The Sistine Secrets Read Online Free PDF

mosaic floor is chock-full of Stars of David.
    THE ORIGINAL FIFTEENTH-CENTURY FRESCOES—NOT WHAT THEY SEEM TO BE
     
    The main attraction of the new chapel, however, was neither its floor nor its ceiling, but its walls. Starting at the front altar wall, there began two series of panels—one about the life of Moses, the other about the life of Jesus, much like a pair of Bible stories told in comic-strip format.
    To paint so many labor-intensive frescoes, a whole team of the top fresco artists of the fifteenth century were brought in—or to be more accurate, were sent in. This is important to know because of who sent them. It was none other than Lorenzo de’ Medici, the richest man in Florence and its unofficial ruler. He is the same man who would later discover Michelangelo and raise him as one of his own sons.
    Pope Sixtus IV hated Lorenzo and his family, having struggled against them for years. Sixtus wanted to seize control of freethinking Florence and its great wealth so that he could then proceed to take over all of central Italy. In 1478 he plotted to eliminate Lorenzo and the entire de’ Medici clan in an early version of a Mafia rubout. The only difference is that even the Godfather would not have dared attempt this particular conspiracy. Sixtus planned to have Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano assassinated in the Cathedral of Florence, in front of the main altar, during Easter Mass. More blasphemous still, the chosen signal for the killing was the Elevation of the Host. Even cold-blooded professional killers turned down this job, and the pope had to enlist the help of a priest and the Archbishop of Pisa. These two plotted out the details along with Sixtus’s most corrupt nephew, Girolamo Riario. Sixtus refused to listen to the details, coyly saying, “Do what you must, as long as no one is killed.” However, he did order his warlord Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, to amass six hundred troops on the hills outside Florence and wait for the signal of Lorenzo’s death. The shameless attack took place as planned…up to a point. Giuliano de’ Medici died on the spot from nineteen dagger wounds. Lorenzo, though badly wounded, managed to escape into a secret tunnel and survive. The signal to invade Florence was never given. The enraged Florentines, instead of rising up against the de’ Medicis as Sixtus had hoped, slaughtered the conspirators. It took personal intercession from Lorenzo himself to stop the citizens from killing Cardinal Raffaele Riario, another nephew of the pope but one who had no involvement in the attempted coup. Two years later, the pope gave up and a truce was declared between the Vatican and Florence. It was just at this time that the new chapel was ready to be decorated.
    So, why did Lorenzo send his most talented painters to decorate a chapel glorifying the man who had killed his beloved brother and had tried to butcher him as well? According to the official guidebooks, this was a “peace offering,” a gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation. But the official explanation is wrong. The real reason is key to understanding the none-too-conciliatory messages of the frescoes.
    Lorenzo did indeed send the cream of the crop of artists: Sandro Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, Domenico Ghirlandaio (who would later teach Michelangelo for a brief time), and the Umbrian painter Perugino (who would later teach Raphael). Besides covering all four walls of the chapel with the Moses–Jesus cycles, they were commissioned to add an upper strip portraying the first thirty popes, plus a large fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven on the front altar wall between the two windows. Faced with so much to fresco, the team later brought in Pinturicchio, Luca Signorelli, Biagio d’Antonio, and some assistants. The list is a who’s who of the top fresco artists of fifteenth-century Italian painting. All of them, with the exception of Perugino and his student Pinturicchio, were proud