Sistine Heresy Read online

  Adriana watched them, seeming interested though drowsy.

  Salomano leaned toward Michelangelo with an open hand. “In Exodus 33, God tells Moses that He can’t show His face. It would be too much to bear. But He will let Moses see his backside as he passes.”

  “God’s backside.” Adriana chuckled weakly. Sleep was overtaking her again, and the nearly empty tea glass tilted precariously in her hand. Salomano took it from her.

  “Maimonides says it means we can see God’s earthly effects, but not His essence. Myself, I like to think of God more like Ficino does, as the incomprehensible perfection behind beauty, behind the things we love.”

  Michelangelo sat up, with unconcealed surprise. “You read Marsilio Ficino?”

  “Do you think only Christians can read Latin?”

  “No, of course not. But Ficino was a priest.”

  “Well, there are priests and priests, aren’t there? He was also an interpreter of Plato, who belongs to neither Christian nor Jew.” He glanced over at the patient. “But I think we have exhausted Lady Borgia.”

  Taking her hand, he said, “You seem out of danger, dear Lady, so I’ll leave you now and look in again tomorrow. Remember about the tea and soup.” He laid the rolled-up list on the bedside table.

  Once the doctor had left, Adriana’s energies were depleted. When Michelangelo turned back to her, she was dozing off again, and sentence fragments in his voice drifted into her sleep-addled mind.

  “Going to Florence,” she thought she heard him say. A gift someone had for him. Back in a few days. Visit him in Rome when she was well. Ideas to share, memories, secrets.

  Maria closed the door behind him and Adrianna drifted off. With her last glimmer of consciousness she thought, “God’s backside. So that’s what it’s all about.”

  XV

  Secret Things

  Michelangelo had timed it well, arriving at Santo Spirito just at sundown. Good old Niccolò Bichiellini, prior and friend, was waiting at the monastery gate. He could be relied on to be discreet. If he was disgusted, good manners kept him from ever revealing it.

  “Fra Bichiellini, good evening. I take it everything is ready. He didn’t cause you too much trouble, did he?” Michelangelo dismounted and one of the lay brothers took his horse silently.

  “No, Signore. Nothing the usual bribes couldn’t take care of. He’s waiting for you now, as before. But I urge you to hurry. It will not escape notice that you are here, and people will ask questions.”

  “Yes, of course.” He took up his satchel and followed the prior into the main building. The reception area was lit by only a few candles, and the prior took up one of them in passing.

  “He’s in the basement, where you’ll have privacy. I’ve instructed the sacristan to admit no one.” He led Michelangelo down a flight of creaking wooden stairs to a completely dark space. The light from the single candle held aloft was not sufficient to light the other end of the room where the coveted one waited.

  Bichiellini strode forward, taking with him the sphere of light. When he reached the figure in the far corner, he held the lantern high and pulled off the linen cover with a single dramatic gesture.

  “Here he is, Maestro,” he said. “Freshly dead.”

  As the prior set about lighting additional candles around the table, Michelangelo bent over the hooded cadaver. “He’s magnificent. I couldn’t have asked for better. Look at that chest.” He ran his fingertips along the musculature that was bulky and well defined in spite of the relaxation of death.

  “They hanged him at dawn yesterday,” Bichiellini added. “Unfortunately, the birds got to him and picked off most of his face, so I asked the bailiff to cover his head. Not a nice thing to look at all night long.” The prior lit a final candle inside a lantern that hung over the table. “Will you be doing a full dissection?”

  “Like the old days?” Michelangelo shook his head. “No. All I’m interested in this time is the musculature. I’ll be out of here in a day and a half.”

  He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and drew a leather apron from his satchel. Opening a small pouch of scalpels, he said, “I would be most grateful, Fra Bichiellini, if you could provide me with a pitcher of water for washing. And perhaps a flask of watered wine to see me through the night?”

