared to give the giant artwork a title he might have called it “The Bridge.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Very often, the title given to an artwork is the key to unlocking its hidden meanings. For example, for centuries no one could discover the true identity of the Mona Lisa. In the year 2006, however, experts were finally able to solve the mystery, thanks to the real title of the painting—La Gioconda. Historians had thought that gioconda, or “joyous woman,” referred to her enigmatic smile. Instead they definitively established that she was the bride of a rich merchant named Giocondo. Leonardo had made a pun on her new married name. Artists gave a great deal of thought to the title they would bestow on their work. It presented them with an opportunity succinctly to convey to the viewer their message and purpose. A name proclaims, “This is what I had in mind when I put all of my effort into this piece.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Very often, the title given to an artwork is the key to unlocking its hidden meanings. For”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Yet, to view the Sistine primarily as a self-portrait doesn’t ring totally true. In spite of his arrogance regarding his artistic skill, Michelangelo was a very unassuming man. He lived an extremely humble life. Even though he was the highest-paid artist of his day, he dressed poorly and lived in a simple apartment, sending almost all his income to his family in Florence. Yes, he slipped his face into The Last Judgment, but unlike Julius II, he did not need an entire chapel or basilica to proclaim his ego. Furthermore, he considered himself first, last, and always a sculptor, not a painter. If he had made one piece the summary of his life, it would certainly have been a statue, not a fresco.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“It is likely that this very maelstrom of conflicted impulses is what has foiled all previous attempts to come up with a “unified theory” of the chapel’s meaning. Any true portrait of a human being must be multifaceted. To portray the turbulent passions, loves, and hatreds of the great Michelangelo required the whole ceiling and front wall of the Sistine. As the famed British architect Sir Christopher Wren summed up his own life and works with the words, “If you want to see my monument, look around you,” Michelangelo may have chosen to write his autobiography on the chapel ceiling.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“So what was Michelangelo’s real message? “SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST”? A more profound and legitimate explanation of the Sistine is that perhaps it is nothing less than a huge self-portrait of Michelangelo. The images are meant to reflect his life and beliefs: his feelings torn between his love for Judaic lore and wisdom and his passion for pagan art and design; his inner conflict between his spiritual love of God and his physical love for men; his respect for Christianity (even after he was no longer a Catholic) and his righteous anger at the pope and at the corruption of the Vatican in the Renaissance; his love of Classical traditions and his passionate defense of freethinking and new ideas; his Kabbalistically inspired mysticism joined to his Neoplatonism and his carnal earthiness.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“The goal was to teach and spiritually transform its viewers. But in what way? We have already unveiled many of the artist’s secret messages hidden throughout the frescoes; but was there one overall statement he was trying to convey? Did he deliver it? In order to decide if Michelangelo succeeded, we will first need to probe into his innermost thoughts and find the key to his master plan, his “hidden brain” in the artwork. We have to do no less than answer the question, What was Michelangelo really trying to accomplish with his Sistine Chapel frescoes?”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Vatican theologians turned the Sistine into “The New Holy Temple of the New Jerusalem.” Its role, they explained, was to replace with a Christian counterpart the original Temple in Jerusalem demolished by the Romans in 70 CE. What was lost to the Jews would be shown to have been transferred to the Church.”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican

“Let’s start with Michelangelo’s predecessors. What did they want the chapel to say, and what relevance, if any, do these ideas still have today?”
― Benjamin Blech, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican