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

criminals in order to increase their knowledge of anatomy and also to try to reclaim the lost medical knowledge of the ancients. Artists wanted to learn all they could about the inner structure of the human body in order to come up to the level of expertise of the ancient Greco-Roman artists in representing the human form. The Church had forbidden any such dissections, since it considered the human body a divine mystery. In addition, it was still leery of perfect representations of human and mythological figures, which it thought might lead to a sort of spiritual recidivism, a return to pagan idolatry. This is the reason that medieval portrayals of the human figure seem so flat and unnatural compared to those found in Classical and Renaissance artwork. The only place in medieval and Renaissance Italy where occasional scientific dissections were allowed was the University of Bologna. However, for those ambitious artists who could not get to Bologna or for whom these rare occasions did not suffice, frustration led them very often to illegal efforts. They hired professional body snatchers, common criminals who would steal the fresh corpses of executed convicts out of their graves and smuggle them under cover of night to secret laboratories where the artists would dissect and explore the bodies, sketch every detail that they could by candlelight, and then get rid of the evidence before dawn.
    The great Renaissance genius par excellence, 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.
    Sandro Botticelli, even though the favorite artist of the liberal de’ Medici family in Florence a generation before Michelangelo, was still not allowed openly to explore the human body. In one of his most famous—and also one of his most mysterious—paintings, he hides several secrets. The painting is the allegorical work Primavera (Spring). Just as in the case of Raphael’s School of Athens, whole books have been written about it, each one promoting a different interpretation of the masterpiece. It is set in a mystical forest clearing, and the action moves from right to left, starting with the mythological Zephyr, the wind of Spring, who transforms the forest nymph Cloris into the figure of Flora, the symbol of Spring and its fertility. Then, in the central position in front of two odd openings in the canopy of branches above, is Venus, the goddess of Love. Hovering over her head is the blindfolded Cupid, about to shoot his phallic arrow at the central woman of the three Graces, the figure of Chastity. The last figure, on the far left and detached from the rest, is Mercury, the god of change and hidden wisdom, stirring up the clouds. No one before has discussed the strange gaps in the branches in the center of the