  After a nod of thanks, Michelangelo adjusted the candles for a maximum of light and set to work. Someone, either the bailiff or more likely Bichiellini himself, had done him the favor of washing off the urine and defecation of the dead man, for which he was grateful. But he noted the early signs of decomposition, the greenish-yellow coloration of the abdomen and the swelling from pooled blood in the lower extremities, an artifact of the hanging position. Only the feet showed evidence of advanced decay, with blistering around the ankles and a covering of foul-smelling brown paste that had leaked through the skin. The odor of the corpse was still tolerable, but by the second night, he would have to work with a mask over his nose and mouth.

  Michelangelo made the first incisions, a horizontal along the surface of both clavicles and a long vertical down the sternum. Then, with the efficiency of a man long familiar with the knife, he cut two more verticals along the sides of the corpse and two diagonals along the lower edges of the rib cage. With the flesh marked out like the panels of a short jacket, he proceeded to flay the upper chest, starting at the throat.

  The leanness of the cadaver allowed him to slice in a series of rapid, small motions under the fatty layer of the skin and gradually roll it back. He was careful not to penetrate the underlying layer of membrane that held the muscles in their living shapes, for that was what he needed.

  The fatty tissue was slimy with a slightly reddish mucus that oozed out with each slice of the blade, but there was otherwise no blood to obscure his view. The unembalmed corpse might still have blood in the deep arteries, but it, too, had decomposed, and as long as the dissection was only cutaneous, the cadaver would seep but not bleed.

  By the time the prior returned, the entire pectoral area was exposed, and the panels of skin lay folded neatly in a wooden pail on the floor. Michelangelo wiped his hands on his apron. “A pity he never modeled for me when he was alive,” he said, and allowed himself a long drink of the sweet wine. “Now we’ll give him a second chance.”

  *

  Michelangelo gently folded the last panel of skin and set it into the bucket at his feet. He let out a long exhalation and felt as if he had been holding his breath for the two hours he had been cutting. He had flayed the entire front of the cadaver, including the male member, which he regarded as skin. But he could cut no more now without the assistance of Bichiellini to turn the cadaver over. That would be tomorrow. Now he came to the reason for the entire procedure.

  He laid out the flayed arms and legs in a pose to his satisfaction before rinsing his hands of mucus in the pitcher of water. He adjusted the candles, redistributing the light over the subject, then took up his sepia pencil and sketchbook.

  After a few moments, though his hand moved rapidly in the sketching, the familiar tranquility settled over him. It was a pleasing trance that came to him at no other time. He had thought at first it was the endless tap-tap of the chisel when he sculpted that transported him. But he had felt it too when he fell into the rhythm of painting a fresco.

  Then he realized that the same euphoria, the same sensation of rising up over the mundane world came over him even when he sketched. It was not the monotony of movement or the sound of the instrument; it was the very act of bringing forth an image, pulling something out of nothing. Creating a form lifted him to a place from which he could contemplate higher things. Not hunger or discomfort or the whims of his patrons, but the color, line, and light of his creation, and the perfect beauty within.

  His transport was so real that he fell into the habit of talking to his subject as it came into being, even before it came into being. For the creature was already in the material, and Michelangelo talked to it as he urged it from the darkness into
the light. Or in this case, from the dissecting table into a sketchbook and finally to a fresco.

  “Sorry to burden you with my troubles, brother. Obviously your last few days have been worse than mine. But it hasn’t been easy for me either. I work for a tyrant, send all my money to a thankless family, live in poverty, and endure constant pain from painting over my head.” He held the drawing at arm’s length. Yes, the pose was good. “And no one listens to me when I complain.”

  He adjusted the cadaver’s limbs a second time and turned to a blank page in the sketchbook.

  “The birds took away your face, my friend, but you know, that’s not such a bad thing in the end. I finished their job by taking off the rest of your skin and the flesh of temptation between your legs. Whatever your sins were, you’re innocent muscle now, and I’m going to make you into something new. What would you like to be: a soldier, hero, pagan god?” He glanced up at the corpse, as though awaiting a reply. “How about an angel? That should compensate you. A man could not ask for more.”

  Almost cheerful, Michelangelo finished the second sketch and posed the limp cadaver yet again. He lifted one of the meaty legs and one of the arms into a sort of twisted pose, the best he could do given the slippery flesh. “Whatever you were before, my friend, you’re beautiful now.”

