The Sistine Secrets by Benjamin Blech, Roy Doliner Read Free Book Online

patriarch, Jacob, is sold into Egyptian slavery by his jealous brothers. The conspiring brothers then take Joseph’s fancy cloak of many colors, rip it, dip it in blood, and tell their father, Jacob, that Joseph has been devoured by a savage beast. Joseph, thanks to his God-given talents and ingenuity, grows up to become the Pharaoh’s vizier, the second most powerful man on earth at that time. At the end of the tale, Joseph is reunited with his brothers and he sends the Pharaoh’s highly decorated royal carriages and wagons to Canaan to take precious gifts to his beloved father and to transport the patriarch in style to Egypt, along with the rest of his large family. Jacob, who has been inconsolable through all the long years since Joseph’s “death,” cannot bring himself to hope that Joseph might not only still be alive, but also have risen to the highest echelons of power in mighty Egypt. The text says at this point: “And [the brothers] told him [Jacob], saying, Joseph is yet alive, and he is governor over all the land of Egypt. And Jacob’s heart grew faint, for he believed them not. And they told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said to them; and when he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived; And Israel said, It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive; I will go and see him before I die” (Genesis 45:26–28).
    The ancient Jewish commentators point out that it is only when the doubting patriarch sees the wagons that he at last believes that his son Joseph is alive and governing Egypt. Why? Because Jacob understood the coded message Joseph had sent him on the artistic adornments of the wagons. Pharaoh’s carriages of the time were as a matter of course covered with pagan Egyptian art, colorful carvings and paintings depicting the various gods and goddesses of the idolatrous death-worshiping cult that controlled Egypt. According to the Midrash, the Jewish oral lore connected to the biblical text, Joseph painted over and disfigured these pagan images on the royal vehicles. This conveyed two hidden meanings to his father: one, that only someone in the highest ranks of power would dare to deface the king’s carriages; and two, that it must have been a member of his own family, someone who believed in but one God, that was responsible for this covert insult to the pagan symbols that epitomized artwork in ancient Egypt.
    From the biblical Joseph’s wagon to the twentieth century’s Jack Benny, we’ve had countless examples of codes relying on cultural references known only to the initiated, the “insiders,” to convey an important message meant for but a select few.
    Serious scholars have increasingly become aware that many of the best-known artworks of the Renaissance and Baroque periods (especially from the late 1400s through the mid-1600s) are similarly filled with hidden ideas and covert codes. Some require fairly little work to decipher. It doesn’t take all that much effort, for example, to figure out the great artists’ references to Greco-Roman mythology and medieval legends, to observe their use of the heraldic colors and crests of the powerful families that controlled Italy and the Vatican, and even to identify many of the faces of then-famous individuals in their frescoes.
    Somewhat more elusive, though, are the secret symbols ordered by the patron commissioning the work. Renaissance and Baroque art teems with this type of hidden message: portraits of the patron and his family members or inner circle who just happen to be present at the Nativity or the Crucifixion, family crests that appear as decorations in architectural details from ancient Rome, and even puns based on the patron’s name. In 1475, for example, the year of Michelangelo’s birth, Botticelli painted Lorenzo de’ Medici and his Renaissance court present as witnesses at the Adoration of the Magi. Much later, Michelangelo similarly festooned the entire ceiling fresco of