We’ve all had quite enough of that Da Vinci guy this decade – but now a new book suggests that Michelangelo also hid messages in his artwork, most notoriously in the Sistine Chapel Fresco. In the book The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican. (Amazon US and UK), authors Roy Doline and Rabbi Benjamin Blech claim…
…that Michelangelo embedded powerful and even dangerous messages in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, that he encoded these messages using his knowledge of mystic Jewish texts and that he intended some images as insults to the pope.
…According to Doliner and Blech, Kabbalah is the key to cracking the code of many of Michelangelo’s hidden messages. But their first clue didn’t come from an art historian. Rather, it came from a tourist from Indiana who looked up at the famous panel of “The Creation of Adam,” and was reminded of something else.
“In the late 1970s, a surgeon went into the Sistine Chapel, took a look at this [fresco]. He said to himself, wait, this is Anatomy 101.… This is actually a cross-section of the brain, the right hand side of the brain,” Blech said.
An interesting comment on the similarity to a brain cross-section – see the ABC News picture gallery for this story to a visual guide. Not a sacred feminine in sight though…