  He took a long drink of the wine and stepped back for a third sketch, though increasing fatigue made him dreamy and philosophical.

  “Beauty is divine, my friend. Like sunlight searches for a tree or a meadow or a face to shine on, beauty searches for something to shine from. It’s my gift, to sense beauty where it hides and to draw it out for the world to see.”

  He paused over the sketch. “Also a curse.” He sighed. “I cannot find God in prayer or in the mass. Only in the material. This weakness plagues me, as much as my flesh, that I find the divine in cellars like this one talking to the likes of you.”

  He turned the page for a fourth drawing, though his eyes had begun to burn. Talking about his curse had cast a pall over his mood. He fell silent, but his mind still rambled. Is this all I’ll ever have to share my secrets with? A cadaver or the phantoms in the stone?

  He was suddenly terribly lonely.

  *

  The crowing of the cock in the monastery hen yard woke Fra Bichiellini in his chamber. Rubbing consciousness back into his face, he dressed and descended the cellar stairs once again.

  Michelangelo was just setting aside his sketchbook. “Dawn already? I lost track of time.”

  Bichiellini stepped toward the dissecting table. The corpse, now in its shiny gray-red flesh, lay in a new position. The two arms were folded back with both hands under the neck of the still-hooded head. The body was tilted slightly sideways, and one flayed leg was raised. Though the entire front of the cadaver was skinned down to the ankles, it looked for all the world like a sort of macabre vanity, a monster displaying himself, nude and provocative, for a lover.

  Bichiellini mused that if anything could be more naked than nude, he now beheld it.

  “I’ve got what I need tonight. If you would be so kind and help me turn him over, I’ll dissect him from the back tomorrow.” The two men grappled with the limp corpse. As they finally maneuvered it into place, facedown on the table, someone called from the top of the stairs.

  “Fra Bichiellini, the bailiff is here. Just stopping by, he said.”

  “Morbid curiosity, I’m sure,” the prior muttered. “He’s already got his bribe.” Then, louder, “Send him down, if you please.”

  In a moment the bailiff was at the door, holding a rag over his nose and mouth. “Everything all right, here?”

  “Yes. The dissection is half finished,” the prior said. “We’ll be done tomorrow and we’ll see to it that he has a Christian burial.”

  Michelangelo arranged the half-flayed limbs alongside the prostrate body but stopped abruptly and raised a candle over the man’s back. The entire surface, from the edge of the cloth hood to the buttocks, was crisscrossed with countless scars.

  “This man was flogged,” Michelangelo said.

  “Yes, and little good it did him.” The bailiff snorted, approaching the table. “You’d think he’d have given up the habit after that. But he just couldn’t stop himself, I guess. The last time they caught him, it was the noose.”

  “What was his crime?” Michelangelo asked cautiously.

  The bailiff hooked his thumbs in his belt. “This one’s a sodomite. Hanging’s what they do to them here if they don’t change their ways. He didn’t.”

  XVI

  Gian Pietro Carafa stood on a balcony on the Piazza Venezia and swept his solemn gaze over the streets being cleared of animal ordure for the parade. He pictured the coming frivolities of Carnevale, and his resolve was unwavering. It would have to be, for the task he had set himself was no less than the rescue of the Holy Mother Church.

  If anyone should know of Rome’s depravity, it was he, for he had seen the effects while Alexander VI still reigned. That despicable libertine had defiled the Throne of Peter, not only fathering children on his various whores, but parading them in the court. Worse were his unashamed display of pagan symbols and Egyptian idols in court frescoes, and the opening of Rome’s door to heathens expelled from Spain. But Alexander’s unforgivable crime was the excommunication and execution of that saint among men, Girolamo Savonarola.

  A brother of his own order, blessed be his memory, the Dominican friar had ten years before taken up the flaming sword against the paganism and the vice, the foreign thoughts and licentiousness of the Florentines.

  Eyes half-closed, Carafa recalled the great bonfire he had seen on the Piazza della Signoria. A fire dedicated to God, consuming the Carnevale masks and wigs, the volumes of filthy Latin and Italian poetry, the vain ornaments and scents and mirrors, the chessboards, lutes, and harps that lured men to frivolity. And, on the highest tier of the scaffold, the obscene paintings of women. The whole collection of worldly temptations rose in a spiral of glowing flakes and ashes, and as the bells of the campanile pealed in celebration, his young soul swelled with a sense of the presence of God.

  But Savonarola’s most courageous act was the one that doomed him, the vilification of the Borgia Pope. Alexander had excommunicated him, accusing him of heresy when, in fact, he spoke the purest truth. The saintly man was hanged in the very spot where his great bonfire had raged, and his still-twitching body was burned in turn.

  Carafa’s heart quickened in outrage at such injustice. He himself had resolved to reclaim the fire, and this time it would be on behalf of God as the Church of Spain used it, to purify the faith and the believer. Pain was good for the soul. He had known pain himself, the suffering of long fasting and mortification of the rebellious flesh, and he welcomed it as the sharing of the agony of Christ. So he rejoiced to witness the sufferings of the tortured penitents. Every scream was an affirmation of their growing piety, the parting shriek of demons.

  He glanced down again, envisioning the revelers similarly consumed. Yes, with fire and the rack he would bring God back to Rome, he swore it on his soul.

  *

  Adriana arrived in the Piazza Rusticucci in the late afternoon, unsure of her reception. She had after all sent no notice and hoped Michelangelo would remember he had invited her. She knocked and within moments the door was opened. The housemaster’s face registered surprise.

  “I’m sorry, Madonna. The Maestro is not due for another hour. Would My Lady wish to visit him at the Vatican chapel?”

  “No, no. I don’t want to disturb his work. I’ll wait for him here.”

  The servant led her into an anteroom where two high-backed chairs were pushed against a long table. He pulled one of them out to offer her a seat and returned a moment later with a glass and a bronze ewer of wine. When he was gone, she poured herself a tall glass and surveyed the room where courtesy required she wait. It had a sterile and depressing air. She did not relish the thought of spending the next hour there.

  Taking
both glass and ewer, she crossed the corridor to Michelangelo’s workshop. Here was life—the agreeable clutter of used objects, the smell of paint, the inviting sight of chairs with worn cushions. One table held drills and mallets and next to them a box of chisels. On another were rolls of vellum, notebooks, an earthen pot with a bouquet of paintbrushes. Beside an inkwell and a pair of spectacles, a smaller vessel contained half a dozen quills.

  The walls held shelves bearing jars of colored minerals. In among them were mortars and pestles and a slab of porphyry for grinding. Everything had a covering of gritty marble powder and ordinary dust.

  She draped her cape over the end of a long table, taking pains not to disturb anything, and poured herself another glass of the soothing wine. She felt at home in this room, or perhaps it was simply the wine that was causing her to relax. She wished now that Michelangelo had invited her sooner, for she could imagine herself in warm conversation with him here. About his work, his thoughts on his papal employer, his “secrets,” whatever they were.

  A sketchbook caught her attention. She sensed she was in some way trespassing, but the wine made her venturesome. Michelangelo surely would not mind if she admired his drawings. With the tips of her fingers she opened the volume and turned the pages delicately. She was horrified.

  A man, or rather what had once been a man, lay on his back, his head covered by a sack. The striations across his muscles, the protrusion of the clavicles, the strip of white cartilage down the center of the chest made it clear he had been skinned. The red chalk used for the drawings emphasized all the more the exposed red meat of the body.

  Page after page held the same figure in varying macabre poses, lying with legs drawn up, slouching, twisting.

  But on the last page, there was something less sinister, even amusing. A male figure, heavily bearded and copiously robed, in two twisted poses. On the right, he curved in midair, as if blown along by some great wind, with arms outstretched, his long robes flowing behind him. In the left sketch, the same figure was in reverse and seemed to fly away, his elbow, back, and foot soles sketched in detail. In the center of the figure, his garment blew against him, outlining well-muscled buttocks.